Introducing Edge City Lanna

A welcome letter from the organizers

Hey folks! Per tradition, we are sharing a welcome essay for our next popup village to give you a sense of what to expect. Applications are live (apply asap!) and we’ll share details about how to buy your tickets next week. 

We’re incredibly excited to officially welcome you to our next popup village, Edge City Lanna, which will take place this fall, October 10th - November 10th in beautiful Chiang Mai, Thailand. Like all of our events, this will be an immersive month, designed for people who believe the future can be better and are actively working to make it happen. 

Lanna is an IRL experimentation lab for new ideas, tech, culture, and organizations, all dedicated to accelerating human flourishing. We aim for this to be the healthiest and most productive month of your year — a place to go deep in your work and learn from fellow experts in other fields while incubating novel technology and ways of living.

Welcome to Chiang Mai!

We are so excited to spend a month in Chiang Mai, a city where ancient history meets cutting-edge innovation. Nestled in the mountains of Northern Thailand, it offers 700-year-old temples, bustling markets, and a vibrant modern culture.

Start your day meditating in peaceful temples and end it by exploring and building the latest advancements in frontier tech. Chiang Mai is also famous for its incredible food scene, offering everything from amazing street food to world-class fine dining. Beyond food, the city is a hub for health and wellness, where it is easy to incorporate daily practices like yoga and Muay Thai. With its deep roots in traditional and modern wellness, Chiang Mai provides the perfect environment to nurture both your physical and mental well-being.

Join us in this dynamic setting to live, learn, and experiment with frontier projects, and be part of a community committed to advancing human flourishing—both in the world and in our own lives.

Local Collaboration

We are excited to be working with John Ho (the founder of Alt_Coliving) and Pat from Idext, our local collaborators in Chiang Mai. They bring a huge wealth of experience in gathering people, having built some of the most beloved coliving and coworking spaces in the city. John and Pat want to see Chiang Mai continue to flourish as a city with a strong innovation and startup founder ecosystem.

John and Pat were the ones who suggested the name Lanna, which refers to the ancient kingdom that once flourished in this region, known for its rich cultural heritage and history. "Lanna" means "a million rice fields," symbolizing abundance, prosperity, and the interconnectedness of community life.

For us at Edge City, this type of local collaboration is a huge reason for doing popup village projects. We see our gatherings as a way to plant seeds with full-time locations and bring energy that can have a lasting impact on a space and a community. We hope to give back to Chiang Mai and help catalyze what Alt Coliving wants to achieve. 

Road to DevCon 

Our village is taking place the month before DevCon in Bangkok, Nov 12-15 and we are excited to support many builders who will be using their time at Lanna to develop ideas and projects to present at the conference. 

We are also hosting and actively supporting teams like ZuPass, Cursive Labs and others, who are creating technology that will be deeply integrated into the logistics of the conference. If you intend to be at DevCon, we’d love for you to join us beforehand! 

One of our primary goals with Edge City is to be a connection point between the Ethereum ecosystem and other areas of frontier tech, including our thematic focus areas (more on that below), as well as nascent movements like d/acc, Protocol Worlds, Network Nations, and many others. So we are excited to be a place where the leaders from these industries can spend meaningful time developing relationships and collaborations. 

The Experience

You can think of Edge City Lanna as a combination of a multigenerational community and a college campus. Here’s how the experience will look concretely:

• During the week: After a healthy breakfast, you’ll spend the daytime in deep work. We provide infrastructure for you to be productive, whether you need a day of focus, give a workshop in a specific topic area, or run a retreat day for your team. We’re here to create the playground and support logistically with bringing your initiative to life.

• Each weekend: There will be programs and unconferences, as well as activities and opportunities to meet people like salons and group hikes in the surrounding mountains.

We recognize everyone will be working different time zones and as a result, the main co-working hub will be open 24/7. 

Principles

In line with past events, here are some of our designs goals for Edge City Lanna: 

Emphasis on creation: At Edge City Lanna, we’re focused on building, moving beyond mere consumption of knowledge. The emphasis is on hands-on applications and experiments, with the goal of fostering new technologies, cultures, ideas, and organizations during our month together.

Participation: At Edge City, we focused on emergence, which means the experience is co-created by all participants. Everyone contributes something, whether by leading a workshop, organizing an activity, encouraging a group to deep work daily, prototyping a project and gathering feedback, or simply sharing their knowledge and skills. This collective effort creates a vibrant and enriching environment for everyone.

Healthy living as the norm: Our village promotes health and longevity as a default. This includes organized community workouts, nutritious meals made from local organic ingredients, weekly farmers markets, and partnerships with local restaurants to minimize seed oil use. We aim for all participants to leave healthier than they arrived.

Building a multigenerational community: Our community will include everyone from toddlers to centenarians, fostering an environment where different life stages interact and learn from each other, breaking away from the typical age-segregated settings.

Importance of social technology: We value social technology as much as hardware and software. This fall, we will explore not only new tech but also innovative ways of living and building community together. 

Themes

We are continuing the overarching themes that we’ve developed in past events, like Edge Esmeralda, and we are excited to integrate leaders in these fields from a new part of the world. Elements of each theme will be spread throughout the month to encourage learning and collaboration between experts in different fields.

Why popup villages? 

We are excited and honored to continue the tradition of popup villages and Zuzalu-inspired events. We look forward to collaborating with other Zu-villages for Lanna. 

We see popup villages as accelerators of kinship and affinity. These types of shared experiences are helping expand the ecosystem of individuals who want to build a better future, growing the interconnected network of communities throughout the world. 

We also see popup villages as important places for knowledge exchange and multidisciplinary collaboration, which is important in developing new insights across fields and thoughtfully accelerating progress. Indeed, many of the most important innovations came from breakthroughs that combined diverse fields of knowledge. 

Whether this is your first popup village experience or you’ve been to them all, we know that you’ll have a meaningful experience at Lanna, and we can’t wait to have you co-create it with us.  

Make sure to apply soon to lock in your spot! 

See you soon ☀️