It seems building "smart cities" is a trend now... Saudi Arabia started one, Elon Musk wants to build something like that on Mars, and there's all these ideas of floating cities being passed around. I don't know much about Akon's entrepreneurial record but "smart futuristic city powered by a blockchain in Africa" seems like a huge and mostly imaginary leap from "local solar company". You'd be hard-pressed to come up with the cash to build this in America, so doing it in Africa feels like an unrealistic utopian dream disguising a ploy for money.
bobthepanda|4 years ago
At least for Songdo in South Korea, it turns out that employers have no interest in rolling the dice on a brand new city with no proven track record, and residents don‘t really want to move to a place with no jobs. Plus cities designed from scratch in ivory towers tend to be very poor places to live nicely.