Edge Esmerelda Retrospective: How Pop-Up Villages Are Incubating Meaningful Community

Earlier this summer I attended Edge Esmerelda, a month long popup village in Healdsburg, California, which describes its mission as to “live in a healthy and productive community focused on incubating novel technologies and ways of living.”

I came without much expectation, and walked away floored with how well the vision was executed upon. Many people, myself included, reported that the week spent there was among the most meaningful and productive that they’ve had in a long time.

In many ways, it felt just like I was back in college, filled with the abundance of social connection, interesting opportunities, and serendipitous encounters that make college such a transformative and meaningful time. It made me question why living in such a fashion was not possible in our daily lives. As the seed experiment for a permanent community to be built nearby, the event organizers are working to do just that.

Thinking about my experience in the village, I set out to analyze and uncover what structural features made the week feel so connective, generative, and meaningful. Hopefully, through exploring these experiments in depth, we can begin to sketch a picture of what sort of qualities are necessary to bring that level of meaning and connection into the everyday lives of average Americans.

Hardware vs. Software

The first thing I want to draw attention to is the distinction between what i’ll call the “Hardware” and “Software” features of a community. The hardware features are the physical design features like the place that the community is in, the design of the town and the buildings, and the natural features nearby. Much of the marketing for the village focused on these aspects —- it would be a chance to experiment with moving out of the car-centric big cities that most attendees came from, and living instead in a small, walkable ‘village’.

Touted were features such as “Serendipity Lane” the 7 minute bike path that ran through town, and the series of communal shelling points and venues that were scattered across town. Notably, much of the conference revolved around the central square in Healdsburg, a grass plaza in the middle of town that was a host for many of the festivities.

Software, on the other hand can be thought of as the ‘operating system’ of society. These are the non-physical layer of values, design principles, and programming that cohere the community together and create the vibe of the village.

Though much is made of the role of urban design in exacerbating the crisis of disconnection, what I found at Edge was that, while the hardware aspect was important, it paled in comparison to the software in terms of actually creating the meaningful experiences.

Hardware

Small, Walkable Community

Living in a small community where we could walk or bike to most places was definitely as awesome as advertised. Instead of having to get into my car and drive around in an isolating way, I got to sink in and be a part of the place that I was in. I could get a feel for the town and its residents, shops, and quirks as I walked past. I had time to think, and take phone calls, and infuse more spaciousness into my day as I walked around.

The plaza was an especially useful feature. It functioned very much like a quad does on a college campus. At any given moment, particularly in the evenings after people were done working, I could walk to the plaza and was pretty much guaranteed to run into friends, or an interesting group of people gathering that I could join. The experience of going through a central shelling point to get to a workshop or a meeting and running into friends makes the world feel smaller and more connective.

Lots of 3rd Spaces and Design For Serendipity

Another important hardware feature was the plethora of 3rd spaces. For every activity — from work and eating to leisure, exercise, and play, there was a space to do that activity in community. If you went to one of the hotel lobbies, co-working spots, coffee shops, or community centers, chances are you would bump into a friend and get drawn into an interesting conversation. Instead of eating breakfast alone in my apartment, I would go to the Hotel Trio and have my breakfast in community.

Just this small change as a start to my day would be enough to boost my mood and encourage more connectivity later on. Connection begets more connection, and isolation begets more isolation —- tiny connective interactions throughout your day create a positive feedback loop generating more connection as the day continues.

The combination of the plaza and bike lane, together with the 3rd spaces, meant that whatever mode you were in — whether you needed to get work done and focus, or wanted to relax and lounge, this was something that you could reliably do in connection with others without any sort of coordination or planning.

I had many experiences of this serendipity that led to completely unplanned and unexpected adventures. There was one day where I went out for a walk, and ran into a couple friends in the plaza who led to me an event on the other side of town, where we ran into someone else that eventually led to a spontaneous pool party that evening. None of that would’ve been possible were it not for the hardware feature of a small, walkable town with lots of overlapping spaces to run into people.

Co-living

The last piece of hardware that greatly enhanced the sense of meaning and connection was a co-living house. My friend had rented a 10 person house right in the center of town that was filled with friends and interesting people. This meant that, at any point in the day, whether I was cooking food, or winding down playing guitar in the evening, I would have friends around to share that experience with. Living with friends is the easiest, most surefire way to bring more social connection into your lives and radically increase the surface area of possibility for meaning in your day-to-day life. For the week, that meant that at all aspects of the day I could be surrounded by interesting people who I had a high probability of connecting with.

The way we live in most American cities and towns is default alone, with community as an extra bonus — if you work extremely hard to coordinate it. In every day life, if you want to go out for a walk to get some fresh air, or get some writing done, it is extremely difficult to do so with friends. You can go to your local park, but you’re unlikely to run into anyone you know. You can go to a coffee shop, but these are atomized, transactional spaces where you feel more like a customer than a community member. If you want to do anything with friends, it requires text threads and planning, coordinating all of your hectic schedules together to the point where you usually can’t find a time that works without weeks of advance notice. In contrast, by enabling micro-moments of connection where our cities encourage atomization, Edge Esmerelda created an atmosphere of connection as the default option.

