https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/10/31/cities.html
Special thanks to Mr Silly and Tina Zhen for early feedback on the post, and to a big long list of people for discussion of the ideas.
One interesting trend of the last year has been the growth of interest in local government, and in the idea of local governments that have wider variance and do more experimentation. Over the past year, Miami mayor Francis Suarez has pursued a Twitter-heavy tech-startup-like strategy of attracting interest in the city, frequently engaging with the mainstream tech industry and crypto community on Twitter. Wyoming now has a DAO-friendly legal structure, Colorado is experimenting with quadratic voting, and we're seeing more and more experiments making more pedestrian-friendly street environments for the offline world. We're even seeing projects with varying degrees of radicalness - Cul de sac, Telosa, CityDAO, Nkwashi, Prospera and many more - trying to create entire neighborhoods and cities from scratch.
Another interesting trend of the last year has been the rapid mainstreaming of crypto ideas such as coins, non-fungible tokens and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). So what would happen if we combine the two trends together? Does it make sense to have a city with a coin, an NFT, a DAO, some record-keeping on-chain for anti-corruption, or even all four? As it turns out, there are already people trying to do just that:
But are these projects, in their current form, good ideas? Are there any changes that could make them into better ideas? Let us find out...
Many national governments around the world are showing themselves to be inefficient and slow-moving in response to long-running problems and rapid changes in people's underlying needs. In short, many national governments are missing live players. Even worse, many of the outside-the-box political ideas that are being considered or implemented for national governance today are honestly quite terrifying. Do you want the USA to be taken over by a clone of WW2-era Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar, or perhaps an "American Caesar", to beat down the evil scourge of American leftism? For every idea that can be reasonably described as freedom-expanding or democratic, there are ten that are just different forms of centralized control and walls and universal surveillance.
Now consider local governments. Cities and states, as we've seen from the examples at the start of this post, are at least in theory capable of genuine dynamism. There are large and very real differences of culture between cities, so it's easier to find a single city where there is public interest in adopting any particular radical idea than it is to convince an entire country to accept it. There are very real challenges and opportunities in local public goods, urban planning, transportation and many other sectors in the governance of cities that could be addressed. Cities have tightly cohesive internal economies where things like widespread cryptocurrency adoption could realistically independently happen. Furthermore, it's less likely that experiments within cities will lead to terrible outcomes both because cities are regulated by higher-level governments and because cities have an easier escape valve: people who are unhappy with what's going on can more easily exit.
So all in all, it seems like the local level of government is a very undervalued one. And given that criticism of existing smart city initiatives often heavily focuses on concerns around centralized governance, lack of transparency and data privacy, blockchain and cryptographic technologies seem like a promising key ingredient for a more open and participatory way forward.
Quite a lot actually! Each of these experiments is still small scale and largely still trying to find its way around, but they are all at least seeds that could turn into interesting things. Many of the most advanced projects are in the United States, but there is interest across the world; over in Korea the government of Busan is running an NFT conference. Here are a few examples of what is being done today.
Reno, Nevada mayor Hillary Schieve is a blockchain fan, focusing primarily on the Tezos ecosystem, and she has recently been exploring blockchain-related ideas (see her podcast here) in the governance of her city: