Working notes · evidence file
The living map — choose your people, space held open, move freely, placed by real bonds — doesn't exist anywhere we can find. But every fragment of it does, proven separately, somewhere in the world. This page collects them: what each fragment proves, and what it's missing.
Fragment 01 · the matching
Live Near Friends and its "Hot Friend Compounds" product (founded by Phil Levin of Supernuclear) match friend groups to properties they can buy together — the closest existing cousin to the living map, and proof that the demand is real enough to build a company on.
Fragment 02 · the app mechanics
Roommate and neighbourhood matchers — Diggz, Roomie, CityTwin — run swipe-and-match interfaces over housing every day. The interaction pattern the living map needs is commodity software.
Fragment 03 · the computation
Economists and computer scientists already run the math the map needs, at city scale: dynamic allocation of public housing, fair house-allocation algorithms, and — closest of all — assigning residents on a neighbourhood graph to shape who lives near whom. That last paper places people on a map of residences by a social objective; it just optimises for diversity among strangers rather than bonds among people who chose each other.
Fragment 04 · the theory
Urban studies now treats the algorithmic reorganisation of cities as a serious research field. The Urban Geography research agenda "Robotics and automation in the city" (Macrorie, Marvin & While, 2019) maps how automation is beginning to restructure urban space and daily life — the intellectual frame in which a program shaping physical neighbourhoods stops sounding like science fiction. And the core spatial tool — nearest-neighbour mapping — is standard GIS, available off the shelf.
Fragment 05 · the simulation
Kent Larson's City Science group at the MIT Media Lab built CityScope, a simulation platform where stakeholders reshape a district and watch the impact in real time; their algorithmic zoning project explores dynamically reconfigurable urban policies, and their agent-based Kendall Square model couples where people choose to live with how they move. This is the nearest thing to the living map running anywhere — as a simulation.
Summaries circulating online attribute papers called "Reconfigurable Urban Skins" and "Dynamic Spatial Allocation" to this group, describing unassigned housing blocks shuffled by social bonds with buffer zones left open. We could not verify those titles or that mechanism in the published record — the verified work is what's linked above. If those papers exist, we'd love the citation.
Fragment 06 · the ownership
The tenure half is proven too. LILAC in Leeds combines mutual member selection with a Mutual Home Ownership Society — members pay 35% of net income, equity tracks wages not property prices. German Baugruppen form the group first and build at cost, roughly 15–25% below market. Australia's Nightingale builds at cost with capped resale (though allocated by ballot, not by choice).
The conclusion
Demand: proven. Matching UX: commodity. Allocation math: published. Theory: established. Dynamic simulation: running at MIT. Affordable chosen ownership: award-winning in Leeds. What does not exist anywhere is the assembly — a living map with space held open, placed by real bonds, that people own affordably and move across freely. That is the whole project.
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