Pop-up City Research Initiative

The web summary of The Pop-up City Report is live. It's a study of what a pop-up city is, what makes one work, and what makes one fall apart, drawn from 93 interviews, 86 survey responses, and 299 coded sources. Read more: thouartofficial.com/research/popup…

original post by @formacity x.com/formacity/stat…

if you’ve ever asked us what a popup city is and gotten a rambling 20-minute answer plus a link to our report we’re sorry, just watch this video

Quick stats: ✨ 850 residents ✨ 48 kids ✨ 60+ countries represented ✨ 10 residencies ✨ 800+ sessions, talks, workshops, and experiments ✨ 200+ residents hosted their own programming ✨ 4 thematic weeks Read our full recap here: bit.ly/4wySFtX

Devcon Community Hubs are ramping up! Who's ready to organize one this year? ✨ They're definitely one of my favorite spaces within @EFDevcon. Community + knowledge + shared experiences = unbeatable moments and memories 💜

This reflects one open discussion at a single pop-up village (@proofofretreat #2), among a small self-selected group. It does not represent all pop-up villages, their design, or the full range of experiences within them. Read the full note here: thouartofficial.com/research/place…

Participants were candid about the limit of the format so far.

Why do people keep returning to pop-up cities, temporary towns where residents live and build alongside near-strangers for a few weeks? At a pop-up village in Vietnam, an open discussion put the question to the people who show up. A short thread on what they said. Full note: thouartofficial.com/research/place…

@stancel_david thank you david & @Polystate_io team for a careful review and summary 🙏🏼

such a great research on Pop-up cities done by @popupcities , we summarized it in a blog at Polystate, check it out!

@mtndao 🏔️👀

Did someone say mtndao? lnk.bio/mtndao

@talhaasiiif @formacity @_zanzalu @magicislandxyz @mtndao @MeritoNetwork 🫶🏼 DM'd

@popupcities @formacity @_zanzalu @magicislandxyz @mtndao @MeritoNetwork Thank you for sharing this 🙏🏻 I would like to discuss with you about pop up cities/villages and network states Your DMs are off so had to comment Please send me a dm so we can chat

Many pop-up cities (villages/events) for these Q3-Q4 dates are getting confirmed, and we're here for it. Forma Bristol @formacity · 6/27–7/5 (live) Zanzalu 3.0 @_zanzalu · 7/25–8/14 Magic Island @magicislandxyz · 8/1–8/31 mtndao X @mtndao · 8/1–8/31 Zō village @MeritoNetwork · 8/2–8/31 Valley of the commons @VotC2026 · 8/24–9/20 ReVillage revillage.com · 9/1–9/30 Cosmo Local CNX cosmolocalcnx.com · 9/1–9/28 ZuCity Japan PopUp @zucity_japan · 9/4–10/5 Edge City India @JoinEdgeCity · 10/11–11/1 Edge City Bhutan @JoinEdgeCity · 11/11–11/20 Network School @ns · rolling, starts the 1st each month More to come!

i gave a short talk @JoinFutura on sunday about @popupcities. some who missed it asked, and since it was not the kind of introductory session to our research but rather niche and chaotic (i was selfishly bored of my own repetitive intro talks and wanted to try sth new), i'm writing a bit more polished ver. of the takes + additional explanations. > a pop-up city blends two opposite dynamics - community (you contribute into it; value flows in) and service (it delivers to you; value flows out). the blend is what feels extractive or confusing. the clean move i observed works best is to pick one, unapologetically (80:20 or more, not like 50:50). both choices aren't really free anyway - in a temporary format, community-mode depends on legibly non-extractive economics, which depends on someone subsidizing the cost (organiser self-funding, crowdfunding, donation). without that subsidy, the economics push you toward service no matter what you call it. (when i said community contribution, i don't mean the 'leave it as you found it' level) > however, the community <> service dynamics are not inherently opposite. you might want to contribute more because you paid more, because the real driver behind this is stake, not price: how much you've invested / have at stake (time, energy, money, reputation, relationships, etc.) and how long you intend to stay. it depends on the state of the individual, not the setting (one-off / recurring / permanent), even though permanent ones would naturally hold more people prone to contribute compared to one-offs. but that only shifts the typical stake, not the rule. > different pop-up cities look different on the surface but are the same machine underneath: gather specific/curated people → create good interaction → convert into relationships and outcomes > the difference between them is only what each organizer converts the gathering into (jurisdiction / brand / ecosystem or product onboarding / etc. ) > the event isn't a placeholder for building a network state - the event *is* the work. nothing really dissolves when an edition ends, when it's done right; people leave with real relationships and memories that compound. however, to accelerate the compounding, we need to fill some gaps: we don't work across pop-up cities as much, and there's an inevitable (but translatable) discrepancy between the stated or implied vision vs. how it actually looks day to day - logistics, programming, dinners, tickets - which makes it feel abstract what this even is and how it's different from other formats. > the policy layer (e-residency, visa, tax, crypto-friendly) is important but copyable, and not really the winning edge in jurisdiction competition. community and culture (the kind people form their identity from) is, and whether it truly serves your needs as a community/city, especially when you're dealing with people who seek 'much better,' not 'less bad' (though i believe this line of effort will become a real exit plan for the underprivileged or people in more difficult situations too). > pop-up cities are built to produce that uncopyable thing, whether they currently do it well / optimise for it or not. > how to run a better edition next time is one question. we also should ask more about what we're building across all of them.

Vitalik & Balaji x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

@indexnetwork_ @EdgeEsmeralda @JoinEdgeCity 👀

Field notes from @EdgeEsmeralda of @JoinEdgeCity // We analyzed 233 intents from Agent Village residents and found the same pattern across every desire: They are almost always more people seeking than offering. It's not a supply problem. The dashed bars in the chart show latent supply. This hidden differential represents residents who had a particular skill or capacity to give, inferred from what they built rather than explicitly framed as an offering. It's a failure of social protocol. Self-promotion is the hardest protocol to build, not technically, but psychologically. That's what we're solving with Edge agents: bridging the gap between what you have and what you say. Stay tuned, more to come :)

One of the coolest things I learned about at [ ] was this research initiative. We are in the embryonic stages of pop-up cities and network states. Stuff like this is paramount to measuring progress of what works and what doesn’t.