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Comment by ajot | Hacker News Reader

Hindsight is 20/20. Now we do have empirical knowledge (from Brazil, but also Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria and Myanmar) that moving the capital away doesn't solve any problem. Not protests, and definitely not a population concentration and disparity. We gotta find better solutions to those problems.

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Yep. Egypt is trying to do it now. Vox had a great video on that recently.

MBS of KSA has a similar fever dream.

The move from Paris to Versailles by Louis 14 was mostly that, so we’ve had that hindsight for a few centuries now.

See also: Washington, DC

Other examples of capitals moving: Bonn to Berlin (Germany), Bursa to Ankara (Turkey)

Bonn was always a temporary capital, and East Berlin was the capital of East Germany.

And Berlin had been capital of the Germany that came before. Colloquially named after Weimar (until a certain party took power, then colloquially named after that party), but Weimar has never been capital, only the place where the constitution was drafted. By that measure the Bonn republic would have to be called Frankfurt. Traditionally, the state that is usually considered predecessor of Germany (more like a feudalist mini-EU that happened to be mostly German language) never had anything resembling a capital, even after Habsburg effectively made Vienna the permanent seat of what we'd now call executive power. Assembly ("diet") was held in changing locations. At least formally, the last session at Regensburg was ruining for more than a century.

Italy:

from Turin to Florence (temporary, 5 years 1865-1870)

from Florence to Rome (1871)

In theory Rome was the capital of the new Reign of Italy since 1861, but in practice Rome became "available" only 10 years later.

Constantinople to Istanbul. Why did Constantinople get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turk's.

Sorry to nitpick, but that is the same city with a different name.

Even old New York, was once New Amsterdam… ;)

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