The Lineage of Popup Cities

Transcript

Introduction

I think a really good place to start here will be to talk about the lineage and the history of this movement and the point that I really want to come across here is that humans and human societies have had a long history of coming together to talk about new ideas about how Society should be structured humans have a lot of uh creativity and Collective agency in this process of shaping society and it often looks like taking some space away from mainstream Society to gather in a space that will allow for discussions about new ideas that can then spread and permeate through the rest of

society these movements have through history been critical and very important in incubating new ideas and new technology and I think this gives us a bit of an idea about what is actually happening with popup cities my personal assertion is that popup cities are a new surface area for this type of experimentation especially for a lot of the ideas that we're developing in the crypto space to find actual meaningful ground for tangible in real life experimentation a lot of the things we're doing are quite heady they're quite um abstract and so what we've seen already in the last couple of years is that it's a very it's it's kind of

The role of popup cities in societal innovation

fertile ground for um for tangible applications for how to live how to build new Tech and how to ultimately improve Society so I I I went deep down this Rabbit Hole I originally had maybe 20 different examples I picked five just to give us a little bit of a sense um for what's happening here so the first one is The Enlightenment salons in 17th and 18th century France these were mostly in Paris they were social Gatherings they were often hosted by mostly hosted by women and they were kind of a safe space for new ideas about philosophy politics and science this was you know France at the time was a monarchy but it was the the general

Enlightenment salons - Philosophy and democracy

prevailing sense of the Enlightenment was is there actually a new way to structure Society right now that feels a little trivial maybe kind of obvious to us but at the time it was really uh very I mean literally revolutionary to even be talking about ideas of moving beyond a monarchy and the I mean the impact of these environments was was huge right they spread ideas uh from the enlightenment kind of the classical uh ideas we think of about liberalism like individual liberty uh Freedom individual rights human rights and this is kind of the the birthplace of modern democracy um and obviously if you study the history of the French

Revolution you see that this was critical in making France a uh constitutional monarchy for a brief moment and then obviously um a full Republic so that's kind of one one example that we can hearken back to another one that's slightly less well known but I think is potentially even closer to what's Happening Here is What's called the chitaka movement so this started in late 19th century us in a place called chiaka in Upstate New York but it very quickly spread throughout the country so I think it's actually a really cool model for What's Happening Here essentially it was um a adult and kind of family education movement so every summer in this town they would bring uh University professors they would bring folks and

The Chautauqua Movement - Education and community

families to come together and and teach each other it was kind of like a long unconference that happened over the course of once two months um and this and and it had folks like Henry Ford who's pictured here and a bunch of the other kind of big innovators of the time who would come and spend their Summers there and this eventually spread around the country so pretty much every city in the US had a chiaka in the summer some of them happen throughout the year and it actually kind of approximates very closely see what's happening with things like Zulu things like Edge City Zoo Thailand where we have these one to two month temporary Gatherings that are then now starting to pick up steam again um so yeah it's just a really cool example of a small idea that became a national

movement the next one is Black Mountain College which was a a experimental College it was a reaction to kind of the industrial education movement um in the early 20th century it had a lot of interesting folks like John Cage Buckminster Fuller actually invented the geodesic dome while he was at Black Mountain College um it was the center of American avangard art and poetry so it influenced a lot of American culture um but again it was this it was uh it was a permanent place but for most people their experience of it was that they would go there for once or two months they would go deep on some ideas they would collaborate with other folks who were there and out of that came a lot of

Black Mountain College - Avant-garde arts and collaboration

interesting philosophy art um technology like uh like buckminster's work that's actually him pictured here um it's a little bit pixelated on the screen but uh yeah just really interesting history it's even less than just 100 years ago orille so orille is an interesting example in India it's actually a permanent New Town that's still going um and it was created as an attempt to uh to figure out a place focused on human unity and sustainable living and uh especially human flourishing there are people that live there fulltime but

Auroville - Sustainability and human unity

again for a lot of people their experience is ephemeral so they come for a month or two they stay there they learn they develop ideas um at the time this kind of came out of the 60s you know uh cultural revolution happening in the US so uh the hippie movement a lot of talk about peace and Harmony obviously the Vietnam War was happening at the time um it's it's it's big there's you know 3,000 people but uh they've I think they've had over 100,000 in terms of like folks that have been there um and it's a really interesting experiment that shows that these things can have a lot of longevity over time and one oh yeah so the last one here is the Santa Fe Institute which is a little

Santa Fe Institute - Tackling complexity with collaboration

bit of a more contemporary example but I think gives a really good sense of what's possible here when people come together around a particular concept of study so SFI is um focused on the idea of complexity science it was started by folks that were part of the Manhattan Project and um yeah it's a space for people to tackle complex problems it's a very multidisciplinary research space which I think is very interesting they actually incubated a new way of bringing together scientists and tech people and thinkers from a variety of different fields and finding ways to kind of uh create collaboration points between them

um huge impact again it has influenced a lot of scientific thinking in modern times a lots of mathematics economics biology and and especially computer science so uh yeah and there is one honorable mention which is Burning Man um I I wanted to include this is because I think when people think of pop-up cities this is probably the first thing that people think of it's It's a literal pop-up City for you know 10 months of the year there's nothing but desert in this place and then um people start building and for a week there are close to 100,000 people there um it has had a huge cultural impact it has spawned a

Burning Man - Radical experimentation in culture

really a global movement of burns there are now Burns in most uh regions around the world it's obviously quite radical in the experience that people have it's it's quite different from people's traditional Lifestyles I think so I've I've been going for a long time I do think it's a very interesting experiment but I do want to call out that I think it's ultimately very different to what we're trying to do and I think that's important to note because again it's like a a um it's it's an association that people have and that they come to quite easily but I see the burn as a a chance for people to very momentarily kind of lar or um yeah like role play a completely

different lifestyle to the one that they currently live whereas I think the thing we're trying to do with pop-up cities and obviously there's there's infinite variety of what people will do with this format but um it's much more approximating what does what could life actually look like if it was thoughtfully designed um yeah so that's that's that and the the question is so where do we go from here we you know our generation has a whole set of new problems some of these old institutions or movements were the the answer to a prior set of problems we have our own there's a lot going on I I don't need to

The future of popup cities and new tools for experimentation

tell you um but we also have new tools there are things that have been developed in the last couple of decades that have reached maturity that are now usable um obvious examples internet Ai and and ultimately blockchains which we believe are very kind of foundational tool for this kind of experimentation we'll get into some of that later there are new experiments starting to happen there's new ideas like the network State there's Zulu there's Edge City Zoo Thailand and so I I really see these popup cities as a way to prototype new Solutions like I've been saying and each experiment kind of brings us closer and closer to what a uh a resilient inclusive and flourishing Community

could look like