Quantum City Initiative

THE QUANTUM CITY INITIATIVE
Cities Are the Engines of Human Progress—We Must Make Cities that Evolve with Us, Not Against Us
By Chase Garbarino, Co-founder and CEO of HqO
Introduction: A National Strategy for Urban Strength
America's cities are weakening and this puts our global standing at stake.
Cities are the engines of human progress. Throughout history they have defined every great civilization—Athens launched democracy, Rome was the first global economic power house, New York has shaped modern finance and wealth. Today, many of America’s cities are faltering. Once the technology hub of this country, Detroit’s population has plunged 65% since 1950. Today’s technology hub, San Francisco, has been in decline the past several years and teeters between fixing its problems or becoming the next Detroit. Chicago continues to lose ground as crime surges and corporations leave the city.
Yet not all of our cities are failing. Miami has become a tech and financial hot spot and Austin has benefited from those leaving the Bay Area with attractive policies around key concepts like autonomous taxis. Outside of America and the West, many of our rivals forge urban giants—AI-powered, state-controlled cities that are advancing steadily. America’s primacy hangs in the balance if we do not get back to building the best cities in the world.
We need cities that evolve with us—not against us. Cities need to be the platform that enables our most precious resource—our people—and unlock innovation in the 21st century in a way more powerful than ever before. This is our renewed purpose at HqO—starting by enabling buildings to operate smarter and connect deeper. We believe deeply that America and the West must revive its urban core or we will cede leadership to those who are building the urban future.

The HqO Vision: Powering the “Quantum Cities” of the Future
HqO is powering cities to propel civilization forward.
Quantum City Defined
The moniker of “Quantum Cities” has been used in a few different studies and places over the years, however no one has fully defined the concept in a way that aligns with technological developments and practical applications of the 21st century. At HqO, we’ve spent the past year working on defining this concept—a Quantum City is a self-optimizing urban ecosystem where AI and decentralized technology supercharge economic growth, human potential, and personal liberty—transforming cities into living networks that continuously think, adapt, and thrive.
Starting with Buildings
It starts with buildings and people, which is where we at HqO come in. HqO is building the platform that transforms buildings into AI-powered nodes—where access goes beyond entry and egress to enable dynamic, personalized experiences: energy adapts, spaces respond, systems align seamlessly. This vision of a “smart building” has existed in the industry for years but with advancements in AI, we at HqO now know it is finally possible.
Leveling Up
Taking it up a level: buildings link to streets and to citizens. They are the molecule of the city if people are the atom. By focusing our urban design efforts on building infrastructure that better connects us as people, we can slash waste, spark jobs, and unleash ideas. A city that thinks and thrives—restoring America’s, and her allies’, urban might. We’ve conquered frontiers before—Apollo, the internet. Quantum Cities are our next mission to lead the world again—by creating a better platform for humanity to connect, we will safeguard our future for generations to come. This is our mission at HqO.
The American City Decline
Our cities are eroding—a crisis we cannot ignore.
America’s cities once led the world—hubs of innovation, commerce, culture. Now many of our great cities are weakening, and our collective strength weakens with them. The data is undeniable.

The Evidence of Decline
Industrial powerhouses are shells of themselves. The data below tells the story of these once great places of builders hollowing out:
Key Insight: Half a century of loss demands action.
We have watched for over half a century as we’ve lost the ability to make things in these critical cities. And it is not just the heartland—coastal hubs falter too. New York’s population is down 500,000 since 2020. San Francisco’s lost 7.5% of its population in three years. Chicago’s population shrinks annually—crime and exodus feed the doom loop. Los Angeles grapples with homelessness and wildfires, worsened by poor governance. 

Europe’s not immune—London has stalled post-Brexit, Parisians are drifting to suburbs, Berlin chokes on housing shortage. Over half of Europe’s big cities shrank or flatlined from 2015-2020. The West’s urban edge has dulled.
The Drivers
1
Economic Strain
High taxes and regulations drive firms to cheaper states.
2
Housing Gridlock
Zoning stalls new homes—costs soar, residents flee.
3
Disorder
Crime and neglect repel investment and families.
4
Aging Systems
Crumbling roads, grids, bridges choke daily life.
5
Bureaucracy
Getting anything done in many cities has become near impossible.
The Ripple Effect
Beyond numbers, the cultural fabric frays when our cities’ social infrastructure isn’t a priority. As Robert Putnam famously detailed in his book “Bowling Alone”, our civic bonds will continue to weaken if we do not address this issue. Local voter turnout drops. Small businesses die, edged out by policies favoring giants. Remote work empties our city cores. If cities cease to fuel progress, our nation’s engine stalls.
The Power Law of Cities
A handful of cities steer progress. America must master this truth.
Human advancement isn’t uniform. A few cities generate most of it—wealth, innovation, influence. The power law of great cities is etched in history and is vital to our future. The nation that builds the most great cities wins. America must become a Quantum City factory to maintain our position as the global superpower.

