Build-a-City

The people using it write the rules

The standard story says shared things are doomed. Everyone takes, nobody maintains, and the only fixes are private ownership or a state. Elinor Ostrom spent a career documenting places where neither happened and the commons survived anyway, and won a Nobel Prize for it: irrigation systems, fishing grounds, forests, held for generations under rules the users wrote themselves ¹. So self-governance is not a naive hope, it is an engineering problem with known parameters. What I have to be honest about is where the evidence stops. Her cases run fifty to fifteen thousand people who depend materially on the resource. Leaving was expensive. Urban work finds the principles need modifying and that some barely apply ². A city you can leave on a Tuesday is a different animal, and I have not found the literature that covers it.

Agreement is not the goal

Cooperation is not the default, which is easy to forget when you are designing for people you like. The useful positive result: when the shared thing itself changes depending on what people do, cooperation rises sharply. Not repetition alone, not a changing environment alone, but the feedback between them ³. And the finding that cuts hardest against instinct, groups solve problems better when consensus is slowed down and disagreement kept alive longer ⁴. A community optimised for harmony is optimised against its own intelligence. Building somewhere on the promise that people will finally agree is building something that cannot think. The objection this page exists to answer: every technologically governed city is also a proposal about who gets governed, and the current crop of network states reads to serious people as authoritarianism in the language of exit and freedom ⁵. That is the right default assumption. The burden is on whoever builds.

Sources

1. Ostrom, E. Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
2. Governing the urban commons: lessons from Ostrom's work and commoning practice in cities. Polko, Cities, 2024.
3. Evolution of cooperation in stochastic games. Hilbe et al., Nature, 2018.
4. Maintaining Transient Diversity Is a General Principle for Improving Collective Problem Solving. Smaldino et al., Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2023.
5. Post-smart cities as digital authoritarian polities: the aesthetic politics of the Praxis Network State. Wood, Dialogues on Digital Society, 2025.