Cities serve as humanity’s exoskeletons. They’re the hard shells we’ve built to scaffold and support less tangible aspirations — progress, prosperity, and the rest of the messy project of civilization. But like any exoskeleton, cities eventually outgrow themselves. Without adequate mechanisms to adapt or trust in the scaffolding that helps them remain stable, we are starting to see cities crack under the weight of their own complexity and growth, even as the people and technologies they house continue to evolve. The problem isn’t a shortage of ideas or solutions. It’s that cities, as systems, have become bad at metabolizing them.

What cities lack today is “Overton Infrastructure”, the invisible lattice of norms, rules and capital that shift the focus from acceptable solutions to the execution of them. While this infrastructure usually takes the form of policy infrastructure, more broadly they can be thought of as the operational scripts that cities are constrained by. Think of them as the source code that compiles into everything we can build and do, the when, where and what. Zoning ordinances dictate where housing, parks, or factories can exist, similarly traffic laws and regulations shape driver behaviour and road design. While our ability to generate new “code” (ideas) has exploded, our deployment pipeline is still stuck. We’re drowning in blueprints, yet the bridges remain unbuilt.

The mad rush for efficiency and optimization we’re seeing now is a painful but long overdue upgrade to institutional operating systems. On the outside the inadequacies of modern day institutions might look similar to a collapse, but it’s more apt to call this transition a phase change. The shift demands more than optimizing cities as machines; it requires rebuilding them as learning organisms, where policy isn’t dictated through rigid rulesets but cultivated through feedback loops between ground truth and governance.

The opportunity lies in recognizing this isn’t about patching bugs in old code, but introducing a new operating system for cities. New institutions will emerge—not by starting from scratch, following better politicians and charismatic leaders, or through “smarter” laws—but from dumber protocols: more adaptive, modular rulesets that enable more freedom than they constrain. What would a world where housing policies that adapt to demand rates, energy grids responding to real-time emissions, and neighborhoods collaboratively editing zoning rules within citywide guardrails, look like?

We need new institutional scaffolding within and between cities to stop reinventing wheels, proactively address the "delivery gap", and start compounding progress. The enemy isn’t bureaucracy, it’s brittleness. The hero isn’t innovation either, it’s adaptive capacity.

OVERTON WINDOWS → OVERTON INFRASTRUCTURE

Policy acts as the operating system (OS) of cities. And when this OS is built for static, linear problems, it’s hard for the same system to handle the more dynamic and exponential ones we're coming to terms with today (climate change, changing labor configurations, updating national energy infrastructure). The result? Cities default to what systems theorist Stafford Beer called “blunt instrument” modes: top-down mandates, one-size-fits-all solutions, and a creeping privatization of the governmental services and public infrastructure, i.e. the commons.

In both blatant and invisible ways, policy dictates much of urban life. The Overton window, the range of politically acceptable ideas, is now shifting faster than cities can respond, making the operationalization of good and needed ideas more difficult. Packy McCormick argues that, “ideas aren’t getting harder to find; they’re getting harder to use.” While the rate of idea generation hasn’t slowed, the ability to deploy and implement them has become the bottleneck.

Many shiny “new” innovations we're seeing today are based on decades-old ideas being revived due to two conditions finally being met: improved technological capacity and premium demand. Only when supporting technology and appetite matures do most ideas become feasible. In the same way, widespread aging or ubiquitous infrastructure (crumbling bridges or roads) creates demand for innovations in repair and maintenance technologies due to the sheer magnitude of the effort. Crises (climate change, housing shortages) also create urgency, pushing previously "unthinkable" ideas into the Overton window. For instance, AI traffic optimization was theorized in the 1990s but only became viable and needed with cheap sensors, 5G, and the urban congestion crisis.

I think of “Overton infrastructure” (OI) as the institutional, technical, and financial systems that determine how well politically acceptable ideas (within the Overton window) can be operationalized. In other words, OI serves as a bridge from the abstract realm of policy ideas to the concrete systems and tools that make those ideas viable. If a city’s gas grid locks in fossil fuel dependency, “phase out natural gas” becomes a fringe idea, narrowing the Overton window. Conversely, a smart electric grid with distributed renewables makes “100% clean energy by 2030” seem more plausible, thereby expanding the window. Overton infrastructure is the next step of policy changes, funding and built environment that legally and physically allows or blocks innovation. Without the right wires, pipes, or transit lines, even popular ideas risk remaining theoretical. 

