UN City

Without the resources of a state to keep order I fear it would become a no-man's land like the walled city of Kowloon.

Probably not quite that bad, but I can definitely see it becoming poor and crime-ridden - depending on what sort of resources it gets and how open the border is with its host nation, of course.
 
Precisely. Place it in Berlin after 1945 and before 1961 and it would make the Soviets think twice about partitioning the city.

One of the countries that would have to agree to the site would be the USSR, which was as determined as the US not to have it in Europe. (Charlene Mires in Capital of the World: The Race to Host the United Nations suggests that one reason may have been that "Although Gromyko did not say it, a United Nations presence in Eastern Europe could be a barrier to Soviet influence and expansion." https://books.google.com/books?id=BDAVCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA85) With the USSR and its satellites in favor of the headquarters being in the US, with the Western Hemisphere nations including the US likewise in favor, with the Pacific nations including Australia agreeing, it is going to be in the US--period. And if somehow it is in Europe it is not going to be in a pile of rubble in the middle of a hated and defeated nation whose political status was still to be determined.
 
One thing that might help this idea is to understand why the UN chose New York ultimately. Does anyone know?

See my post at https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...n-headquarters-location.450068/#post-17472805

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...The first decision was Europe versus America. (America here almost always meant the United States, though for example Quebec City, where FDR and Churchill held two wartime conferences, put in a bid.) Not only the Latin American countries and the Asian/Pacific ones (China and Australia, both of which liked San Francisco) favored the US, but so did the Soviet Union. (The Soviets, who had bad experiences with the League of Nations, and had broken off diplomatic relations with Switzerland, were particularly opposed to Geneva.) "The United States is located conveniently between Asia and Europe,” Andrei Gromyko said. " The old world has had it once, and it is time for the New World to have it." (As Myers suggests, the Soviets might also have worried that having UN headquarters in Europe could hinder Soviet influence there.) This was a common theme: "For many diplomats, the center had shifted as a result of the war fought in Europe and the Pacific, with the United States lying in between." https://books.google.com/books?id=BDAVCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA85&lpg=PA85

There were an incredible number of places in the US which tried to get the headquarters. Myers has a 25 page appendix listing 248 (!) locations involved in the competition to varying degrees. Among the unlikely places were the Black Hills http://www.history.com/news/the-united-nations-hq-that-never-was , the Choctaw capital of Tuskahoma, Oklahoma. http://una-okc.blogspot.com/2015/06/when-oklahoma-vied-to-be-home-of-united.html and Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. http://capital-of-the-world.com/the-great-and-powerful-osborn-maybe/#more-175 The last-named was boosted as being on "an undefended frontier 3,000 miles long which has been without war for more than 125 years." (p. 59)

"In the Osborn vision, interpreted through drawings by Ed Kreiger of the U.S. Corps of Engineers, the UN would occupy a world-capital compound both modern and rooted in regional history and folklore. Sugar Island would be outfitted with its own airport, sea plane base, and steamer dock. Bridges and tunnels would connect with the mainland United States and Canada. The roads from both countries would meet in a traffic circle, then continue jointly toward a United Nations Center, a modern building with a tall office tower flanked by semicircular wings. Inside that building, the peace keepers would draw strength from The Song of Hiawatha, the "world epic of international cooperation" and the subject of the 697-page book the Osborns had published in 1941. The UN delegates would be surrounded by murals of Hiawatha and take inspiration from Longfellow's poem, first published in 1855:

All your strength is in your union
All your danger is in discord
Therefore be at peace henceforward
And as brothers live together."

https://books.google.com/books?id=BDAVCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA62

Anyway, all these local boosters emphasized the alleged historical uniqueness of their sites, showed maps using concentric circles to "prove" that their site was, with modern air transportation, at the center of the world, etc....all recognized booster techniques. They thought the UN headquarters would make their sites "the capital of the world." They lived in a different world from the people who actually did the selecting, who always referred to what they were seeking as a site for UN "headquarters," not a world capital, and were more interested in getting some place convenient for diplomats than in poetry. San Francisco was ultimately doomed by the memories of how time-consuming were the diplomats' 1945 trips for the UN's founding conference. The Northeast always had the advantage here. For quite some time, though, it was thought that the headquarters should be fairly near but definitely not *in* New York City. "The site committee ruled out any urban locations because of the organization’s sizable land requirements and fearing that the United Nations would be an afterthought instead of a focal point in New York, they eliminated all sites within 10 miles of Manhattan. However, when millionaire philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr. surprisingly offered a gift of six blocks of Manhattan real estate along the East River in December 1946, the committee reversed itself in a New York minute and found its new home." http://www.history.com/news/the-united-nations-hq-that-never-was Prior to that, the Stamford-Greenwich-Westchester area was seriously considered (though a lot of local residents did not like the idea) and even Hyde Park (as a memorial tribute to FDR) was inspected...
 
While "hosting" the UN is one thing, giving up a city for the UN is another. You could look at the Canberra or Brasilia model, starting with a basically blank slate on an appropriate piece of ground, that would most likely be more acceptable. Ignoring all the other issues, once it gets built what then. Given the way the UN bureaucracy works, with civil service positions doled out by quota to be filled by member nations, the UN administration is a disaster. Imagine if the UN, instead of managing a relatively few buildings here and there, had to manage running a small to medium size city - maintaining the infrastructure, policing/jails, planning for expansion, paying for all of it etc. Good luck.

It's likely that how the UN service is run would be different in such scenario, and the civil service positions are now open to public applications.

The main problem would funding, not just the initial investment, but how and who to pay the recurring expenses. If that problem is solved, we would see not only a UN city, but probably the UN Air Forces stipulated in Article 45 of the Charter can be realised as there would be land to build the necessary facility and funding to maintain independent UN forces separated from the P5 forces. .
 
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I found this proposal a while ago.

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I think Trieste was a very good suggestion, it's small city state on the border between a Communist and capitalist country, it have significant empty land which can be used for expansion.
 
How about Iceland? Small country, not many people live there, population's densely concentrated in only a few areas, rest of the island is pretty much open real estate, and it's a rough-enough midpoint between Europe and America that it could work as an acceptable compromise.

You can easily put it in Reykjavik itself, or build an entire dedicated city elsewhere in Iceland without too much difficulty.
 
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