What if cities — the grand, messy, miraculous stage of our shared lives — weren’t merely adapting to the digital age, but designed for it?

What if the spark of civic possibility — the one that burned so brightly in the hearts of early cyber-visionaries — didn’t fade but was simply waiting for the right moment to be rekindled?

That same “what if” that animated the early days of Code for America — where people believed the internet could make city government not only more efficient, but more humane — still flickers. It’s there in the countless pilots and prototypes, apps and dashboards, policy labs and innovation teams that have bloomed across the public sector over the last decade.

And yet: the way city government actually works — the deep structures, the protocols that run below the surface — remains largely untouched.

We’ve seen innovation around the edges: a better user experience here, a smoother DMV website there, a participatory budgeting tool in one city, a predictive analytics model in another. But the shift hasn’t yet happened at scale. We’re still operating with a civic firmware designed for the industrial era — when “professionalism” meant hierarchy, standardization, and control. Our cities, for all their diversity and dynamism, are still organized and operated by industrial era assumptions — shaped by charters and practices built for railroads, not routers.

What if we updated those?

Not just with new programs or policies, but with new protocols — digitally native operating instructions for how city governments coordinate, decide, adapt, and serve? What if the foundations of urban life — budgeting, emergency response, infrastructure management, civic engagement — weren’t patched over with tech, but reimagined from the root up?

It may sound abstract — but its absence is painfully real. During this winter’s firestorms, millions in Los Angeles received erroneous evacuation orders. It wasn’t malice. It wasn’t politics. It was systems: disconnected data, unclear authorities, outdated tools, and brittle processes designed for a slower, simpler world.

That’s what happens when the underlying protocols don’t match the world we live in.

But there are signs of what’s possible. Recently, I sat down with water technologists from Israel, exchanging insights on reuse, innovation, and how peer-to-peer knowledge exchange can accelerate progress. It reminded me of Le Guin’s vision of the Ekumen — a federation of worlds where the highest form of diplomacy was the patient, reciprocal exchange of lived expertise. Imagine such a thing not between planets, but between cities: a decentralized network for civic knowledge sharing, where what's working in Barcelona could be adapted in Boise, and Tel Aviv could learn from Tucson.

That’s the true promise of web3 — not speculative finance, but shared infrastructure for trust and coordination. Imagine:

Smart contracts that manage interagency agreements.
Decentralized identifiers for securely accessing public services.
Tokenized incentives for climate action or civic care.
Interoperable governance protocols that make collaboration not just possible, but easy.

Many of these tools are not science fiction — they’re already being piloted and proven around the world. India’s digital identity platform, Aadhaar, has enrolled over a billion people and underpins a wide array of public and private services. Stablecoins, meanwhile, are already streamlining remittances — a lifeline for climate refugees and migrant families alike, bypassing slow and costly intermediaries.

We’re not far. It’s been 25 years since GovWorks — a bold attempt to bring local city government services online, which crashed as much from timing as from ambition. A decade since Healthcare.gov’s rough debut. Countless lessons learned since. Today, the tools exist. The need is urgent. And the moment — this moment — may be our chance to move from scattered experiments to a real upgrade of how city government functions.

So what if cities weren’t just retrofitted for the digital age — but actually designed for it from the ground up?

What if we had the courage to reimagine how city governments operate?

What if, from the centers of civic power, we looked to the edges — to the experiments happening right now at places like Esmeralda — and asked how they could be replicated and scaled to meet the massive challenges we face?

What if — at long last — cities were designed for the digital age? What if we explored and pioneered that frontier with the creativity and curiosity of the following comic strip?

Seeding the Second Foundation Series

Vol 1: The Edge and the Ember
Vol 2: The Quiet Power of California style data collaboratives
Vol 3: Gov Sherpa and The Worms Eye View
Vol 4: Street Sensors and the New Civic Commons

What If Cities Were Designed for the Digital Age?