Hello Steemians,

I'm pleased to announce that I will be building Bania D-City from scratch on 200 hectares of land in Nigeria. Bania D-City will be a decentralized smart city built with and administered with two emerging world technologies: the Graphene blockchain and Cross Laminated Timber (CLT).

We will use the graphene blockchain to create a decentralized city app and an official cryptocurrency that will serve as the native currency of D-City. This currency will be used by all residents, businesses and visitors when transacting in D-City. Land purchases, leasing and every day transactions will all take place using these tokens.

D-City will also utilize the groundbreaking sustainable timber technology, Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) as the primary construction material for the city's residential and commerical buildings. D-City will be a decentralized smart city, as well as a creative wooden city.

When you combine blockchain tech with CLT, you have Bania D-City: The City of Creativity

Disclaimer

This proposed project is an idea of a 19 year old steemian with no professional experience in related fields. It's an extremely big project that requires a big load of work and a big amount of money to achieve as it took a large mind to conceive. There are many reasons this project might not become a reality and it's safe to say it's a big risk to attempt this but same time, this is the type of risk I prefer to die taking than continue living with this idea in my head without a trial

Why a Decentralized Smart & Wooden City?

I envision a future where blockchain technology isn't just something used in smart contracts and speculation, but something we use in our everyday lives.
I envision a future where sustainable wood technology like CLT completely replaces conventional building materials because of its clear advantages over both steel and concrete.
I want to build the city I've always dreamed of living in and help shape a better future for the next generation.

The Type of City I Want to Build (Goals and Vision)

I want to build Bania D-City as a human friendly, technology driven and Smart living environment. My goal is to build a city that will attract technology enthusiasts, adventurous tourists, and be a hub for the next generation of blockchain businesses and small business startups.
I want to build a city that will favor cultural flourishment and empower a growing population of smart people with the opportunity to work from home, and rely on their two feet to walk to necessary places within the city so they don’t have to get hooked up in hours of traffic thereby sabotaging their own health.
Build a lovable and livable city that will receive national recognition and become a road-map for future decentralized smart cities.
Build and make Bania D-City a practical guide/example of how emerging world technologies such as blockchain and CLT could unfold and become applicable to daily human living in order to transform our lives.
Redefine smart city - though we are going to be building a smart city, but our smart city isn’t going to be underpinned by advance data technology only but will be based on human development and good lifestyle.
D-City will be built to ensure environmental sustainability, fix social inequality and empower residents with needed resources to build a life they can be proud of.
Build a city that will be self-sufficient in food & energy. So residents don’t have to spend a big part of their budget buying expensive foodstuffs far away when they could actually be grown in the neighborhood.
The overall goal is to build a decentralized smart city that’s 60% human centric - 30% technology driven and 10% automobile centric

How it Will Play Out

We will acquire 200 hectares of land in an infill area of a rural settlement close to a urban environment in my country Nigeria where land are relatively cheap and we can build whatever we want.

The advantages of using an infill area are that: we wouldn’t be contributing to urban sprawl, we can utilize the existing location, infrastructure and there is already a population based close to us that will make it easy for a city to get started.

What You Need To Know About Cross Laminated Timber

Example of CLT Buildings

And the interior of CLT buildings?

How do You Handle Fire Break out?

Watch CLT fire performance testing- SOFIE research project

Technological Requirements and City Features

1. D-City App: we will build a decentralized city application on the blockchain that will serve a lot of purpose among which are:

A platform for city residents to interact with each other, their leadership and widely share information
A platform for tourists to register, plan and schedule their trip to the city.
A open platform for residents to get fully engaged with the development of the city and propose projects that will be considered and acted upon based on upvotes of other residents, which will encourage resident participation in the governance of the city.

2. Free High Speed Wifi: we are building a smart city where everything will be internet connected, inclusive of daily micro and major transactions that will be occurring every minute in the city across the blockchain.

This will require fast internet access so we will offer free, unrestricted, high-speed Wi-Fi, fast enough to do your normal internet surfing like streaming video and uploading files to the internet. There will be a free hotspot almost everywhere you need one. This will make everyone live easier and smarter. This will entice individuals and businesses that need fast internet access to relocate to Bania D-City.

