Cities as Network Sovereignties

Introduction

Cities have long incubated, refined, and exported ideas, many of which outlive the civilizations they came from to spread across geographies and generations alike. Yet today's cities confront a paradox: technological change accelerates exponentially, while governance, the operating system of civic life, remains necessarily linear. It’s a tension that’s given rise to charismatic “great men” and uproar’s, but it’s also birthing a quieter revolution; a collaborative movement inspired by the ethos of open-source software and enabled by new cryptographic technologies. Together these new affordances and a changing cultural ethos are reshaping the way institutions function and how governance takes place in our world today.

Cities are the physical form of our technological and cultural competency as a species, they’re an indicator of the limits and affordances of our current organisational models and the extent of our scientific knowledge. Policies and laws, from housing rights to air quality, are an attempt at distilling our collective intelligence into a set of assurance and guarantees that act as a common ground for building ideas and collaborating upon.

[QUOTE: William Gibson: “Cities... are our most characteristic technology. We didn’t really get interesting as a species until we became able to do cities—that’s when it all got really diverse, because you can’t do cities without a substrate of other technologies. There’s a mathematics to it—a city can’t get over a certain size unless you can grow, gather, and store a certain amount of food in the vicinity. Then you can’t get any bigger unless you understand how to do sewage. If you don’t have efficient sewage technology the city gets to a certain size and everybody gets cholera.” (Joseph Grammer's Blog, page 4)]

Many of the rights and relative stability we enjoy today are due to institutions being deliberately designed to respond slowly to change, not despite it. However, this is often at the cost of adaptative capacity. Ensuring these guarantees in a changing world currently means we struggle to adapt to the new challenges and possibilities that are emerging. But how do you repair a moving ship on water?

Observing today's institutional strain, it’s easy to come to quick conclusions of perceived collapse. This era may be more accurately viewed as a phase shift however. In a world with an abundance of information and the ability of every individual to share their preferences without the need for intermediaries, there also lies an opportunity to update current institutional operating systems. This transformation demands more than optimizing existing institutional (infra)structures. Instead, it calls for a new governance paradigm: transitioning cities, the geographic and political unit that seems to have both enough weight to bring about real solutions and yet still small and agile enough to move and respond quickly to change, from static machines to adaptive, learning organisms.

Historically policy has been made from top-down edicts and lossy democratic processes, though often updated and changed from high friction, bottom up efforts. However policy now has the ability to be created, updated and adapted through smaller and smaller feedback loops between ground truth. The most effective systems, natural and human made, evolve through practical adaptation to local constraints, values and realities. Is it possible to construct governance frameworks capable of harnessing local insight and pluralities while maintaining the coherence and legibility required for the global coordination 21st century challenges requires of us? In other words, can we have our cake and eat it too?

Exploring these questions introduces a "third path" for governance: open, protocol-driven systems made possible and inspired by cryptography, open-source software, and biological models of evolution and organizational structure. This new paradigm rejects the dichotomy between Silicon Valley's "move fast and break things" ethos and bureaucracy's cautious "move slowly and preserve the status quo" systems. Instead, it advocates for a chimera; iterative and collaborative governance that operates as protocols, a shared set of rules and procedures that in their strictness, enable more freedom than they constrain, resulting in good enough outcomes for all by design, rather than from high effort grassroots movements, prerequisites of political popularity, or virtue and ideological alignment.

The internet and open-source movements have already hinted at this shift from rigid rules to protocols, due in part to changing labour and organizational configurations that favour distributed networks and ecosystems over traditional hierarchical organisational structures. Complex systems, from cities and agriculture, to open source software powering most of today's cloud infrastructure, thrive through decentralized tinkering and permissionless improvement within agreed upon constraints and checks, not central planning.

The best way to maintain complex software now isn’t closed organizations but open source contributions where anyone can jump in to contribute, where the many eye sof the crowd can check and balance the system. Similarly, blockchain technologies exemplify governance as kind of probabilistic gardening. These are all examples of a re-emerging approach to governance and the role of policy and law in designing the environment to incentivize and make room for the right things to grow, rather than controlling precisely how and where growth must occur.

