The solutions to our cities’ most pressing problems already exist — in labs, start-ups, pilot projects. What’s missing is the system that gets them where they’re needed.

The diagram shows something that seems paradoxical at first: the pressure on our cities is high — and growing. Climate crisis, housing shortages, ageing infrastructure. The political will to act is there. And yet working solutions rarely get through.

Why?

Because between the will to act and actual implementation lie three brakes — and they reinforce each other.

Every city develops solutions from scratch, as if other cities hadn’t already spent years on the same problems. This wastes time nobody has. Bureaucracy — procurement law, funding conditions, jurisdictional boundaries — is built for stability, not speed. And the money that could finance transformation doesn’t find its way: private capital avoids risk, public funding programmes are complex, and city budgets are tight.

The result isn’t a failure of individuals. It’s a system that blocks itself.

.GUT addresses the three bottlenecks shown in the diagram. Solutions aren’t built for one city — they’re designed to work everywhere. The bureaucracy problem is solved once, and the result made available to all connected cities. And financing is built in from the start, not assembled as an afterthought.

This isn’t incremental progress. It’s a different approach: not transforming the next city, but building the infrastructure through which hundreds of cities can access ready-made, proven solutions.

Innovate. Package. Deploy.

What this looks like in practice:

Every solution that goes through this process becomes replicable. Not as a blueprint that needs adapting — but as a finished unit that a city configures rather than develops. That’s the difference between a pilot project and an infrastructure.