FUTARCHY + FRONTIER CITIES

Prediction markets as instrumental governance. 

Good pilots rely heavily on small airplane instruments, especially the "Six Pack" (airspeed, altimeter, attitude, heading, vertical speed, turn coordinator), engine gauges (oil pressure/temp, fuel), and navigation/communication radios, to understand the aircraft's status, maintain orientation, and fly safely.

Frontiers do not forgive bad governance.

Every civilisation that has expanded beyond its comfort zone has learned this the hard way. At the edge, errors compound quickly. Capital flees. Talent moves on. Infrastructure fails. What survives is not ideology or optimism, but administration that can act decisively under uncertainty.

ROMULLUS begins with a simple premise: if we are serious about building industrial spaceport cities that must earn their place in a volatile, multipolar world, then governance cannot be an afterthought. It must be engineered with the same care as ports, power systems, and launch infrastructure.

Our current view, and we are explicit that this may evolve, is that the strongest foundation lies in combining two ideas that are rarely discussed together: the City of London Corporation and futarchy.

One is among the oldest and most effective urban administrations in history. The other is a modern mechanism for extracting high-signal information from uncertainty. Together, they point toward a form of governance unusually well suited to frontier cities on Earth and, eventually, off-world.

The City of London Corporation as a governance template

The City of London Corporation is not a municipal curiosity. It is a governance system that has operated continuously for over 900 years, surviving plagues, fires, civil wars, industrial revolutions, and the rise and fall of empires.

Founded in the medieval period and formally recognised by royal charter by the early twelfth century, the Corporation governs the Square Mile, an area of just over one square mile that today hosts a workforce of more than 600,000 people and underpins one of the world’s most important financial centres. The City contributes an estimated £75 billion to UK GDP annually and supports roughly 2.3 million jobs nationwide through financial and professional services.

Its durability rests on several features that matter enormously for frontier cities.

First, it is commercially oriented. The City’s primary obligation has always been to maintain throughput. Trade, finance, insurance, and logistics were not ideological projects. They were survival mechanisms. Regulation evolved pragmatically, often faster than national law, to support commerce rather than inhibit it.

Second, it is institutionally autonomous but politically legitimate. The Corporation operates with its own court system, police force, and ancient electoral mechanisms, including business voting through livery companies. These arrangements are not democratic in a modern mass sense, but they are accountable to those who bear economic risk within the City.

Third, it avoids ossification by design. The City cannot rely on a captive population or a guaranteed tax base. Its relevance must be continuously earned. When Amsterdam overtook London in the seventeenth century, the City adapted. When New York rose in the twentieth, it retooled again. This exposure to competition imposed discipline that most metropolitan governments lack.

Frontier cities require exactly this combination of authority, flexibility, and commercial realism.

Why frontier cities cannot copy the British mainland

The British mainland is governed by systems optimised for risk avoidance, consensus management, and political stability. These are not flaws. They are rational responses to governing a mature society of nearly 70 million people with deep historical scars from war, inflation, and social upheaval.

But those same systems struggle under frontier conditions.

Planning regimes that take a decade to approve housing cannot support cities that must scale industrial capacity in years. Regulatory frameworks designed to minimise downside risk struggle to capture upside opportunity. Advisory processes optimised for representation often dilute signal precisely when clarity matters most.

History shows that frontier cities fail when they inherit governance structures built for settled societies. The result is paralysis rather than prudence.

The solution is not anarchy. It is governance that can absorb uncertainty faster than rivals.

Futarchy as an advisory layer, not a sovereign replacement

This is where futarchy enters the picture.

The concept, developed by economist Robin Hanson, proposes that markets can be used to forecast the outcomes of policy decisions. Participants stake capital on measurable results. Those who are correct profit. Those who are wrong lose money. Over time, signal emerges from noise because incentives punish error.

Used carelessly, futarchy can be naïve. Used properly, it is powerful.

ROMULLUS does not envisage futarchy replacing governance. It would be reckless to hand sovereignty to markets. What we propose instead is an advisory layer that augments decision-making with continuously updated, incentive-aligned forecasts.

An on-chain implementation matters for practical reasons. Smart contracts enforce rules immutably. Settlement is automatic. Participation is global. Historical performance is auditable. Prediction markets gain credibility when no administrator can quietly intervene.

This creates a forecasting system that learns over time.

For a frontier city, this could apply to questions such as expected port throughput, energy demand growth, housing absorption rates, or the economic return on a new manufacturing cluster. Capital markets already make implicit forecasts. Futarchy makes them explicit, transparent, and accountable.

Bad ideas lose money. Good ideas attract capital.

This is not ideology. It is instrumentation.

Why the combination matters

The City of London Corporation provides authority, continuity, and legitimacy. Futarchy provides signal.

One without the other fails. Authority without feedback ossifies. Signal without authority fragments.

Together, they form a governance system unusually well suited to environments where the margin for error is small and adaptation is constant.

This is precisely the condition of frontier cities.

It is also the condition of off-world settlements.

Any serious attempt to establish permanent industrial capacity beyond Earth will confront extreme capital intensity, logistical fragility, and unforgiving constraints. Governance models optimised for electoral cycles or ideological purity will not survive there. Systems that reward accurate forecasting and penalise error will.

In that sense, frontier spaceport cities on Earth are not merely economic projects. They are rehearsal spaces for the governance of a multi-planetary civilisation.

Governance as a competitive advantage

History rarely records governance as a technology. Yet it behaves like one.

Rome’s roads mattered, but so did its administrative replication. Britain’s navy mattered, but so did its chartered companies and commercial courts. Hong Kong’s ports mattered, but so did the fiscal discipline imposed by leaders like Sir John James Cowperthwaite, who in the 1960s refused even to publish GDP figures for fear that central planning would follow.

Governance that adapts faster than rivals becomes a strategic asset.

ROMULLUS takes this seriously. We are not pretending to have final answers. We are explicit that governance must evolve with evidence. But we are equally explicit that copying the administrative failures of the present would doom the cities of the future.

Frontier spaceport cities must earn their place. In capital markets. In logistics networks. In geopolitics. In history.

Getting governance right is the difference between becoming indispensable and becoming irrelevant.

That is why we are thinking about it now.