If you had a free 24/7 chauffeur to drive you anywhere you wanted, do you think that would impact where you lived, worked, and played?
Put differently, if you were relieved from actually having to contend with traffic yourself and if you never had to worry about parking and/or drinking and driving, would you be more inclined to live further out of the city to get bigger and cheaper housing?
This is the question I tried to ask in a Twitter poll this morning:
If you had a free chauffeur, would you be inclined to live further out of the city to get bigger, cheaper housing?
— Brandon G. Donnelly (@donnelly_b)
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Personally, I think that this scenario would impact my behaviour, only slightly. I would certainly take advantage of the free chauffeur, but I would not be more inclined to live 1 or maybe even 2 hours of the city.
Sure, I would be able to get more real estate, but I wouldn’t want to sit in a car every morning – even if I wasn’t the one driving. Maybe I’d be more inclined to have a cottage out of the city, but I can’t imagine a big commute. In my view, minimizing commute times is one of the most effective ways to up your quality of life.
I’m thinking about all of this because of this TechCrunch article, arguing that technologies such as driverless vehicles and VR (for telecommuting) will soon cause rapid decentralization. This reminds me of what was said during the dot com era. Real estate was out of favor and it was all about tech.
Though I am sure that there are technological impacts that you or I cannot foresee right now, I think it’s important to remember that people live in cities for many different reasons. It’s not only for access to a labor market, it’s also for access to a dating market, as well as other things that involve people coming together. I believe that we are inherently social beings. And technology is not going to make that disappear overnight.
I would be curious to see how you all feel about this topic. Please leave a comment below so we can discuss.
One of the most profound shifts taking place today – because of new technologies – is that of decentralization. I’ve written about this before, but I keep coming back to it because I find it so fascinating.
It’s happening to varying degrees, but as a general trend, I believe it is leading to better data (less information asymmetries), more efficient markets, and the removal of many middle people. In the past, some intermediaries were necessary in order to act as proxies for portions of the market. But I believe that is changing.
So what’s an example of this? Bitcoin. Bitcoin is an example of decentralization because no one entity controls it. It operates through a decentralized public ledger. And because of this, it has the potential to be highly disruptive to the way we think about currencies today.
Put another way, I see decentralization as a way to leverage the wisdom of crowds. I am convinced that large groups of people can be incredibly intelligent when they’re allowed to contribute in the right ways. And I think this could solve many different problems, from the infighting we see within cities to broader market phenomena.
As another example, there’s something new in the venture capital space called DAO – which stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. Essentially it’s a decentralized VC platform based off of a Bitcoin derivative currency.
But perhaps the most noteworthy and relevant feature is that it allows its large pool of investors to anonymously vote on which investments to pursue. This is in contrast to a more centralized approach where an investment committee would meet behind closed doors in a big boardroom and make a decision. This would be the more typical approach.
If you’re not in the tech space, the above may not seem all that exciting to you. But I see many parallels between venture capital and real estate development, which is one of the reasons I follow the space. So I can’t help but wonder what this trend could ultimately mean for real estate, design, and other city building industries.
I can certainly imagine a world where the forces that shape our cities are more collective and decentralized in nature. It’s already starting to happen through crowdsourcing, social media, ridesharing, and other online platforms.
I just backed this project on Kickstarter.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wmougayar/the-business-blockchain-books/widget/card.html?v=2
I haven’t backed a lot of projects on Kickstarter, but I definitely enjoy the process of discovering a project that I’m interested in and then providing a small, seemingly insignificant, sum of money to help make it a reality.
In this case, it’s a collection of two books by William Mougayar about Bitcoin, blockchains, cryptocurrency, and decentralization.
These are all topics that I’ve touched on before on this blog, albeit with much less rigor than what I’m sure William will be applying to his books. I wrote this post about 2 years ago, when I first started wrapping my head around Bitcoin. And more recently, I wrote posts about how the blockchain could transform home buying and how Honduras is building a decentralized land registry system using the blockchain technology.
So while at first glance it may seem like these books having nothing at all to do with city building and real estate, I am betting that they will over the long term, which is why I am doing my homework today.
Here’s a snippet from William’s Kickstarter page:
“The fundamental characteristics of blockchains are puzzling to consumers, corporations, governments, policy makers and regulators, because their implementation challenges centrally orchestrated trust, and enables a new kind of trust: one that is distributed, decentralized, from peer to peer, and not centrally managed by any single entity. Take any service, and add “without previous center-based authority”, and replace by “peer to peer, trust-based network”, and you will start to imagine the possibilities.”
If all of this isn’t enough to pique your interest, then you should also know that William is from Toronto. Great things come out of this city :)