Timour Kosters I How Developers Shape the Future of Cities with Edge City I Pragma Bangkok 2024

[Music] let's get right into it and for this I'd like to bring on teore to tell you about the world of new pop-up cities focusing on at city so please give tore a big round of [Music] applause thanks so much thanks for having me this is going to be super fun because I feel like this is the first time we're actually covering this thing as a as a big topic because I think the time is now that it's uh big enough that everybody knows about it a lot of you may have heard of zulu other pop-up cities Network States and we're kind of seeing a lot of creativity around how we can innovate in the physical world and uh we'll kind of do certain things out of order so my first question to you is well how was Ed City Lana yeah it was incredible honestly I feel very energized which is actually kind of a new thing the first couple times we did this we honestly burnt out pretty hard but this time it feels like things are really falling into place we've built a Playbook we you know we open sourc to our whole teams on board so it that feels very gratifying to feel like okay we're making progress we're actually making these things sustainable um it's the third event we've done in a row that was break even so that feels good as well and and yeah so it's just it's great to be here awesome well and let's do the actual question well what is that City Lana and tell us about what you've been working on yeah so at Edge City we convene people in what we call popup Villages or pop-up cities it's essentially 500 to a thousand people living together for a month and it's a place for experimentation with new ideas about Society Community Building Technology I think of it practically and the and and I think this is most relevant to folks here and as an actual practical place where you can experiment with the technologies that you've been building in an environment where people can can actually get to know it can actually use it IRL and we focus a lot at Edge City in particular on being multidisiplinary so although we come from the ethereum space we also uh put in a lot of effort to bring folks from AI from biotech from other Frontier Fields as well as not just Tech and science but you know philosophy governance um you know government officials and and things like that so that's the core idea of what we're doing with these pop-up cities and I very much see them as a almost like a Proto version or like a first initial version of some of these ideas that have started to gain a lot of traction recently around Network States Network societies um and and eventually I think a lot of the things that we build in these environments can also go on to impact current cities as well actually there's a few new terms that I hadn't heard before so I want to dig into that but uh maybe a meta question is what got you excited about this and and why did you choose to uh make this effectively a company that does this thing for a lot of places in different parts of the world yeah so personally I was lucky enough to attend uh an event called zalu which happened only a year and a half ago which is quite surreal zalu came out of um a small group of folks including vitalic and Janine my co-founder and my co-founder at Edge City and um the idea was that again a lot of folks have been talking about these ideas of network States and metallic was like why don't we just try it let's just actually try an experiment two months in Montenegro we had 200 people living there full-time we had a, visitors come throughout those two months and I I went I organized the AI track there I ended up getting more involved in the in the core organization as well and I just personally had a very meaningful experience it felt like an environment where multiple sides of my personality could kind of uh manifest themselves I there's obviously the intellectual side I was learning a lot about crypto about ethereum about AI um but it was also a very fun playful environment I was doing C plunges with David Hoffman I was learning about um longevity I was uh r randomly got a chance to DJ with Grimes and so that's that's not going to happen at every one of these but you know it it's it's a very kind of diverse environment that to me approximates what life can and maybe should feel like at least for a month or two per year so that's how I got into it um zalu we ended up decentralizing the concept um encouraging a lot of folks to try similar experiments and out of that process Edge city was born amazing and um Lana was just the latest iteration but you've done a few of these to get to here uh give us a overview of like what the past versions have been and are they thematic are they where are they how long have they been and kind of how has your thinking evolved around how to make a pop of City yeah so we are very much in the experimentation stage right now this time last year we did an event called zuc connect that was again primarily with the Zulu community that was in the middle of Istanbul so we went from a resort in Montenegro a Beachside Resort to just like middle of the city very different experiences that definitely influenced the way that we think about these things and then with Edge City we've done Edge City Denver which happened during eth Denver last uh this year it's crazy um and then we did edes meralda in California so that was in a town called Hillsburg an hour north of SF it was our the idea was like okay we've done Beachside Resort completely removed from everything we've done huge urban center let's try a small comfortable walkable town and that's the model that we're feeling really good around that event in Hillsburg was very special there like over a thousand people it was maybe less than actually 50% crypto so we had a lot of folks coming who were in AI in biotech a lot of folks coming up from the bay um we had the Burning Man organization there we had just a lot of incredible things and one thing that made that particular event special was that it was in partnership with a new town project called as meralda that's now