The Free City offers a framework for rebuilding democracy from the bottom up through local, permanent, and representative Citizens’ Assemblies.

We propose a standing layer of citizen-led assemblies within every city: randomly selected residents who deliberate on policy, budgets, and shared priorities. This is not an advisory reform. It is a structural redesign of how democratic power functions, placing informed participation at the foundation of representation.

The result is a model that is coherent, scalable, and rooted in local self-governance, where each city becomes a living democratic system shaped by the people who inhabit it.

A Citizens’ Assembly (CA) is a representative group of randomly selected residents (much like a jury!) who learn about an issue from experts and stakeholders, deliberate together, and make policy recommendations or decisions within defined legal frameworks.

Assemblies are structured, professionally facilitated, and time-limited, with rotating membership to ensure continuity without entrenchment.

This method of random selection (called sortition) reflects the population more accurately than elections alone, prevents the rise of a permanent ruling class, and supports decisions based on evidence and deliberation rather than partisan alignment.

The Free City advocates for permanent Citizens’ Assemblies at the local (city) level as a core democratic institution.

Modern democracy struggles not only with scale, but with the quality of decision-making it produces.

As nations grow larger and governance becomes more centralized, public decisions are increasingly shaped by partisan competition, media cycles, reactionary processing, and abstract national debates. Politics rewards signaling and alignment over deliberation, leaving complex policy questions like housing, infrastructure, education, and more poorly examined and weakly resolved.

Most of what affects daily life happens locally, yet local decision-making is often fragmented across boards, agencies, and elections that prioritize turnout and ideology over informed judgment. The result is governance that is corrupted, reactive, disconnected from local realities, and ill-equipped to handle trade-offs or long-term consequences.

The Free City addresses this by embedding deliberation directly into democratic decision-making. Permanent, local Citizens’ Assemblies bring ordinary people together to learn, weigh evidence, hear competing perspectives, and make decisions grounded in shared facts rather than partisan identity. Decisions shift from party alignment to informed deliberation on the complex, nuanced trade-offs that real governance requires.

By shifting democracy away from abstract, personality-driven politics and toward informed, collective judgment, The Free City improves how decisions are made, not just who makes them, while allowing those decisions to scale upward through coherent coordination.

As societies grow in size and complexity, democracy drifts farther from everyday life. Decisions are made at greater distance, people feel less connected to the systems that govern them, and trust erodes, not just in institutions, but in one another.

When people no longer feel like a meaningful, distinct part of a shared democratic whole, politics shifts from governing shared problems to expressing identity and grievance. Cultural conflict, extreme polarization, and reactionary movements are not the root problem; they are symptoms of a system that no longer gives individuals real ownership of, or connection to, public life.

The Free City Org addresses this by bringing democracy closer to the people. Permanent, local Citizens’ Assemblies allow individuals to participate directly in shaping decisions that affect their communities. People are no longer just voters or spectators in abstract policies; they are active contributors to a shared system they can see, touch, and trust.

Building democracy from the bottom up restores connection, between people and institutions, and between neighbors themselves. It also builds democratic capacity: human-led structures that can adapt and evolve as complexity accelerates — from artificial intelligence and climate change to economic, agricultural, and geopolitical shifts. It allows individuals to remain distinct while participating in something larger than themselves, strengthening social trust and cohesion as society continues to grow in size and complexity.

Cities establish a permanent Citizens’ Assembly: a rolling body of randomly selected residents who serve for limited terms. These assemblies deliberate on issues that most directly affect daily life: housing, budgeting, zoning, education, and public infrastructure.

Assembly outcomes are directive within defined domains, with elected officials responsible for coordination, implementation, and accountability. City Councils evolve toward alignment and oversight, while mayors serve as executive leads, ensuring decisions are carried out effectively and transparently.

At larger scales, local assemblies connect into a unified national democratic system, informing regional, state, and federal elected officials who integrate local outcomes into law, budgets, and national policy. In towns and rural regions, smaller or county-level assemblies perform the same function at appropriate scale.

The result is a system that combines the freedom and responsiveness of localism with the coherence and efficiency of national coordination — democracy as a network, not a hierarchy.

No. The Free City preserves and strengthens representative democracy within a unified national system by grounding it in informed, community-driven deliberation.

Citizens’ Assemblies focus on local needs. Elected officials remain essential for coordination, implementation, and accountability — integrating local decisions into law, budgets, and national policy while upholding constitutional rights.

Some local roles and boards may be consolidated or replaced where they duplicate deliberative functions. Elected authority does not disappear; it becomes more clearly defined, limited, bounded, and responsive, scaling upward from cities into a coherent national framework.

Importantly, this is an evolutionary, living system, designed to adapt over time as communities, technologies, and challenges change, rather than a fixed or imposed model. This is why our framework addresses the structural incentives that produce corruption and dysfunction, rather than attempting to manage their symptoms.

By reallocating existing local resources from overlapping or ineffective civic bodies, without raising new taxes.

In cities like New York, this could include funding currently spread across community boards, borough offices, participatory budgeting programs, and commissions that lack clear authority or decision-making power (totaling approximately $80MM in fiscal year 2025). The aim is consolidation and clarity, not expansion.

Citizens’ Assemblies and polycentric governance have deep historical roots, from ancient Athens to the federated principles outlined by the U.S. Federalists.

More recently, successful assemblies in Ireland, Belgium, and Paris demonstrate that deliberative bodies can produce legitimate, informed outcomes. The Free City builds on these precedents by making the structure permanent, local, and systemic, connecting into a larger unified national whole.

1. Coherent Governance
   Links local deliberation with regional and national coordination through a clear, scalable structure.

2. True Representation
   Random selection reflects the population more accurately than elections alone.

3. Informed Decision-Making
   Citizens deliberate like juries, engaging evidence, expert analysis, and competing perspectives to make decisions grounded in reality, trade-offs, and long-term consequences, rather than partisan alignment or ideological identity.

4. Efficiency and Clarity
   Removes duplicative and non-authoritative civic bodies that slow local decision-making, increasing clarity, reducing cost, and improving accountability in areas that desperately need it like housing and infrastructure.

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

6. Safeguard Against Technocracy
   Ensures democratic authority remains human and deliberative as technology advances, using tools to support decision-making without allowing automated or centralized systems to replace public judgment.

7. Contextual Adaptability
   Scales across cities, towns, and rural regions, balancing coordination where density demands it and autonomy where it does not.