A concept for the governance and layout of Aetheria City in Decentraland

I have been following the Aetherian City Project (formerly called Black Sun City) since August. The project intends to create a virtual cyberpunk-styled city within Decentraland.

As I write this 7828 parcels of LAND, worth US$568,000 have been staked towards this district. This would make it around twice the size of The Vatican City.

There is conflict at the moment between those who want to have control of their LAND within the district and those who want to see a return on their investment.

What I suggest is splitting the city into three zones which would fit in with the cyberpunk genre — Commercial, Factions and Independents. With city-wide rules/guidelines decided by citizens.

Commercial Zone

This zone would be for the financial investors to try to make money via entertainment, advertising and rented facilities (virtual work spaces etc).

This would be a highly regulated zone with an authoriatarian control mechanism. No giant penis sculptures. Corporate Police would monitor unlicensed virtual hat hawkers.

Profit making ventures within the commercial zone would initially be controlled by a investors. (Eventually there would be competing DAO’s and we could name them “Zaibatsu Heavy Industries” or “DYNCORP” and when they are making millions we can have them buy land in the real world and make robots and finally our cyberpunk dreams/nightmares will be fulfilled).

Initial revenue could be from in-world advertising with giant billboards (a-frame GIFS) providing resources with which to hire 3D artists and programmers to develop the city.

Faction Zone

This would be for groups of like-minded indiviuals to pool their resources and collectively work on projects. LAND could be set so that only faction members could edit their faction LAND (in the future there could be heirarchical editing permissions given to varying levels of faction status). They would control what goes on inside their space.

Hacker Districts, Maker Districts, Red Light Districts, Secret Societies would form over time. The communities that form will act as a social-glue holding people to the city. The demand for LAND will create competition between Factions.

Governance freedom could allows for ad-hoc, rule-free, structures akin to Kowloon Walled City…

and also allow for larger structures with a coherent architectural style…

This is a real court building…

Independents

Total freedom loving citizens can be at the edges. These would be the “slums” of Aetheria. Anything goes.

My ideal version of the slums (Image by Josan Gonzales)

A living, growing city.

The layout of the city can be regularly updated to reflect the relative size of factions. Larger factions closer to the centre and smaller groupings of land closer to the edge is a possibility. This would need to be done programatically and city members would need to vote on how often this should happen. Nightly? Weekly? Monthly?

Smaller parcels to the edges.

A constantly re-arranging city allows for the city to expand. The rich mega-corps of the centre can purchase LAND at the edges, stake it against the city and incorporate it into the commercial zone in the next re-org of the city tiles.

Competition between factions and the larger central corporate zone would add a natural power-struggle dynamic to the city bringing it to life.

Form Follows Function.

Good design solves a problem. It performs a function. Right now the TL;DR of the vision statement is “lets make a cyber-punk city”. Not cohesive enough to hold a community together.

What the city needs is a sense of purpose — a reason to exist. A problem to solve.

This can be anything. Having the problem being solved external to the city stops the city being insular and inward-looking — this can cause stagnation.

I have been involved in many community projects and a key difference between sucessful projects and failures, is the communication between leadership and stakeholders. Right now there’s a lot at stake and not a lot of communication. This project needs collaborative organisational tools, a clear vision and a roadmap.

Join the chat to discuss futher https://chat.decentraland.org/channel/District_Aetherian_project