Computer says no...

The market for permissions given by office network managers is all too close to the market for permits given by city managers. The anxiety of the users sure is similar.

There is a special category of anguish and fear that you feel when you can’t do something in your office workstation because you lack the appropriate permission from the IT guy.

Cities are like that. Citizens lack appropriate permissions to make places better. This is why most of us feel things don’t work and we can’t do much about it.

This happens everywhere, too. From wealthy suburbs to Rust Belt towns.

I have a tweet that keeps getting traction every time I post that reads “plant a tree. It’s still legal”. It may sound like a joke but it’s not. Cities are “Read-only”.

In most places, we would need a permit from local government to purchase a garbage truck and make rounds picking the neighborhood trash, to fix a broken sidewalk, repaint a faded crosswalk or replace a burnt street light.

Remember CD-ROMs? They were Read-Only. Burn it once and chuck it if you made a mistake. Cities shouldn’t be like that. The system is broken and the only way out of this mess that we are offered is to increase the budget and the scope of intervention.

No looking inward to audit efficiency. No revising failed programs. No assessing public land and assets to make them generate revenue.

There’s not even talk of letting citizens step in. God forbid they do it well.

Processes and services in local governments are broken. Taxes keep going up, especially in more established areas perceived as “wealthy”, but the decline in service is visible and painful. In every aspect. Potholes, accumulated trash, unkept sidewalks, you name it.

When exasperation hits at work because the IT guy gives no permissions, folks opt to use their own computer and open a Gmail account to be able to function at minimal standards.

The same exasperation prompted users to run toward open source operating systems like Ubuntu or Linux when Windows got too uncomfortable. The same frustration with the banking system has led to the spectacular growth of Bitcoin.

Local codes need to find a way to be open source. Only systems where free agents make autonomous decisions evolve and thrive. Our cities are hardwired for wealthy users who can afford them. When times are tough and we stop creating wealth, that’s gonna be a big problem. It has been a big problem already in some towns.

Form-based codes have slowly and timidly disrupted Zoning and afford more freedom to individual agents within evidence-based sets of rules. They are the MacOS of Zoning. But they’re still proprietary systems with restrictions set by the designers.

We need to figure out steps toward open systems for every area that cities control. Technology is advancing at a pace much faster than any bureaucracy can keep up with. The gap that exists between the limits of regulation and the limits of technology keeps getting larger. That should make regulators very scared.

I find it amazing that small towns of less than forty thousand people, with councils of less than ten supposedly accountable folks from the community cannot get their act together and figure this out.

A push to rewrite dumb regulations should be a priority. But photo ops and the next election are higher. Obviously.

We rarely think of cities as operating systems. But then we realize that everything we like and dislike about how our city works has been hardcoded into sets of rules and regulations that we abide by.

Remember the feeling you had when you first made the move from Windows 95 to Big Sur? We should find an exit so we can feel that again, but with our cities.