Software

If I were to have moved to Healdsburg during a random month, it’s highly unlikely that I would’ve felt nearly that level of meaning and connectedness that I found at Edge Esmerelda. The design features of the physical city provided the foundation, but it’s really the software —- the intentional programming, shared values and identity, and social design features —- that created the magic of the pop-up village.

Shared Identity, Values, Purpose and Rituals

The most essential feature of the village was that everyone was there for the same reason. We weren’t merely living in the town of Healdsburg going about our individual business. We were participants in this experiment, united under the banner of Edge Esmerelda.

That container gave us all a shared identity. When I ran into someone at a coffee shop, for instance, I would know instantly that we have something important in common: we were all attending this unique experience together. The fact that this self selecting group of people all decided to spend a large part of our summer participating in this niche experiment meant that there was a high likelihood that we had values in common.

The people I met at Edge were some of the most ambitious, open, curious, and interesting people that I’ve met. The chance that any given person who was attending would be an interesting conversation partner and new friend was extremely high as a result. This meant that the constant serendipity encouraged by the design of the space actually had some glue to hold it together. I wasn’t just running into random people, but into friends and potential friends, united under a shared identity, with shared values. This also made it very easy to engage strangers and make new friends, because you had an instant and easy point of connection.

The shared purpose —- being there for the pop up village — created a shared identity as ‘citizens’ of Edge Esmerelda, which was bound together by shared values like ambition, openness, curiosity, community. This was all cohered by rituals that bound us together underneath those banners. There was an opening ceremony designed to get the wheels of connection spinning, nightly family style dinners, as well as daily movement and reflection groups. The combination of a shared purpose, identity, culture with the hardware features above ensured not just a high density of social connection but also, more importantly, a high quality of that connection.

Intentional Programming

The second critical software feature that made Edge Esmerelda feel like such a meaningful communal experience was the intentional programming. At Edge, there was a packed schedule and you could find something interesting and meaningful to do with someone at pretty much any moment. There were movement classes in the morning, lectures and workshops throughout the day, and dinners and parties throughout the evening. There were no ground rules as far as what programming was allowed, and events covered everything under the sun. There was more standard fare conference talks about people’s work, but also sessions on animal telepathy, fertility, regenerative farming, acroyoga, and the aptly named “kids at the pool.”

Intentional programming is the glue that holds communities together. It’s the connective tissue by which relationships are able to be formed. It serves as beacon connecting people in the community who share values, interests, and goals, bringing them together to gather around those things. Living on a beautiful small campus without any sort of programming is like having a laptop without software —- it might look pretty, but its functionally useless.

Combining thoughtful intentional programming within a shared context of values, purpose, and identity is the recipe for a highly connective space, where people who are already operating within a larger framework of shared meaning come together to build experiences together.

Agency, Emergence, Co-Creation: The Ingredients of Aliveness

The most meaningful experiences, places, and communities that I have been a part of have almost always been nearly impossible to describe to someone outside of the container. Edge Esmerelda often had the same quality. When trying to explain to other people what the event was, I found myself often struggling to come up with the right words to describe it.

This is a critical feature of the system, and not a bug. The village was hard to describe because it wasn’t any one thing. The activity of the village was, in principle, not something that could have been planned in advance. Each event came to be because someone who was attending the village decided that there was something inside of them that they wanted to bring into connection with the community. In aggregate, that meant that the whole experience was merely an amalgamation of what happened to be alive for the 1200 attendees at a given moment.

This was an explicit design principle from the organizers. They described their job as “creating the conditions for you, the attendees, to engage and build awesome things on top of the structure we provide.” By providing a container within which people could bring forth whatever was alive for them, they enabled a kaleidoscope of meaning to emerge from the participants.

It’s hard to stress just how crucial this is. The difference in meaning between a top down set of events organized by a committee and a bottom-up emergent co-created event is massive. The emergent quality of the event enables participants to feel a sense of contribution and ownership to the event, which enables a heightened sense of connectedness to the community and fellow participants. As Ian Corbin describes in Commonweal:

“the opposite of loneliness is shared agency. When you and I value the same things, and pursue those things together, what might have been a competitive, zero-sum relationship becomes one of solidarity—of shared risk and reward, of mutual aid, even of loving care or shared identity.”

We were not merely attendees of this pop-up village, but we were all co-creating the village, spontaneously in each moment, like an improvised symphony of 1200 instruments playing their most meaningful notes. Whether it was through building solar A-frames, hosting workout classes, leading workshops on mental health, or creating rituals for the community, each person found some way to contribute to a small slice of making the village a reality.

