Maybe you don’t think of yourself as a pioneer, but we do. By virtue of having been part of an emergent “pop-up city”, you helped pioneer new forms of governance, economy, and culture, and likely witnessed or contributed to the development of frontier projects within the community.

Pop-up cities, in the sense we use the term here, are temporary, city-like communities where people co-live, co-work, and experiment with new forms of culture, governance, and economic life. They are characterised by:

• Short duration: a few weeks to a few months

• Relatively large size: roughly 100 to 1,000+ short- and long-term residents

• Techno-optimist populations with strong overlap across crypto, longevity, AI, governance, neurotech, and art

• Project acceleration dynamics: startups, research collaborations, art projects, and policy ideas

The term “pop-up city” became widely adopted starting in 2023 with the emergence of Zuzalu, and later with Zuzalu-like communities such as Vitalia City, Edge City, the Mu, and dozens of others.

There is no single agreed model for these communities. Some frame themselves as proto-cities or “network societies”; others look more like retreats or residencies. Some prioritise product-building, while others focus on governance, science, or community healing. Some are embedded within specific legal structures (such as special economic zones). We treat these as variations within a broader class of temporary, experimental, city-like communities, and ask how different configurations perform in practice.

For one, pop-up cities remain poorly understood. The concept is both overloaded and underspecified: full of promise, yet short on grounded accounts of what is actually happening on the ground. We aim to offer a more precise description of the phenomenon for people who do not yet have a vocabulary for it, or who currently encounter it only through second-hand hype or criticism.

A second motivation is the gap between potential and practice. Plenty of tools, companies, and movements can already trace part of their origin to temporary, experimental communities of this kind. The Pop-up City Research Initiative included. 

As project founders, we met in a pop-up city and lived in such environments for approximately two years, plenty of time to feel both appreciation and concern for the broader movement. Our aim is not to prescribe a single ideal model, but to study what works, for whom, and under what conditions.

On the positive side, a well-run pop-up city can compress years of networking, collaboration, and learning into a single, focused period. People form relationships and ship work that would be difficult to replicate in siloed, traditional environments. Norms of generosity, openness, vulnerability, and high personal agency can make everyday life feel unusually aligned.

On the critical side, we repeatedly hear about and observe similar structural challenges: ambiguous or improvised governance arrangements; opaque or inconsistent selection processes; heavy emotional and logistical burden on a small number of organisers; and uncertainty around legal status, immigration, and local integration.

We are here to aggregate and amplify these observations in a constructive manner. Over time, we hope this work contributes to an ecosystem in which temporary, pop-up communities are neither over-hyped nor dismissed, but understood as one of several viable tools for cultivating meaningful innovation and contribution across technology, science, and the arts.

This is a rationale for the Pop-up City Research Initiative.