Cities Are The Best Tech Product Ever Built
Innovation and Coordination at Scale
Cities are the best tech product ever built.
At first glance, they don’t look like products. Cities aren’t primarily created by a single founder, they don’t ship updates on a clean quarterly cadence, and there’s no clear version history since they evolve continuously over time and have no distinct versions of themselves. But upon deeper inspection, one might be inclined to see the similarities and embrace the metaphor. Cities, like great technology, solve coordination problems at scale. They aggregate people, ideas, infrastructure, and incentives. They evolve continuously. And most importantly — they’re actually used.
Among other things, a great tech product does three things well: it reduces friction for users, enables new forms of collaboration, and becomes more valuable as more people use it. Cities are the ultimate instantiation of this. They compress the cost of finding collaborators, customers, and capital. They provide interoperable infrastructure — roads, power, legal systems — that others can build on. And as they grow, their value compounds through agglomeration effects, just like networks.
But unlike most tech, cities don’t need a singular roadmap or chief executive. They’re of course shaped through the implementation of policies via leadership teams, but they’re uniquely self-organizing and emergent. Nobody sat down to architect New York’s financial dominance, or Tokyo’s precision logistics, or Lagos’s energy and scale. While yes, many leaders held these visions and implemented policy to help align each city towards these callings, these properties ultimately emerged from millions of local interactions layered over time. The city is the interface — but the product is a living system, shaped as much by its users as its builders.
More than any company, application, or device, cities have endured. The most impactful technologies are always at risk of fading or fragmenting; today’s killer app might become tomorrow’s legacy system. But cities persist, precisely because they adapt. Their boundaries flex, their internal logic shifts, but the core utility — high-bandwidth human interaction — remains universal. The resilience and the permissionless adaptability is what makes cities not just a product, but the product — the one we’re still iterating on after thousands of years of human history. And as today’s world becomes increasingly shaped by decentralized systems, permissionless protocols, and software-native institutions, understanding how cities work might just be one of the best ways to design what comes next.
Self-Organization and Emergence
Cities are uniquely self-organizing systems. Nobody designed their final form from the top down. At best, they were nudged by their leaders and molded by the decisions they made along the way. But the most vibrant cities didn’t emerge from a singular master plan — they grew through layers of iterative behavior. Informal paths became permanent streets, ad hoc markets turned into financial districts, neighborhoods were shaped not by blueprints but by cultural pressures and economic necessities.
Cities are archetypes of spontaneous order. They start as small settlements, coalesce around points of economic gravity, and over time, crystallize into something far greater than the sum of their inputs. Their complexity arises not from centralized control, but from the interplay of millions of decentralized decisions. The corner shop owner, the street vendor, the underground DJ, the public transit commuter—each shapes the urban landscape simply by acting in their own interest, responding to local incentives.
The crypto landscape mirrors this well. Blockchains and protocols don’t scale through command and control but through composability and adaptability. Ethereum was never "designed" to be an end-all-be-all financial layer—it just offered a virtual city block where DeFi developers could set up shop, and others followed. NFTs weren’t originally part of the plan, they were cultural side streets that evolved into entire creative economies. The system never asked for permission in this innovation, it simply absorbed each new wave of participation and allowed something unique to be created at every turn.
What emerges from this bottom-up dynamic is a form of collective intelligence. Cities “learn” over time. They encode historical shocks in their layout, absorb new technologies into their flows, and reflect changing cultural values without needing to be rebuilt from scratch. Cities show us that robust complexity doesn’t require perfect foresight. It simply requires fertile ground. Give people the space, tools, and incentives, and they will collectively build unique and innovative things beyond the scope of what was previously imagined.
Cities as Permissionless Platforms
Cities remain among the most permissionless environments humans have ever created— though not in the anarchic or lawless sense. Of course, bureaucratic frictions will always exist: zoning laws, health codes, and licensing requirements are all part of urban development. You can't open a restaurant without a permit or build an apartment complex without approvals. But that’s not the kind of permission in question.