The goal in our next evolution of governance should be setting the right scaffolding conditions and guarantees, rather than dictating outcomes.

This essay explores how cities might shift towards protocol-driven governance that integrates naturally into the “terroir” of local communities. It poses and explores essential questions such as, how have cities historically functioned as laboratories of innovation? Why do traditional top-down governance models falter amid modern complexity? And critically, how might protocol-based, open systems offer a pathway toward more adaptive, plural and effectively built urban futures? In answering these questions, we aim to go beyond “fixing” cities and reimagine what they could become at their best. The following is an exploration of the invisible rules that shape urban life and how we might embed our collective values within the very tangible and intangible infrastructures we inhabit.

Cities as Networks: Lessons from History

For most of history, cities have functioned less as centrally governed jurisdictions and more like open networks.

Rather than obeying a singular master plan, cities evolved through “metis knowledge”, what James C. Scott describes as pragmatic, on-the-ground knowledge acquired tacitly and through observation over time of a place and its people.

Indeed, states have often tried to impose top-down “legibility” on their inhabitants, only to misread and disrupt the complex seemingly unorganized systems that make civic life possible and resilient in the first place. The most instructive historical examples reveal urban governance as various forms of peer-to-peer, protocol-driven processes: a collaborative weaving of social fabric from the bottom up, often in defiance of and adjacent to high-modernist, central planning.

Medieval European City Republics

The German saying, stadtluft macht frei ("city air makes you free") reflected a legal principle where serfs could break free from feudal obligations by relocating to a city for a year and a day.

In medieval Europe, a wave of self-governing cities emerged as a distributed network governed by the Magdeburg Law, a de facto open-source legal framework. Rather than fixed statutes, Magdeburg Law consisted of flexible collections of norms and legal principles adapted by nearly a thousand cities across Central and Eastern Europe. Originally the customary law of Magdeburg itself, it was intentionally designed as a body of civic guidelines,“highly variable and modifiable from case to case,” enabling urban self-determination and autonomy (source).

Precisely because of its adaptability and loose governance structure, Magdeburg Law spread rapidly and organically. Each city adapted—or “forked”—this shared legal code to suit local conditions, creating a standardized yet highly diverse ecosystem of over 1000 municipalities connected by common protocols facilitating trade and alliances.

From these autonomous yet standardized charters emerged powerful merchant guilds, such as the Hanseatic League, which linked cities into horizontal alliances. These loosely aligned urban confederations, operating without permanent central bureaucracies, arose organically out of open, protocolized laws that allowed both freedom and a common ground for the network to coordinate and collaborate from. Deliberation among peers replaced hierarchical command, demonstrating how networks of cities could govern themselves effectively through shared standards—such as common weights, measures, and trading privileges—rather than centralized authority. Medieval city republics, from Lübeck and Novgorod’s merchant guild councils to Florence’s commune, were explicitly polycentric by design. Power was dispersed among elected burghers, guild elders, and neighborhood assemblies, creating robust checks and balances within horizontal governance structures.

Islamic Golden Age Cities

A similar ethos of decentralized urban innovation can be found in ancient islamic states which were largely sustained by informal community institutions. Lacking formally organized commercial enterprises or large corporate and institutional entities, Islamic cities instead thrived on a lattice of trusts, marketplaces, and guild-like fraternities overseen by local stakeholders. A prime example is the waqf, a charitable endowment which underwrote communal infrastructure and public goods at the neighbourhood level, from schools and hospitals to water systems.

Each waqf was founded by a private, usually pious donor and managed by trustees. Crucially, they were “ decentralized and autonomous…not controlled by the state or any other centralized body”​ (source). In effect, the waqf system turned essential urban services into a distributed network of small philanthropic foundations, providing a funding mechanism for civic utilities to be financed and run at the community level. Historians note that this tradition of the waqf was “a key organizational tool for socio-economic progress. It played an important role as an institution in the decentralization of social services, and the transformation of major cities” in the region​ (source).

