Imagine a place where driverless cars roam the streets, intelligent electricity grids regulate the power and everything is built from the ground up to the specifications of the ideal “smart” city.

This idealised place has been getting a lot of attention in Silicon Valley of late. Y Combinator, the region’s best-known tech incubator, is the latest to dream, announcing a research project aimed at stimulating ideas and designs that it hopes to use in a real-world location.

It is far from alone. From Google co-founder Larry Pageto libertarian venture capitalist Peter Thiel, ideas like this have had plenty of currency. Y Combinator says it wants to to speed up the adoption of technologies for ordinary people, not just build “crazy libertarian utopias for techies”.