Step 1 : Have The Right Mindset.

It’s 2020, you can’t afford rent, to see a doctor, or pay back your students loans from the college you dropped out of 2 years in. Things are bad and you get by in life by ubering people around the city, you drink your problems away, and you repeat this until your death, which you presume will be inevitably soon. Ah, but the shining light at the end of the tunnel appears to you one night after drinking until near blackout. You get a call that your dad has died. You are now the last one left alive in your family. You stumble to your apartment and blackout on your bed, crying yourself to sleep.

Step 2 : Location, Location, Location.

You wake up the next morning, briefly forgetting about the death of your father, and you head back to your hometown to deal with the funeral. During this process, you stay at your grandparents house, which has been willed to you, via your father’s death. You are the proud owner of 40 acres in the middle of nowhere east Texas. You hate how the funeral director is trying to sell you the gold package so your dad is “happily” buried in peace, but for a price you can’t afford, and you decide to start your own funeral business. You crowdsource a “Memorial Tower” on Kickstarter, where you cremate and bury the ashes of the dead. It will take up less land space and be cheaper to operate than the nearby cemetery. A journalist picks up your project, resulting in a viral audience to your cause. Your project gets funded.

Step 3 : Establish Housing

You draw up plans and talk with a local contractor from the nearby town to help you construct this building. You have plans to prefabricate these towers to replace all the cemeteries in the country. While the architect you hired is making your plans legible, your contractor hires men to work on your tower. The commute from the closest town and your construction site is too long, so you have to provide temporary housing for the crew. You buy 10 shipping containers from a family friend who use to work with your grandparents. You renovate them to be livable. You don’t build kitchens in any of the units for safety and cost reasons. You hire a chef to cook for the construction team. On the first day of the build she made the most delicious black bean burgers you’ve ever had.

Step 4 : Establish Funding

Since your successful Kickstarter, you have kept up a presence on Twitter. The supporters are excited to hear about the progress on the tower and the ambition to build more apartment units. You tell them you see a potential to start a new type of community, but you need funding and can’t create a Kickstarter project for every idea you have. They respond and tell you to launch a cryptocurrency for your towers and community idea. It’s confusing for you, but you agree, and after interviewing several volunteers, you invite a few engineers to live in your new community. Together you establish a Co-op bank and launch an ICO, for a token you call “Topian Coins”. You begin to charge $1000/mth in rent to live in one of the shipping container units you made. You include everything in that cost. You wash their clothes and pay the chef to feed them.

Step 5 : Establish Utilities

After a successful ICO, you install 100 container units into one beautiful building. You are elected mayor and establish guidelines for your community. Everyone becomes a contractor for the city, you pay $15/hr, and $10/hr after 30 hrs a week. Each citizen picks 3 areas of focus and are offered jobs based on their interests. After negotiating with the county, you establish an environmentally friendly approach to water conservation and limit each unit to 20 gallons of water a day. Several engineers approach you about creating a community wide internet service. You approve. Your community has too high of an electric bill, so you build a parking lot with solar covering. You establish a ban on cars in the city. Your chef’s team gets bigger and you establish a food credit system. Each resident receives 300 Topian Coins after paying their rent, to be spent through the community, mostly on food. All of this is included in the rent, residents do not pay more than $1000/mth.

Step 6 : Feed The People

The first memorial tower goes up just outside the community and a park is established around it. People from all over the state begin to buy spots in the tower and when they visit they rent a container unit airbnb style, one of the first sources of income for the city. The city bank begins to offer loans and financial services to the surrounding area, creating another source of income. The chef wants to spread her wings and establish a food hall of different types of cuisines. She finds newly graduated chefs to begin this venture. You call your old college roommate from thailand, to join your venture. He moves back to the states and establishes the gardening program through the city. You make a commitment for the community to be carbon positive as soon as possible. An engineer helps establish a water filtering system that collects rain and filters water to be used on plants.

Step 7 : Embrace Democratic Technology

Your community has established housing, with plans for another apartment building of container units going up soon. Your community has reached its first 100 people. You have established weekly mandatory voting on city issues, everyone has access to fiber internet services, and the city provides everyone with a smartphone. An engineer has established a voting system that utilizes the blockchain, whatever that means, and citizens can vote from their units. The hydroponic garden building is being built on schedule. Citizens are generally happy and the Topian Coins have risen in value. Only two residents were late on rent, and a 2 month late rent response was established. Citizens vote together to remove neighbors not paying rent, if they so choose. The city was established as gun free, with several residents offering up security volunteering, fortunately, no citizen has performed a criminal act. An engineer setup a 24/7 security drone that monitors from above. You aren’t sure how you feel about that and a vote on the issue will be placed next Friday.

Step 8 : Establish Healthcare

A newly graduated doctor applies to live in the community. She establishes the first preventative care center in the community. Citizens don’t pay more for her services. After 3 months of care, she begins expansion of her services by teaming up with a new member who practices dentistry. The residents enjoy the food options in the cafe and at the new eateries experience. As you begin to establish a meat farm, many residents have temporarily embraced a vegetarian diet. You are surprised at how much people will try new things and embrace change. As a result of these practices, your residents are healthy. One resident has lost 40lbs and the community is proud of him. He has also established the most miles ran by a resident. A record you never plan to beat him at.

Step 9: Keep Your People Happy and Engaged

After establishing the patio gardens in every unit, the residents are more conscious about the food they eat and are becoming well educated on the gardening process as they take care of the food growing around them. The hydroponic farm has grown 3 stories, and now fully supplies the eatery experience, lowering the food costs for the whole community. Because the community hit their savings goal, and have become net positive on the electric grid, you embraced a brewer to come into the community to establish the town brewery. You market the opening of the brewery as an opportunity for the Topian Coin investors and people interested in visiting Utopia to come down for the event. Although initially upset, visitors embrace only using Topian Coins in the city. Residents offer tours and services for the tourists. The value of Topian Coins goes up and the community votes to grow the city.

Step 10 : Move on

The journalist who sparked the viral article about your Kickstarter project reaches back out to you. She writes an article about your city and the reception is well. On a federal level, the country discusses a universal basic income solution to automation job replacement. You visit congress to establish a bill. You ask for $1000/mth, and work with politicians to fund the bill. You are gone for 6 months. The bill passes the House, and still needs to pass the Senate, but you are confident. When you return to your city, the residents have done wonderfully without you. You tear up with pride, as your ‘children’ have grown up. You step down as mayor and recommend the chef who started with you take over as mayor. The residents approve, but move her to an honorary title, and establish a government with no hierarchy as they transition to an automated system built by the engineers in town. You buy a plane ticket to California to meet with Kanye West, as you heard a rumor he was planning his own utopian community. You smile and walk away into the sunset.