By the late Middle Ages, these endowments were so prevalent “they had become the thread that stitched together the diverse tapestry of [Islamic] civilization” ​(source). Water fountains, bathhouses, libraries, and caravanserai inns for travellers and merchants in cities like Cairo, Damascus, and Fez were sustained by locally managed waqf trusts, which provided financing by the community for the community.

Alongside these material networks flowed an open-source culture of knowledge. Cities such as Baghdad, Cordoba, and Timbuktu formed hubs in a transnational web of scholarship. In Baghdad’s ninth-century Bayt al-Hikma (House of Wisdom), scholars of various faiths collaboratively translated and built upon each other’s works, creating a repository of science that was freely disseminated across the Islamic world. Learning was organized in halaqat study circles and madrasas patronized by local intellectuals, effectively a decentralized “university” network where a student earned ijazat, their credentials, directly from a teacher and so often traveled city to city to gain wisdom.

This mode of open knowledge-sharing, unencumbered by church or state, meant that scientific and civic ideas, and crucially, public goods and infrastructure (from algebra to public hygiene) could spread rapidly through the urban network.

In sum, the Islamic city prospered through bottom-up governance: markets regulated largely by mutual guild agreements and a muhtasib (inspector) drawn from the community, neighborhoods policing themselves via customary norms, and local infrastructure built and maintained organically via waqf public-private partnerships.

It may be tempting to imagine these cities as anarchical, however accounts point to an emergent order that grew from the chaos of thousands of individual contributions. They illustrate Scott’s point that practical know-how and local initiative often outpace formal administration, especially in effectively delivering services attuned to local needs.

Chinese Song Dynasty Cities

Imperial China, usually seen as the epitome of centralized bureaucracy, one can find examples of local urban dynamism overcoming top-down plans. During the Song Dynasty (960–1279), Chinese cities exploded in size, the resulting complexity forced imperial authorities to learn to ride the wave of bottom-up innovation rather than suppress it as earlier Tang-dynasty capitals had done.

Previously, these cities were strictly regimented with curfews at night, walled wards locking residents into designated neighborhoods, and government-sanctioned market hours, however the Song did not uphold this high-modernist rigidity.

In the Song capital of Kaifeng and other cities, residents “broke free from the constraints of nighttime curfews”, and vibrant night markets soon gained official recognition as a legitimate part of the city’s economy​ (source). Entrepreneurs lit up the streets with lanterns and stayed open all hours, while crowds mingled in teahouses, food stalls, and theaters well past midnight. Initially, this round-the-clock city life emerged informally (an urban adaptation to demand), but the state eventually legalized and embraced it, showing how policies enforced for over 800 years opened themselves up to grassroots practice (source).

​This newly unlocked civic energy allowed another layer of innovation to take shape: guild halls, known as hang or gongsuo, sprang up to represent merchant interests, provide mutual aid, and liaise with officials. City residents formed neighborhood watches and fire-fighting associations on their own accord to fill in gaps left by the imperial administration.

This was all a result of the Song government’s relatively weak military power, which devolved decision-making to local society out of necessity. An unintential policy of benign neglect allowed cities like Hangzhou and Quanzhou to flourish as cosmopolitan trading hubs.

By perhaps unwillingly trusting the emergent order of the marketplace, Song-era rulers brought prosperity that top-down control alone could not provide. The result was an urban culture that historians dub “China’s first modern economy,” driven by spontaneous social and economic coordination.

In the Song cities, when authority was limited to setting out and enforcing broad protocols (e.g., basic law and coinage) and then stepped back, cities were able to independently self-organize into resilient, adaptive systems. Song cities succeeded because they tolerated a degree of informality and chaos, not despite it, allowing local knowledge and preferences to steer urban development.

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Across geographies and timescales a common pattern emerges among these case studies: cities were able to successfully function as open, evolving systems, more akin to networks of free human coordination than top down rigidly upheld structures. Governance was often by protocol: general rules or charters setting the groundwork, and allowing daily order to arise from countless decentralized expressions, decisions and adjustments.

