# Pioneering protocols for the next City O/S

> Written in collaboration with the Patchwork Protocol and Patrick Atwater

**Published by:** [Pioneering Spirit](https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/)
**Published on:** 2025-09-12
**Categories:** cities
**URL:** https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/pioneering-protocols-for-the-next-city-os

## Content

Earlier this week a gov tech colleague in Colorado shared a sharp provocation: “government is software" That metaphor of government-as-software is certainly punchy. And it packs a kernel of truth. After all, the very word “computer” comes from banks of clerks doing calculations, and many of our bureaucracies are still evolutions of those clerical functions. Benefits programs today run on code, and in that sense the program is the software. But the metaphor is also misleading. Government invests in infrastructure, holds monopolies on legitimate violence, and builds the civic commons. None of these are reducible to apps. Still, there’s something alive in the phrase. Years ago an advisor of ours at ARGO wrote The New City O/S, and lately through the Summer of Protocols I’ve been digging deeper into what that metaphor means. At the large municipal utility where I manage the innovation program, we’ve been streamlining internal processes with a protocol-native approach, and I’ve been noodling on what protocols for adaptive, digitally native cities might look like. Our cities still are largely organized on an industrial logic in everything from how we budget to how organization charts to civil service are structured. So what comes next? Cities have long been living platforms for public services and each era upgraded its core protocols from colonial night watch patrols to the rise of professional police, from dirt roads to municipal waterworks. The table below sketches how those civic modules evolved, showing the shifting codebase of public life that any next generation city operating system will build upon.Evolution of City ServicesEraPublic Safety & HealthInfrastructure & UtilitiesCommunity & EducationGovernance & Admin1750 (Colonial America)Night watch patrols; volunteer fire brigades; local militias; Almshouses for poor; no systematic sanitationPublic wells and cisterns; rudimentary dirt or cobblestone roads; a few oil lamps; no organized transitChurches as primary centers for schooling and welfare; public marketsTown meetings or small councils; sheriffs and constables; basic local ordinances1850 (Industrializing City)First professional police forces; volunteer or early professional fire departments; growing municipal courts; sanitation drives during choleraMunicipal waterworks and early sewers; cobblestone or plank roads; gas streetlights; horse-drawn streetcars and omnibusesCommon-school movement; first public libraries; early public parks and recreation groundsMayors and city councils with formal charters; property-tax systems; expanding administrative apparatus (see NY customs office)1950 (Postwar American City)Full-time police, fire, and EMS services; traffic enforcement and civil defense offices; Public hospitals; vaccination campaigns; garbage collectionWidespread electricity and piped water; fully paved streets and traffic lights; robust bus and subway networks; suburban infrastructure build-outPublic school systems with high school graduation as norm; GI-Bill-driven universities; rapid suburban growth and recreation centersProfessional city managers and planning departments; modern budgeting and tax collection; formal zoning and land-use regulation Each period’s civic upgrades rested on its own information substrate, the implicit technology stack for storing, moving, and acting on knowledge. Here’s how information flows inside each era quietly set the limits and possibilities for the services above.EraInformation-Technology ParadigmHow It Shaped City Services1750 – Colonial AmericaManuscript & Oral Culture – handwritten records, church registers, town-meeting notes, word of mouthLimited speed and reach of information; laws and ordinances enforced mainly through personal familiarity and local custom Notice Boards & Broadsides – single-sheet printed announcementsEnabled occasional citywide alerts (markets, ordinances) but still slow and uneven Personal Networks as “Bandwidth” – kinship, guilds, congregationsGovernance and service delivery depended on trust and informal coordination1850 – Early Industrial CityMass Print & Telegraph – newspapers, cheap pamphlets, telegraph linesAllowed near-daily civic communication and the first near-instant urban news loops; sped up coordination of markets and emergencies Standardized Forms & Ledgers – carbon paper, printed permits, uniform record booksEnabled more complex taxation, policing, and transit operations Postal System as Civic Backbone – reliable mail routesCarried