ETHKL24 | Panel | How Might Pop-up Cities Regenerate Culture, Systems & Communities?

um can I have Quinn uh stay on stage because you're representing webt tree Villages now link one for Seas Community Janine Ledger from Edge City arifa sh shariffudin from MD and the moderator might be someone quite familiar to many of you this is one of our organizers who put in a lot of hard work behind everything that you see for the last three days ladies and gentlemen give it up for Vienna they're here to talk about how might popup cities regenerate culture systems and communities all right testing great welcome everyone welcome to e k I just wanted to share very quickly what popup cities is about uh in case for those of you guys are who are not familiar with it so popup cities is like a group of people who decide to come together for a certain period of time like for example in the US there's burning men for 60,000 people to come together for one week to build a city from nothing from the desert um into to something that could be beautiful together and could work together as a city for a week so um this has been going on like as an experiment in the ethereum um and web pre space as well like one of it is someone that Janine uh have done in like the context of zalu that uh vitalik is part of um and that they experimented like doing one month of like co-working and co-living together so with that as a contact uh I have a couple of questions for for our panelists here so I will first start with actually link um you you can also introduce briefly yourself the question I actually have for link uh given that link is a part of a web three sorry a part of uh forc in changai is like what is the role of web Tree in this whole thing yeah how about city um yeah so like um normally like a people Gathering Together uh we call that the village but the difference is the popup city is coming my first experience started from Zulu actually so like at that time I just started traveling want to go overse to see the world but start from Zulu and so like a how web really change the people's mindset is uh we have tools we have this kind of a technology to governance ourself uh before that we I I don't even like thinking about that like we we're living together we can sharing some knowledge to do something but I never saw like we can be a union a real Union in the uh in somewh and um but I mean uh web Street technology uh like the tools or the product not always uh can be easily to integrate in the in the community or like the popup City uh because uh in my opinion I think the web technology coming with some value like the also the popup City itself also have its own value uh but if it is match and get gain the the the consensus from all the renes I mean it's going more easy to in in integrate it uh like um I know um a product is um social layer it been using by a lot of popup cities and made by one of my friend JN and because it's like it it's a very infrastructure level uh usage and every popup City need to plan for their event and for people to easily to upload their own event but for some of the other product it's not that easy uh because uh but not that easy for integrator because um they have their own like a value it maybe it looks like a they're aligned they value aligned but we need to uh to experience it right so but if maybe in a small group of people they can starting to test and then uh to scout it uh and of course as a web3 vage or as a like popup City uh with a web3 technology we need to care about the scalability because it's not easy to as a continuable uh Community not easy to change a tool or the uh TX stack uh also about the Privacy uh take care of the privacy and the safety of the information um uh and uh the most important thing I think is actually sustainability uh of the product web product because we know like if we want everyone to using a product in especially in the popup City I think most of them are like a public goods right it's public goods so like how the to funding for these public goods and let them to get the continued B to get the funding results to building for that if we don't have confidence for this product can get the results we cannot chosen for them right so I mean it's related to another problem is um founding the comments yeah so that's my answer great a lot of challenges and um we'll try to explore this we won't solve all the challenges today but uh next up I do want to invite Janine uh if you want to share a little bit about what you do and also how you see pop-up City regenerating like cultures systems uh and commun unities thank you um so just a bit about me I helped build Zulu which was the first pop-up City we did last year in Montenegro it was two months and the whole concept was really just experimenting what does it take to bring 200 people together for the full two months and the idea was two months is a good amount of time to convince people to you know move and uproot their lives for but it's not so long that you're asking them to change their lives entirely it's a long enough time where it feels like it becomes real life without the full-time commitment and with that was a ton of experimentation however it wasn't super integrated with the local community in Montenegro because we used a sort of Resort Town um that didn't have that many locals living in it during the time and since then Edge city was has emerged that's a project that I've been working on uh we've built a number of pop-up cities around the world um in eastanbul in Denver and in California now we're going to be doing one in changai and one of the Nuance differences that we've been focused on is how do we build where it's more about integration than it is about exiting a lot of the network State movement has been focused on how do we exit from the world that exists today and build something completely a new but with Theory and philosophy that so many of us hold dare and appreciate is's this concept of what does collaboration look like what does decentralization look like and with that what does integration look like and a big piece of that is making sure we're integrating with local communities so when it comes to your question about you know how are we trying to regenerate local communities as well we've helped support the projects that we've worked on as well as incubate additional ones like what we did in Argentina we went down in April as a group between Edge City and protocol labs to see is there a an a concept locally that we can get off the ground with starting a movement to regenerate Argentina around crypto adoption and becoming one of the first crypto Nations and in that we integrated both with local efforts that um were working on just like crypto projects on the ground plus additional groups like the mo who had a builder residency earlier that year and we did a big pop-up city um in August and that was fully run by the local community that was 80% Argentinian um link was there as well we were there and there was about 50 other Community Partners that got involved to support that local community there is now an entire effort on the ground that is continuing to build and drive adoption of crypto Technologies and our hope in changai would be something similar um changai as a city is known as a nomadic region and has a lot of digital Nomads and if we can both bring pop-up cities and the idea of not just having a digital Nomad Hub but also this like catalytic Innovation Hub where there's a number of different popups that are each giving back in their own unique way to the local community the hope is that we're leaving changai better than when we arrived thank you and um and I know that Janine has been having discussion with uh arifa who is one of our Malaysia digital economy Corporation government agency that focuses on actually supporting digital Nomad visas and she's actually looking into popup cities now going to participate in one in Japan herself for a month uh this month that's why she can't be in changai with the rest three of you but uh arifa like so what you can introduce yourself and also what you're trying to do in the government and how do you see the government helping uh this movement hi um good afternoon everyone my name is arifa I'm from Malaysia digital economy Corporation we are a public company that reports to the ministry of digital um and we Champion the digital economy agenda it's development in Malaysia um at MD I actually look after the digital Nomad program where we actually design a digital net visa for Tech professionals uh to land themselves here in Malaysia um there are also um some other areas that I'm working on specifically in digital tourism so that's my other portfolio um but how the role of uh government um in facilitating um um the growth or maybe having popup City to consider Malaysia as a location uh it will be uh things like uh for example um facilitation um services that we can do do um at mte we not only um manage the processing of the digital NAD Visa we also have a tech entrepreneur program uh and its relevant visas for that one as well as um the moment that you um like working in Malaysia or working from Malaysia you feel that you want to build a company in Malaysia there's also that pathway that you can take where uh once you build a Malaysia a Malaysian company in here you have the Malaysia digital status you will be given a quota for employment pass for foreign knowledge workers and you can continue to live in Malaysia for a longer period of time so that's the clear pathway that we have provide of course uh there's also access to uh the local Tech ecosystem uh that MD has been working on because we've been around a long time since 1996 so we've been around a long time so yeah and uh um um I think another point that we uh that I want to raise is actually um for technology right um new products and especially new technology for it to scale there needs to be regulation right there needs to be some form of regulatory intervention so this is a key role that the government um will take and should take uh and um this is where we can work collaboratively more uh in the future future yeah this is right on on my next question that I'm curious about which is about collaboration like how can this whole thing come together and with that I actually do want to ask Quinn because I know that Quinn personally has been thinking a lot about okay there has there's going to be about 10 different at least uh popup uh cities or residencies that we're aware of coming up in changai in October so how would it all come together any thoughts yeah so I think that this is a actually the very good question even for all the you know organizer of different popup Village in jamai we also ask our s because like we all want to create the impact in chai for the local community also we want to see that after all of this like you know we need to live you know and make the jimai even better and how we can bring all of that collaboration together and we don't see that it's like you know as a competition not at all but we all see that we have the same vision we also trying to make the movement in in in the country so um actually we also thought about different like activities like how we can bring you know different activities together amongst like you know 12 different village uh so for example uh me Janine uh Ling and also other organizer we also can say that like during the weekday different you know popup Village also have different activities and create like different impacts and they also have different goals but maybe we can save you know someday during weekends and then we can do some activity like together uh in terms of even that like doing like for example hackathon demo day or even like do something commune or even like do some roundout table discussion so we can open for everyone not is this like only the resident of for example Ed City or fory or whoever and then with that way you know we can open the platform for all the residency of different you know Village and also people can join and we also see that you know this is one of the way that we just like can do the experiment first for the first week and then we also even can do you know different The Continuous activity for example we even can do like the popup Festival uh the last week together and then also let like celebrate the month working in ch so that is one of the things that we start to do uh but I think that like you know uh deeper on that we also want to see like you know what is the problem or you know the thing that we want to change in the local community that we also can have ji or Thailand or Asia together also that is a deeper question that we also trying to see and maybe with all the expertise and also like different Builders uh different like leaders and also commune we all can sew it together and how we can do that maybe also Heath is one of the thing or also like you know um I don't know maybe you can add