EV Atlas — every Emergent Ventures grantee, in one place

Mark Lutter was in cohort 1 with a grant for the 'Center for Innovative Governance Research, on charter cities and also an attempt to create a new charter city.' The Center for Innovative Governance Research has since become better known as the Charter Cities Institute. The charter cities thesis is the idea that institutions are the binding constraint on growth in many developing countries, and that the way to unstick them is not to fix existing cities but to build entirely new ones with imported governance — Hong Kong as the template, Próspera in Honduras as the modern test case. Lutter received a second EV grant in cohort 41 (March 2025) for 'American free cities and governance,' an expansion of the original thesis from the developing world to the United States — the freedom-cities movement that's been gaining traction in policy circles.