Policy ideas need accountable but nimble institutional machinery to move from “acceptable” to “implemented.” Progress can be thought of as completion of this pipeline. Overton Infrastructure can come in many forms, such as:

- Funding mechanisms (municipal bonds for wastewater projects)
- Regulatory sandboxes (testbeds for zoning/housing reforms)
- Data systems (real-time emissions tracking to legitimize climate adaptation urgency)
- Workforce skill (enough retrofitters that make “mass home insulation” plausible)

It’s important to note that OI can also be cultural, like social trust in institutions. Narrative infrastructure operates at both window and infrastructure levels: it shifts the window (rebranding nuclear energy from dystopian to pragmatic) and builds the overton infrastructure (fostering public trust to deploy it). If citizens distrust their government, even consensus and ready-to-implement ideas, like heat pump subsidies, face backlash. When LA reframed its car-centric urban form as a solvable design problem, not an immutable “car culture” as it was frequently portrayed, it expanded both the Overton window (accepting transit reforms) and Overton Infrastructure (funding rail projects). Similarly, smart grids and real-time data systems (Overton Infrastructure) are enabling cities like Copenhagen to aggressively target net-zero goals, which were once politically unthinkable because of their technological impracticality.

If OI is brittle or misaligned a bottleneck occurs that prevents civic innovation and appetite from converting to policy implementation. Political acceptability needs to align with technological readiness, financial capacity and societal demand. 

James C. Scott’s concept of legibility, the state’s ability to “see” and shape society, also applies here. Centralized states often impose standardized infrastructure to make societies legible to power, but while this standardization is necessary to coordinate, it also ends up entrenching a much narrower Overton window. Conversely, decentralized systems create infrastructure that reflects local diversity while providing standardized ways for different system participants to “talk to” each other and therefore coordinate. More localized, but connected networks have the converse effect on Overton windows, they expand the range of “thinkable” solutions.

Imagine if local authorities were equipped to manage tailored energy transitions. A town that builds a community-owned solar microgrid isn’t just swapping coal for photons, it’s normalizing ideas like energy democracy and decentralized ownership, which then ripple into broader policy debates and possibilities. 

Without adequate Overton Infrastructure, ideas simply glitch between unthinkable and popular within the Overton window, but never quite land on being operational. It’s the missing middle layer between what we want to do and what we can do.

THE DELIVERY GAP & POLICY METABOLISM

The phrase “delivery crisis” haunts the civic innovation space. It’s the gap between policy theater and policy reality, the chasm where many policy changes and promises have disappeared without ever being sufficiently implemented. This isn’t bureaucracy, it’s a systems failure where “policy mittens” (Scott’s term for blunt, one-size-fits-all governance) fumble with their scalpels.

Donella Meadows calls this a “systems crime,” when we allow critical functions to atrophy through neglect or malcoordination. Policy, at its best, is the operationalization of science and what we collectively know, a way to encode what we are learning into rules that scale. The gap between what cities claim to do and what they actually do isn’t hypocrisy, but ultimately a mismatch of metabolic pathways and feedback between market and state, between innovation and policy.

The norms and rules that shape cities evolve over decades, while technology and culture now evolve over months. The same problem plagues deep research and its conversion into market-ready technologies. The result? A coordination debt that compounds daily. 

The metabolic mismatch is mathematical in a sense: civic innovation grows exponentially, while policy evolves linearly. Scott’s “legibility” crisis metastasizes as cities grow illegible to themselves and to each other. Amsterdam’s traffic engineers optimize for 2015’s bike commuter patterns while Uber’s shadow algorithms rewrite mobility norms in real-time. 26 agencies control $1 billion annually to address Los Angeles’ homelessness, yet 75% of funds are spent on temporary shelters while permanent housing stagnates. It’s a kafkaesque mismatch between centralized governance and ground truth. The UK’s net-zero ambitions reveal the same flaw. Local authorities control 45 key policy levers impacting 82% of the country’s emissions, but face a tangle of mandates and funding silos. Only recently has a Local Area Energy Planning (LAEP) framework been employed to integrate tailored solutions at the local level 

If this mismatch isn’t addressed we’re likely to see two trends amplified in coming years, both key symptoms of atrophied Overton Infrastructure: 

1. Resource Misallocation: Cities in an effort to address the delivery gap reinvent policies and infrastructure already proven elsewhere or need to beat around the bush complying to top-down, dated mandates, wasting both time and capital.