The Pattern Holds
Ancient Roots: Through the Delian League Athens was a trading power house which in turn created a cultural power house that birthed democracy and modern philosophy. Rome borrowed many of the concepts developed by Athens and built the ultimate economic empire commanding 22% of global GDP.
Industrial and Financial Rise: New York and London have long reigned as global powerhouses, their dominance forged in finance and industry. New York, with the NYSE’s $25.24 trillion market cap and a GFCI score of 765, leads as the world’s top financial center, its $2.299 trillion metro GMP dwarfing rivals. London, handling 43% of the $6.6 trillion daily forex market and boasting a £64 billion financial trade surplus, holds the #2 spot at 750 GFCI points, its historical might still echoing through towers like the Shard. Together, their wealth—built on stock exchanges, trade, and skyscrapers—defines modern economic supremacy.
The Technology Era: Silicon Valley reigns as America’s unrivaled epicenter of global tech innovation, its dominance fueled by venture capital, talent, and groundbreaking companies. With over $95.5 billion in venture capital funding in 2022—accounting for 40% of all U.S. VC Investment —and home to giants like Apple, Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia, Netflix, Salesforce that make up more than $10T of market cap, it drives the world’s digital economy. From garages to gleaming campuses, Silicon Valley’s tech supremacy continues to reshape industries worldwide.
Today, 10 U.S. metros—25% of our population—drive 33% of GDP. New York’s $2.3 trillion dwarfs Canada’s output.
The Mechanism
The bottom line is that better cities amplify output. Double the size of the average city, and productivity rises 15% per capita. Where there are more people, there are more links in the network when designed well—ideas spark, capital grows. 

It is important that we recognize America’s cities must reclaim this dynamic—we must develop the places for our best and brightest to freely build, create and connect—or we will yield the century.
The Natural Laws of Cities
Cities are systems—bound by the laws of nature and physics.
While we believe the benefit of great cities is incredibly clear, it is important to understand that cities aren’t accidents. In order to develop more of them and make them even more productive, we must first understand through first principles why great cities work. We believe through the laws of physics and nature cities can be explained with three relatively basic concepts—networks, energy, gravity.