on other things yeah I'm happy to add on here um it it's really cool seeing so many different groups coming together and it's kind of this question of are we at the level of you know schools each doing their own thing and then doing sports games together um is it a group where it's more like a city where each of these are their own neighborhoods and we're overlapping in different ways and we'll see how things play out out ultimately seeing where we can collaborate and not just being in the same room um but actually doing projects together is a core piece of weaving the community together so some of those Initial Ideas um that are definitely on the table is the last week of our efforts in changai before Devcon there'll be a big hackathon between all the different groups so that the idea is like can people hack together based on learnings that they've each had in their separate Villages throughout the month and then a big festival at the end that we're all co-creating with different stages and different initiatives to celebrate different groups uniqueness and celebrate cultures that get built in each of these Villages over the course of the month versus just kind of try and you know make everyone the same the entire period right on the plurality theme as well and the theme for evk around building decentralized Harmony like how can we have our own in integrity to our own Identity or purpose but also still collaborate together so um I know that link mentioned just now about like hey like there there's a need for the infrastructure layer which a lot of people don't see the importance of but do you want to share about like how collaboration looks like to you who you're trying to serve in your users like and also how would that success look like for you um yeah uh sorry I I didn't introduce about for so uh yeah as um I'm I'm I'm as a Chinese come from melan China and we group of people go overseas to find our like a very first stage to like a building with a local and um to like to experiment our web and Technology how can like to involve with our community building process so we started to build the fores as just um the we made a defense of the startup Society in chimi and now we build um the very first started with a very beautiful place of forces Mountain View and uh we we chosen this this place because we think First Co living is important this is what we learned from Zulu we saw how magic happened when people living together for one month and second we mean we think common area is the most important we must need place for educate maybe for awareness for like a conversation for handout we need this space otherwise people cannot like a hang out together the magic scene cannot happen right so um and now we have one uh infrastructure space uh in chimi uh Mountain area and another in the downtown area uh because uh we want to service for all the popup cities the change makers all the in innovators uh who wanted to change the W also want to integrate their technology with a local to help the local build better things so we also open our like a space for all the public goods event and the like a event don't have like a specific their on groups of people to join but want to uh facing to all the CV uh peop we open our space to all of them uh so now this time we like do service with the funding the commons reny group uh of course this related to the topic I mentioned before uh and um now we know uh there is a heavy flood in in chimi there's a heavy run there and now it's um the level of the flood is a four five M yeah it's really bad and I I know a lot of people right join to uh gather together to to solve this disaster to help the people uh and also I hope this topic can interact with the fun and commment other is a invisible Garden they want to build a university with a ZK technology and uh uh solidity technology I hope local people can more involved with the invisible Garden to facing with a global people and do building in local yeah I think what I can mention is there's many layers to all of this right we have the people layer we have uh the systems layer but we also have system that are visible and invisible to us like for example we have climate system like climate change and flooding but we have government systems and then we have culturals uh so this all kind of is the experiment uh in pop-up City like how can it come together so very quick since we're only have five minutes left like a last words from all of you what does like your uh Utopia look like CU yesterday we had a workshop together as as well to discover this like yeah utopian state for me uh would be um abundance of resources in harmony um on my side it's human flourishing and getting to a space where we don't just care about epic technology that's being built and like the Techno optimistic future that we have but also making sure that humans are flourishing in that environment it just one keyword is a coordinate coordination yeah for me I think that you know as a as a being for you know any person who join that Utopia they need to be healthy in terms of you know physical and also like mindfulness um and they also you know participate and together collaborate to create the impact and also as the community I think that's also the you know Catalyst for everyone also to view you know like the trust and the trust net is the place that you know everyone also can share and also can feel the freedom to be themsel and also can you know devote um contribute to the community without any judgment L from anyone or from any community and I think that's the way way that we also all together can create the impact and also can make the world better and with that I think I will also like to thank all of you and also extend the invitation to all of you to join us in shaping this future together because there are a lot of real challenges as we know there's not only flooding but um how do we actually integrate the hum uh in the systems uh that we talk about as well but also create a thriving culture to support that given that you know from my own personal take that climate change is just going to worsen um so so this is the time if uh web tree is going to prove itself useful it is to step in and be part of the infrastructure to power how are we going to face and coordinate um against like natural disaster together or how do we create actual like cities that are sustainable that are supportive of all of us and all your Utopias so thank you [Music] [Applause]