2. Commons Enclosure: Overwhelmed by implementation demands, cities outsource public goods (water, transit) to private actors, enclosing common infrastructure by default.
   

THE PURPOSE OF A SYSTEM IS WHAT IT DOES

The Purpose of System Is What It Does (POSIWID). At the end of the day, if policy continues to be treated as scripture, not iterative code, the purpose of our current governance systems is to prevent itself from adapting. When life fails to adapt, it dies. The best proxy for cities' adaptability is their democratic bitrate: the capacity to process, adapt, and enact collective will in alignment with the velocity of societal and technological change. It’s a term borrowed from digital communications, where "bitrate" quantifies data transmission speed. In our more urban context, it captures how effectively a governance system translates citizen needs, emerging ideas, and ground-truth feedback into actionable policy. 

When the democratic bitrate starts to lag amongst prescriptive, outdated rules, democracy also begins to die, morphing into its other forms: authoritarianism, facism, dictatorship, to balance out the system again until the cycle starts over. While these may seem like political cycles at first glance, underlying these shifts are innovation-policy and idea-implementation gaps. These mismatches in metabolism create reactionaries growing bored of slow, but stable systems which provide the certainty many of us take for granted but can’t appreciate until it’s gone. Good times create bored people who crave faster institutional metabolisms. 

Cities need new ways to digest and implement ideas at the pace of change, while maintaining the steady foundations that enable progress in the first place. This means building Overton Infrastructure that can both accelerate adaptation and preserve stability, not as opposing forces, but as complementary strengths. Like any living system, cities must find their optimal metabolic rate: fast enough to evolve, but steady enough to sustain the invisible systems that make life in these vast agglomerations of human life possible.

EXOSKELETAL → ENDOSKELETAL EVOLUTIONS

Our societal and technological systems today operate like biological exoskeletons, external, rigid structures that provide stability but resist adaptation. Just as insects rely on chitinous shells for protection, our legacy infrastructures (urban grids, policy frameworks, energy systems) are optimized for static, 20th-century challenges. These exoskeletal systems excel at containment, such as zoning laws dictating land use and defense, centralized cybersecurity protocols, but they struggle to evolve. Every now and then cities require pathways to molt, disruptive all-or-nothing periods of time to upgrade, to grow, that leave these systems vulnerable during transitions.

Exoskeletal thinking prioritize legibility for control, but sacrifices responsiveness to ground-truth complexity. Endoskeletal thinking ask for internal, dynamic frameworks that grow and adapt with challenges. The systems that arise from an endoskeleton approach to institution building and city governance protect through flexibility, not rigidity. While exoskeletons have served us in an era of predictability, their brittleness now hinders an immediate need to adapt and navigate exponential change. 

A POST NEO-CITIES WORLD

Current solutions to addressing the delivery gap in cities over index either on neocities and building new states from scratch (led by great man theories and technocracy) or completely overhauling existing government (and the slow but needed structures that nonetheless still ensure our basic safety and needs). A third way is possible, however. Instead we can retrofit existing systems with new endoskeletal frameworks; adaptive, decentralized protocols that enable cities and communities to evolve without abandoning their shared foundations. We're moving into an era where it's far more efficient to create a positive sum outcomes in the game by designing good rules, than it is to gatekeep the players and brute force the end game. There is no longer a map, and so our most powerful tool becomes a compass.

The protocolization of institutions neither clings to outdated nation-states nor retreats into digital enclaves. It’s a third way that is a defense of both "boring" governance: permitting reforms and workforce training aren’t sexy, but are the plumbing that make grand visions (net-zero cities, universal housing, more frictionless business innovation) possible. At the same time it’s also a call for a new civic stack: a digital-age update to the current technological and physical infrastructure of cities, combining decentralized tech with renewed social trust is reinforced by technological trust. 

The enemy isn’t bureaucracy, it’s brittleness. The hero isn’t innovation either, it’s adaptive capacity.

The big question is how do we redesign governance for an age of exponential change? The exoskeleton → endoskeleton framework goes beyond simple metaphor, it’s a blueprint for the future trajectory of institutional evolution.