The Natural Laws of Cities
Network Effects
Great cities have immense network effects. Connections between people multiply value. New York at ~8M population and ~19M metro population doesn’t just outproduce typical cities of 1 million population 8:1—it tends to outproduce them exponentially. It’s density and quality of high volume connections fuels its advantage. Similarly in Silicon Valley, the density of tech talent and network effects are quite apparent and well described by Paul Graham in his essay Why Startup Hubs Work. The results are seen in the generational renewal of great tech companies being born out of the employees of other great companies—see the Paypal Mafia.
Thermodynamics
Thermodynamics is the way energy moves and changes, and cities use it to turn the wild bustle of human activity into organized, productive systems. They gather people, resources, and ideas into dense urban cores, sparking interactions that produce economic growth, cultural richness, and fresh innovations—think lively markets, towering offices, or creative hubs. The grid system, with its clear, straight streets, is a standout example of a chaos-taming tool, boosting efficiency and amplifying output in sprawling cities like New York.
Gravity
With a strong combination of the first two, cities can achieve a “gravity” that helps compound their advantages. Gravity dictates that stronger cities exert a stronger pull, drawing talent, capital, and innovation into their orbits with irresistible force. In places like Silicon Valley, this clustering effect—where over $95.5 billion in venture capital and a $636 billion GDP concentrate despite steep living costs—creates a magnetic hub that overshadows smaller tech hubs. The density of skilled workers, deep-pocketed investors, and cutting-edge ideas amplifies this gravitational advantage, despite disadvantages like high-cost burdens.
We have started to think of it like an algorithm of sorts: The Quantum City Algorithm = Inputs (People, Ideas, Energy, Smart Design) → Outputs (Wealth, Innovation, Culture, Smarter Design)
The Quantum Shift
Cities have always been humanity’s “computers”—the word “compute” traces back to the Latin computare, meaning “to settle an account together,” reflecting how humans gather to reckon with life’s challenges and opportunities, and ultimately solve problems. From ancient marketplaces to modern metropolises, we’ve settled together, and through this clustering, we compute progress—turning raw human energy into advancements in trade, art, and technology. Even Douglas Adams glimpsed this in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, imagining Earth as a sprawling computer designed to crunch life’s ultimate questions. In truth, it’s not one machine but a vast network of them—our cities—each a buzzing hub that, when they are working, transform chaos into ordered output. Like a computer’s circuits, features like the grid system can help streamline this process. With today’s AI-driven capabilities we will be able to supercharge these urban processors.
The Principles of the Quantum City
Quantum Cities fuse technology with freedom—America's way forward.
At HqO, we don’t believe the vision of a Quantum City is merely a tech upgrade—it’s a conviction that if technology truly empowers people, in alignment with our nation's founding beliefs, we can flourish like never before. We’ve said it a few times and will say it again—cities are engines of human progress, and ours have lost their fire. We believe they can burn bright again, not through control or restriction, but through principles that put people first. This is the heart of the Quantum City—where technology doesn’t rule us, it lifts us.
Consider this our declaration of the founding principles of what Quantum Cities must stand for in the 21st Century.
Individual Liberty
As we have learned over the past few decades, technology is not inherently good or bad. While technology’s progress is inevitable, it’s societal impact is not predetermine but comes down to how humanity applies its use. The technology that will power Quantum Cities can clearly be deployed in ways that enable individual liberty to flourish or in ways the restrict and limit the liberty of individuals. 
Unlike smart cities that track and dictate to citizens, a Quantum City guards what makes us human: the right to speak, to own, to choose. Technology in Quantum Cities isn’t a leash—it’s a shield. We do not believe in trading privacy for convenience or safety—this is a lazy tradeoff made by lazy thinkers. With the technological capabilities of today, a Quantum City’s value proposition to citizens can marry privacy, safety and convenience. In a Quantum City, your data, your life, stays yours. Property, whether a house or a digital asset, is yours to hold, not some bureaucracy’s to snatch. Speech stays free and public spaces stay open. 
This isn’t about gadgets making life slicker—it’s about tech making freedom stronger. A Quantum City doesn’t just run efficiently; it runs free.

Economic Dynamism
Prosperity thrives when barriers crumble, and a Quantum City rejects the stranglehold of bureaucracy, red tape, and overregulation that choke opportunity in too many of our cities today. We see these as silent thieves, rigging the system against the outsider—the dreamer, the hustler, the underdog—by piling on complexity and cost that only the well-connected can navigate. A Quantum City flips this on its head: Economic Dynamism here means markets—real, competitive, human-powered markets—running free as the ultimate engine of growth and equal opportunity, not equal outcomes. We don’t promise everyone wins the same prize, but we damn well believe in working to ensure everyone gets a fair shot at the race. 

Technology is the great equalizer, slashing participation costs and shredding the red tape that keeps people out. Start a business in hours, not months—no labyrinth of permits or insider handshakes required. Buy, sell, trade, or build—real estate, assets, ideas—without middlemen gumming up the works or outdated rules suffocating the flow. Imagine a city where a street vendor and a tech founder face the same low hurdles, where wealth isn’t locked in the hands of a few but forged by anyone with grit and a good idea. 

In a Quantum City, Economic Dynamism hums because it trusts people over systems. Bureaucracy breeds inequality of opportunity—favoring those with lawyers, lobbyists, or legacy—while our tech-driven design dismantles those walls, letting capitalism breathe and rewarding effort, not privilege. This is a city where the market’s pulse beats for the bold, and the only limit is how hard you’re willing to run and a little bit of luck.

System Efficiency
A Quantum City runs lean, slashing the dead weight of administrative inefficiency, bureaucratic bloat, and red tape that strangles progress and stifles human potential. This isn’t a project with a finish line—it’s a program, a core strand of the city’s DNA, designed to perpetually streamline and simplify. We reject the slow grind of outdated systems—think endless permits, tangled zoning laws, or petty gatekeepers—and replace them with processes that move at the speed of human ambition. Technology is our scalpel: AI flags redundant rules, blockchain cuts middlemen, and real-time data keeps the city’s pulse fast and fluid. Here, every layer of complexity must justify itself or get stripped away, ensuring liberty breathes free and markets hum without friction. 
This relentless drive for efficiency is coded into how the Quantum City operates, a living algorithm that never stops pruning. Citizens don’t drown in paperwork and complexity—they plug in, verify, and go. Land use adapts with demand, not decades-old plans; taxes flow through transparent, automated streams, not labyrinths of loopholes. It’s a system that trusts people over process, measuring success by how little it gets in the way. By baking this into its bones—through smart design, constant feedback loops, and a culture that prizes results over rules—the Quantum City stays agile, empowering individual liberty and fueling economic dynamism. Bloat doesn’t just die here; it never gets a foothold.

