Communities

Local government, rural infrastructure and the machinery of small places.

• Why town meeting government survives, and what it is bad at

  Direct legislative assembly at municipal scale is often romanticised and occasionally dismissed. Both readings miss what the format actually does well.

• The last mile is an arithmetic problem, not a technology problem

  Rural broadband programmes keep rediscovering the same cost curve. The density threshold where private deployment stops has barely moved in twenty years.