Part 1: Building a Society Incubator — What We Learned in 2024

What we learned from a year of building experimental villages for human flourishing.

Edge City Team

January 5, 2025

What if the future of society could be prototyped today? How can we create environments to run applied experiments that will increase human flourishing? 

These are the questions we aim to answer at Edge City. In 2024, we hosted three popup villages—bringing together thousands of people to test bold ideas in real-world settings. Each village was a unique experiment, offering new insights into how communities can spark innovation, collaboration, and wellbeing.

This piece reflects on what we've learned from these experiments and shares an updated vision for what’s ahead. We’ll start by exploring our updated take on ‘What is Edge City?’ and then dive into the key stats and insights from our first full year.

We're just getting started, and we're so excited that you're here building with us. ☀️

What is Edge City 

Edge City is a ‘society incubator’ dedicated to advancing human flourishing. We create environments perfect for practical experimentation with new ideas, technology, culture, and organizations committed to moving humanity toward a brighter future.

We've developed a new format of gathering that is best suited for experimentation to further human flourishing. We call them “popup villages.” These villages last 1–2 months and bring together 1,000 people to live and collaborate, with roughly 200-300 of those being full-time residents. The temporary nature of these events creates freedom to experiment outside of the box, mixed with a shared sense of urgency and ambition to build and ship before the end of the month, similar to a college semester.  

Our villages bring together people who are curious, kind, and high-agency, all building towards a brighter future. At Edge City, you might find a renowned AI researcher and a 19-year-old developer debating ideas over breakfast or a biotech founder and philosopher discovering shared insights during a hike. One morning you could be learning about gene editing techniques, then spend the afternoon exploring how technology might reshape cities, before ending your day testing VR prototypes with fellow builders. These unexpected connections and varied experiences create an environment where innovation thrives.

We create environments where you can do your best work while feeling your best — from daily workouts and healthy meals to good sleep and mindful habits. At Edge City, you'll live within walking distance of collaborators across many fields, from AI and biotech to philosophy and urban design. These intersections spark unexpected innovations, while the shared meals and experiences build real friendships. The closeness lets you get rapid feedback on ideas while still having focused time to push your projects forward. The result is an intense but energizing month where you can grow your work while living in a genuinely healthy way. It's innovation at its most creative, health at its most natural, and community at its most fun.

In 2024, we’ve done three major villages—Edge Esmeralda, Edge City Lanna, Edge City Denver—and we’ve incubated a fourth in Argentina, Crecimiento. We want to share what we’ve learned and how that has impacted our thinking going into next year and beyond.

"Edge City Lanna did an excellent job integrating diverse participants from all kinds of backgrounds: technical and non-technical, crypto, biotech and culture, young and old. I learned a lot from my time there" — Vitalik Buterin

What we’ve seen in year one 

In our first year, Edge City popped up across three continents, hosting over 9,000 attendees and creating environments where innovation and connection flourished. Below is a snapshot of what we’ve accomplished:

While these numbers highlight the scale of our work, the real impact lies in the lessons we’ve learned. Each Edge City event has revealed key insights into creating environments that foster human flourishing.

Key Insights

Edge Cities are great places to experiment and build transformative ideas that will impact society

Some problems can’t be solved in isolation or rigid environments like traditional accelerators or think tanks. They need a village—a space to test, iterate, and refine ideas in real-time with others equally invested in building the future.

Examples:

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Edge City Lanna was a fantastic place to build & collaborate. Excited about where it can go from here.” — Dan Finlay, Metamask
Visualization of private set cryptography in action, from the Cursive team post

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We are a natural collaboration fit for permanent physical infrastructure projects, including new cities

We’ve seen that we are able to bring a lot of energy and excitement to a particular physical location, which works well with people who are working on large-scale projects, like new cities or significant real estate developments. We see Edge City as the place where the “software” gets developed to be used by the “hardware” of new or reimagined cities. We recognize that software is worth building in parallel to the hardware because it’s just as important, and cities depend on having a positive culture. We’ve found these synergies so successful that we’re hesitant to build in any region where we won’t be able to support long-term permanence. 

Example: We loved partnering with Devon Zuegel, the creator of the new town project Esmeralda, on our popup village Edge Esmeralda this year. Devon said that this one-month event was able to accelerate her project by several years because it brought so much attention to the long-term vision of Esmeralda, and it gave people a chance to see what living in this new town would feel like. We’re excited to continue to partner with Devon on Edge Esmeralda 2025 and beyond. 