Citizen-centric Design 
We believe in building for people, not for power. Too many cities bend to the whims of elites, bureaucrats, or faceless systems—rules that favor the few over the many. A Quantum City puts people first, crafting every street, system, and space to reflect the needs, voices, and pulse of its residents—not just the loudest or best-connected. It’s about building a city that works for everyone, tuning its design to the real sentiment of all who call it home. 
Technology makes it happen—smart polls tap collective input, data maps what citizens actually use, and flexible designs adapt to how people live, not how planners dictate. No more monuments to power or gridlock to appease old interests. Housing bends to demand, transit cuts the slog, and public squares hum with life—all shaped by the people who walk them. In a Quantum City, the citizen isn’t an afterthought but the heartbeat, and the city’s design proves it, balancing liberty and dynamism with a relentless focus on who it’s all for.

City Compute 
While we believe cities have always been humanity’s most powerful computers, now it is time to make it official. Quantum Cities harness technology to capture, structure, and share data from countless urban sources—sensors in streets, digital building OS like HqO’s, citizen apps, economic transactions—turning the city into a self-improving network. This isn’t computation for its own sake; it’s the engine that amplifies our core principles, making freedom, opportunity, efficiency, and citizen voice not just ideals but measurable realities.

City Compute transforms the urban fabric into a living algorithm, where every building, transit line, and marketplace acts as a node in a vast, adaptive system. Data flows—traffic patterns, energy use, citizen feedback, market trades—are structured in real time, shared across districts and even other Quantum Cities, driving decisions that reinforce Individual Liberty by empowering citizens with transparent tools, fuel Economic Dynamism by optimizing markets, enhance System Efficiency by pruning waste, and uphold Citizen-Centric Design by aligning the city with its people’s needs.

With the principles of Individual Liberty, Economic Dynamism, System Efficiency, Citizen-Centric Design, and City Compute as its foundation, the Quantum City reimagines urban life as a dynamic, intelligent system that empowers people and adapts in real time. These ideals aren’t just aspirations—they demand a measurable structure to bring them to life. The Quantum City Framework translates this vision into actionable standards, ensuring every city that bears the name delivers on its promise of freedom, opportunity, and human-centered progress.
The Quantum City Framework
The Quantum City Components, Score, Impact Goals, and Roadmap—a deliberate path forward.
Our reason for launching the Quantum City Initiative at HqO is because we find most of the work in this space in the past to be mostly academic. We are making it our mission at HqO to take action—as I have said: cities are the engines of human progress and ours are sputtering. Quantum Cities can revive them but only if we start acting now. We have put together a framework for cities to implement in partnership with HqO in order to execute on the Quantum City vision.

The Quantum City framework ensures a city is a living, intelligent network that optimizes freedom, opportunity, and livability through our five core principles: Individual Liberty, Economic Dynamism, System Efficiency, Citizen-Centric Design, and City Compute. It’s a system where citizens, markets, and technology converge to amplify human potential.


The Quantum City Measurement Framework: Qualifying as a Quantum City

Individual Liberty Score – Empowering the Citizen
The Individual Liberty Score measures how well the city equips individuals with tools and autonomy.
Targets: 50% digital ID adoption, 50+ customizable options per citizen, 50% data control.

Economic Dynamism Score – Markets for All
The Economic Dynamism Score measures opportunity and market freedom.
Targets: 50% tech-optimized transactions, 10+ startups per 100,000 population.
System Efficiency Score – Lean Operations
The System Efficiency Score measures the city’s agility.
Targets: 5% rule reduction, 50% automated operations, 5% rule reduction, 30 days or less.
Citizen-Centric Design Score – Rated by the People
The Citizen-Centric Design Score measures the impact of citizen feedback.
Threshold: 4/5 citizen rating, 50% feedback-optimized, 50% smart building coverage.
City Compute Index (CCI) – Powering Liberty and Connectivity
The City Compute Score measures the city’s computational backbone.
Targets: 15 terabytes per square mile, 1 gigabyte per capita, 50% Digital OS adoption, 7 petabytes shared.

