Tokenizing Towards Sustainability - Abstract
Throughout history, humans have worked together to create habitats that support collective life. They have managed resources, defended borders, defined norms, created systems to govern life, and developed civilizations that are capable of lasting for centuries or even millenia. Throughout, technology has played a significant role in allowing towns, villages, cities, and countries to manage resources and support a constantly growing population. Failure to effectively manage these resources and to deliver the requisite energy to feed and power a civilization has often led to the collapse of these civilizations. This threat has fueled a desire for innovation to meet new challenges. It is a threat that looms today as resources are becoming scarcer and more expensive to extract, climate events are becoming more severe, droughts are causing food shortages, sea level rise is propelling migration, and the global population continues to increase. Now, more than ever, we must look to technology as both a potential cause of this crisis as well as a possible solution.
In this essay, we explore how Tokenization and Blockchain can support such a solution by becoming the fundamental technology on which Smart Cities operate. Beyond arguing for the merits of Tokenization and Blockchain as a fundamental technology, the essay explores how these technologies will change how we plan, experience, and administer cities. These considerations range from examining how they will drive clustering around nodes that validate new entries on a blockchain and that facilitate digital / physical connections to the implications of tokenizing homes, flow of commodities, and entire neighborhoods. In the process, we consider how doing so will give individuals greater agency to manage and invest their assets. Ultimately, we explore how a tokenized built environment will support an enhanced understanding of the true cost of building and maintaining the world in which we live so that we can allocate resources appropriately, generate revenue from points where the most value is being added, invest in new infrastructure, and support a growing economy that works for as many people as possible.