Manifesto

A manifesto is not a roadmap. A roadmap tells you what we will ship. A manifesto tells you what we refuse to ship, and why. Six principles, one page.

1 · Public by default #

Every metric a city publishes about itself belongs to its citizens before it belongs to its administrators. Cittopia's public atlas is and will always be free for citizens. We will never paywall a city profile, a Pulse score, or any data we ingested from open sources. The SaaS sits on top — citizens see everything beneath it.

2 · Cities are knowable, not smart #

We refuse the language of "smart cities". Smartness implies intelligence we don't have and surveillance we don't want. We build for knowability — the small, durable property that any citizen can understand the state of their city in under three minutes, without a degree in urban planning.

3 · Measurement before opinion #

The Pulse is not a politics, it is an arithmetic. We publish the formula, the inputs, the data confidence, and every assumption. When two of us disagree about whether Warsaw or Istanbul is "doing better", we do not argue — we point at the spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet is open.

4 · The citizen is the customer of the citizen #

Municipalities pay for the SaaS. Citizens use the atlas free. This is non-negotiable. The moment we charge a citizen to read their own city's data, we have failed the project. The moment we sell a citizen's data to anyone, we are over.

5 · Data has confidence, not certainty #

Every metric in Cittopia comes with a data confidence percentage — a measure of how recent, complete and verified the underlying source is. A 95%-confident number is presented in full saturation; a 60%-confident one is presented muted. We will never round confidence to 100% to make a chart prettier.

6 · Long horizons over loud quarters #

This project will take a decade to do well. We will not optimise for a quarterly metric, a "growth hack", or a vanity press cycle. The only thing that compounds in this work is trust — of citizens, of municipalities, of the cities themselves. Everything else is noise.

Tunç Meriç · founder · April 2026