The way we invest in our cities is broken. Public investment in common infrastructure drives huge amounts of private profit through land value – a problem which underpins our current model of urban development. This fuels the unsustainable land speculation that sits at the heart of our global housing crisis,creating unequal and unsustainable neighbourhoods. We need to redesign our land economy in a way that starts by recognising public goods create private wealth.

In collaboration with EIT Climate-KIC and Centre for Spatial Technologies, Dark Matter Labs are developing a platform that brings together smart contracts, property value data and distributed ledgers to more fairly distribute this public value, by creating a mechanism to invest in building green infrastructure and more sustainable communities.