Edge City Monthly #1 — March 2024

This is the first in a series of monthly updates from Edge City. You are receiving it because you have opted in or you were a 7-day pass holder at Edge City. If you’d rather not be on the monthly update list, feel free to unsubscribe below.

Hello friends!

Timour from Edge City here 🌞 I hope you are having a wonderful day.

What a month it has been! You know what they always say—when you’re building a network city, there’s never a dull moment. Right? Sometimes, I wonder what it would be like if we just threw a party or a conference instead, but where’s the fun in that?

On with the update!

Remind me, what is Edge City?

Edge City creates “popup villages” around the world that convene people working at the frontiers of tech, science, and society.

We aspire to be a ‘society incubator’— a lab of experimentation for new ideas, tech, culture, social tech, and organizations, all dedicated to accelerating human flourishing.  

Asks

• Check out Edge Esmeralda — our popup village in Healdsburg, California happening June 2-29.
• If you know great folks — who would be a good fit for this event or future ones, share Edge City with them. You can send the Edge Esmeralda launch tweet, event website, or our main site (which has a contributor interest form).
  • In particular, we’re looking for out-there founders, researchers, scientists, biohackers, community builders, or generally just interesting people around the world who want to build towards a better future.
• Southeast Asia village — we’re doing a 7-week village in Southeast Asia this fall. If you are well connected with venues or communities in Thailand (Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai), the Philippines (Palawan), or Malaysia (Penang), let us know!
• Grants — If you work for or know of a large grant-giving organization, we are looking to be connected with 1-2 more potential grant partners on our plans for this year. The best fit would be an org that would be excited about the ambitious nature of our vision.

The Latest

Edge Esmeralda

We announced our next popup village, Edge Esmeralda, which will run from June 2-29 in Northern California. Link to the announcement here!

We are building this in partnership with Devon Zuegel, and we aim for it to be the healthiest and most productive time of our attendees' year.

If you know folks (or yourself) who are leaders or ambitious builders in their fields and are brilliant, curious, and kind, we’d love to have them apply. Please share with those who you think might be curious to sign up!

Edge City Denver

We had an incredible launch event two weeks ago, bringing together 2,000 people and a dozen partners for a week of programming. This is just a microcosm of the types of popup villages that we will be building in the future.

You can see a recap gif here, and hear about Arjun’s experience below.

Zuzalu & Gitcoin QF Round

We are so grateful to receive support through the Zuzalu Gitcoin QF round. If you supported us, thank you so much! We are incredibly grateful. And, of course, huge props to Vitalik for initiating the round.

New Site

We have a new site and we’re very proud. Check it out here!

The full loop takes 1:10mins to go around, in case you’re curious.

What we’re reading

Great longer reads we’re enjoying.

Toby Shorin — Field Report: Vitalia, The City of Life

We loved Toby Shorin's write-up of Vitalia, a Zuzalu-adjacent popup city focused on longevity. It is beautifully written and goes into detail about why new cities are an interesting novel paradigm.

Devon Zuegel — Chautauqua: an idea embedded in a place

For those who are curious about our partnership with Devon Zuegel on Edge Esmeralda and her inspiration for the new permanent town she wants to build, this will be a great quick read. It showcases the origins of the Chautauqua movement, an experiment in out-of-school learning for communities that started in 1874. Fascinating stuff!

Steven Johnson — Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

Our pick for the ZuLit book club last month, this book goes into great detail about the source of innovation and great novel ideas. Definitely very inspiring as we create this new community. It is organized in chapters that work well as standalone reads.

Concept Art

How it feels to live in an Edge City village ❤️

Thanks for reading this far! See you soon!

Timour + the Edge City team.

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