Pop-Up Cities

= temporary villages set up by Web3 communities, such as pioneered with Zuzalu in Montenegro

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/?)

Vitalik Buterin on the limits to what popups can do

Vitalik Buterin:

"Popups are expensive: short-term rental is always more expensive than long term, and you easily get ripped off negotiating in a new location for the first time. Edge City is not cheap to attend.

It's difficult to truly have depth when customizing. ShanhaiWoo is one of the "Zu spinoffs" that impresses me deeply because it actually tries to create a culturally unique immersive environment, making its physical zones "feel like ShanhaiWoo". But when it's only in one place for 40 days, the best that it can do is often paper and cardboard.

Bringing that many people together is hard. The most sustainable approach that I have discovered is what we did in Chiang Mai, where 5-10 popups, each independently bringing 30-300 people, co-located in the same city around the same time.

Involving locals in a non-superficial way is hard. A common goal that people doing popups have is to involve local people from the region, in a way deeper than buying food and rent from them (though I would argue even buying food and rent can be a meaningful contribution to an economy, especially if you come during off-peak season, as the original Zuzalu did, so you're stabilizing load rather than overcrowding it). But involving locals non-superficially is hard: if you have a niche interest that only a few people care about, and you're in a country with 1-5 million people, the intersection will be very tiny. Realistically, my main conclusions so far are (i) reach out to diasporas of the country, and not just already-in-country locals, and (ii) effective local community building requires coming back to a place for years, and not just doing a one-off.

Another pattern I have noticed is that two things core to the early ideology often fall away over time: novel governance designs, and a search for legal autonomy. Within the context of popups, this makes total sense. If a popup is short-duration, then "forking as governance" works perfectly fine. Each popup can be run by a founder or core team, and if anyone is unhappy, they can make their own version and try to attract people over. The longevity-focused Zu spinoff Vitalia already split into two forks. And if a popup only lasts 30 days, then there is not much interesting that could be done that would benefit from legal innovation.

As a result of all this, I have noticed a worrying pattern: over time, popups would get shorter in duration, smaller in scope, and more generic in substance, to the point where in the limit they approach being simply a few more conferences and hackerspaces. Outside the Zuzalu-verse, I saw Praxis aspiring to big dreams of a new Mediterranean renaissance, but in practice mostly delivering parties in upscale cities in the United States. (Since then, they seem to have switched to pursuing the American military dynamism topic)

For all of these reasons, I have started advocating for Zuzalu-inspired communities to start having permanent nodes. There already are a few: Frontier Tower, Crecimiento, and 4seas' two nodes (one city, one mountain) in Chiang Mai, with others under construction (additionally, of course, there is Balaji's Network School). But even with these, in the back of my mind I always fear the "regression to the mean" that they will turn into glorified coworkingspaces, and lose all of their cultural or experimental interestingness. Making sure that this does not happen is an ongoing challenge, and indeed it is a primary goal of this post to paint a clearer picture of what alternative future these projects could be driving toward."

(https://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2025/12/17/societies.html)

Examples

• Zuzalu