Distributive Property — blockchain, equity, and real estate.

What do decentralized software platforms, such as Ethereum, have to do with architecture and real estate? This question was presented at a panel conference we organized at Columbia GSAPP called Distributive Property. In short - they have everything to do with the way resources are owned, organized and distributed in the production of a building or development project. But to understand why this topic - and why now - some further explanation is required.

There are invisible and unseen infrastructures determining the production of the physical environment. Part of the reason we don’t design them is because they are hard to identify. But they are identifiable, and they are highly contested spaces for those who have the skills and means to interact with these systems.

Ten years from now we may remember July 2015 as a special time in the evolution of distributed network technology. Many associate the launch of Ethereum to be an evolution of the internet itself, reaching every field of practice in the highly interwoven global economy.

The location is a tension between the critical design aspects of architecture and the legal and regulatory authority produced by real estate. Architects have spent the majority of the past few decades ignoring the financial infrastructure of their building proposals. Taking risks in a building project is akin to selling out to some corporate interests, resulting in the professions' current isolation in the market. Real Estate Developers, by contrast, use and propagate a system that works for their own financial self-preservation. There is little incentive to change a system that is working for your interests. Is it possible to imagine these assumptions collapsing and forming a revolution?

In brief, blockchains enable value transactions between people without an intermediary. To understand the force of this tool, think about all the personal resources you own and the types of intermediaries that facilitate how you use or transfer that value. Now scale that in a global, decentralized infrastructure. As Mike so aptly put during the event “If the Web spread information to every corner of the world, blockchains have the potential to spread trust to every corner of the world.”

Answers to some of these questions come from an increasing awareness of the financialization of design development as the primary infrastructure that determines the outcome of design, whom it services, and where it’s built. Like other infrastructures, blockchains present new ways for which resources are produced, owned, and distributed. The problem is the systems are so new and developing at such a quick pace, academia has not yet caught up with it. There is also a prevailing representation issue. Pipes, sewers, electrical lines are all ‘hidden infrastructure’ in that they go relatively unseen in our daily experience, but digital infrastructure is hidden in the sense of literally invisible to the eye. It is formless by nature of its existence as computer code. 

For these reasons it’s imperative we develop a critical understanding of these technologies and approach them from our expertise as designers / developers. Large companies have the economic and political power to hire specialist to implement these system according to the business logic or strategic demands of competitive advantage. Any form of ethical consideration that does not influence their public image does not fit within that modus operandi. 

Approaching the unfamiliar can elicit the most basic human fears, cynicism, and apprehensions. In times of intense technological transformation that can numb our ability to consume ‘the next big thing’ we would only be doing ourselves a disservice by not considering it.