Project Description:
ZuCity Japan is solving Japan’s critical “Akiya crisis” where 8 million homes (15% of total housing) lie abandoned. This is projected to reach 33% by 2030! We buy these abandoned properties and transform them into vibrant hubs of art, innovation, and sustainable living while addressing severe environmental and social challenges in Japan.
We are buying and restoring these abandoned homes and revitailizing our areas by hosting art residencies, popup cities, unconferences, and raves. We also build community infrastructure like our makerspace for protoyping and innovation that our community excels in.
ZuCity Japan is not just about buildings; it’s about building economies. By transforming akiyas into economic assets our model develops local crafts, agriculture, and tourism reversing rural depopulation and economic decline.
Additionally, by running popup cities and other events on community owned properties we can dramatically reduce costs, increase quality of service and experience, and have venues customized to our communities needs and interests allowing more innovation to be birthed out of the Zuzalu community.
Public Repository:
Budget Breakdown
Full itemized budget submitted in Octant application form
Milestone 1: Makerspace Equipment & Supplies [$$21,000 / ~5.8 ETH]
Finish purchasing critical fabrication equipment for the makerspace and so we can open it to the public
- Expected Outcome:
- Makerspace open to the public and capable of fabricating parts for home repairs, furniture construction, and art pieces.
Milestone 2: Environmental Restoration [$15,000 / ~4.1 ETH]
Work on improving public spaces around our town like recycling trash around all the abandoned homes, growing a community garden, and creating public art works.
- Expected Outcome:
- Recognition from local government and community for our contributions
- Initial discussion for getting free land from government for bigger projects
- A cleaner and more beautiful town
Milestone 3: Education & Documentation [$14,000 / 4 ETH]
- Expected Outcome:
- Faster time between new community members expressing interest to buy a house and actually purchasing it
- Exponentially reduced costs (in $ and time) for a member to purchase a house
- More contributions from Japanese locals after translating our playbooks from English
- Better projects coming out of makerspace from guides on tools
Funding Requested: $50,000 / ~13.8 ETH ETH
Plans should you fall below, reach or exceed funding goals:
We will prioritize finalizing our makerspace since that has the highest impact return on the community to be self-sustainable and work on more impactful projects in our town.
Impact Measurement and Reporting
Inputs > Activities > Outputs > Outcomes > Long Term Impact
Short-term Outcomes (0-3 months):
- Increase capacity and amount of visitors to our town
- Increase deposits on home purchases
Mid-term Outcomes (3-6+ months):
- Makerspace operational
- Capacity to host small unconference/retreats (10-30 people)
- Government
- Community hub schelling point for Zuzalu
Long-term Impact (5+ years):
- Increase property values in our town
- Capacity to host multiple popup cities at once (500-2,000 people)
- Community and Innovation hub schelling point for Zuzalu and other network state projects
- Longevity effects on long-term foreign residents (one of our reasons for picking Japan)
Outcomes Measurement:
Vitalik described the most impactful aspect of ZuCity Japan best when explaining why he started Zuzalu.
“A healthy lifestyle is also a technology—one which works
best as a social technology—and this too improved quickly
at Zuzalu…Technologies that have a heavy cultural
component, where new software tools and new human
habits are being developed at the same time, are likely a
great fit for this approach…given that many now desire
personal spiritual progress”
– Vitalik Buterin, Why I Built Zuzalu
Enabling a new lifestyle for Zuzalians in ZuCity Japan that lets us upgrade our habits, culture, and social network to maximize personal development, which feeds back into healthy community metrics. The liveliness, economic activity, and other symptoms of improvements are the non-linear outcomes from having a high-agency, high-creativity, high-productivity people together 24/7 in an environment designed for intentional community activation like residencies and popup cities.
That being said, we focus on metrics that are leading indicators of later downstream effects. E.g. we do not track “Total $ Invested” but “Homes Under Acquisition” since owning a home causes ongoing economic activity and higher human density for coliving.
Community:
- Abandoned Homes Under Acquisition - How active is our community in finding and restoring land at this moment?
- Members Visited Per Year - How many community members volunteering to renovate homes do we have capacity to host over time?
- Sales Qualified Leads - How many community members are likely to come for visits, art residencies, buy houses, or other value adding activities?
Environmental:
- Homes Restored - How much progress have we made against the national akiya problem?
- Materials Utilized/Recycled - How many resources can we reuse from akiyas and prevent trash going to landfills and incinerators?
- Local Sustainable Materials Sourced - How much of our building costs and pollution can be reduced by using harvested local resources?
Interim Reporting
Regular Updates:
Zuzalu and Akiya Collective each have weekly community calls compatible with US and EU timezones where we give updates on houses, art projects, local engagement, and other activities.
Currently we manually track our impact metrics since they are hard to automate like materials recycled and others like members visited.
Milestone Verification:
You can come visit us and see for yourself 
We post content across all channels (mainly instagram) of our ongoing projects.
