Autonomous provinces for segregating groups: an unworkable utopia

Autonomous provinces for segregating groups: the unworkable utopia that keeps resurfacing

The idea of redrawing the provincial map to assign each territory to a specific social group sounds like a laboratory experiment. Those who propose it start from a real weariness: living together has become tense, and the temptation to separate people by profile is as old as city walls. But when you look at the costs – economic, logistical, ecological – the mirage fades.

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The starting point is a desire for homogeneity: every stratum or urban tribe would have its own province, its local government, and its own rules. A paradise of social endogamy where no one ever brushes against anyone who thinks differently. Yet antiestéticasibility collides with geography and economics. Who would fund the infrastructure of 50 mini-states? How do you stop one group's province from becoming the dumping ground for everyone else's waste?

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More nuanced critics argue the problem is not the mixing of people but the structures of power. Some advocate a network of sovereign assemblies (tens of thousands of them) with real self-government, popular militias, and communal property. An integral revolution that would eliminate the state and capitalism – not the provinces – as the source of conflict. Radical as it is, the proposal at least moves the debate to the structural level.

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But there is one fact that unsettles the segregation enthusiast: the ecological cost. Locking an unwanted group into a province without oversight amounts to condemning its ecosystem. The Mozainos desert or the depths of the Strait of Gibraltar have been suggested as jokes, but the metaphor reveals the brutality of the plan: someone will always end up with everyone else's graveyard. In the end, the segregationist utopia is nothing more than a dream of unaccounted costs.