We’re open to speaking with anyone interested in collaborating on a similar level of project; feel free to share your interest here. 

Making it multi-generational completely changes the dynamic 

We spend a lot of time thinking about how to make this an environment that is friendly for kids, families, and elders. There are two main reasons for this:

1/ Having families improves the vibe significantly. Even people without children are happier and more open when they interact with a kid. If we’re talking about actually changing the world and prototyping new models of society, it’s important to have the people around who will inherit what we build. 

2/ Having kids shouldn’t mean leaving behind the community and work that inspire you. At Edge City, families can thrive in an environment where raising children and building a better future go hand in hand. It’s not just easier for parents—it’s a richer experience for kids, surrounded by diverse ideas and role models.

At Edge Esmeralda, we had 80 kids and a diverse age distribution: the youngest person was 6 weeks old, and the oldest was 86. It created an amazing environment with everyone able to learn from the wisdom of the oldest and youngest among us. 

Example: We were lucky to have a Swiss family, Adrian, Martina, Sophia (14) and Ronja (11), join us at Edge City Lanna, who completely integrated and became a core fixture of the village. The two daughters led sessions about the clothing brand they had started and co-led a workshop on kids books about space with a space engineer who was also at the village. 

Creating default healthy environments is essential

Being healthy shouldn't be as difficult as modern cities have made it to be. At Edge City, we make it easy for people to be default healthy, with good food, daily movement, and many opportunities for connection. By integrating wellness into the fabric of daily life, we create a foundation that supports higher levels of productivity, creativity, and wellbeing.

Example: Our daily schedule includes daily workouts, nutritious meals prepared with local, organic ingredients, and communal activities like hiking and group discussions. We have expert-led workshops on topics like mindfulness, sleep optimization, and stress management. Participants report significant improvements that they carry with them afterward.

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There is huge potential in interdisciplinary collaboration

Breakthroughs don't happen in silos—they happen at the edges where disciplines collide. The biggest challenges we face today can't be solved by any single field alone. Edge City brings together experts from diverse fields like cryptography, AI, biotech, urban planning, the arts, and beyond, to create connections that wouldn't happen in traditional settings. 

By breaking down the usual barriers between disciplines, we make space for new ideas and projects to emerge through unexpected collaborations.

Example: At Edge City Lanna, cryptographers working on privacy tools in our Deshittification Technology residency connected with experts in AI and neurotech, discovering how their work could revolutionize human-computer interaction. These natural but unexplored overlaps between fields are exactly what we aim to unlock.

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The duration unlocks faster forming, deeper relationships

Very few environments bring together this many people to live together in an ecosystem for such an extended duration. This creates an opportunity for deep, sustained connection—whether through ambitious projects, new ideas or shared daily living. 

The month-long format strikes a perfect balance - long enough for people to build real habits and run meaningful experiments but without the pressure of permanence. This creates just enough urgency to try new things, whether that's a daily workout routine, meeting with people daily, or testing a community project. 

Example: Mike Johnson, a philosopher and neuroscientist, calls Edge City a “minimal viable paradise” and says that “a month gives people time to unfold themselves — social abundance takes time to make itself fully felt.”

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Emergence outperforms rigid structure

We focus on a “bazaar” approach to programming, where sessions emerge organically from the community, leading to more serendipity and meaningful engagement. By empowering participants to shape the experience, we create a culture of ownership and creativity. 

This is also related to our broader theory of change: we expect the best ideas about how to build a brighter future to emerge bottoms-up from the community instead of us mandating what everyone has to build based on our vision of what human flourishing means.

Example for programming: At Edge City Lanna, we had over 1,000 sessions organized by 150 different people. One highlight was a spontaneous session organized by Brink Lindsey called “What is a Flourishing Life? What is a Flourishing Society?” that came together last minute and ended up being the favorite of many attendees. 

Example for building: Metamask brought their “stunts” team, which specializes in building early prototypes of moonshot ideas, to create a new product called Propel.   

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Residencies allow groups to focus while benefiting from the broader village

We have introduced thematic residencies—focused groups of 15-40 people who live together and partially have their own programming—to enable participants to dive deeper into specific topics while staying connected to the broader community. 

We saw how this allowed builders to go deep in their area of focus, but still have the chance to showcase it to the whole village to get feedback. 

Example: Justin Melillo, founder of Monaverse, led the Art on the Edge residency at Edge City Lanna, a residency for top AR/VR artists. Nico Shi and Colton Orr completed a video “the Future I want” based on Edge City Lanna in the final hackathon. 