[Pace layers graphic]

Grand schemes that ignore local input, whether the Napoleon-Haussmann bulldozing of Parisian alleys or “smart cities” drawn on top of technocratic blueprints, tend to falter because they cannot replicate the adaptive, granular intelligence that lie within the city.

Historical cities, by contrast, accumulate wisdom in their very form and function, layers built on top of one another due to real needs and preferences. They were laboratories of bottom-up innovation that led to systems and public goods that were guided by what worked in practice. Successful social systems take into account local conditions and in doing so they produce solutions far more intricate and robust than any single bureaucrat or top down administration could design.

How would governance change if cities were viewed as “open-source” projects, constantly refined and maintained by their residents themselves? Where experiments and tried and tested solutions alike can be remixed and adapted across geographies and into new contexts as needed? Networked governance composed of guilds, endowments, and customizable policy, was the operating system that enabled complex urban life to thrive long before the rise of modern states. That’s not to say authority was abolished in these proto-city networks, instead it existed in a different, more distributed form that allowed order to naturally take shape. Cities, at their best, are a collection of protocols fore human coordination, proof that decentralization, far from being chaotic, can be profoundly generative when anchored in shared and trusted scaffolding.

Hyperstructures: Hard Constraints, Open-Ended Outcomes

The concept of hyperstructures arises in multiple fields. The concept of hyperstructures appears in several contexts and domains, Nils Baas, a mathematician and prominent advocate, sees the need for hyperstructures in order to better capture real-world dynamics in complex systems, such as cities and biological systems. Baas argues standard frameworks assume overly rigid hierarchies and consistent directional relationships, failing to adequately represent the context-sensitive interactions which characterize real-world systems; especially those that operate at multiple scales simultaneously (e.g. cells -> organs -> body, city -> region -> nation state).

Because they handle multi-way interactions at different scales, hyperstructures are increasingly used in multi-agent systems, swarm robotics, weather forecasting, and protein-complex modeling. The unifying goal is to accommodate and leverage emergent, adaptive behaviors that span different scales.

Mathematically, hyperstructures appear in three related but distinct ways: through category theory, hypergraph theory, and algebraic systems employing hyperoperations. Each sheds light on how multiway bonds and multi-scale affordances can be better modeled.

Category Theory

Baas and others have advanced category theory by replacing directional connections with multi-way “bonds” that link several objects at once. These bonds can be nested, modeling hierarchical systems in which higher-level composites emerge from lower-level relationships. This multi-layered, scale-bridging structure makes category-theoretic hyperstructures especially relevant to policy, where local conditions, regional mandates, and national directives must interlock without losing valuable nuance or autonomy.

Hyperstructures in the context of category theory introduces a powerful form of relational complexity where higher-order properties emerge at each successive level through many-to-many interactions. Baas emphasizes that these multi-level bonds are critical for modeling complex phenomena by mathematically capturing how wholes emerge from interactions among simpler parts.

This is crucial for representing many-to-many interactions, like a single infrastructure element (e.g., a transportation hub) serving diverse groups at different scales. From a policymaking standpoint, hypergraphs mirror how a single initiative might link multiple agencies, communities, and funding sources simultaneously across different scales or jurisdictions.

Hyperoperations

In classical algebra, combining two elements yields one result. By contrast, hyperoperations can produce a set of possible outcomes. Applied correctly, hyperstructures can reflect scenarios where interactions and computations yield multiple possible results rather than one deterministic outcome.

Such structures naturally fit real-world situations marked by unpredictability and multiplicity, and are currently being explored in emerging fields such as error-correcting codes, homomorphic encryption and post-quantum cryptography to handle multiple possibilities in computing.

[QUOTE: "Japan has taken a different path. Property prices in Tokyo were the most expensive in the world thirty years ago. No more. Affordability has not come because of population decline. Greater Tokyo’s population increased by 4 million people over the last thirty years. Instead, urban zoning is simple. There are twelve zone types, each defined by a nuisance level they allow that ranges from residential to industrial. If the building type doesn’t exceed the nuisance level, then anything can be built. That circumvents a lot of planning and permissions for individual sites and makes it far easier to increase housing density where there is the greatest demand."]