The Final Quantum City Qualification Score




Quantum City Impact Goals
In order to live up to the name, Quantum Cities must deliver a quantum leap in performance. To that end, we have set our impact goals high:
Economic Growth: Triple GDP in 10 years—a quantum leap past history’s best. Shenzhen soared 6-8x in the ‘80s with trade zones; Dubai hit 5-6x in the 2000s on oil and towers; Houston doubled-plus in the ‘50s with oil rigs. We are aiming high but we can do it—11%+ yearly growth—because AI, freedom, and grit can outpace them all.
Startup and Talent Density: 50+ startups per 10,000 residents yearly, +5% talent migration yearly—ignite an innovation inferno. San Francisco peaks at 30-40 startups; Austin pulls 5-10% talent in hot years. We double down—Quantum Cities don’t just draw talent, they will breed it.
Cultural Vitality: 50%+ rise in arts and civic engagement—life thrives, not just survives. Voting, volunteering, galleries boom—think Seoul’s K-pop rise or Basel’s art surge, but bigger.
With the Quantum City Framework establishing clear standards for Individual Liberty, Economic Dynamism, System Efficiency, Citizen-Centric Design, and City Compute, the stage is set for a city that thrives as a responsive, intelligent network. Central to this vision are Quantum Buildings—smart structures equipped with digital operating systems like HqO’s Quantum Building OS—that act as the city’s vital nodes, bringing these principles to life. This next section explores how these buildings power the Quantum City, turning abstract metrics into concrete, citizen-focused reality.
The Quantum Building by HqO
Quantum Cities start with Quantum Buildings—nodes that ignite the network.
A Quantum City—a self-optimizing urban ecosystem that thinks, adapts, thrives—doesn’t rise without a foundation. That foundation is the Quantum Building: a commercial structure—office, lab, studio, warehouse—rewired into a live, intelligent node. It’s not just smarter; it’s a catalyst, fueling economic growth, human potential, and personal liberty at the city’s core. At HqO, we’ve defined five components that make a building quantum—because cities are engines of progress, and buildings are where the spark catches fire.
The Components of a Quantum Building

Why It’s Quantum
A Quantum Building isn’t a gadget—it’s a node in a living network, wired to think with the city. This is what we are building at HqO—turning the theory of Quantum Buildings into steel and code. One building sparks a block, a block sparks a district, a district sparks a Quantum City. This is where tripled GDP begins, where startups flood, where civic life roars—because cities evolve with us when their buildings do.
How to Join The Quantum City Initiative
America’s cities shaped history. They must shape it again. Join us.

Say it with us, cities are the engines of human progress—ours need revival now. Quantum Cities are the answer: living networks that think, adapt, thrive—rewriting decline into dominance. This isn’t a side project—it’s a national mission, a modern Manhattan Project for the 21st century. Not cloaked in secrecy, but open, urgent, and brimming with life—a coalition to triple city GDP, ignite innovation, revive our urban soul. The Quantum City Initiative (QCI) calls you to act—because delay cedes the future.
Who We Need
Mayors & Officials
Conduct a citywide audit to get your Score. Enlist your city's properties to join the Quantum City Network. Work with HqO to hone the framework and develop a roadmap to achieve Quantum City status.
Real Estate Partners
Get your buildings audited. Join the Quantum City Network. Adopt Quantum Building technology. Build nodes that wake cities up.
Technology Companies
HqO can't build Quantum Cities alone! Become certified partners—bring apps, infrastructure, AI, decentralized tech to life. HqO's in; join us to scale the framework—your tools transform cities.
Financial Institutions & Investors
Banks, Institutions, VCs—fund the leap. Back Quantum Buildings, infrastructure, and startups—your capital fuels a trillion-dollar shift.
Academic & Research Institutions
Universities, think tanks—sharpen the edge. Innovate on the framework, urban models, and assess data—your minds drive quantum breakthroughs.
Citizens
Demand freedom and growth. Push your city to join.
Your Call to Action
This is no quiet effort—it’s a thunderous push to reclaim America’s urban edge. Cities triple GDP—Startups and talent flood in—Arts and civic life surge. We’re not tweaking the system; we’re rebuilding it—block by block, node by node, partner by partner. Join The Quantum City Initiative because progress waits for no one and our cities will rise again.
Join The Quantum City Initiative
Email: quantumcity@hqo.com  |  X: #QuantumCities