Speculative Fact #320: Want to Live in a Corporate City?

Speculative fiction allows use to use narrative to illustrate thought experiments. We can ask what if and muse about what could be, whether we’re talking about alternate realities or future ones. As we head farther into the twenty first century, we may rethink everything that worked (or failed) in the twentieth.
          There are some social/political/economic movements that argue for a reduction in government, often citing it as a potentially corrupt evil. Some go so far as to advocate for its utter removal and replacement with privately run institutions.
             Enter Gurgaon – a quickly growing city in India which has been run solely by companies for about forty years. The result has been a very lopsided city where only some neighborhoods have facilities like running water and electricity.
             Such a model could be edenic or dystopian depending on the tone and theme of your story. This could be a dark exploration of a corporate run world in a hard boiled cyberpunk story or a libertarian utopia for entrepreneurs unhindered by red tape and the strings of government corruption.

-Jonathan Hernandez