polycentric

DEMOCRACY

FROM THE BOTTOM-UP

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As national power expanded, cities lost their autonomy — absorbed into an ever more centralized single system. But coherence isn’t sameness; it’s harmony through distinction. Just as the brain’s neurons retain their individuality yet fire in coordinated patterns of resonance, The Free City envisions governance the same way: distributed local autonomy, unified national coordination.

democracy thrives when individuals trust their own conscience and see themselves as part of a greater whole.

The Free City is a framework for participatory governance that’s both coherent and scalable. We have a vision of democracy built and safeguarded from the bottom up — giving every city and community the structure to deliberate, decide, and act for itself.

Through permanent, representative citizens’ assemblies at the local level, we can restore self-governance, civic trust, and long-term coherence in public decision-making.

restoring public power AND CIVIC TRUST.

Democracy is a living system — it must evolve, if we want to keep it.

As a nation grows and power drifts further from the people, so does its effectiveness and the people’s trust. The Free City vision rebuilds governance from the bottom up, by returning power to the people at the local level — deliberative, coherent, and collective, all while remaining distinct.

True freedom is neither the absence of governance nor the flattening of distinction. It is the capacity of people to govern themselves — freely, locally, and in connection with something greater than each part alone.

  • The Free City is a framework for rebuilding democracy from the bottom-up through local, permanent, and authoritative Citizens’ Assemblies.

    We propose a permanent layer of citizen-led assemblies within every city — randomly selected residents who deliberate on policy, budgets, and shared priorities. This isn’t an advisory reform; it’s a structural redesign of how democratic power functions: participation first, representation second. A model that’s coherent, scalable, and rooted in local self-governance — where every city becomes a living system of the people who inhabit it.

  • A Citizens’ Assembly (“CA”) is a representative group of randomly selected residents (just like a jury!) who learn about an issue from experts and stakeholders, deliberate together, and make policy recommendations or decisions. Assemblies are structured, facilitated, and bound to policy and legal frameworks. A different group of citizens would rotate in and out.

    This random selection practice (called sortition) ensures decisions reflect the whole citizenry, not a permanent ruling class, and that votes are based on information, not group outsourcing.

    The Free City advocates for permanent Citizens’ Assemblies at the local, city level.

  • Modern democracy is collapsing under its own scale.

    As nations expand and centralize, power drifts farther from the people it governs — decisions made by a few, for millions, with almost no feedback loop to daily life. The result is predictable: polarization, incompetence, and public distrust.

    Most of what shapes our lives — housing, safety, education, infrastructure — happens locally. Yet our political focus has been pulled upward, into national outrage and partisan identity, while the places we live get overlooked and thus more easily corrupted, bureaucratic, and unnecessarily partisan.

    The Free City restores proximity between people and power. It’s a vision that rebuilds democracy as a living system — structured from the bottom up, where deliberation and decision-making begin at the level of community and scale upward through coherent coordination.

    The founders began a project of self-governance that remains unfinished. Democracy was never meant to end with representation, but to keep evolving with the people themselves.

  • Each city establishes a permanent Citizens’ Assembly — a rolling body of randomly selected residents who serve for limited terms. These assemblies become the first line of power in the city, deliberating on the issues that most directly affect daily life: housing, budgeting, zoning, education, and public infrastructure.

    The assemblies’ decisions are binding or directive — enacted by elected officials who coordinate and implement, not replace, the public’s will. City Councils would be reimagined as coordination bodies, aligning resources and administration with what citizens decide. Mayors would function as executive leads, responsible for carrying out those directives efficiently and transparently.

    At the next scale, these assemblies connect upward into the broader system — informing state and national representatives with coherent, bottom-up policy direction. In towns and rural regions, the same model applies at scale: smaller or county-based assemblies deliberate on local matters and feed their outcomes upward directly into state coordination.

    The result is a structure that combines the freedom and community of localism with the efficiency and coherence of centralization — democracy as a living network, not a hierarchy.

  • No. The Free City strengthens representative democracy by giving it an informed, community-driven foundation.

    Assemblies handle local deliberation; elected officials ensure coordination and implementation.

  • By reallocating existing local budgets from overlapping or ineffective bodies — no new taxes required.

    In NYC, for example, that includes ~$80MM in funds from community boards, borough offices, participatory budgeting programs, and related commissions that are duplicative and hold no authoritative power.

  • Citizens’ Assemblies and polycentric governance have deep roots — from ancient Athens to the U.S. Federalists’ design for federated republics — and modern experiments in Ireland, Belgium, and Oregon show they work. The Free City makes that structure permanent, local, and systemic.

  • 1. Coherent Governance
    Creates a clear, scalable structure for decision-making — linking local deliberation with state and national coordination.

    2. True Representation
    Random selection reflects the population more accurately than elections alone, bringing real diversity of experience into public power.

    3. Informed Decision-Making
    Citizens deliberate like juries — reviewing evidence, hearing experts, and debating trade-offs — producing thoughtful, legitimate outcomes.

    4. Efficiency and Clarity
    Replaces redundant or overlapping bodies with a single civic structure, reducing cost, complexity, and delay.

    5. Trust and Stability
    Re-roots governance in community participation, restoring confidence in democratic institutions through transparency and proximity.

    6. Safeguard Against Technocracy
    Grounds governance in human judgment and participatory coherence, preventing future AI systems from centralizing power or eroding civic agency.

    7. Contextual Adaptability
    A framework that scales across cities, towns, and rural regions — balancing coordination where density demands it and autonomy where it doesn’t. Most of our distinctions are not state-driven, they are urban versus rural, and this model adapts to both ecologies.

JOIN THE MOVEMENT FOR COHERENT DEMOCRACY

The Free City is an emerging grassroots initiative for civic renewal. We’re building a coalition of citizens who believe in its mission.

Stay tuned for more information and resources!