Edge City Roadmap
Thank you, Venkatesh Rao, Vitalik Buterin, Toby Shorin, Justin Mares, and Ryan Pripstein for giving their thoughts on earlier versions of this essay.
Tech is moving fast; society isn’t. The systems that shape our time—institutions, norms, governance structures—were made for a prior world. They are not able to meet the opportunities and challenges of the current moment. There are profound technological breakthroughs on the horizon, and their implications need to be worked out.
What if we saw this moment as an opportunity to build something better, leveraging new advancements to prototype new ways of living and connecting in global communities?
This is the challenge we’re embracing at Edge City. Over the past year, we’ve hosted monthlong popup villages where thousands of people—builders, thinkers, creatives, and more—lived together to test new ways of organizing communities and collaborating on emerging ideas. Across frontier tech, health & longevity, education systems, governance, and even consciousness research, it is a place to learn about and create what comes next.
We've never had more leverage and agency to shape our world, but this comes with responsibility; ideas that could become new systems need to be tried and tested. That's our aim in building a society incubator. By embedding innovation in a living, evolving community—where a variety of perspectives and disciplines interact—we unlock breakthroughs that wouldn’t emerge in traditional accelerators or think tanks. And we can better guide them to enable human flourishing.
Below is our roadmap to build a global ‘network city’: a collection of temporary and permanent ‘villages’ designed as laboratories for social, economic, and technological innovation. The result will be an interconnected global network of communities that demonstrate a better way to live and flourish.
As we go, we'll iterate and open source everything we learn. Our goal isn't just to build one community—it's to spark a movement of thousands of experiments on how humans can live and thrive together, creating blueprints for more resilient and flourishing societies worldwide.
Our roadmap
1. Build fun ‘popup villages’ where people thrive
We start by making monthlong communities designed for collaboration and well-being. Start your day with mountain treks and cold plunges. Move into deep work and learning alongside accomplished builders. End with farm-fresh dinners and sessions that push ideas forward. We gather awesome people by creating environments where you can live your best life and do your best work.
Four key principles shape our approach: villages should be default healthy, multidisciplinary, build & co-creation focused, and multigenerational. We believe the best ideas emerge when people feel great physically, when people from different fields live alongside one another, when everyone is focused on building vs. passive learning, and when family life is fully integrated. The result is an experience that isn't just productive but deeply fulfilling. (Read more about our approach and what we learned in our first year.)
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. Imagine what will be incubated in a space where people flourish, in an environment where nurturing your mind and body is the default state.
The connections created in these villages don’t fade when the month ends. They grow into a global network ->
2. Build a global network of people shaping the future
The heart of Edge City is its people. We bring together curious, kind, high-agency individuals who want to build a brighter future. You share meaningful experiences—living together and collaborating on big ideas—which build trust and create lasting bonds. You’ll leave with friends and collaborators who will push your thinking and expand your work.
Strong connections create the conditions for progress, and the network spreads that progress across the world. The Edge City ecosystem has already incubated and spread a variety of projects in our first year, from privacy-preserving identity systems (Cursive and ZuPass) to community currencies (∈dges) to new tech movements in Argentina (Crecimiento).
As the ecosystem grows, we’ll learn more about what works. Then, we’ll turn those lessons into playbooks and infrastructure that make it easy for others to launch their own popup city experiments ->
3. Build the stack for tomorrow’s communities and cities
Edge City is pioneering a new approach to building tech-enabled communities. As we solve challenges, we’ll create open-source tools and playbooks that help people organize in more fluid, high-trust ways. We’ll share the norms, practices, and technologies that we develop, which will emerge not from theory but from the real needs of a thriving community.
We believe technology should enhance in-person connection, not replace it. From governance frameworks to coordination tools, we are developing systems that amplify trust, increase serendipity, and enable more intentional ways of living. These tools are incubated in our temporary environments but will also be used by communities in existing towns and cities who are looking to evolve.
Why open-source everything we learn? There are two key benefits. First, it makes it easier for others to do the same, which grows the movement, and we’ll learn from experiments and breakthroughs we could never have predicted. We’ve drawn inspiration from our time building Zuzalu and know that the best ideas emerge from the bottom up. Second, the further these tools spread, the more we accelerate the transition toward better ways of living beyond just our villages.
By making this stack available to everyone, we are ensuring that Edge City-style communities can grow and evolve without starting from scratch. Some will stay temporary, but others will become permanent over time. ->
4. Build permanent anchors, including new towns
While popup villages provide the freedom and urgency to experiment, Edge City will also create opportunities to ground those learnings in more permanent settings. These may look like hubs in existing cities or like entirely new towns. The hubs are not replacements for temporary villages, but spaces where the ideas and practices tested in popups can be refined and implemented over time.
One example is Esmeralda, a new walkable town project located 90 minutes north of San Francisco. Founder Devon Zuegel is building Esmeralda to blend the intimacy of a pedestrian-friendly community with the Bay Area’s culture of creativity and invention. This summer, we are once again hosting Edge Esmeralda—a month-long popup village designed to showcase what living in this innovative town will be like. This gathering provides an opportunity for Esmeralda to demonstrate its vision while allowing Edge City to further explore how the tools and culture that we incubate can be applied in a more permanent context.
A single village can test new ideas. A permanent hub can refine them. But when these communities are linked into a broader network, their impact multiplies—transforming isolated experiments into a global movement. ->
5. Link the nodes of the network city to build a global innovation engine
Ideas evolve best when they encounter new environments and constraints. Each Edge City village serves as a testing ground, but real breakthroughs emerge when projects travel and adapt, taking on new forms across the different locations.
A governance model first explored in Esmeralda may take on a new form in Bhutan, and then be refined in Argentina. A decentralized identity system piloted at Edge City Lanna could expand its applications in a permanent hub. A coordination system designed in Thailand may only reach its full potential when tested in a permanent hub.
How will we create the links within the network city? People who visit multiple create natural bridges between locations. A shared archive of experiments could track what’s been tested, what needs refinement, and what could be built next. Having 24/7 portals set up between nodes will allow for serendipitous connections. Most projects begin in one village and continue in the next, strengthening through iteration.
As these villages connect and evolve, they begin to model a future where better ways of living are possible ->
6. Demonstrate a better way of living. (Yes, seriously.)
Eventually, existing cities will adopt the best ideas from our network. Local governments will integrate our community technologies and governance models. Public and private institutions will adopt our methods. And new kinds of globally connected communities will emerge, not bound to a single place, but existing across physical and digital spaces, linked by shared ideas and practices.
There will be a shift in culture; one that recognizes people’s agency to shape their communities into spaces where they flourish. Cities, towns, and even online spaces don’t have to be dictated by outdated systems; they can evolve through the choices and actions of the people who live in them. Our goal isn’t to design a single utopia, but to empower individuals and groups with the tools to create the kinds of places they want to live in.
If we do this right, Edge City-style living won’t be an eccentric subculture; it’ll shape how mainstream society evolves. That’s our endgame: a future where the best aspects of these experiments become normal, and the next generation of humans grows up in healthier, freer, and more imaginative communities by default.
Get Involved
- Join a popup: Come live with us for a month. Bring your ideas, friends, and family.
- Build with us: Incubate a project, contribute to one, or simply give feedback to accelerate progress.
- Partner or Donate: We’re a 501(c)(3). If you believe in advancing technology, science, and society through experimentation, we could use your support.
The Edge City team ☀️
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