3. Smart Phones distributed to all residents: depending on what the city budget would permit, but I would love all residents to be smart without any excuse for being sluggish in a smart city. So this could be part of the packages that would be distributed to all residents and maybe tourists can lease one free during their stay. The smartphones could come pre-loaded with necessary applications such as D-City app, sensor tracking and data collections apps and more.

4. Build on the blockchain Decentralized applications that could use wireless sensor network in monitoring physical and environmental conditions. We would experiment with an open source, end to end software solution for collecting, displaying, and sharing health and environmental data using a smartphone.

5. Solar Powered City: we will use solar energy and other renewable energy sources to remotely power D-City without the requirement of tapping into mains electricity grid. 10% of the energy requirements of D-City would be met by solar energy and about 80% buildings will be made energy-efficient and green. Hundreds of buildings in D-City will have solar panels and we will put sensors to all the solar panels to track the energy that’s collected. So we can know immediately when a panel has stopped working because it won’t be collecting energy.

Land Use and Zoning

The 200 hectares of land when acquired will be zoned for mixed use following the five categories of Land Zoning System and each zone will have low, medium and high density area.

Residential: Places where people will live (I.e., housing unit, apartments, townhouses, etc... )
Commercial: places where people can buy things (I.e., stores, restaurants, supermarket, hotels, malls, gas station, e.t.c.)
Industrial: places where people will work (I.e. Companies, factories, start-up hubs, offices, e.t.c.)
Community Area: places where community activities will take place or community resources are stored (I.e. City conference hall, schools, libraries, parks, churches, temple, fire station, sewage treatment plants, public work garage e.t.c.)
Vacant Spaces: Green Places with nothing on them at all, (I.e. natural places, reserved areas, etc...)

D-City Architecture and Infrastructures

Roads and Streets: there will be variety of wide and narrow roads, but majorly the road in the central part of the city will be narrower and there will be a lot of it because we are designing a city that’s focused on being human and padenstrial friendly environment. We are trying to make walking a priority in our city to create a healthy environment.

Narrow Streets

arterial road

Public Places: Parks, plaza, recreational areas and other public places will be integrated throughout the city to keep it lively.

Wooden skyscraper: we would invest in building CLT powered skyscrapers and if possible see if we could get a spot for the tallest wooden skyscraper in the world (that will be nice for a wooden city).

Already the world has seen a wooden skyscraper as high 20 story and there is an architects ready to build a 40 story timber tower in Stockholm Sweden. And Micheal Green a Vancouver architect already building a 30 story in his city.

The most amazing is 80-story Oakwood Tower, which when completed, it would be not only be one of London’s tallest skyscrapers, but the world’s tallest wooden skyscraper at 984 feet (we might not be able to beat this).

And the interior of wooden Skyscrapers?

Residential Buildings: we will work with Planners, architects, and builders around the world to create at least 50% of D-City residential buildings using unconventional architectural design for housing type ranging from apartments, detached houses, town houses and low-rise social housing, secondary suites, garden suites, duplexes, semi-detached and other residential and mixed-use buildings. The remaining 50% of lots could be sold out as founders lots for to private developers and buyers that want to choose a pre-approved architect to design their own custom houses.

What I am trying to achieve with this is a authentic city that embrace diversity and uniqueness.

Flexibility Plan For Building Bania D-City

We will be working with a flexibility city building plan which will require us to build D-City in 4 phases and each phase to be completed in 1 quarter of the year. So if there's adequate funding and things work according to plan, the whole city could be completed in one year.

I am aware that new cities can't be fully planned before being built, either from a technology standpoint, or a socioeconomic one. So I'm thinking we could dedicate the first building phase to building "Steemit Village" as a district of D-City.

