The world is rapidly urbanizing, however, most organically formed human settlements (villages) have problems evolving into bigger settlements (towns) and those have problems evolving into even bigger ones (cities). The main problem is that various types of public goods (like roads) are very hard to build once the whole surface of the settlement is owned or used by someone – which happens early on.

Building a new road that was not originally there requires acquiring a (large) number of privately-owned land parcels. Even one owner holding out could prevent the road from being completed and usable. For this reason most societies have a way to resort to force. Via a mechanism such as Eminent Domain, the government can typically force its way through. Because this is unpopular, the mechanism is rarely used even when available. While restraining the government is a good thing in principle, this also does mean that many useful things simply never get built. Evolution of settlements is thus suboptimal.

How can we take a settlement that is a mess and make it better without resorting to force?

The project can be used by different actors:

• Parcel owners
  • Upon checking a map area anywhere in the world the user can see the land parcels, see existing proposals, and start creating proposals.
• Official city planners
  • They can create proposals that will have more weight because of who created them, and also they can fund them with the City Meme Token because the City has a lot of it
• Individuals that like to plan
  • Hobbyists can propose improvements to their city or other cities
• Real Estate developers
  • Can offer to conditionally purchase several plots
• Random donors and benefactors
  • Can decide to boost a proposal by adding funds to its budget

The solution does not have a proper separate backend, all data is either at the front end or in smart contracts.
We use Scaffold-ETH to bootstrap the next.js application and we have custom-built smart contracts and UI elements.

Scaffold-ETH 2 (with its many included integrations), USDC and RLUSD for payments, USDC for onramping people so that they can add funds with a credit card. Planned future integrations with Humanity Protocol, Worldcoin, and similar, to allow people to claim NFTs of their parcels reliably.

We are not aware of a similar project. While projects do exist for representing RWAs onchain, no project is focused on using crypto primitives for (repeatedly) building consensus about urban evolution. Also, this project has a unique feature in attaching a City Meme Token to every settlement. For the poorest of settlements this could be a welcome additional source of funding for building infrastructure.

The design space is large indeed. We had to focus on just making the parcels and proposals visible and usable, but we plan to continue working on the project:

• integrating official cadastre data where available
• enabling parcel owners to claim their respective NFT
• offering predefined algorithms (for forming road grids...)
• novel tokenomics mechanisms with the city meme token