Placemaking vs. Mission-Shaping

The central tension of the pop-up city movement

I’m currently in Chiang Mai, Thailand, doing the most rootless-cosmopolitan-liberal thing possible: participating in a popup city called Edge Lanna, one of a dozen that have sprouted up in the broader region, in what is starting to be called the first-ever “popup city season.” Being here, doing what I’m doing, is probably the poetically perfect condition to be in as the news of Trump’s comeback percolates through the world. I do have non-trivial thoughts taking shape on that, which I may write about later, but I have what feels like a more interesting and important topic to talk about this week: The popup city scene and the central tension it manifests between placemaking and mission-shaping.

Placemaking is the problem of creating a space (especially one that is public to some degree) people want to be in and bring their whole selves and lives to. Mission-shaping is the problem of creating a catalytic context that helps develop or accelerate particular missions, such as building a startup, pursuing a research program, or completing a work of art. The two motives are necessarily in tension because one is broad and totalizing, while the other is narrow and reductive. You bring your whole life to a place. You bring a particular set of skills and capabilities to a mission.

I’m mostly here in Edge Lanna on a mission myself: To help run a week-long event called Protocol Worlds, a part of the Summer of Protocols program I help run. The event is a simulation focused on the idea of holographic cities — digital city-like social realities (ideally crypto-flavored of course, and preferably Ethereum-flavored) projected onto physical cities. If that feels meta, it’s by design. I’m mostly a spectator of the placemaking side of what’s going on. I really haven’t actively participated in anything else besides my track.

Next week, I’ll be in Bangkok, hosting a session at Devcon, the flagship Ethereum event (my session is on Nov 13, 15:30-18:30 if you’re attending) on a related idea, that of a hardened commons, which we’ve been developing within the program. These two ideas — hardened commons and holographic cities — both belong within a larger placemaking imaginary that’s been getting increasingly influential in tech circles, particularly crypto circles.

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My passport is locked away in the hotel safe, but I’ve been walking around with this wristband, which is sort of my passport for this toy post-nation-state civilizational placemaking simulation currently running on Chiang Mai’s urban hardware.

There are people walking around with multiple such wristbands, marking membership in multiple popup cities. There are also sketchy stateless characters (who are clearly not locals) wandering in and out of the simulation with no wristbands. It’s a pretty porous and leaky scene out here. If the phrase popup city conjures up images of isolated billionaire-led compounds far from population centers, you’ve got exactly the wrong idea.

All this is happening in the bustling heart of Chiang Mai, which is teeming with tourist activity. The popup-city scene is not big in absolute numbers. It is probably a rounding error relative to the baseline of tourist activity and expat scene activity. Most locals probably have no idea that there’s a group of people harboring grand civilization-rebuilding conceits here. Besides the wristbands, and a few suspiciously solidly booked event venues, there are no visible signs that anything different from regular tourism is going on. Despite the somewhat grandiose phrase popup city season, it’s not like the Olympics is in town (Devcon next week will be different — it’s a big enough conference, with pop-up city vibes, to be noticeable even in a larger city like Bangkok, not least because it will take over the city’s main convention center).

Here in Chiang Mai, there are people around playing with with literal mixed reality headsets to make the virtual reality of pop-up cities more visceral and sensory, a la Pokemon Go, but I’m making do with a fairly low-tech presence here, limited to the NFC chip in the wristband. We can tap each other’s wristbands with our phones to add a connection via an app called Cursive that’s progressively weaving a virtual social fabric for Edge City.

This really isn’t your grandma’s hippie commune or grandpa’s religious cult/militia compound, tempting though it is to make that sort of lazy analogy. Good or bad, silly or substantial, there is something fundamentally new going on here.

This is the second such experiment I’ve participated in this year. In May, I was at Edge Esmeralda, which has now turned into a well-funded project to build a permanent city in Northern California.

