Incubating New Societies: The Rise of Pop-Up Cities with Timour Kosters │ S4 Bonus 🏙️🎧

Tereza Bizkova, Maya Dentzel

18 Mar 2025 • 2 min read

Can temporary pop-up cities incubate the future of society?

In this Bonus Episode of Season 4, The Regeneration Nexus, of the ReFi Podcast, hosts Maya Dentzel and Tereza Bízková welcome Timour Kosters, co-founder of Edge City, a project pioneering the pop-up city model. These temporary, month-long communities bring together people from technology, governance, science, and culture to test new ideas for living, collaborating, and building the future.

From community currencies and decentralized governance to public goods funding and real-world resilience, Edge City is testing new models of living, collaborating, and innovating—all in real time.

Inspired by Vitalik Buterin’s Zuzalu experiment, these 1-2 months communities go beyond conferences to create a space where people don’t just talk about the future—they live it.

While Edge City doesn’t explicitly position itself as a “regenerative” project, its theory of change is deeply aligned with regenerative principles—emphasizing community resilience, interdisciplinary collaboration, and self-sustaining ecosystems.

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“We need more spaces for this kind of thinking, for this kind of experimentation, and we need to create places where people from a lot of different fields come together. It’s not like a conference where you exchange contacts and never talk again. It’s about meaningful time with people, going deep on ideas, and actually incubating projects in a real-world setting.”

Key insights from the Bonus episode include... 💡

Pop-up cities are not conferences—they’re living labs. Unlike traditional events, Edge City provides deep, immersive collaboration, where attendees co-create governance, funding models, and social structures in real time.
Governance, coordination, and public goods are being reimagined. Attendees experiment with local currencies, AI-assisted decision-making, and decentralized funding models to explore new ways of organizing society.
Edge City is not just a temporary experiment—it’s a blueprint. The movement is scaling, with upcoming pop-ups aiming to transition from temporary villages to permanent communities.

🎧 Tune in to Episode with Timour

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