Patrick Atwater pfp
Patrick Atwater
@patwater
"What if cities — the grand, messy, miraculous stage of our shared lives — weren’t merely adapting to the digital age, but designed for it? What if the spark of civic possibility — the one that burned so brightly in the hearts of early cyber-visionaries — didn’t fade but was simply waiting for the right moment to be rekindled? ... We’ve seen innovation around the edges: a better user experience here, a smoother DMV website there, a participatory budgeting tool in one city, a predictive analytics model in another. But the shift hasn’t yet happened at scale. We’re still operating with a civic firmware designed for the industrial era — when “professionalism” meant hierarchy, standardization, and control. Our cities, for all their diversity and dynamism, are still organized and operated by industrial era assumptions — shaped by charters and practices built for railroads, not routers." https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/what-if-cities-were-designed-for-the-digital-age
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Patrick Atwater pfp
Patrick Atwater
@patwater
"What if, from the centers of civic power, we looked to the edges — to the experiments happening right now at places like [ @edgecity ] Esmeralda — and asked how they could be replicated and scaled to meet the massive challenges we face? What if — at long last — cities were designed for the digital age? What if we explored and pioneered that frontier with the creativity and curiosity of the following comic strip?"
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