What makes cities uniquely open is that, within those boundaries, individuals still retain the extraordinary freedom over what they choose to create and how they engage with the system. You don’t need anyone’s approval to start a street performance, form a community meetup, or launch a startup in a garage. People have a choice in the type of business to start, the type of community to form, or the type of creative pursuit to follow. They make the design decisions — the business model, the brand, the vibe — and the city provides the substrate for experimentation.
There are, of course, rules to follow, and red tape to be dealt with, but when we think big picture, cities more so resemble open protocols than tightly managed platforms. They offer the scaffolding for innovation, not the script. Much like anyone can deploy a smart contract on Ethereum or spin up a validator in Cosmos, (nearly) anyone can open a corner store, a food truck, or a coding bootcamp in a city. The magic comes not from any central control, but from the unpredictable ways in which people leverage the infrastructure to do cool things.
This uniquely contrasts the curated world of closed platforms — app stores, big-tech social networks, corporate campuses — where gatekeeping is the norm and innovation is subject to top-down approval. Cities, by comparison, are messier but more generative. They reward initiative and absorb failure. A failing café becomes a tattoo parlor; a defunct warehouse becomes an art gallery. Iteration happens in real-time, not on quarterly product cycles.
Importantly, this permissionlessness also extends to cultural innovation. Cities are where so many subcultures are born — jazz, skateboarding, hip-hop, streetwear, startup hustle — because they allow individuals to remix identity, space, and meaning. No one grants you permission to become an artist or street performer. The city gives you the bandwidth and surface area to try. This freedom to build and belong without top-down coordination is a powerful design principle — one that crypto networks have internalized deeply. And in both domains, the most interesting outcomes are rarely the ones originally envisioned — but that’s the point. The value of permissionless platforms isn’t just in what they enable, but in the unpredictable forms of human creativity they unlock.
Network Density
From an economic standpoint, the greatest value in a city lies in its density, and not just the density of people per square mile, which differs drastically for urban environments across the globe, but the density of ideas, capital, talent, and opportunity. When enough minds and motivations cluster together, productivity doesn’t just grow linearly but naturally compounds. This is the phenomenon urban economists refer to as agglomeration effects—the empirical findings that aggregating more people together induces greater productivity for the regional economy overall.
Cities thrive on this effect because they uniquely reduce the cost of connection. A casual coffee shop conversation can lead to a business partnership. A designer overhearing a developer at a meetup can spark a startup. These effects become more pronounced the closer that people are, and the more overlapping their interests. Importantly, agglomeration doesn’t just create more output—it creates new kinds of output. It enables complex coordination problems to be solved locally and creatively, resulting in new expressions of human potential.
The Original Network
Cities are humanity’s oldest and most enduring operating systems for innovation. The history of civilization is largely the history of urbanization: from the ancient agora to Renaissance Florence to modern-day San Francisco, cities have been the platforms upon which so many major leaps in art, science, finance, and technology have occurred. Not because they were specifically designed for that purpose, but because their structure encourages emergence. A city is not “run” in the way a company is—it’s coordinated, often invisibly, by millions of individuals acting in pursuit of their own goals within a shared spatial and institutional framework.
This is why cities are arguably the greatest technology humans have ever built. They are living, breathing systems that absorb energy, culture, and capital, and turn it all into invention. Unlike a product, they aren’t versioned and shipped, and they don’t risk breaking when pushed to scale. They reshape themselves, and they grow increasingly more valuable as more people use them.
Cities teach us that the most powerful technologies are not necessarily the most efficient or the most controlled. They’re the most generative. They create conditions for others to create; they invite participation; they turn chaos into culture. In an era obsessed with scale and abstraction, it’s worth remembering that many of the most transformative moments in human history —the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Age — didn’t happen in isolation. They happened in cities, among people. On streets, over drinks, through friction.
Cities are the original network, the original marketplace, the original incubator. The best tech product ever built — not because they were designed to be, but because they became one.
Note: I highly recommend the book, Read Write Own, by a16z’s Chris Dixon — one of the greats and my inspiration in imagining crypto networks under an urban framework.