Grid Housing — Distributed Living

Grid Housing — Distributed Living was a separate project from my architecture thesis. It took one question from that work — how could someone move through connected cities without starting their housing life from zero each time? — and tried to bring it down to the scale of a product.

I started it after Replit was closing, at a point when I was learning how differently an idea behaves once it has to become a company. An architectural proposal can make a whole world available in order to test a spatial hypothesis. A product has to decide who joins, what they contribute, why they trust one another, how the system operates, and where it fails.

The premise was a decentralised network of homes across global urban centres. A member would contribute a home, room, or other viable space to the network: not financial collateral in a formal sense, but their stake in the shared system. In return, they could see availability elsewhere in the network and access a space when it was free. The point was not to make accommodation free, but to create reciprocity between people who had something real to contribute.

I explored several ways the exchange could work. A host or local node could set a fee; the network could establish common rules; access could also accumulate through a credit model that was not directly reducible to cash. The difficult part was not showing an empty room on a map. It was defining participation, expectations, and accountability without making a central platform the sole arbiter of every relationship.

This is why blockchain entered the work. During the 2016–17 cycle, it looked like a possible coordination layer for membership, availability, and the terms of an exchange between people who did not already know each other. It was never the point of the project, and I was not interested in putting housing “on-chain” for its own sake. I was interested in whether a shared record and common rules could support a network that no single operator fully owned.

It never became a company. Looking back, the model was right to take trust seriously but too optimistic about what a network can solve. Housing is shaped by local regulation, maintenance, unequal markets, and the uneven power between a host and a guest. Making inventory visible does not make those conditions disappear.

I still keep the work because it taught me a distinction I return to often: a decentralised system is not automatically a fair one, but asking who can participate, what they contribute, and who sets the rules is a worthwhile place to begin.