Edge City Monthly #6 — September 2024

Hello friends! Timour here with another monthly update for Edge City ☀️ I hope you are having a great day.  

This will be the last update before we kick off Edge City Lanna on October 10th in Chiang Mai. We can’t wait to see many of you there. We’re bootstrapping a global network so if you know anyone interested in Asia interested in living healthier or interested in any of the fields below, please share the invite.

At a high level, the program involves:  

• Whole month: Programmable Cryptography, Art on the Edge
• Oct 13 - Oct 20: Biotech & Longevity, Healthy Living
• Oct 20 - Oct 27: Cities and Nations of Tomorrow
• Oct 27 - Nov 3: Neurotech & AI, Stablecoins
• Nov 3 - Nov 10: Crypto, D/ACC, Protocol Worlds, Hackathon

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Here are a few stories about how a simple invite led to something great.  

On with the update!

Remind me, what is Edge City?

Edge City creates popup villages around the world that convene people working at the frontiers of tech, science, and society.

Our mission is to act as a ‘society incubator’—a living lab where new ideas, technologies, cultures, and organizations are tested and scaled, all with the goal of advancing human flourishing.

We aim to partner with folks who are reimagining permanent living environments — whether a new city or a reinvigorated town. Please reach out if you are building something relevant!

Calls to action

• Share: Share Edge City Lanna with friends or just retweet our announcement post!
• Telegram and Twitter: Join our Telegram updates channel and follow us on Twitter to stay in the loop :)
• Partners: we’re looking for 1-2 more sponsor partners for Lanna who would want to get involved. Reply to this email if you’re interested or if you know someone who might be!
• Donate: Edge Institute Inc. is a registered 501c3 non-profit. Your contribution helps us continue our mission. Every donation makes a significant impact!

Edge City Lanna

We shared a number of updates on the Lanna blog. Here’s a quick summary:

• Kids and Families: We are creating a space where family life and creative pursuits blend seamlessly! This post covers the details of how kids will be part of Edge City Lanna, including daily activities, weekend adventures, and local experiences.
• Venues: Get to know the spaces where you'll be spending the month! The village will consist of a variety of venues all within a 10 in walk, with more to be announced soon.
• Health & Wellbeing: Our goal is simple — you will leave feeling better than when you arrived. Everyone is encouraged to get 30 min of activity a day, eat healthy food, sauna & cold plunge, and meditate.

Programming Preview

We’re including month-long residencies as a new experiment at Lanna. These are focused sub-villages where participants engage deeply with specific themes for the whole month, led by experts. It creates a more intimate and self-organized learning and building environment within the larger Edge City. These will run alongside the theme weeks and  tech and health experiments.

The residencies and experiments are live on the Lanna site, and our programming preview post on the blog provides a full breakdown.  

Network State Conference

Janine kicked off the Network State conference last weekend with a presentation about Edge City. You can watch her talk at the 16:40 mark here and check out the slides here.

All in all, this is an excellent introduction to popup villages and our particular approach. She discussed the inspiration for these types of gatherings, our experience in building the ones we’ve done so far, and some of the principles that we focus on when we create them: health & wellbeing, multidisciplinarity, co-creation, and having multiple generations. She gave plenty of tangible examples throughout the talk to ground these ideas in reality.

Something we’ve thought a lot about is the idea of Integration instead of Exit. We want to integrate with the places where people live and their ways of being, helping them innovate and push them forward instead of just exiting and creating our own new world somewhere else. This points to a key difference in our approach from a lot of network state dialog.

Introducing: the Edge City Podcast

We are excited to launch the Edge City podcast, which is now streaming on all podcast platforms! The first episode can be found on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

The Edge City podcast will explore ideas and projects pushing the edges of tech, science, and society. By the end of every episode, you’ll have a clear understanding of an important idea that’s set to shape our future.

We kicked off Season 1 with an episode that features Devon Zuegel and Janine Leger talking about our experience in building Edge Esmeralda. If you’re curious about the highlights and learnings from that experience, check it out.

We have a ton of incredible guests coming up. If you listen and have a moment, we’d love it if you subscribed and gave a 5-star review—it helps a lot with discoverability. Thanks!

Read

Listen: RadicalxChange(s) podcast — Janine Leger & Timour Kosters: Co-Founders of Edge City

We’re podcasting all over these days. This time, we sat with Matt Prewitt from RadicalxChange to discuss the new movement of popup villages and cities. We spoke about the historical inspiration for these types of gatherings, and how we can create spaces for experimentation for novel ideas, like the ‘∈dges’ experiment that RadicalxChange ran at the event.

Read: Erik Hoel —  Why we stopped making Einsteins

Interesting piece that explores a key question. During the 2000s, most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge, yet it seems that it didn’t trigger a golden age of innovation; why is that?  

As always, thank you for reading, and see you soon ☀️

Timour + the Edge City team

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