If it's going to work this way, then what I want is that, Steemit Village is first built as a prototype of Bania D-City before we do ICO and give opportunity for everyone to participate in the fund raising rounds

I really want to take this route because I conceived this idea when I joined steemit and after being motivated by many amazing projects I keep coming across on this platform. Additionally, I'm a big believer in Steemit and steem blockcain and I know this community deserves all the recognition possible.

To raise funds for building this prototype I propose an idea below in the "Raising Fund" chapter.

Estimated Cost of Building Bania D-City

This whole write up is a basic footprint drawn out of my personal knowledge and research (and as I mentioned at the beginning of this paper, I have very little experience in related fields).

I will need to work with a team of urban architects and city planners to gather more concrete data to give a reliable estimate cost.

However, I did little findings and discussed with different real estate companies across Nigeria and from that, I was able to gathered that I could get 200 hectares of land in an urban area of the country for a price ranging from ₦1. 7B to ₦3B which is calculated to be around $4.7M to $8.3M

We wouldn’t be building D-City at the center of an urban area, but we wouldn’t build it far from one either. So it's a bit safe to assume 200 hectares of land would not actually cost around our researched price if we are buying the land and building in a rural area but close to an urban environment.

Building Team

This is really a big project that requires a team of professionals in 4 different fields which are: city planning and Urban architecture, blockchain and cryptocurrency, Cloud computing and Data technology and lastly Cross Laminated Timber.

One of the major reasons I choose steemit as the first platform to publish my idea is because I believe I can reach the right people, connects and partner with them and also get mentorship quite easily here.

Already I have a team of 3 intelligent people that share same vision as me and it would be nice of the steemit community if I could see more people that can think in line with me and share their professional experience with me.

I'm a firm believer in the saying: "team work makes the dream work" so it's an open offer.

Raising Funds

I'm scared this might be the most challenging part of this project, but i believe we can reach this goal if enough support arise at the grass root.

I'm thinking of opening a door of private investment for the building of the prototype (Steemit Village) where all private investors get a User Issued Asset or token that will pegged to the future ICO valuation of D-City similar to a convertible debt used in traditional fundraising.

So this token will be converted to ownership of D-City token/coin during ICO at a conversion preference and interest percentage agreed upon.

Basically, we could set conversion preference to a percentage say 10% and interest rate at 10% as well.

So for instance if you purchase our user issued token worth of $50k, we get the money and put it to work by first acquiring a portion of land that we will build Steemit Village on and then we begin work on building the basic infrastructures. When that's completed, we do ICO and price our coin with a real valuation.

You can then convert the User Issued Token to a worth of $50k of our ICO coin with both conversion preference and interest rate of 20%, your ICO coin investment will be worth $60k.

Of course, this is no exception just as everything written here are my personal thoughts with no professional insight yet and shouldn't be treated as the master plan or whitepaper of Bania Dcity, because everything here will be modified as we do more research, get more ideas and shape our plans.

Conclusion

Nothing in this world was possible until the first successful attempt. Satoshi Nakamoto only hoped bitcoin grows and become what he dreamt but he never had 100% assurance that bitcoin will become what it is today.

This is one of the reasons I am publishing my idea to the blockchain because if eventually this works (which i pretty much believes will), I will be glad to come back here to see this first pen down thought leading to it manifestation.

I seek all steemians support by way of advice, criticism, suggestions, ideas, collaboration, donation, motivation and those not mentioned here.

I will be glad if more people see this and believe in my vision, so would you please Resteem, and most importantly Upvote this post as a way to support this vision financially.

And Remember to follow my steemit blog @bania because i will continue updating this platform till the day Bania D-City opening ceremony will take place.

Donation

You can donate to this project by transferring SBD or STEEM to user steemit user @bania. Also, donations in Bitcoin and Bitshares will be much appreciated.

Bitcoin Address: 3NXcUJX4ifAAey4X5WGrwNUAW5HipRvmpc

Bitshares Address: bania19

All donations towards this project and post reward will be channelled at hiring a city planner and architectural designer that will draw the master plan of Bania D-City.

You can reach me on steemit.chat - bania
Discord - bania or use this link to join my private server https://discord.gg/nsw2VSb

Email: baniabtc@gmail.com