We will also update our Karma GAP page
Sustainability Plan
Our Revenue Streams:
- Consulting services for akiya acquisition, renovation, immigration, and other processes to buy homes in Japan
- Art sales from resident artists
- Workshops and event hosting
- Venue and accommodation rentals for private events
Our Partnerships:
- Our local municipal government
- Local construction and craftsman
- Art collectives and galleries in Tokyo and Osaka
- International artist residency networks
- Network states and popup cities
Additionally, our commitment to permaculture and food forestry are deepening as we further prepare the land for use. Land surrounding our community home is registered as farm land, so we are communicating with the regional Agricultural Affairs department in rural Japan to help gain access to it. This will help us grow and source food and materials even more locally and sustainably.
Case Studies and Testimonials
Gathering Feedback:
- We have a very engaged community and many of us have colived together. Testimonials from Japanese locals would be the challenge but our City Hall and neighbors are very welcoming and actively supporting us already.
Showcasing Success:
- Taking pictures and videos is the best way since we build things in the real world.
- Tracking how many people come, for how long, and amount of hours helping with restorations
- Projects created using our makerspace or playbooks
- Working with City Hall and businesses to track economic and environmental impact on the town
Advancing Values of Freedom and Privacy
Living off the land is true freedom, without dependence on the global economy or state infrastructure. Our goal is to support artists in their freedom to create and build a new world with their own hands.
Privacy in an IRL community is very different from privacy for a software product. We obviously dont publish peoples names, where they live, etc. but people are doxxed by showing their face in the town they live in.
Supporting Decentralization
We allow anyone from the local or global community to use or makerspace, only paying for resources consumed. We participate in local Japanese community events to meet neighbors and friends.
We demonstrate our commitment through:
- Comprehensive open-source documentation of akiya acquisition and renovation processes
- Multi-year community building effort now manifesting into a physical village
- Public makerspace with 3D printers, electronics lab, and craft materials
- Knowledge sharing platform connecting rural Japan with global regenerative communities
- Researched 100+ properties, visited 25+, and explored 5 different areas of rural Japan over 2 years
- Established our first community home in Nagano Prefecture in early 2024. This home is owned by a non-profit and hosts our makerspace.
We are NOT a DAO. So we are actually more decentralized because each individual community member personally owns their house. This makes our community and housing network capture-resitant, allows diverse business models , and different governance models for different properties/communities.
Team Information
ZuCity Japan is a collaboration with Zuzalu members and Akiya Collective (AC) to create a permanent ZuVillage from akiyas in their town. AC is an art collective that hosts art residencies to help restore akiyas. Since starting their scouting search in late 2021 and closing on their first property in early 2024, AC has kept open logs and records of our journey to home ownership and village creation in Japan for anyone to learn from and reuse for themselves. Kiba Gateaux has participated in both communities for over a year and acts as the coordinator between them.
Core:
Kiba Gateaux - Real Estate Ops - Twitter, Warpcast, Github
Michelle - Makerspace & Residency Director - Twitter, Github
Social Proof
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~4 ETH in donations + matching funds from Zuzalu Gitcoin round in Q1 2024 to renovate our first akiya
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Presented at Kominka summit in 2023 and 2024 about buying and restoring traditional Japanese folk homes
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Hosted two residencies, with cohorts of 10 people each, in rural areas in Izu and Nagano
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Developed relationships with city governments and locals, learned different renovation techniques, and produced installations
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Spoken at several well-known Japanese conferences including - Japan’s largest crypto conference (IVS), DAO / ETH Tokyo, NCC, Minka Summit (focused on akiya / kominka renovation)
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Presented at MegaZu and Zuzalu Town Hall in Chiang Mai to Vitalik and 100+ other Zuzalians and at ZuThailand
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Hosted our first public community call with global Zuzalu community.
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In partnership discussions with Cohere.Network for property purchases, rentals, and community activations
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Over 50 community members have come and stayed with us in just 9 months since we purchased our first house. This is with only one home in living condition, by end of q1 2025 we should have 4 houses operational.
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Promoted by our friends at DeSci Tokyo for our work on DeSci and network states
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Coordinating multiple popup cities for an archipelago in Osaka 2025 similar to Chiang Mai 2024. We are working with teams that have already confirmed and are moving forward while still supporting teams that have not decided yet. More details to be announced as our partners confirm on their side.
Transparency
Because our costs are in Japanese Yen which has been pretty volatile the past year for a global reserve currency, we try to offramp into fiat yen as soon as possible, especially if rates are favorable.
Other funding
Total Past Funding: $75,600 in grants and donations
$3,600 in donations
- ~$3,600 in Gitcoin rounds
- $2,800 Zuzalu Q1 round
- $800 Asia Round
$72,000 in previous grant funding
- $60,000 grant
- $50,000 from emergent ventures
- $10,000 from mass
- ~$12,000 Gitcoin round matching
- $9,000 Zuzalu Q1 round
- $2,500 Asia Round