Territorial State Craft

Territorial State Craft is the art of raising human flourishing in a place by modifying the protocols it runs on. A territory is an assembly of such protocols interwoven with one another over a specific geography, ranging from the most implicitly held to the most strictly policed. The procedures that produce a product or reproduce a yearly event are as much a protocol as the maintenance of land records or regulations on water allowances per farm. Where this assembly is continuously renewed, a territory thrives; where it is left to go out of date, it declines. Protocolization is the act of setting up procedures within organized groups that can run in the background of attention, so that attention can move to the next opportunity for protocolization. Territorial State Craft is the discipline of applying this central act at leverage points across the organizational types of a territory, from the private to the civil to the governmental, in the interest of a broader territorial transformation. To do so it draws on the fields of design, policy and technology. Design reimagines entrenched problems; policy crafts incentives; technology opens up protocolizations once out of reach. The resulting combination of know-how is an art through which humans continuously raise the ground of a place, feeding its limitless potential for complexification and reaching for fuller and fuller forms of flourishing.