This doesn't really make sense. If you give a city full of people the money and technology they need to be self-reliant, then how do you make sure a few asshol

This doesn't really make sense. If you give a city full of people the money and technology they need to be self-reliant, then how do you make sure a few assholes (the managers) don't take everything for themselves and leave others homeless? If you have automation doing all the actual work, how are people in this city supposed to earn money to survive? After all, who's going to own the financial help and technology that's being provided to the city? The government of course, but then how do you distribute that? Well either you make people work for money, or you give everyone a UBI. Finally, there's no practical way any city can be self-reliant anyway. Humans have relied on trade for millennia now. Cities in the frozen north aren't going to easily be able to grow all their own food, cities in other places won't be the best place to run factories, our entire global economy is run on the idea of specialization of labor, and it's been this way since before Roman times. People specialize in certain things, they form groups (companies) that excel at doing certain things, and then they trade with each other. That's how an economy works. Hindering that isn't going to help anyone, at least until we invent replicators (and no, 3D printers are not like replicators). A low barrier to automation doesn't work because someone has to own the automation, and whoever owns it first has the first-mover advantage and puts everyone else out of business.