Sultanate of Oman
The World's first city-state for Art, Science & Entertainment
Charter of Foundation
On the shore of the Sea of Oman, beneath the Hajar Mountains, a new city-state raises its first arch.
Magan takes its name from the oldest maps: the Bronze-Age country of copper and shipwrights that sent its hulls from this coast to every harbor of the ancient world. We are laying out its successor the old way — in stone, shade, and proportion — to hold a society built the new way: in code, in commons, in light.
The charter is short. One hundred thousand citizens, present and remote. A government that runs in the open, its ledgers public by architecture. And three pillars carrying everything: art, to give the city its meaning; science, to give it its means; entertainment, to give it its evenings.
Every institution in Zero answers to one of three pillars, and every citizen serves on one. The pillars are not ministries; they are the load-bearing walls of the charter.
01
The city as a commission
A permanent commission for makers: open ateliers along the shade streets, a public archive of everything the city produces, and light itself treated as a civic material.
02
The city as an instrument
An instrument pointed at sea and sky: an observatory on the ridge, a reef laboratory beneath the corniche, and a falaj of computation running under every street.
03
The city as a festival
Evenings are civic infrastructure: an amphitheatre the tide fills twice a day, a night souq of games and screens, and a calendar that treats the khareef as a curtain-raiser.
Six districts on twelve kilometres of coast. The falaj — the old Omani art of leading water downhill — is cut again, this time carrying water, power, and fibre from the ridge to the sea.
Plan of the City-State of Zero
First Survey · MMXXVI · 1:20 000
The Six Districts
100,000
Founding citizens
300+
Clear nights a year
12 km
Of shaded corniche
0
Combustion engines
2026
The Survey
The coast is mapped, the charter drafted in public, line by line.
2027
First Arch
Groundbreaking at the Harbor Gate; the falaj is cut from ridge to sea.
2028
The Commons
Archive, souq, and assembly open to the first thousand residents.
2030
Charter Day
The register closes at one hundred thousand names. Zero governs itself.
Cohort 001 · one hundred names · reviewed quarterly