The development of the contract for Democratized Autonomous Buildings follows a modular approach. Each module of the smart contract implements specific community functions that align with and will be validated through real-world scenarios and case studies. During the development, we are looking to form partnerships around three types of community real-estate models:
The Digital Community Project is a digital demonstrator project that bridges parametric configurators to digital twins and into the metaverse. This project investigates how the social construct of a community development initiative can be created a priori - before the building has been built. The mechanisms for the future of housing will be researched and designed by simulating the social dynamics of housing development in a pre-emptive, accelerated and iterative manner. We envision a design that explores a hybrid digital-to-physical aesthetic and can be visualised digitally on-screen and experienced in an exposition installation.
Proposed partners: metaverse platforms, game design studios, BIM specialists and digital twin developers.
The smart contracts we aim to develop will integrate a democratic governance model that provides robustness, fairness and resilience. This governance model can be best described as a building specific democracy run by an algorithm. It functions as a quality assurance suite that ensures that a building and its tenants form a socially sustainable community during their lifetimes. Relevant existing community governance models include Homeowner Associations (HOA), Tenant Panels, Priority Boards, and their Dutch counterpart; the Vereniging van Eigenaren (VvE).
Proposed partners: existing or emerging real-estate and housing communities.
This is the actual real-world development and construction of the first Democratized Autonomous Building (DAB). The Development Community Project governs the full scope of collective housing development and investigates how built form can follows a designed financing mechanism within the constitution of its tenant community. Relevant existing community development models, such as Building Cooperatives, Housing Cooperatives, Community Land Trusts (CLT), Community Development Corporations (CDC), and their Dutch counterparts, such as Collectief Particulier Opdrachtgeverschap (CPO).
Proposed partners: architects, project developers, housing corporations and municipalities.