um probably one of the more exciting New City projects in the US and the creator of that project said that the event that edge city did accelerated it by probably 3 to four years which was very gratifying to hear and gives us a sense that okay there's something really special here where we can bring a ton of energy and excitement and interest to an area and the reason that it was so effective was that it actually gave us a chance to almost like lar as what it will feel like to live in this new town which right now is just you know plain land and and we hosted it in the nearest uh viable town but it gave people a sense of okay this is what life will feel like in Esmeralda and we had you know things happening we had decentralized identity systems and you know crypto payments and all this stuff so um yeah that's been the that's been the story thus far Edge City Lana just happened in changmai again incredible it just finished uh a few days ago and in the interim we also uh incubated an idea called cimento which is now taken on a life of its own it's a big crypto movement happening in Argentina currently that came out of an idea out of um Edge City Denver um from from the SAA in Edge City Denver and and then folks like Juan n and others kind of ran with it and they did their first pop-up City in August and they're now doing their second in December so that's been the the short timeline wow um so you're always effectively on the road trying to pop up a new city somewhere I'm actually in New York for like nine months of the year the most counterintuitive thing I expected yeah exactly amazing uh maybe just as a quick survey who has attended one of these uh events whether it's ET or Zulu in any other part of the world okay this is actually great I wanted to see less hands so here's my personal question how do the logistics of something like this work when I hear this thing I imagine you got a whole empty kind of ground being turned into a pop-up City and that's where my imagination stops what happens after do we have new laws do we have new money do we elect somebody as a leader every week do we have internet like tell us about what actually happens when you get there yeah totally so we use a lot of existing infrastructure right I think in some ways the term pop-up city is maybe a little bit uh not helpful but it's essentially we go to a generally a new place and then we find venues that are suitable for our needs and we try to kind of create a village like feeling so there's maybe 10 to 12 different venues within a 5 10 minute walk there are hotels airbnbs where people stay there's a place for people to have shared meals there's a co-working space that's generally The Hub of of the experience and then every location has its own flow so people generally you know they get up they go have healthy breakfast they go to a workout there's lectures there's time for deep work um and then in the evenings you can go have dinner and um and then social time so it's very much it's very similar to think what you would college campus for adults yeah college campus adjacent 100% it's it's very similar to what I think you would imagine if you just you know if you're like oh let's go live in a nice town for a month but the cool thing about it is that we fill these villages with uh Curious kind High agency people generally people building something really interesting in the world and so your and because everyone is removed from their usual context everyone's in a state of Mind of being interested to innovate and experiment and talk about new ideas and learn from each other so yeah that's that's to give you a sense of the actual experience it's amazing and you also kind of talked about there there a lot of workshops and educational pieces um how are those structured or going of how do you decide what to focus on yes so we have two main buckets there so for the programming the general overarching thesis is that we do not want to be centrally uh planning any like most of that meaning it's essentially a long series of unconferences based on topics that uh we find interesting and that folks uh essentially volunteer to lead so just to give some examples at Edge City Lana we had um and and to be clear like we do stack the deck ahead of time we do work with experts to say hey do you want to lead a track in XYZ but I'd say still 80% of the content is actually just co-created by the community so to give some examples at Edge City Lana we had uh Justin Drake from ethereum run a sequencing week we had Tim beo and vanesh raal run a series on protocols as a concept as a new field of study um but we also had you know people showing up and saying hey I'm actually a teacher and I've been working at you know this um interesting kind of new education system School in Switzerland land I'd be very happy to run a track on that or at least do some workshops so about 80% of the content that's actually on the calendar on the shared calendar is co-created by the community members themselves we have nothing to do with it another 15 to 20% is is um things that we kind of help to pre-plan but again there we really leave it up to the experts to to create those and maybe to understand what happens after the city ends what kind of are the expectations for the attendees and kind of do you see them come back what do you kind of expect for them what's kind of a good way of thinking about the impact yeah so a few things one uh people definitely have been coming back which is very cool to to see uh we've been getting a lot of positive feedback it feels like we've hit pmf with this particular type of gathering um so that's great in between there are meetups around the world there are you know there's a bit of a digital Community but we're very focused on the IRL component so we haven't pushed too hard into that that's definitely an area where we um we need to kind of cultivate that more but yeah for for now it's essentially you we're we're very early in these stages so we're in the kind of movement building phase we're still figuring out what's happening here so there's no expectation that they must do