2024 Pop-up Cities Recap & an Invite to PopOut Club by Nico Shi

Enjoy a brief summary about my 'slowmading' experience with popup cities in 2024, and an introduction to PopOut Club

Nico Shi

February 10, 2025

This is a guest post, first published on Nico Shi's Substack and shared here with permission. The views are Telamon's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Edge City.  

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GM ☀️ from Shanghai!

I’ve been exploring communities that support individuals in living in alignment with their truths and growing in directions that are fulfilling, purposeful, and happy.

Not a surprise, many are exploring the same frontier: pop-up cities, events, networks — projects designing ‘micro-society incubators’ to curate a new way of living.

Here’s my journey of exploring pop-up cities and intentional communities in 2024 and some news for 2025. 🌞

Edge City, 2024

Edge City was the first official ‘pop-up city’ I stumbled upon. What are pop-up cities? It’s a fairly new phenomenon, and here’s how I would define it:

My first pop-up city experience was Edge Esmeralda.

Edge Esmeralda was a month-long “popup village” that brought together ~1,300 people who believe the future can be better and are actively working to make it happen. We gathered for a month of living, learning, and collaborating in Healdsburg, CA.

The official blog recap is the best way to learn about this event.

The community at Edge Esmeralda was beautiful, adventurous, open-minded, multi-disciplinary, and technologically progressive.

The event was personally fruitful. I met many friends who were aligned in values and lifestyle, expanded my professional network, discovered many exciting communities to visit, and learned a lot about the frontiers of science, technology, governance, art, and culture.

Cacao ceremony at Edge Esmeralda

Check out this gallery for excellent photos of Edge Esmeralda 2024!

The Edge City team did an excellent job of curating their events as ‘society incubators.’ They paid incredible attention to the multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary aspects of cities and curated the event to be not only fruitful for frontier researchers, academia, engineers, and founders, but also diverse, inclusive, family-oriented, and health-focused.

There were physical activities like workouts, yoga, and dance, mindful activities like breathwork, philosophical discussions, social games, and many intellectual workshops on the future of governance, innovative hardware technology, brain-computer interfaces (BCI), AI, nature sovereignty, decentralized governance, and more…

The Pop-up City Landscape

Pop-up cities really began to pick up momentum after Zuzalu in 2023 — a one-time, 2-month pop-up city in Montenegro with about 200 permanent residents and a total of 700 participants. Vitalik, the core organizer of Zuzalu, described the event this way:

My own prediction is that Zuzalu will in part become a structure that has aspects of universities, monasteries, and digital nomad hubs. But it will also introduce entirely new activities like “incubating” novel technologies, including social technologies, by testing them out within a dedicated community.

— ‘Why I Built Zuzalu‘

Check out this blog post from Vitalik to learn more about this event.

Leaving Montenegro with a Full Heart: My Top Lessons from Zuzalu
Image from Gary Sheng’s blogpost on Zuzalu, read HERE

The incubator aspect is especially fascinating. On the ground, many pop-up cities need to coordinate among their guests to optimize the time we spend together. It’s almost like running a Montessori lifestyle campus with people from diverse cultural and technical backgrounds, this new type of social gathering needs new social technology.

Many teams use pop-up cities as fertile testing grounds to experiment with ideas:

  • ZuPass — zero-knowledge ticketing app & profiling system
  • Social Layer — coordination calendar & map, pop-up city aggregator.
  • Cursive — applied cryptography for IRL connections

Attendees were inspired by Zuzalu and decided to ‘fork’ the concept, hosting their own pop-up cities of various scales and durations, typically with 50+ people for 1-2 months.

Here is my list of other notable pop-up cities of 2024:

This is just the beginning of this movement.

If you’re hosting a pop-up city or want to collaborate on one, please leave a comment here or shoot me a message on X @syntonikka.

Introducing PopOut Club

PopOut club started with a conversation between me and a good friend Alaska, founder of MDRN.

We met at Edge Esmeralda and bonded over our shared passion for the pop-up city movement, and the idea of bringing music, art, culture, and long-term local intentional communities into the pop-up city landscape.

We came up with PopOut Club aiming to address these questions:

PopOut Club is designed to host IRL events that are open to anyone — a place for people to meet with minimal gatekeeping. It’s a bridge between different pop-up city residents and a welcoming gate to non-pop-up city residents.

The club is also designed to develop long-lasting relationships beyond short-term ephemeral events, with online community calls, group chats, blogs, and workshops, most of which will be posted here as well.

Finally, PopOut Club aims to emphasize art & culture first, as a complementary offering to the often tech-driven pop-up city projects. We want to invite artists, world-builders, narrators, and underground creators into the space with our future gatherings.

PopOut Club’s Journey

This project started with just one website and a group chat in July earlier this year.

During the pop-up season in Chiangmai last month, the group chat grew to over 100 people. We intentionally invited people who passed the IRL ‘vibe check.’ We made sure only high-quality content and fun events were shared in the group chat — no shills, no bullshit.

In the end, the group chat became an amazing place to discover fun activities with fun people, ask for support, and offer offerings.

As a ‘club,’ we also successfully helped curating 3 events at the intersection of all the pop-up cities (there were about 15 of them!).

Every pop-up city event I visit, I meet people eager to find out more about this ecosystem and stay connected after the event. This gave us a lot of hope to continue operating PopOut Club. So far, my best offering for you to get involved is:

  1. Subscribe to this blog ;)
  2. Subscribe the PopOut Club calendar

👁️ Agartha x PopOut Club 👁️

If you have followed this blog for a while, you would be familiar with the Agartha project — a global map of ‘Solarpunk’ intentional communities, at the intersection of art, technology, and regeneration.

On a personal note, the name ‘Agartha’ came to me in a dream (literally heard the word in a dream as I was waking up). This idea originated with a deeper mythological lore rooted in a conspiracy theory about aliens. Over the years, it has evolved into an artistic & conceptual world-building project beyond a platform.

I dream that Agartha evolves into a deeper exploration of myths outside of the default life as we know it.

A snapshot of all the ‘art’ I made for the Agartha world

PopOut Club, on the other hand, is a lifestyle community that anyone can be a part of to explore new forms of pop-up cities, alternative communities, and uplift each other along this journey. #protopia

Here are the 3 rules of PopOut Club:

If you’d like to join the club, the various doors can be found on the official website.

Next steps for us: Community calls, IRL activations, and more blog posts coming your way about pop-up cities and communities of 2025.

A List of Additional Resources

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‍This is a guest post, first published on Nico Shi's Substack and shared here with permission. The views are Telamon's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Edge City.