contracts, ballots, and citywide notices with predictable speed and regularity1950 – Postwar American CityElectromechanical & Broadcast Networks – telephone switchboards, radio dispatch, early televisionAllowed real-time emergency response, public announcements, and coordination of large civic events Mechanized Data Processing – tabulators and mainframesStandardized property-tax rolls, utility billing, and demographic statistics, supporting larger bureaucracies Mass-media Public Sphere – newspapers, radio, televisionCreated a shared civic narrative and helped coordinate infrastructure and urban planning From the town-crier notices of 1750 to the telegraph clicks of 1850 and the radio dispatches of 1950, every leap in information technology has quietly rewritten the city’s operating code. Manuscript ledgers and church registers once set the rhythm of civic life; cheap print and the first instant messages of the telegraph widened the loop of markets and governance; broadcast networks and punched-card tabulators let postwar bureaucracies scale and standardize. Each era’s pipes for moving knowledge defined the city’s limits as surely as its roads or aqueducts. Now look from the dirt up at today's obvious digital trends. Artificial intelligence shows up in everyday tools from translation to shopping recommendations and photo editing while cloud storage has replaced the old filing cabinet making files and photos available anywhere. Money itself is going digital as mobile payment apps and cryptocurrencies spread. Work and school blend boundaries through video calls and shared documents so people can collaborate or learn from almost anywhere. Below offers another GPT-ified table with four scenarios of future city services using the usual IFTF transformation / constraint / collapse / growth scenarios: 2050 ScenarioPublic Safety + HealthInfrastructure & UtilitiesCommunity & EducationGovernance & AdministrationTransformed (deep shift)Community-driven safety networks with AI mediators; climate-first disaster brigades; ubiquitous environmental health monitoring; bioengineered microbes cleaning air and waterRegenerative infrastructure—sponge cities, energy microgrids, fully circular waste systemsLearning webs that blur school–work–life; civic AI tutors fostering agencyProtocol-based governance; transparent ledgers of public trust; citizens co-write adaptive rulesConstraint (austerity & limits)Underfunded police/fire/EMS and public health; reliance on volunteer brigades and mutual aid; reactive disease controlAging infrastructure patched together; rationed water and energy; car bans in dense coresSchools overcrowded; libraries shuttered; widening digital divideShrinking municipal budgets; stripped-down bureaucracy; limited capacity to innovateCollapse (system breakdown)Fragmented local militias and vigilante groups; privatized or absent emergency care; recurrent epidemics; unsafe water and wasteBlackouts and brownouts common; potable water scarce; transit unsafe; streets deteriorateEducation collapses to family or religious enclaves; community care ad hocPower held by strongmen, gangs, or corporations; formal city government hollowed outGrowth (expansion & prosperity)Fully integrated AI–human emergency and health networks; predictive disaster prevention; universal preventive care and sanitationUltra-efficient clean grids; water desalination ubiquitous; self-repairing roads; autonomous transitAbundant free lifelong learning; universal cultural access; thriving civic commonsCities as innovation platforms; citizen assemblies with global linkages; fiscal surpluses reinvested Certain no regrets invariants include digitally native and adaptive approaches. What would it mean to develop protocols for the next city operating system? What are the new model city charters? What are the new template permitting mechanisms evolving from pdf-ed paper forms? What are the new machine legible standards for permitting fees? What are the paths for liquid data sharing so the public sector can operate efficiency, effectively and imaginatively? Hit me up @patwater on the socials if you're interested exploring that frontier. Further Reading 3web: The Frontier Where Digital Meets DirtIn the late 1960s Stewart Brand campaigned to have NASA release a photograph of the whole earth seen from space. He believed that a single image of the planet entire would shift human perspective. When the Apollo 17 crew finally captured the Blue Marble, that vision crystallized. It was not just a photograph.https://pioneeringspirit.xyzThe future of California housing planning and permittingThe future of California housing planning and permitting The Problem in Brief "When developers can't even find an estimate of what their fees will be, what affordability requirements they must ...https://medium.com

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