Pop-up Cities as a Category for Social and Governance Experimentation - Jimin Lee

Transcript

[music] >> Um, hi. This is Uh, my name is Jimin and I am here to talk about pop-up cities. Well, specifically as a category for social and governance experimentation. Uh, we started this pop-up city research initiative around 6 months ago, last November. Um, there has been many pop-up cities out there since Zuzalu in 2023 and we figured there were not much of a documentation and proper research going on around like different pop-up cities

and how we could compare or understand the current landscape of it. So, we started it and these are the research question questions that uh, we started with, such as what kinds of value people seek when people are engaging with pop-up cities or like what are the expectations or actually realized and like the cost and benefits, uh, the balance of it, whether it makes sense, how pop-up cities models differ in structure and forms and um, yeah, like what are the current models differ as well and which groups helps well and how we can make the future

iterations more economically, socially and operationally sustainable. And then these are some of the numbers. Um, we've done 84 plus interviews with all the key stakeholders of the ecosystem. There are like 54 plus pop-ups and intentional communities adjacent type of organizations covered and there were like 90 plus surveys and yeah, like 89% of their codes are triangulated across at least three or multiple independent sources. And I am not going to go through all the research details and methodology here, but this is the website if you are interested in looking

into it and also happy to chat more if you could if you reach out to us. And yeah, so like pop-up cities can be many things. I don't know how familiar you guys are about pop-up cities, but it can look like a network state precursor, or it could look like a startup incubator, it could look like a hacker house or residency models, it could look like a conference or many different things here. And so like what is really a pop-up city or at least how in our research sort of figured as a pop-up city. Well, this is an operational definition rather than sort of like authoritative

arguments that we are doing. But yeah, like temporary and intentional communities where a cohort gathers in a shared physical place for a defined period, usually around some sort of substantive common purpose. So like there were some four recurring features that we been consistently observing and also help help us to distinguish this format from other adjacent formats such as conference and hacker houses and other stuffs. Those are equal presence, shared intention, time-bounded intensity, and selection generated trust. And as you see in the graph, pop-up cities um sort

of locate between conferences and universities in terms of time frame, and somewhere adjacent to conferences and different meetups, concerts, festivals type of things. In yeah, terms of population. And also, the shared intention part is specifically important because we see pop-up cities as a in relation to the broader wave of tech-enabled new city and special zone experiments. Someone could call it network state initiatives as well. So, like institutional ambition really mattered in our report and in terms of how we typol- typolog-

Sorry. The like how we uh come up with four different archetypes um depending on duration and institutional ambition. And whether pop-up cities have been financially sustainable, like what are like there were lots of questions about economics uh pop-up cities. And these are some of the survey results. Um they revenue varies a lot from under 25,000 to uh up to a million per uh just one uh edition and um whether revenue cover total expenditure or something like that is well, most either reports they are

approximately break even or ran a uh deficit. And um yeah, like a little bit more of our findings in terms of finances that cost vary widely and it varies from 75K per event to about a million dollars. And um it's usually depends on the scale, the location, whether it is um hosted in a like premium location or it is, you know, in a relatively cheaper location. It is more related to that rather than a programming itself. And per person costs also range quite widely from $170 per person per week to

like around $1,000. And also our research implies that there's no flagship scale cases have yet achieved a self-sustainable model without premium pricing or ongoing subsidy. And these are some of the criticisms and risks also been observed or suggested such as exclusivity or monoculture, some of the like fragility around funding and economics, and there are some like governance that is rather opaque and founder-led when we are talking about decentralized governance, and also lots

of core team and organizers members burning out and etc. etc. And yeah, like this survey for attendees also suggests that like some of them report that cost was too high relative to the value, or there were some kind of issues with communication channels. It's cut off but says like too noisy or inefficient, or the governance and decision-making also very opaque or non-like unresponsive or things like that.

But still the trends is growing. There has been around 500 sorry, around 100 cases of pop-up cities since 2023 since this year, and this year we are expecting to have around 50 different pop-up events, and uh and then also there's a little image there shows the geographic distribution of these events suggesting that it's happening all over the world.

