Nonproprietary City

Description

Proposal only:

"I propose referring to the left wing alternative to the proprietary city as a nonproprietary city.

I suggest we work within capitalism’s rules when establishing the territorial boundaries of our nonproprietary city. This means the nonproprietary city will be built on privately owned land acquired in the real estate market, which is paradoxical, but consistent at least with the idea of “Building the Structure of the New Society Within the Shell of the Old”.

I imagine a crowdsourced (and of course crowdfunded) effort. Participants in this swarm are understood to be playing a unicoalitional game.

The object of the game is to acquire

• as much land as possible, and do it in a way that is
• as geographically concentrated as possible, and
• as contiguous as possible

Think of it this way: Each swarm participant is looking at the real estate market as a whole (eventually converging on one geographic area, per nonproprietary city, anyway). Each available property has surveyed boundaries and therefore has geometric properties such as area and perimeter, and distance from other parcels. At any given time (starting with the first land acquisition), the swarm has an already-acquired portfolio of land holdings that can be mapped. For each available additional parcel, we can calculate certain properties of the portfolio assuming the addition of that parcel.

These parameters would include:

• total land area of the portfolio
• radius of the smallest circle that circumscribes the entire portfolio
• total perimeter of the parcels, minus whatever portion of each is the boundary between two adjacent parcels

In terms of minimax (or maxhi schema) approaches to optimization problems, we’re looking to maximize the first of these parameters and minimize the other two. In a lot of ways this has the look and feel of a Dan Gilbert style urban land grab, and may or may not run afoul of the law. One huge difference is the nonproprietary nature of a nonproprietary cities project. A defining feature of a nonproprietary city, as I see it—as I am defining it (as of this writing a Google search of the quoted phrase yields no results)—is radical transparency.

For starters, a nonproprietary city building swarm is not a secretive cabal. Its existence is to be a matter of record, and so is its agenda. More to the point, it is to treat all data as nonproprietary, along the lines of a “T corporation.” " (https://anagory.wordpress.com/2014/09/16/nonproprietary-cities/?fref=gc)