Edge City Newsletter — Feb. 2025

Announcing our new roadmap & vision. Updates on Edge City Austin, Edge Esmeralda, and more.

Edge City Team

February 27, 2025

Hello friends! Timour here. I hope you are having a flourishing week. 🌱☀️  

This month’s mail includes: details about Edge City Austin, a friendly robot, Janine on two pods, discounts for Funding the Commons SF, and an opportunity to go volunteer in Bhutan (fully comped).

Onwards!

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Yesterday, we shared the Edge City Roadmap, a vision outlining how we’ll go from popup village to to a global Network City.

We’re also thrilled to start Edge City Austin on Sunday, our first gathering of the year!

A quick reminder of our upcoming plans:

1) Edge City Austin [March 2nd—7th] — A week-long gathering with co-created workshops focused on frontier tech and human flourishing, setting the stage for Edge City’s 2025 program and the SXSW festival. It’s not too late to send this to your friends!

2) Edge City South Africa [April 3rd-12th] —  A 10-day expedition from Cape Town to Stellenbosch, exploring Africa’s growing tech scene and spending time in beautiful nature. Apply directly here (limited spots).

3) Edge Esmeralda 2025 [May 24th — June 21st] — Our first month-long popup village of this year in beautiful Healdsburg, California, in partnership with the new permanent town, Esmeralda. Apply directly here (prices go up at the end of the month!).

ATTEND EDGE CITY AUSTIN →

Remind me, what is Edge City?

Edge City creates popup villages around the world that convene people working at the frontiers of tech, art, science, and society. We create these experiences based on four design principles, visualized below.

Our mission is to act as a ‘society incubator’—a living lab to experiment with new ideas, technologies, cultures, and organizations. All with the goal of advancing human flourishing.

We’re building towards a global network of temporary and permanent innovation hubs. You can read our roadmap on how we plan to scale into a Network City.

Collaboration is essential to achieve our vision. That’s why we aim to partner with folks who are reimagining permanent living environments, whether a new city or a reinvigorated town. Please reach out if you are building something relevant!

Calls to action

Edge City Austin

Edge City Austin is a six-day immersive gathering from March 2—7, the week after ETH Denver and before SXSW 2025.

A mini popup village

We're creating an environment that encourages collaboration, social connections and default-healthy living. The goal of this mini popup village is to advance a techno-optimistic future through hands-on workshops, engaging talks, a cozy co-working space, and a hackathon to explore new bold ideas.

Programming highlights:

  • Vitalik Buterin will talk about the d/acc movement he started a year ago
  • Balaji Srinivasan and Jon Hillis will lead sessions on Network States and Network Societies
  • Luis Sentis, Co-founder of Apptronik, will lead a robotics workshop
  • Josie Zyner will facilitate a practical workshop on gene editing plants
  • Justin Mares, Andy and Alexa Bromberg, and Aastha Jain Simes will host sessions across health tech, policy, and the built environment
  • Brendan McCord, Sina Habibian, and Yondon Fu will lead workshops in the Embodied AI track
  • Julia Winston, Gray Garmon and Andrew Horn will showcase the impact of human-centric design and human connection
  • Patri Friedman, Jeffrey Mason, and Kevin Fishner will share insights into charter cities, special economic zones, and future towns in the Environment of Tomorrow track

Check out our thread on Twitter for more information on all these speakers and read our blog post for more details about the venues.

You’ll see me hanging out with Apollo (I’m particularly excited for the robotics workshop with Luis from Apptronik)

‍Families and Kids: We shared a blog post with details on our EC Austin kids program.

Calendar: The program includes morning workouts, time for coworking, moments for connection, as well as daily workshops and talks. We’ve visualized the high-level schedule in the graphic below.

You can find a detailed version of our programming calendar here.

GET TICKETS →

Edge Esmeralda 2025

TLDR: prices for Edge Esmeralda go up at the end of every month, so reserve your spot now!

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Building on last year’s success, Edge Esmeralda 2025 is scheduled from May 21 – June 24 in Healdsburg, CA.

Edge Esmeralda is a month-long popup village that aims to prototype new ways of community-driven living and working. Our experiments and learning experiences contribute to making the new permanent town of Esmeralda a hub for human flourishing. ☀️

This gathering brings together a diverse, multigenerational community to explore and build frontier technologies, healthy living environments, novel education models, and collaborative social structures.

Join us and become part of the movement that’s building a future focused on human flourishing!

APPLY HERE →

Edge City South Africa

Taking place from April 3—12, Edge City South Africa is a 10-day exploration of South Africa's tech and culture scene. We’re inviting a small group frontier builders, creatives, researchers, and thinkers on this Edge Expedition.

The goal of these shorter and more intimate trips is to build lasting connections among participants and with South Africa’s techno-optimistic innovators. We believe that bringing together a group of high-agency people who are passionate about accelerating human flourishing in this trip will result in meaningful collaborations and partnerships.

Join our first Edge Expedition and dive into South Africa’s frontier ecosystem at the intersection of AI, web3, health tech, neurotech, biotech, art, culture, and social technologies.

APPLY NOW →

Other news

Insights from Janine

Janine Ledger recently appeared on two podcasts shows, sharing her experience on building Edge City as a society incubator, creating environments that encourage health and wellbeing, her community-first approach, and our focus on multigenerational experiences.

Listen to the podcast episodes:

Funding the Commons

We're thrilled to partner with Funding the Commons for their upcoming conference in San Francisco on March 15-16. This gathering explores digital public goods and their intersections with web3, AI, decentralized infrastructure, and open science.

I’ll be speaking alongside other builders, researchers, and policymakers working on public goods and human flourishing.

The first 10 people to grab a ticket with code EDGECITY50 get 50% off. See you there!

Bhutan’s Desuung Skilling Program

Do you want to go to Bhutan and share your expertise in return for covered flights, accommodation, and a stipend?

The Desuung Skilling Program is looking for trainers in a number of fields, including tech, design, data, finance, health and wellbeing, to equip Bhutanese youth with future-ready skills.

Check out this flyer for more information and apply directly here.

Read, Listen & Watch

Read: Toby Shorin - Prototyping Social Forms of Care

Researcher, writer, and technologist Toby Shorin explores how organizations are building four new types of communal spaces (centers, campuses, parlors, and practices) to redefine healing and social connection.

Read: Bryce Butler - What is Human Flourishing

What does it mean to truly flourish? Bryce Butler’s article for Access Ventures breaks down human flourishing as more than just success, emphasizing purpose, agency, community, and holistic wellbeing. A recommended read for anyone designing communities and places that make it easier for people to thrive.

Quotes and Reflections

“My friends at Edge City are building something interesting—a society incubator. Instead of just theorizing about new governance, new institutions, and new ways to live, they're running real-world experiments across the globe.” - Jonathan Wu

“Who would like to build a teeny Solar Data Center at Edge Esmeralda in June? Completely off-grid w solar, batteries, cooling, starlink all integrated. Will put together a squad if there’s interest.” - Ben James

As always, thank you for reading. Looking forward to seeing you at Edge City Austin next week! ☀️

Timour + the Edge City team