The so-called startup city movement has been going for about a decade now, (with many early instances in usual-suspect Latin American locations like Honduras and Chile), but it has acquired serious momentum in the past year or so via the popup phenomenon. Popup cities, arguably, are a new evolutionary stage in the longer story. A new generation of placemaking entrepreneurs, made wary by past failures, is taking a much more iterative, low-cost, low-capital experimental approach to getting the recipe right. Perhaps the most important difference from past attempts is that much like popup restaurants, these experiments consciously try to fit into existing societal landscapes in a harmonious way, rather than attempting to find (or create through coercion or wealth) exclusive and sovereign terra nullus spaces to colonize. There is a self-consciously anti-utopian sensibility to the activities here that is reflected in the decision to run these experiments in Chiang Mai rather than on some uninhabited island, knee-deep in guano.

As I said, I’m a casual drive-by participant, mostly here for my one narrow mission, and I’m as much a tourist of the scene itself as of the underlying city. But I find it interesting that I’m here at all. If you’d asked me a decade ago, I’d have laughed at the thought of being part of experiments like this.

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A decade ago, there were probably four ways to be a rootless, cosmopolitan globalist:

1. Be part of the ultra-elite Davos-level circuit (tickets: $20,000 I’m told)

2. Be part of the rather miserable masses of working-class migratory circulation, a world of moving serfdom

3. Be part of globetrotting multinational industry like oil or semiconductors, as a working high-skilled professional stiff logging big frequent flier miles

4. Be part of the nomadic worker set doing internet marketing and selling vitamins from beaches, and weathering the occasional angsty existential crisis triggered by too much hustling.

Now there’s a fifth way: Be a part of entire large nomadic scenes with no particular geographic base, but with highly complex organizational capabilities and internal economic engines. The Ethereum ecosystem is a very good example of this phenomenon. It has the scale, operational complexity, and economic mass of a major multi-national corporation, but it does not have a fixed geographic footprint. It is something like a high-tech Mongol horde, just with benevolent intentions.

Running this scene itself is actually the first and best use case for the technology. It’s a giant exercise in dogfooding blockchain-based infrastructure technology, for which grand claims are often made. If there’s a chance blockchains will eventually run all of civilization, we’ll probably trace the origins of that future condition to nomadic ecosystem scenes. If these scenes didn’t naturally exist to test the evolving infrastructure via dogfooding, we’d have to invent ways to do so.

The Ethereum ecosystem just periodically precipitates in particular places. It doesn’t really come from anywhere in particular. There is no Mongolia for this horde. There are entire virtual startups with no real geographic base that only get together around big Ethereum events. There are groups that gather around these events without even going to them. The largest events are complex engineering feats, almost comparable to the Olympics. A vast halo of derivative activity trails along in their wake. There are scouting teams that scope out new locations, there is a playbook of running events of increasing complexity before bringing a big event to a place, another for follow-on activities, and so on. And unlike the traditional conference circuit, there are no huge anchor organizations driving things. Just a constellation of small organizations.

These nomadic ecosystems though, are not in themselves placemaking activities, though they achieve a degree of placemaking as a side-effect. The purpose of a big Ethereum conference is still primarily to work on the technology and associated economy, not placemaking. It’s a mission-driven activity.

The popup city movement though, is a placemaking-oriented reification of this larger scenius. It is attempting to evolve a logic of placemaking independent of specific missions.

The particular gaggle of popup cities going on in Chiang Mai right now was sort of memed into existence by Vitalik Buterin, who serves as a rather laissez-faire Chief Imagineer of one major meta-scene in the popup city movement, comprising popups descended from an experiment called Zuzalu, instigated and funded by Vitalik in Montenegro in early 2023. The Zuzalu descendants form a loose confederacy of friendly competition/cooperation, and have a kind of mini United Nations thing going among themselves. Edge City, spearheaded by Janine Leger, who was also the architect of Zuzalu, is the only one I have direct experience of, but all the zubabies appear to have a lot of shared DNA.

The other big meta-scene that’s unfolding, with a very different DNA, is the Network School, based on the Network State ideas of Balaji Srinivasan. That one is taking place in Malaysia. From what I’ve been hearing on the grapevine — and yes there is enough going on that there’s now a popup-cities-grapevine — that one has much more of an authoritarian vibe. Which is not very surprising if you’re familiar with the underlying ideas in Balaji’s book. Obviously, I’m much more sympathetic to the mutualist, relatively leaderless premises of the one I’m part of, or I wouldn’t be here. I’m not exactly a fan of Balaji’s version of the idea, but I’m kinda glad his experiment is taking place too. This design space needs more than one set of experiments to be explored fully. There are several other meta-scenes besides these two, and I’m sure some energetic person somewhere is making a map of all of them.

