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The idea of citizenship has long been treated as the foundation of political belonging. To be a citizen of a state or a city is to belong to its demos. The history of citizenship has historically been built on exclusionary principles, and it has defined who counts and who doesn’t, who is the ‘we’ and who is the ‘they’. The passport, the residency permit, the proof of legal status have all served as tokens of belonging in various capacities. And yet, when we step back, we see that the act of governing, the work of building and sustaining a place, has never been limited to those with official papers.

Immigrants without citizenship have often been central to local economies. Travelers may spend months or years in a city, shaping its culture, creating ideas, working on projects, and contributing to it's growth. Volunteers, activists, and even temporary residents manage to leave their imprint. Within the framework of nation-states, their voices rarely count, because the state defines citizenship, and only citizens get the full bundle of political rights.

This exclusion was evident even after the American Revolution, a struggle often remembered as a universal fight for liberty. In reality, the question of who counted as part of "we the people” was fiercely contested. Many who lived, worked, paid taxes, and fought in the name of the colonies, including women, slaves, natives, indentured servants, and even free immigrants without formal status, were excluded from formal decision-making. 

Foreign-born residents who fought in militias or contributed to the economy often found that, without property or legal recognition as citizens, they had no claim to the new republic’s political life. In fact, one of the earliest citizenship laws in the United States, the Naturalization Act of 1790, restricted citizenship to “free white persons of good character.” So, even at the founding moment of American democracy, governance was tightly circumscribed, leaving vast populations subject to laws they had no role in shaping.  There is a deep irony in the fact that the United States, which revolted against the Crown over the same lack of representation in parliament, immediately restricted political rights to a narrow class of citizens.  

I often question how this connection between citizenship and political rights has remained so durable for so long. Part of the reason lies in the nature of the nation-state itself. The modern state developed not only as a political unit but as a mechanism for control. The ability to restrict the use of land, to define the boundaries of our borders, to restrict the rights of access to labor, and to claim the enforcement power of taxation have only been possible because of this deep bond.   

Citizenship emerged as a legal shorthand to decide who owed allegiance to the state, who could be taxed, who could vote, and who could be conscripted into military service. To separate political rights from citizenship would have undermined this machinery of sovereignty.  Otherwise, how could the state legitimize their extraction of resources or their ability to command armies if it allowed non-citizens equal say in its direction? In this sense, tying political rights to citizenship was not only about belonging but about enforceability. 

Citizenship is inseparable from exclusion.  The sense of belonging granted by citizenship is only meaningful because it is not universal. It has become a badge of honor, a token of identity, and a way to distinguish insiders from outsiders. In a world of competing states, governments relied on loyalty, and loyalty was assumed to come from those legally recognized as citizens. To allow political rights without citizenship would have threatened this imagined unity, raising the possibility that strangers could steer the fate of the collective.

It’s amazing that for centuries, political thinkers debated monarchy v. democracy, liberty v. authority, representation v. direct rule, but few have paused to question the assumption that political rights must be inherently tied to citizenship in the first place. It was taken for granted that political rights belonged to the legal members of the state, even as vast numbers of people shaped and sustained the very communities from which they were excluded. Only today, in an age of global migration and increased mobility does this assumption begin to crack. The boundary between citizen and non-citizen is increasingly mismatched with the flows of people, capital, work, and culture that actually govern our shared lives.

In democratic societies, the concepts of political rights and governance rights are often conflated with one another. This overlap obscures important distinctions and creates structural tensions in how inclusion and representation are defined.

Generally, political rights refer to the formal privileges conferred by the nation-state upon its citizens. These include the right to vote in elections, to run for office, and to access the full protections of the legal system. Political rights are rooted in citizenship, tied to sovereignty, and bounded by territories. To possess political rights is to be formally recognized by the state as a member of the body politic.

Governance rights, by contrast, describe the capacity of individuals to participate in decision-making processes that shape the systems in which they live, work, exist, or depend on. These rights are not necessarily tethered to citizenship. Even if citizens lack the political rights of the host country, residents may sit on local neighborhood councils, workers may vote in labor unions, parents may influence school boards, and entrepreneurs can even start their own companies. However, pathways for non-citizens to exercise their governance rights are continually becoming more restricted and are fundamentally subject to the prevailing dialogue and political currents associated with non-citizens.

The consequences of merging political rights and governance rights are significant. By assuming that only citizens deserve governance rights, modern democracies systematically exclude vast groups of people who are nonetheless directly affected by political and social decisions. Immigrants who contribute to the economy, refugees who depend on public services, or young people whose futures are shaped by policy are all denied a voice because their political rights are withheld. This creates what scholars call a democratic deficit, where governance decisions are made without the input of those most affected.

Historical examples highlight how fragile and contingent this link between citizenship and governance has always been. In the United States before the Civil Rights Movement, Black Americans were citizens but effectively denied both political and governance rights through voter suppression and segregation. Women, too, were excluded from political rights until the 20th century, though they were deeply embedded in the governance of families and their communities.

