Pop-up City Research Initiative is an applied research and field-building effort covering pop-up cities, startup societies, communities, and decentralised coordination infrastructure. We document what these projects do, where they hold and where they break, and we work alongside the people running them rather than only observing from outside. Three pillars decide what we take on: technology, culture, and statecraft. Roughly in that order of weight, though not absolutely.
Broadly, that means urban hubs and congregation forms: experimental cities, temporary communities, large-scale cultural events, special zones. We lead with these because they are the part of the field a stranger can already picture, and because they carry what's required to put a society somewhere physical. Logistics. Legal and jurisdictional structure. Land, development and sales. Diplomacy with a host government and the neighbours. Policy, geopolitics, enforcement, and how the whole thing reads from outside.
It also means the tools those forms run on. Any group of people has to settle the same few things: who is in, who decides, whose record counts, and who owes what to whom. Answering those at any real scale used to require a state or a large institution, and that is no longer the only route. So we follow the people and projects working on proof of personhood, portable identity, agentic governance, DAOs and the wider civic coordination tooling, along with the crypto, AI, and data analytics underneath.
And it means the cultural layer, where we arguably pay the closest attention of all. Movements, projects, figures, trends, memes and phenomena that are translating what an interlocked technological, economic and geopolitical shift has done to us into a live argument about how humans should think, teach, live, connect and coordinate with what we now have, whether the answers turn out to be new or rediscovered. That layer is what connects domains that otherwise look unrelated.
None of which means we study every vertical at once, or that we are experts across all of them. While we're working to build a team and network of the best specialists, we know that the questions we care about don't sit inside just one domain of expertise, and that they require creative, polymathic strategies and collaboration. That is what we already do well: moving between domains that look separate from each other and finding the relations and the obvious-in-hindsight truths that only surface from a distance.
Our focal research subjects, as the name says, are pop-up cities and the formats and technology immediately adjacent to them. They are not only where people building better systems gather, but where those systems get run for real: admission, money, governance, dispute handling and identity, largely from scratch, on real people, within weeks. You can read the full reasoning on 'why pop-up cities' here.
We published Pop-up City Report (v1.0) under CC BY 4.0: 103 pages, the first structured cross-case study of the format. It draws on 92 coded interviews across 54 communities and 337 desk sources, tests 22 hypotheses, profiles 12 focal cases in depth, and reports 7 key findings. We also publish shorter analytical pieces and frameworks that operators, residents, funders and host jurisdictions can pick up and use.
Jimin, our founder, has given talks at EthPrague and Futura Camp. The team spoke on a panel with Mark Lutter of the Charter Cities Institute and Yesh of ZuGrama, ran an introductory session on pop-up cities at Parallel Society Conference, and facilitated Logos Circle in New York, a discussion session at Proof of Retreat. We have participated in Network School, Edge City Lanna, Futura Camp (ZuBerlin), Vitalia, Proof of Retreat #2, Frontier Tower SF, and Edge City Patagonia, visited [ ], Forma Bristol, Crecimiento, Ârc, and Invisible Garden, and hosted or helped host sessions and residencies on pop-up cities, art and longevity.
We built the brand system and website for Proof of Retreat, and helped shape their brand strategy and operating software. We partner with xyz.city, an aggregator of pop-up cities, network states and special economic zones run by delta Y, on documentation and ecosystem growth.
If you build, run, fund, host or study any of this, we would like to hear from you. Get in touch or follow us on X to keep up with the initiative and the space around it.