another interesting idea that'll never happen

Hong Kong is everywhere now

So it might be neat to see say Nairobi work as an invested city-state with relative independence. The trick as I see it isn't getting the developing nations on board (some of them already see the potential here), it's getting the developed nations on board to do it or developing a means of apportioning who gets what city-state governance. The developing world gets the advantage of a less corrupt city-state around which to model it's economic development and toward which investment would flow more easily (rather than "aid"), and the developed world gets to profit for a little while, say 100 years, and then gets a respectable trading partner that grew out of it. And that means the trick is determining who gets to call the shots where and then the question becomes how the Canadian or Finnish economic zones would grow.