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Proximity drives innovation and connection

Physical proximity is everything. By living close together and stripping away logistical barriers, we maximize serendipitous encounters and create an environment where ideas flourish. This environment allows people to feel safe and free to focus on ideas, connect with others, and build what they want to see in the world. 

We prioritize one shared meal each day to create moments for connection and shared learning. We also create “serendipity lane,” a path connecting key touchpoints to maximize spontaneous encounters. 

Example: Shared spaces have resulted in attendees like Bob Haywood (an expert in Special Economic Zones who has helped to build Shenzhen, among others) standing on the co-working steps at Edge City Lanna, sharing stories for an extra 3 hours, or Jim O’Neil extending his stay by three days to maximize interesting conversations.

Distilling learnings into design principles 

As we continue to iterate on our experience, we want to distill our learnings into actionable core pillars of how we think about creating our experiences. Thus far, we’ve identified the following four. This will doubtless grow over time, but these design principles have been—and will remain—central to Edge City’s mission.

Funding the future of Edge City  

One of the key things that people building popup villages are focused on is finding the right financial model to make them sustainable. Balancing quality, accessibility, and long-term impact is an ongoing experiment—one we’re committed to refining.

At Edge City, we have explicitly chosen to run the villages through Edge Institute (our 501(c)(3)). Our nonprofit model ensures that the events themselves aren’t pressured to optimize revenue, allowing us to cover costs through a mix of ticket sales and partnerships. This approach means we can focus entirely on designing the right environments without cutting corners.

In 2024, this model proved sustainable, with all three edge cities we created breaking even. However, sustainability is only part of the story—we want to dream bigger. While the events themselves will remain nonprofit, we see exciting opportunities for supporting ecosystem initiatives that can operate in a for-profit structure. Starting in 2025, we plan to establish a separate for-profit entity, focused on complementary projects that expand Edge City’s impact while maintaining the nonprofit’s core mission.

Finding the balance between sustainability and growth is an ongoing process, and we’re excited to keep learning, refining, and building alongside our community. If you’d like to help sustain and grow this vision, you can contribute here.

Integration, not exit

What are all of these experiments and learnings actually for? 

For Edge City, the concept of integration is important in two ways. 

1/ We focus on integrating with local communities everywhere we go, engaging them in the work that we’re doing, and building trust with locals whilst also learning from their expertise. 

2/ Our goal is to integrate the innovations and social infrastructure developed within Edge City back into the fabric of society. The goal is to create ‘micro-exits,’ where we can temporarily create a bubble of experimentation for a month or two and then merge the learnings and tools we develop back into the mainstream.  

At Edge Esmeralda, we chose a location close to San Francisco but rooted in a small, walkable town. We worked hard to build trust with locals, and by the end, they weren’t just accepting us—they were joining in.

“Edge Esmeralda was one of the weirdest, wildest, most ambitious, most unexpected — and most fun — things I’ve ever watched unfold in Healdsburg.” — Simone Wilson, Healdsburg Tribune

By remaining connected to the broader world, we aim to improve everyone's lives—not just those who join us in our popup villages. The solutions we co-create are designed to be accessible, scalable, and applicable to the challenges faced by people everywhere.

The future we’re building

Edge City is just getting started. We see a future where interconnected nodes of experimentation—popup villages, new towns, and reimagined cities—form a global network for people building a brighter future. 

Every generation has to come to terms with the world it has inherited to figure out how to improve it. The current set of ideas, institutions, and culture were the answer to a prior set of problems. To tackle the current set of issues, to adapt to new technology, and to see a world where humans flourish, we need to find ways to experiment with new possible solutions. This will require changing culture and social norms. 

We see Edge City as new surface area to develop solutions that could not be developed in other environments, like typical accelerators or thinktanks. The act of coming together to live with a community in an ephemeral social structure for a longer period allows cross-sections and connections between fields that would not be possible otherwise. It allows people to experiment with new norms and experiment with living in the future they want to see.

Get involved 

We have a long, exciting road ahead, and we’d love to have you with us as we build this.  

If you want to attend an Edge City event, stay in touch by subscribing or following us here. We’ll announce our plans for 2025 soon. 

If you want to run a residency or a program, let us know here. 

Support the work of Edge City by making a donation to our nonprofit foundation. Click here to contribute. 

With love, 

The Edge City team ☀️

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