Cowboy DAOs, WeWork → WeCity, Porta Norte Founder Wins, Urban Planning as if Reality Mattered
This Week in Startup Cities: January 7, 2022
You’re reading Startup Cities, a newsletter about startups that build neighborhoods and cities.
This week:
Adam Neumann gets into city housing
The Financial Times Discovers CityDAO
Henry Faarup, Founder of Solarpunk Town “Porta Norte”, Recounts 2021 Wins
Urban Planner Joni Baboci on Urban Complexity
Startup Cities as Memetic Signpost
Adam Neumann (Yes, the WeWork Guy) gets into city housing
The former CEO of WeWork has ventured into urban real estate. Rumor has it that he’s acquired a billion dollars worth of apartment buildings.
The internet reacted as you’d expect: extreme cynicism. There’s reason to be skeptical. This is the dude who brought us “strategic” wave pool company acquisitions and years of hilarious Softbank powerpoints.
But here’s a contrarian take: Neumann changed cities forever with his vision of co-working spaces. Cities everywhere now have something that at least looks like a WeWork. And the optimist in me is heartened by Neumann’s focus on “multifamily housing” with unique “amenities”.
One reasonable definition of a Startup City might be “multifamily housing with unique amenities”. Those amenities may stretch from the mundane (a nice walkway, a park, a gym) to the frontier (health insurance, security, a one-stop-shop for incorporating a business). Pioneers of the Startup Cities meme in the mid-20th century imagined cities built by entrepreneurs as amenity-rich apartment complexes at a larger scale (a subject for a future newsletter...).
It’s also healthy to frame city services as amenities. An “amenity” is less political and more about the value delivered to customers. This customer mindset is desperately needed in today’s cities.
The Financial Times Discovers CityDAO
Tradmedia finally found out that CityDAO is buying land parcels in Wyoming. I’ve seen some screenshots of their software and I’m excited to see how the project evolves. I hope I can take a roadtrip up from Denver and visit whatever awesome cyberpunk cowboy DAO ranch the team ends up building in the next few years!
Wyoming’s case is interesting because of their groundbreaking legislation that blurs the line between traditional Limited Liability Corporations (LLCs) and DAOs. Here’s the blockchain integrating itself with legacy legal systems.
My current view of DAOs is that they’ll prove potent tools for capital aggregation around niche interests (such as building a town in Wyoming), but will falter as a general “governance tool”. Many in the space seem to think that the many problems with collective decision making are solved if they are made digital. On DAOs as a replacement for entrepreneurial leadership, I’m skeptical. Let’s hope some DAO entrepreneurs prove me wrong.
Henry Faarup, Founder of Solarpunk Town “Porta Norte”, Recounts 2021 Wins
Recap Porta Norte 2021 (in Spanish)
Henry Faarup is building a new town in Panama that embodies the best elements of traditional urbanism. I spoke with Henry last year and was impressed with how deeply he’s thought about his project: Porta Norte.
In my ideal world, the idea that Startups Should Build Cities is so commonplace that startup blogs and outlets like AngelList post the progress of founders like Henry. Fantasy metrics like CAR (cost to acquire a resident) and a “City NPS” would stand alongside analogs like CAC and ARR. We’d cheer the unveiling of apartment buildings and sidewalks just as we cheer product launches today.
We don’t live in that world yet. So, for the non-Spanish speakers, let’s celebrate a few of the exciting milestones reached by Henry and his team in 2021:
Built 1.4 kilometers of roads with bike lanes, as well as bus stops and pedestrian walkways 5 meters in width.
Built systems for drinking water, drainage, gas, and sanitation, including a water treatment plant which integrates with that of Panama City
Laid out the cable and fiber optic network
Selected and planted 350 trees based on the aesthetic and natural requirements of the neighborhood
Partnered with a university that will construct a branch inside the city
In future newsletters I’ll explore how Startup Cities can deliver tablestakes urbanism. Conversations about visionary political reform and futuristic technology are great. But huge markets, such as the one Henry is building for in Latin America, lack even the most basic value propositions of a city like: “Can I walk down a street and not get mugged or run over by a bus?” Entrepreneurs take note.
Urban Planner Joni Baboci on Urban Complexity
Joni Baboci is one of the smartest urban planners working today (check out his writing).
His most recent article looks at urban sustainability. But Baboci inverts the Malthusian, doomsday, “zero-growth” scenarios that urbanists and sci-fi nerds love. He writes of cities in an age of abundance and technological progress.
Urban imagination like this — actually informed by economics and technology — is all too rare. Baboci’s work harkens back to what I think of as the computational-complexity school of urbanism: Friedrich Hayek, Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander and modern proponents like Alain Bertaud, Geoffrey West, and Sandy Ikeda.
On Self-Healing Concrete:
The next step of innovation in materials science is adding self-healing and self-repair features to familiar materials. These novel products might respond to environmental, temperature, or humidity changes in their surroundings and provide contextual cues to existing products.
On Our Love for Imperfection:
The slow collection of dust and defects makes places feel original. New buildings lack grit - they need time to settle in our psyches, time to accumulate wrinkles in their skin. We can’t stand cracks on our phone screens but subconsciously yearn for cracks in our public realm. This unnatural combination between technology and grit will probably define the cities of the future.
On City Design:
Complex systems like cities can not be "designed", they need to grow in an iterative collaboration between designers and communities.
One of the central themes of Startup Cities is the tradeoff between building from scratch (“greenfield”) or within an existing city (“infill”) . Greenfields tend to invite the biggest visions, because they lack the institutional and geographic constraints of existing cities. But the problem with greenfields, as Baboci points out here, is that they lack the accreted character and “vibe” of long-lived neighborhoods. This is why just about every office park, special economic zone, and planned community has a certain sterility.
Startup Cities as Memetic Signpost
Constructing Signposts in the Memescape – Samuel Arbesman’s Cabinet of Wonders
Complexity-scientist-turned-VC Sam Arbesman has an excellent piece on “memetic signposts”. Certain concepts have outsized impact on language and thought. Think: “Lindy Effect”, “Intuition Pump”, or “Great Filter”. Arbesman argues that people who create memetic signposts have high impact on human progress.
For the relatively small world of early adopters, Startup Cities serves as a memetic signpost. It’s a lens that’s difficult to “unsee”. Once you understand the potential of startups that build cities, you perceive cities differently. You curate reality through the Startup Cities memeplex.
How might we spread the Startup Cities meme?
Let me know in the comments 👇 And don’t forget: Startups Should Build Cities!
One of the reasons I think DAOs might have some compatibility with the startup cities meme is that for an urban environment to feel authentic (more than a development), it needs to have shared ownership AND governance. It’s what makes a condo feel more authentic than a rental community. And what makes a neighborhood feel more authentic than a district. Basically the more invested you are as a resident and more decisional power that comes with this, the closer you are to feeling and acting like a ‘citizen’; which is necessary for the longevity of networks like cities.
I think there has to be some progressive hand-off process where people acquire ownership not just through property within the city but also decision making ability as things begin to harden. Progressively moving from private startup to DAO (one with real structure and hierarchy) makes more sense to me as a meme than a more traditional alternative to this hand-off. You could also think of it as the move from private company to public government; even if a very creative version of what ‘government’ means.