In the present day, the mismatch between political rights and governance rights has only widened. Globalization has made migration, international work, and digital communities increasingly central to social life, yet formal political rights remain almost exclusively tethered to national citizenship. The result is that millions of people live under laws and regulations they cannot influence. Cities with large migrant populations exemplify this tension as entire neighborhoods are continuously being shaped by residents with no ability to cast a ballot. Similarly, young people under 18 are subject to education policies and climate decisions that profoundly affect them, but they remain locked out of the political sphere.

The deeper consequence of this misalignment is an erosion of legitimacy. When governance is restricted to the politically enfranchised, but entire classes of people are governed without voice, the democratic promise begins to ring hollow. What was once a practical alignment of confining governance to the domain of political citizenship, now functions as a barrier to responsive, representative systems. As societies become more interdependent and diverse, the need to separate governance rights from political rights becomes clearer (at least imo). Political rights may remain the domain of the state, but governance rights demand recognition wherever people are impacted by collective decisions.

In the digital sphere, people exercise governance rights within online communities, cooperatives, and networks that recognize membership or contribution as the basis of legitimacy rather than national identity. Why can't our cities?

The City/Sync project seeks to offer a radically different foundation for governance rights. Governance power should not be derived from identity, but from contribution. The question is not whether you hold a passport or rent an apartment within the city limits, but rather, what have you done for this community? Did you volunteer your time? Did you help build a park? Did you contribute code or ideas for a civic application? Did you organize neighbors around a problem? Each of these acts can be logged, recognized, and rewarded with governance rights. In other words, your stake in the city is earned through service, and not inherited through paperwork.

The City/Sync framework seeks to reframe the civic identity problem. Instead of asking “Who is a citizen?”, we can instead begin asking “Who has contributed to our success?”. The abstraction here is powerful because it allows us to separate two things that modern states have collapsed into one. The right to live somewhere and the right to govern somewhere are a set of inherent rights operating independent of one another. The first may still belong to the nation-state through immigration controls, residency permits, and visas which all determine who is legally allowed to be present. However, the right to govern can be opened to a broader field of individuals. You do not need to be a citizen of a nation to help govern the city where you live, work, give back to, or care about.

In practice, this shift has several implications. First, it makes governance more responsive to reality. Cities are living ecosystems where the people shaping them are not always permanent residents. The students who spend four years building the rhythms of a college town, the seasonal workers who contribute labor to industries that sustain the local economy, and the commuters who volunteer in organizations across city lines all deserve to influence the laws that govern them. To deny these actors a voice in governance is to omit the reality and fabric of civic life. An onchain system of governance, based on recorded contributions, recognizes these realities.

Second, it makes governance more meritocratic in a civic sense. Instead of treating all citizens as equal, regardless of their engagement, it weights governance power toward those who are actively investing in the city. A disengaged resident who never participates in community life has little incentive to shape policy, while an active non-resident volunteer might have deep knowledge and care. The contribution-based model channels governance power toward those whose actions demonstrate lasting commitment.

Of course, this raises difficult questions. What counts as a “contribution”? How should the system measure and record it? Is a financial donation equivalent to volunteer hours? Does digital participation count the same as physical presence? These are not trivial debates, but they are no more arbitrary than the current system of citizenship, which grants equal voting rights to lifelong contributors and indifferent bystanders alike. At least in a contribution-based model, the weighting is transparent and adjustable through collective design.

There is also a deeper philosophical angle. By abstracting governance from citizenship, City/Sync offers a way to experiment with post-national democracy. Today, democracy is constrained by the geography and identity structures of the nation-state. But in a networked, global era, people’s affiliations and contributions extend far beyond the borders of their passports. A coder in Manila might meaningfully shape the governance of a civic tech platform in Oakland; a teacher in Mexico City might contribute to the design of an education commons in Berkeley. Why should their voices be muted simply because they lack a local ID card?

In this sense, City/Sync points toward an idea of networked belonging, where the unit of governance is not the state but a contribution-based community. Each city chain becomes a micro democracy, open to anyone who invests in its flourishing. Residency and citizenship may remain important for legal purposes, but governance itself becomes porous and reflective of real-world contribution flows.

The model also addresses a long-standing tension in democratic theory around the question of stakeholder democracy. Who should have a say in collective decisions? The traditional answer is “the citizens,” but that leaves out many stakeholders. A contribution-based model gives them entry points proportional to their involvement. This framework does not deny the weight of residents, even though residents will naturally have more opportunities to earn governance power, but rather, it avoids reducing democracy to the accident of legal status.

One could think of this as a shift from citizenship-as-identity to citizenship-as-practice. Instead of belonging by birth or by law, you belong by doing. It is less about who you are and more about what you give. This makes governance not a static right but a dynamic relationship through a living contract between the individual and the city.

Critics might worry that this system commodifies civic life, reducing contributions to a ledger of tokens. But the deeper truth is that governance always rests on the recognition of contributions, whether it is through taxes paid, laws followed, or services provided. What the onchain model does is make that recognition explicit and programmable, and extends itself to those who fall outside of formal citizenship.

In the end, the City/Sync experiment seeks to create a simple shift around governance rights that explicitly guarantees that the right to govern is not the same as the right to belong. A nation may still decide who can live within its borders, but a city chain can decide who helps shape its future. By abstracting governance away from citizenship, we create space for more fluid and reality-based democracies that reflect the diverse contributions that actually make cities thrive.