Pop-Up Cities

= temporary villages set up by Web3 communities

Discussion

Dev Lewis:

"The term pop-up cities refers to month-long gatherings where people from frontier spaces come together to co-live, learn, experiment, and connect. Unlike traditional conferences—short, intense sprints that interrupt "real life"—pop-up cities offer a chance to integrate everyday life, experiment with new habits, and make deeper connections.

This format isn’t entirely new, but the unique backgrounds of the participating communities make it stand out. Many attendees that identify as digital nomads, moving across continents without fixed bases, exploring areas like longevity, biohacking, networked nations, and digital public goods, regenerative finance.

There was a time when meeting and forming relationships online felt radical. Today, it’s mundane. Everything is online now–mediated by algorithms, bots, and corporate or governmental crawlers. The vitality once felt in digital spaces has diminished. Naturally, the pendulum is swinging back.

Interestingly, the swing is being led by those who once pushed the boundaries of digital life. The Web3 and crypto communities, which exist almost entirely in digital realms, are now seeking something different.

Remote work and digital life had been the baseline since the very start. The entire experience of life, the economy, the 'modes of production' are all primary digital, 'dreams within dreams'. If these nascent technologies, which still lacks proven, large scale applications, are to scale it has to be tried out IRL (In Real Life). Pop-up cities come from a recognition that we still exist as bodies in physical spaces and that the most powerful coordination and transformational learning happens here.

Pop-up cities are also a response to our collective longing for somatic connection and belonging. Digital life, for all its connectivity, often amplifies feelings of disconnection and isolation. Amidst terms like "loneliness pandemic" and rising global mental health challenges, these gatherings represent a swing toward embodied, intentional togetherness. The pandemic forced us deep into the depths of digital connection, to extract what we could from every last byte. Now everything is being flipped.

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum co-founder, who also spent the month in Chiang Mai, credited with helping conceptualise and fund the first 'pop-up city', asks:

- What if cultures or tribes that have formed online with their own goals and values could materialize offline, and new physical places could grow due to intention rather than random chance?

Chiang Mai, a digital nomad hub for over a decade, became the site for these experiments, with nods towards the promise of being close to nature and spiritual well-being. Pop-up cities provided the foundational infrastructure—physical and digital—necessary to coordinate. ShanhaiWoo, bringing in many Chinese communities, Edge City, an evolution from the genesis Zuzalu, Invisible Gardens, focused on tech development. On top of this, people could organise workshops, retreats, talks, parties, hackathons, or playshops like Seapunk, to re-imagine solar punk futures rooted in Southeast Asia, or an 'Un-College' I organised with friend and collaborators Sam Chua & Lorilei. While the Crypto space helped incubate and fund this moment, the profile of people attending was very broad and diverse (more than I expected), many with few to no direct ties to Web3 at all.

Fellow Chiang Mai collaborator and P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens believes this Scenius is historical pivot moving to a translocal form of organisation fundamentally different from a city. I recommend reading it for a deeper analyses on this pop-up city phenomenon."

(https://lightforest.world/forest-dispatch-living-cosmo-local-chiang-mai/?)