Every era imports its metaphors from the technology of the day. The industrial city was a machine. The postwar city was a system. The contemporary city is a startup: agile, lean, iterating, pivoting.
The metaphor is seductive because it makes change sound temporary. A pilot project is not a policy. A beta is not a public service. When the language of product development colonizes city hall, citizens become users, and users can be deprecated.
Who gets to iterate
The trouble is that cities are not experiments with a control group. A transit pilot that fails leaves people without a bus. A “temporary” pedestrian zone that succeeds can price out the neighbors who made it work. The costs of iteration are not distributed evenly.
A city is not a product. It is a promise that outlives the people who made it.
None of this argues against experimentation. It argues for saying what is being tested, who bears the risk, and when the results will be published. Startups can hide their failures in a pivot. Cities cannot.