And then you would ask then like why pop-up cities actually matter and why it has to be now. And then these are some of the following following reasons that I would answer which is that Well, this is obvious one. New technologies are creating new powers faster than institutions can regulate them responsibly. And yeah, pop-up cities can be good bonded environments because we could test some like new technology, some kind of new governance models, some kind of yeah, like for example, AI agents for coordination or digital IDs. I don't know if you can see there there are

supposed to be another Can you see it? No. Right, so So Yeah, for example, if we could actually come up with some output such as failure logo from experiments that we're running around AI agents AI agents for coordination for around let's say 500 people or something or UX data set, some kind of like adoption playbook or something like that, then it would be a meaningful data set that you could implement potentially to a bigger audience or bigger environment. And then crypto clearly is maturing and then now is like maturing from an asset class into actually like

coordination and settlement infrastructure and now is the right time to actually take this more take this to a next step and experimenting with within this environment. And thirdly, um digital nomad visa attracts individuals, but pop-up cities could attract a entire network. There is um roughly 40 to 43 million global digital nomads populations, and also there are 64 different countries now offer nomad or remote worker visas.

And cities and jurisdictions are competing for global talents and then capitals, and pop-up cities can create a good reason for these kind of specific talents and high mobility people to actually gather and then not only have fun there or experiment, they actually form a relationship with the specific location there and potentially move and work um yeah, reside there. And um IRL economy is one of the topic that's been emerging a lot. So it's not

going Sorry. Well, anyway, online identity is becoming embodied through real-world gatherings, and the importance of IRL connections and community events, building communities uh getting more Sorry, how do I fix this? Uh I want to just go to the next slide. It just doesn't Yeah, it's just >> Looks like your laptop froze.

>> Uh-oh. >> [laughter] >> Then there's probably not nothing we can do. >> It's Figma. No. Oh, cuz of the Wi-Fi. >> It's fine. It's just the internet

problem. The Wi-Fi went went dark. >> Right. Um, all right.

So yeah. IRL gatherings importance and yeah, importance are emerging. Come on. Yeah, this is actually from McKinsey's reports of Gen Z'ers want spaces for co-creation and community. And since we're in East Prague, I wanted to also mention in the relations between Ethereum and pop-up specifically because I'm sure like many of you are familiar that this pop-up city the term and the format somewhat emerged and propagated from Celo directly.

And those that could be I Ethereum's role in this pop-up city ecosystem as a historical catalyst. And then there's cultural incubator role which is that Ethereum space has been talking a lot about public goods, those decentralized governance, credible neutrality, and open-source coordination, digital infrastructure, and everything's here which is directly also related and important for pop-up cities to coordinate properly. And also as a technical primitive important Ethereum is important and could do a lot of things in terms of how you could use this kind of technology and protocols to

not only test but also help pop-up cities especially if they are moving toward like permanent or more ambitious projects to like coordinate and yeah test out this mini version of society. So I would say crypto's first institutional question was whether digital assets could become legitimate financial infrastructure and the next questions that we could ask is whether these crypto native coordination could organize people, funding, identity, and public goods in the real world.

These are also from our corpus. Sponsors what sponsors of pop-up cities are saying is that one sponsors actually reported that they had 100% KPI. Um but also notes that participants valued relationship formation and serendipitous collaboration outside of this kind of KPI frame. And also there are multiple sponsors constantly argue that the highest ROI for um sponsoring or participating in pop-up cities comes when companies participate directly like sending some of their team members into a pop-up city and

participating there rather than just remaining as a passive sponsor. And also some of the findings uh regarding economics imply that pop-up cities' values are often under captured and ineligible yet to existing funding or evaluation models. And the investor layer may not only be about a pop-up city itself, but the infrastructure, um these membership, these governance tools, and the way to locally integrate and safety systems, documentations, and longitudinal outcome tracking. These are the infrastructures that all needed in order

to run a pop-up city in a more rigorous and effective way. And investors and funders also need a some diligence framework to evaluate pop-up cities and similar adjacent projects and ventures better. So are pop-up cities just a new event format or are they actually prototypes for the cities that we wish existed? And to that questions, I want to show you some cases as part of our research as well. So Edge City just recently published a request for experiments which includes a list that's

list that shows like liquid democracy or quadratic funding, prediction markets versus committees for resource allocation and privacy preserving governance without exposing personal data, agent-to-agent negotiations. These are the things that actually they think they could run it in a pop-up village environment to experiment and also they are sending like following like they were they were a expedition that they did last year in Bhutan and following to that they are sending some mentors to Bhutan to um

collaborate and share knowledge around the AI system thinking mechanism mechanism design and education. Also yeah, these are the stats that they're showing on their website. There were over 12,000 participants and uh uh 300 plus startups and projects incubated or started in the in the pop-up cities. And there were network school ones.