something after no no no there's there's no expectation um um yeah I guess just I guess prep for the next one yeah that's that's absolutely Fair um we kind of see that with people coming back to hackathons uh just they're just two days instead of two months um I do want to tie this back into the crypto side of things uh one interesting pattern obviously here is that you have a very interesting collection of attendees uh there're people who are interested in very specific topics all of them are founders Builders uh not the general distribution you expect uh when you're living in a city or or anywhere else um how's that influence kind of your decision- making or kind of what you think uh they get to do uh and maybe kind of relatedly like how do you think that actually has helped anywhere from make our ecosystem better or just overall actually make ethereum more interesting to people yeah totally so let me touch on the Builder side first we've had a number of amazing teams come through the doors um projects like Dao Zupas which is now being used all over Devcon a team called cursive that's been with us from the beginning and they have these amazing NFC chips and there's programmable cryptography on them to allow people to connect uh we had the ZK email team with us this time so we we genuinely want to be a place for actual experimentation and the cool thing is that if you're a builder you have you know 300 to a th000 people they're ready and excited and willing to use your product and that's just a really cool thing to be able to get that kind of live feedback and it's especially cool if Builders come to multiple of The Villages because they can use the interim time to say Okay that was amazing what how can we adjust maybe how can we slightly pivot and then you know 3 months later they have another chance to get in the weeds with uh with potential users and customers um um we so this time around at Lana we did something new that we haven't tried before but we we liked it a lot we called we call it residencies it's essentially what it sounds like but we had you know of the 300 people that lived there full-time there's about a thousand people in total through the month but 300 Liv there full-time of those about 75 were part of a residency so to give an example there was a residency called the desertification technology residency which was run by Ala from the ethereum foundation and the idea is it's like incredible programmable cryptography Engineers Building Technology that's actually good for humans rather than extractive from our time attention and and just human values um and so they had you know they were able to focus and actually build the things they were building so that's teams like cursive ZK PTP ZK email but then every Thursday they had a demo night where they would be able to demo to all of the people at the city or of course they can integrate into the city as much as they want you know if vitalic is doing a talk they can obviously go to that attend use that to get inspired and this this format worked really really well and so I could imagine for example like a eth global residency for a month you know where it's like hey to all of the I don't know winners or Runners up or whatever of Prior hackathons if you want to go somewhere and live for a month and actually have the chance to really go deep on the project you've been building this could be a cool OB for that so that kind of thing I think offering Builders new opportunities to go deeper is is really interesting and to touch on ethereum so we we have come out of the ethereum ecosystem we're incredibly values aligned um we are always thinking about how do we give back and the two things that we've discussed with with folks um at ethereum is one just being a bridge to other Frontier Industries which is something that I think the ecosystem is very interested in so to use the the tools that we're we're building here and see how that's applicable in AI in biotech in in Frontier Fields like that and then two to just continue to be a place where Builders can come and experiment and actually try their products IRL and yeah and go from there awesome maybe kind of to close this off um my obvious question to you is well what's next Lana just ended how do you kind of think about that the next one and maybe other future things that you're thinking about experimenting with for next year yeah totally so we have a big year planned for next year we're probably going to do three big uh popup Villages the one that I can 100% announce is that we'll be back in California in June we'll do Edge Esmeralda 2025 again working with this new city project there's a lot of exciting technology to build for this project so you know highly recommend folks to to uh check that out there'll be two others that we'll announce before the end of the year and then we're also thinking about doing um what we call like scouting trips but it's essentially slightly smaller group maybe you know 100 people still pretty sizable and going to a a new place in the world and treating it as a way to um start to establish relationships with folks on the ground so I was just in Bhutan a few weeks ago um that's looking like a pretty likely one that we'll do next year and there's a lot of exciting things happening there so um yeah that's the that's the plan for next year and in terms of the bigger Vision I I genuinely think that what what what we're doing is we're creating a new type of environment like new surface area for experimentation with um societal ideas and and technology that relates to those and I think there are there will be things that will be developed in these environments could be Edge City it could be another pop-up City but that could only be developed there right that couldn't come out of government couldn't come out of private Market or think tanks it's it will be formed at an environment like that and I'm very excited to to see what happens there this is awesome I mean I can't wait to come to the next one so thank you so much for this amazing conversation and please give him a big round of applause thank you [Music]