The applications of hyperoperations in this context has clear parallels in real-world governance, where new rules and policies often leads to many downstream effects, rather than one outcome that can be fully planned and prepared for. The flexibility of hyperoperations aligns with the need for adaptive policy frameworks that can account for emergent scenarios, much like error-correcting codes or homomorphic encryption handle multiple possibilities in computing.

Blockchain Infrastructure

In blockchain discourse, hyperstructures are envisioned as protocols, technological infrastructure, that run indefinitely without upkeep or intermediaries, and which cannot be forcibly stopped. Although fully realized examples remain rare, the aim is of blockchain-based hyperstructures is to guarantee long-term access, neutrality, and composability for all participants to build on open digital systems. In this way, hyperstructures act as a “trust-bearing” or “trust-minimizing” public infrastructure, providing these basic guarantees in order to.

Drawing inspiration from both decentralized protocol design in cryptonetworks (Horne, 2022) and relational modeling frameworks in complex systems (Baas, 2019; Scott, 1998), hyperstructural approaches to policy treat governance not as a static hierarchy of laws and administrative procedures, but as a composable, dynamic system of interoperable components.

A Rule for Rules Framework

Despite the different definitions and applications of hyperstructures, taken together, they point to systems whose strict constraints or their ability to reliably provide certain unnegotiable, guarantees, counterintuitively generate a plurality of open-ended possibilities. In other words these rigid, low-level constraints that yield open-ended, higher-level possibilities.

Internet protocols like TCP/IP and HTTP define very rigid, predictable rules for how data is structured, transmitted, and interpreted across networks. The strictness in how these packets are addressed (IP), delivered reliably (TCP), and how web content is requested and served (HTTP), together allow for more freedom in the types of data and applications that can be shared and built on the internet. They let the internet evolve across multiple scales—from individual devices to global networks—without requiring top-down orchestration.

No one could have predicted the full range of what would emerge due to the introduction of these rigid standards for data exchange. But more importantly, no one needed to because of them.

Protocols, whether technical or social, can thus be seen as practical realizations of hyperstructures, defining baseline interaction rules while leaving outcomes intentionally unspecified. The question still remains of whether rules designed with hyperstructural logic in mind can lead to better governance in the modern day? What would be the result of prioritizing setting appropriate boundary conditions to incentivize desirable outcomes, rather than precisely dictating how or where these outcomes occur.

TCP/IP and HTTP protocols provide rigid standards for data exchange ("hard constraints"), yet allow diverse applications and open-ended outcomes. There is a balance between stability and an openness to emergent behavior at play here that isn’t prevalent in our world today but has appeared and even dominated our past.

In Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott examines how 20th-century Soviet planners replaced complex, locally-adapted peasant farming systems with centralized, collectivized farms compatible with bureaucratic oversight. These new state farms adhered to rigid scientific planting calendars, cleancut geometric layouts, and uniform crop selections that looked rational on paper, but ignored the ecological diversity, microclimates, as well as the tacit and practical “metis” knowledge local farmers had gained over time through observation and experience. The pursuit of order and administrative legibility led to widespread resistance, plummeting yields, and ecological disruption. In attempting to control outcomes through clean, rigid policy design, the state stifled the adaptive, emergent qualities that had made peasant agriculture resilient in the first place and destroyed the very benefits of complexity it sought out to preserve and amplify.

Though part of a larger plan to control agriculture and perhaps an intended failure, imagine if the state had designed a flexible framework that defined “rules for the rules.” Rather than dictating what to plant, where, and how, what would a shared standard for reporting yields and soil conditions have looked like? Or open protocols for accessing markets and qualifying for subsidies which adherence to would automatically allow you to freely participate.

This approach would have established a common layer for communication and coordination, the interest the state had when undertaking this effort of legibilziing peasant agriculture, while still preserving local knowledge, experimentation, and emergent practices.

Much like the internet enables a wide diversity of websites to coexist on shared infrastructure without prescribing their content, such a system could have supported agricultural innovation from the ground up: structured enough to coordinate, but flexible enough to evolve.

Donella Meadows: a system dies when it stops adapting