Scarce urban resources

October 16, 2015 — October 16, 2015

culture
design
diy
the rather superior sort of city
Figure 1: Listen to me, The 1993 version of 2019

Listicle, based on personal experience and some seminars at FCL on smart cities, and the share economy rhetoric, I’m thinking about some urban resources that are possibly sub-optimally allocated in the sense that people are on average worse off with the current mechanism than with conceivable alternatives. There are probably even profitable business plans involved in solving some of these, although you not only have to capture private value from solving a public problem to get that funded, you also have to frame it in terms of smartphone apps. In an effective democracy one imagines, this might be a question of straight optimal mechanism design, in order to extract maximal overall return rather than optimal return for direct investors.