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OPEN SPACE, OPEN ACCESS, AND THE OPEN WEB:
A RADICAL URBAN RESTRUCTURING OF CAPITALIZED URBAN SPACE THROUGH DECENTRALIZED CIVIC FRAMEWORKS

(working project, 2024)

Cities like New York are often shaped by neoliberal urban planning that puts corporate interests over the needs of its working class residents. This creates urban spaces marked by gentrification, displacement, heavy surveillance, racial policing, and the erosion of community ties. Public goods, in an expanded sense of the word, are gated and controlled increasingly by centralized private systems. Meanwhile, climate crises like extreme floods, droughts, fires, and other unnatural events contiue to expose the fragility of our urban systems. Cities must move past band-aid patch solutions that continue to operate from the systems that created these circumstances in the first place.

This project explores how decentralized tools from Web3 technologt could shift the governance and distribution of public spaces, public goods, infrastructure, and community ownership away from private and exclusionary control. 

While blockchain and cryptocurrencies are often criticized for perptuating capitalist inequities, and techno-deterministic agendas— their underlying decentralized infrastructure and open source principles have powerful implications for an urban planning that strengthens core community groups, such as tenant unions and other grassroots organizations.

However, this isn’t about treating Web3 as a magical fix. While blockchain holds real potential, real progress often comes from meaningful policy changes and sustained advocacy. Community groups and activists have long demonstrated that transformative change stems from proven methods like union organizing and grassroots mobilization, which tackle systemic issues at their roots rather than relying on technological quick fixes.


Key questions include:
“ How can Web3 tools support grassroots organizing and collective governance, enabling communities to address systemic issues like inequality, displacement, and privatization while transitioning to equitable, community-led systems? In what ways can decentralized technologies enhance coordination, accountability, and resource sharing among community groups, ensuring they amplify human-led advocacy and policy reform rather than perpetuate existing inequities? In what use case can web 3 can provide the infrastructure to allow community-driven permissions to take form?” 

The important work from RadicalXChange, Dark Matter Labs, and The Blockchain Socialist have  influenced these questions.

Private actors in cities are incentivized by fast revenue streams and growth, disincentivizing the long-term maintenance, stewardship, and community-building of more permanent spaces such as Central Park and the Brooklyn Central Library. This fuels gentrification, displacement, and community fragmentation.
Procurement brings in the technology and infrastructure of our cities. Those who make procurement decisions hold political power— deciding what partnerships to develop, which technologies to implement, and why we need them in the first place. Procurement lacks serious and meaningful community engagement and often does not represent the needs of the people. Between 2007 and 2019, the New York Police Department spent nearly $3 billion on surveillance technologies with large and small companies. 
Decentralized civic frameworks can help bring bottom-up, structural change to the way property, relationships, and infrastructure are valued. Spatial protocols and site-specific contracts can de-center status-quo, capitalist institutions of ownership, and make it easier for communities to access, maintain, and govern themselves and their public goods.