Garcia and colleagues define dynamic fitness as the institutional capacity to anticipate and respond under conditions that exceed inherited design assumptions. Their iconic contribution is the identification of urban water-system archetypes through the relation between biophysical complexity, information-processing capacity and response diversity. The theoretical advance moves beyond robustness as preservation: infrastructure must remain governable as climatic conditions, demands and resource constraints change. Methodologically, thirty-five years of stressor and response data from sixteen United States utilities are analysed through archetype methods, allowing recurrent institutional configurations to be compared without assuming one universal model. The conceptual operation is adaptive fit, where governance structure is assessed relative to the evolving system it must manage. The wider bridge reaches institutional theory, resilience studies, infrastructure planning and polycentric governance. Information sharing across regional structures may expand adaptive capacity, yet flexibility at one scale can constrain control at another, revealing that adaptation is always a negotiated distribution of autonomy, knowledge and cost.