The ideologies represented in the various experiments going on so far cover most of the familiar points of the political compass. There are right-leaning and left-leaning experiments. There are authoritarian and libertarian experiments. There are trad statue-head experiments and neo-hippie experiments. In terms of execution, the experiments range from highly pragmatically organized and managed to predictable shitshows rediscovering the many well-known dumb ways to fail at this sort of thing.

I think the part thing that interests me most about Edge City is that it has managed to strike an interesting balance between place-making and mission-shaping at a smaller scale than I would have thought possible.

Thriving places don’t have purposes and missions, but they’re not hostile to them. They are somewhere between benignly indifferent to mildly (but not over-eagerly) welcoming towards missionary energies. Think of storied city like New York or Rome or Bangkok. These are places that catalyze mission-driven activities of various sorts, but don’t necessarily have a mission themselves. A lot of people come to New York to try and get rich on Wall Street, or famous on Broadway, but New York itself doesn’t have a mission of trying to get rich or famous, even though it is both. The role of a successful place is to provide a catalytic context for missions. The ones that succeed in turn shape the evolving story of the place itself. But successful places shape the missions unfolding in them far more than the even the most successful missions shape them in turn.

Many such experiments, both historical and contemporary, get this balance not just wrong, but wildly wrong. They make the mistake of being about missions first, and placemaking second. That’s a suitable approach for a conference, corporation, religion, or a political movement, but not for a place qua place. Even a virtual place that exists only as a wandering hologram drifting about the surface of the planet. The purpose of places is to simply exist, and to do their best to continue existing. Not to go accomplish something in particular. And the task of placemaking is to figure out what that takes.

Not only should placemaking not be approached as a mission-driven activity, it is a mistake to even center the catalytic mission-shaping activity too strongly. Yes, people who participate in placemaking experiments will obviously bring missions to the context, from research programs and art projects to literal startups and political initiatives. Yes it would be coup for a place to have a successful startup or art project emerge from it. But to be defined by such successes is to be destroyed by them.

A place is not the sum of the projects and missions unfolding within it. It is about life itself unfolding in a fuller way, dominated mostly by activities that are not comprehended by the logic of specific missions or even the positive sum of all the missions.

The emerging place-making imaginary combines old-fashioned experimentation and idealistic physical community building with a highly opinionated tech-positive stance. To be part of the popup cities scene in 2024 is about more than vaguely seeking “community” and “meaning.” It is also about having opinions on things like end-to-end-encryption, cryptoeconomics, virtual infrastructures, health, and longevity. It is about novel technological means for managing age-old placemaking tensions — between locals and newcomers, between reshaping a space to suit oneself and adapting to its existing contours, between being a tourist and being an inhabitant.

These are not problems to be solved as such, once and for all, but circumstances to be managed on an ongoing basis. Solutionism, which is a useful disposition for a mission-driven activity, is not a great disposition to bring to placemaking. This is one reason the more startup-inspired experiments strike me as fundamentally wrong-headed. The term startup city is probably too entrenched to replace (I’d like to see something like seed city replace it perhaps), but we can at least stop thinking of it as city project that acts like a tech startup.

A city, physical or virtual, pop-up or permanent, is not a tech startup. The cosmetic similarities obscure deeper differences. While both do need to be bootstrapped, capitalized, discover viable economic flywheels, and engineer some sort of exit from a developmental trajectory to a sustainable maturity, they are categorically different things. Cities and startups are, to use my favorite new word, entirely different sorts of contraptions.

One way to understand the difference is through the lens of what is known as the Efficiency-Thoroughness Tradeoff, or ETTO principle, which states that you can’t solve for both at once. Startups solve for efficiency. Places solve for thoroughness. Startups solve a specific problem as profitably as possible. Places manage all aspects of being human as thoroughly as possible. Startupping is a finite game. Placemaking is an infinite game. Trying to run the same playbook for both is a mistake.