The Orange City of the Future

Necessary discussions as Citadels become more feasible, and as our cities will need to be retrofitted with a Bitcoin standard.

Cities are the product of billions of decisions. They are never the outcome of grand plans.

Planning is, in the words of Stephen Wolfram, a computationally irreducible question. The only way to know the outcome of such a question is to simulate the plan in real life.

City-wide experiments might also be measured by setting the experiment in motion. The problem is that real people live there. Their lives, unbeknownst to them, are being played with from high above.

Good cities are free cities. Invariably. There is no correct answer to the question of form, nor to its organizational configuration. If they are free, they will be good because they will be allowed to organize organically and fail, when they do, gently.

Free cities are seldom ugly. If we contend that there cannot be a truly free city in a planned economy, then few cities are currently free ones.

The patterns that explain this are found in older examples of cities and also in open source software. The codes that govern both thriving cities and living digital systems share many aspects. Let’s look at a few, from a city-buider’s view.