Edge City Newsletter — Jan. 2025
Announcing Edge City gatherings in the first half of 2025 — Edge City Austin @ SXSW, Edge Expedition South Africa, and Edge Esmeralda
January 22, 2025
Hello friends! Timour from Edge City here. I hope you are having a wonderful day. ☀️
This newsletter is a special one. We’re excited to share the Edge City schedule for the first half of 2025:
1) Edge City Austin @ SXSW [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. Buy tickets directly here.
2) Edge City South Africa [April 3rd - 12th] — A 10-day expedition from Cape Town to the Western Cape, 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] — We’re going back to beautiful Healdsburg, California for our monthlong popup village, in partnership with the new town project Esmeralda. Apply directly here.
More details and other fun things below!
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.
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 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
- Share our announcement for Edge City Austin with friends!
- Twitter and Telegram: Follow us on Twitter and join our Telegram updates channel to stay in the loop :)
- Subscribe to our YouTube channel for the latest talks and content from Edge City events.
- Donate: Edge Institute Inc. is a registered 501c3 non-profit. Your contribution helps us continue our mission. Every donation makes a significant impact!
Introducing Edge City Austin @ SXSW
Edge City Austin is a six-day immersive showcase from March 2—7, the week before SXSW 2025. We're opening a space that will encourage social connections and default-healthy living, all while advancing a techno-optimistic future through engaging workshops, an interactive co-working space, and a week-long buildathon to collaborate on new projects. Core themes include health and biotech, AI, philosophy, cryptography, cities of tomorrow, art and culture.
What sets this event apart is its format. Participants live, co-work, share meals, and connect at Hotel Magdalena, fostering deeper relationships and bold new collaborative ideas.
Join us at Edge City Austin for a balanced and energizing prelude to SXSW.
Join our first Edge Expedition to South Africa!
Taking place from April 3rd - 12th, Edge City South Africa is a 10-day exploration of South Africa's tech and culture scene. We’re inviting 50 frontier founders, builders, creatives, and researchers for this one-of-a-kind trip.
What is an Edge Expedition?
Edge Expeditions are shorter, more intimate, and more focused trips than our popup villages. Our 10-day journey takes us to the Western Cape of South Africa.
Why are we going?
The goal of this expedition is to build lasting connections among participants and with South Africa’s tech innovators who are passionate about accelerating human flourishing and future partnerships with Edge City. We will dive deep into blockchain, AI, biotech, neurotech, governance models, art, culture, and other fields on the frontier.
Ready to explore South Africa’s tech and culture scene with us? ☀️
We are looking forward to having you join our first Edge Expedition!
Announcing Edge Esmeralda 2025
Edge Esmeralda is returning in 2025 from May 21 – June 24 in Healdsburg, CA, as a month-long popup village and prototype for a permanent new town nearby. This year includes thematic residencies, expanded family-friendly programming, and a focus on applied experiments to foster innovation across disciplines.
Building on last year's success, Edge Esmeralda 2025 will bring together a diverse, multigenerational community to explore and build frontier technologies, healthy living environments, novel education models, and new ways of living and working together.
Applications are now open!
Join us and become part of the movement to reshape how we live, work, and create a future focused on human flourishing!
Other news
Our key learnings from 2024
Last year, we brought over 9,000 people together across three popup villages (plus incubated Crecimiento) to explore new ways of living, working, and collaborating.
We recently distilled our key insights and actionable design principles into a thread—and shared even more details in an article on our blog.
Check out the full write-up here!
Reflections on Edge City Lanna
In the two months since Edge City Lanna ended, we’ve seen excellent content from attendees about their experiences:
- Rania Hashim joined Lanna via the Fellowship Program and shared her story in this blog post.
- Jack Mielke participated in three of our popup villages last year and wrote down his experience here.
- Rachel Akerley from the Cursive Team published her reflections on the experiment with Cursive Connections, an app designed to help people connect meaningfully without sacrificing privacy, in this article.
- In collaboration with Dan Finlay and the MetaMask R&D team, we introduced Propel at Edge City Lanna. This app makes it easier to propose and fund small scale co-creation events during our popup cities. You can find a video of this experiment on our YouTube channel.
We have also published an extensive recap and a collection of keynote talks from our time in Chiang Mai.
Edge City Podcast - Episode 3
What does it mean to lead a flourishing life, and how can we create a flourishing society?
In the third episode of our podcast, we invited Brink Lindsey on the show, author of The Permanent Problem. Brink loves thinking about human flourishing and how societal structures affect individual and collective wellbeing.
The hour-long conversation provides insights into the "triple crisis" and its impact on progress, the tension between material prosperity and true human flourishing, and how agency, respect, and innovation can guide us toward a better future. Listen here
What we are reading
Matt Prewitt & Jack Henderson - Edges 2.0
RadicalxChange published a reflection on the ∈dges project, a community currency piloted at Edge Esmeralda and refined at Edge City Lanna. This experiment explores how plural money can foster collaboration, trust, and value creation within communities.
Adam Mastroianni - Underrated ways to change the world
Adam’s article is a playful yet profound call to rethink how we contribute to collective progress. He emphasizes actionable steps like fostering collaborative "scenius" and embracing small, impactful roles in institutions. Adam underscores the power of building new social structures that consistently support communities and encourages cultural shifts through positive participation.
Maria Popova - 18 Life-Learnings from 18 Years of The Marginalian
Maria shares 18 life lessons that touch on love, resilience, forgiveness, and the importance of curiosity and creativity. Her article advocates for outgrowing oneself, finding beauty in vulnerability, and living with generosity and presence. These reflections are personal yet universally resonant, inviting readers to cultivate a meaningful life through small, intentional choices.
Quotes and Reflections
“Someone asked me why I decided to come to Edge and I realized I'd never even considered it. Part of the beauty of Edge is that it's not a product or a service. When you arrive at Edge, it kind of feels like you're finally home. And no one needs a reason to go home.” — Vaughn McKenzie-Landell, founder of Butter
“Minimum viable paradise is something like ‘you have a place to put your love, that feeds only wholesome things, and some of it comes back to you’ . Edge City is that for me.“ — Michael Edwards Johnson, founder of the Symmetry Institute
“Truly such an energizing night…awesome being around people with such varied interests…The best part is when everyone is a little out of their depth and mind melding. So refreshing after being heads down in my own world for way too long.” — Ian Singer, founder of a stealth startup
As always, thank you for reading. We hope to connect with you at one of our events and popup villages in 2025, see you soon! ☀️
Timour + the Edge City team