Um network school this month they are hosting Ethereum network school month as a genesis of their Ethereum node inside a network school. And they are growing and yeah, this is the Eth NS. I don't know what is wrong with this. Yeah, and also I don't know if you guys heard the David's talk before. Um they just rolled out this new feature in their operating system which is basically like a calendar feature with low friction because they were previously using Luma, but they are putting lots of efforts into developing their operating system. So, they are now

having quite rigorous, as you see on the right tab of all the ways to coordinate within this um within this environment. There are for the Mass City announcements a few days ago as well. They've been running uh pop-up villages across the world over the last 2 years in uh many interesting locations, and now they are going permanent and setting up their permanent hub in the UK. And also rolled out an announcement of about residency they're running this summer.

And there are many more uh interesting things going on. I'm sorry. >> [laughter] >> Uh So, Switzerland recently rolled, I think currently is rolling out a white paper about the Combinator. Uh which is like accelerator permanent accelerator and builder hub model, and there's a Valley of Commons hosting their first pop-up villages this summer, and there's >> [laughter] >> uh Future Camp and sorry, like Zanzibar also coming.

And Oh, yeah. And the Moo Shanghai is happening, actually starting tomorrow in Shanghai. Um anticipating to host uh 1,000 plus builders across um the country No, not just the country. Like, yeah, connecting international and local talents. And there are platforms that I want to also introduce. I do not have enough time, but yeah, this is a village tech um incubated and developed uh in a proper village called the proper retreat uh mapping proper villages around the world. There are um

this platform called Zuzalu. They are um optimized for Zuzalu ecosystems. There are listings, Zuzalu um zoo family, proper villages, and events. Wow. And um yeah, they're doing newsletter things and Yeah, there's an XYZ that city also I directories and dashboards for different proper villages and network state projects.

So, like there are clearly a need for infrastructure in this environment. And like these are the things that already mentioned. There's an interesting initiative research initiative going on in inside a EF use case lab uh called the verifiable cities which I wanted to also um ex- introduce a little bit for city use case landscape and pilot ideas. Uh which is interesting because learning pain points from like cities and municipalities directly and solving or testing it in a pop-up or smaller scale environment first would be a good use case.

And um Yeah, so whether you uh operating as a community or as a governance test bed or as an accelerator, like whatever the format that you're are as a pop-up city. If you If you um are to produce more durable value, then these are the things that we argue that are needed more in the space. And uh as pop-up cities are becoming an emerging category of temporary society experiments, the next phase would require legibility and durability and

transferability for it to be more meaningful. So, depends on your role. I would love you I would love to Yeah, I would love you to participate or Yeah, get uh have more attention to these matters. And Yeah, if you are operators and builders, then uh I think there are more documentations and figuring out some measurement tools and frameworks and some sort of standards and standard standardizing um practice would be great. And then there are also some like if you are funders or investors or interested in investing or

sponsoring, then also please uh support the infrastructure, research, and founders and um also focusing on local integration and long-term evaluation. And for institutions and host jurisdictions, um actively host or co-design the experiments and test different things, bring the problems that you want to solve. And let's uh solve this together. Um that's it. Sorry, I probably passed some time, but Yeah, thank you so much. And um if you have any questions or feedback,

um I don't know, inquiries, please contact uh contact us this way. And yeah, happy to answer to all the Sorry. [laughter] >> [gasps] >> questions. And yeah, I mean, if you're in Sorry. If you If you're involved in like pop-up cities and then we haven't yet reached out to you, then uh uh well, probably first check your inbox first and then uh yeah, please reach out to us. Thank you. >> Fantastic. Thank you so much, Julian. >> [music]