Furthermore, it allows the day-to-day happenings of the event to be comprised exactly of the most meaningful things to attendees. This means that when you connect with fellow attendees, you aren’t just socializing or getting to know each other on a surface level like you would at a happy hour or a networking event. You are getting to directly interface with people’s deepest values and sources of meaning.

This sense of shared agentic purpose, centered around our core values, is what was primarily responsible the feelings of solidarity, meaning, and connection that I experienced at Edge Esmerelda.

Different Modes of Being/Combining Inner and Outer Worlds

The final software feature that distinguished the experience at Edge Esmerelda was the ability to connect in different modes of being. In just one week at Edge, I was able to connect with people intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually, around work, leisure, and play.

I remember going from a brainstorm about some ideas I was working on, to a creativity and emotions workshop which then led into a pool party and a late night jam session. Being able to bring in all of those sides of myself, which are normally split off into different contexts, made the whole experience feel much more authentically mine.

Perhaps the most important way that Edge Esmerelda enabled expression through different modes of being was through the fusion of our inner and outer worlds. Toby Shorin, a researcher who is creating Care Culture, led this aspect of the village through his Concept Clinic experiment.

His goal with the clinic was to seamlessly integrate inner work into the skeleton of the community. There was a pop up therapy clinic, mens and women's groups, sound journeys, breathwork, yoga, dance, and emotional/relational work all throughout the month. This was all happening concurrently, in the same place, at the same time, and with the same people as workshops on A.I., crypto, and all the other professional interests of the attendees.

In modern American life, there is often a strong sense of fracture between your private inner self and your public outer self. Therapy is something done 1 on 1, in the privacy of an enclosed office or your bedroom. The friends that you are able to have deep conversations about your emotions are not usually the people you are working and collaborating on projects with. This frequently manifests as tension and inner conflict, as your deeper desires and feelings have to be suppressed in your work or in the public sphere.

But Edge Esmerelda felt like the opposite. The concept clinic especially encouraged a fusion of inner and outer world. The people that I went through a deep emotional process with were the same person that, two days later, I was having a mind-meld conversation about a project we wanted to collaborate on.

That sense of inner-outer alignment meant that life felt integrated there in a way that it hardly does in the modern world. You could bring your full self to any endeavor, and never had to check your authenticity at the door in order to participate the fruits of public life.

Our lives feel meaningful when the outer manifestation of our actions, activities, and projects corresponds to the inner reality within us. So much of the core dissatisfaction of liberal modernity comes from the separation of the spiritual, emotional, and aesthetic from the social, political, and economic. By encouraging the unity of inner and outer world through the concept clinic and other activities, Edge Esmerelda promoted a sense of integration and meaningfulness that portends as an essential part of addressing the meaning crisis.

Conclusion: How Do We Export This?

Someone might read this and object that this was a conference and festival —of course you’re going to have a high degree of meaning and connection in such a context. After all, isn’t that the whole point of that kind of gathering?

While that is true, this objection speaks to one of the most essential features of the pop-up village as an experiment. It was designed to be a month long prototype for a permanent setting. The point of the village is to experiment with how to take the energy and generative spirit that you find at a conference or a festival and make that a longer term, more permanent feature of people’s lives. While shared values, intentional programing, agency and a chance to exist in different modes is the entire point of conferences and festivals like this, there is no reason why we couldn’t make those features a more permanent feature of our towns and cities.

What would it be like if we took that energy and made it a permanent fixture of our civic life?

The organizers planted a flag, provided a shared context, and the physical and digital infrastructure necessary for coordination, but the bulk of the of the village was created by the attendees themselves.

This means that the logistical and financial overhead to create this sort of meaningful participation in our everyday lives is actually quite low. What’s really needed is a high degree of agency and social capital.

Take the “kids at the pool” event for example. Creating this event — a wonderful way for families with kids to come together at the event, connect, and share the duties of childcare, merely required somebody taking the initiative to add it to the calendar and show up at the pool. All that was required is a shared calendar, a pool, and the will and initiative to coordinate. We can work to take those design tools and port them to existing neighborhoods and communities.

There are already lots of emergent projects dedicated to doing just that. Esmerelda, who hosted this event, is working on building a permanent town with these qualities. Culdesac is working on creating walkable villages to replace isolating car-centric suburbs. Cabin is working on cohering neighborhoods together to build stronger connections, and LiveNearFriends is working on making co-living with your friends more accessible. Care Culture is trying to make the concept clinic integrated in our cities, and Weave is an app working to bring more emergent intentional community to American cities. Hopefully, with more villages being planned in the future, there will be many more projects that emerge to address the crisis of disconnection we are facing.

The systemic social, political, and economic factors that have torn apart the social fabric are deeply entrenched, and working on rebuilding our shared identity, values, and sense of agency is no easy task. Fixing a culture that has been decimated by decades of atomizing, individualistic neoliberalism is a gargantuan task, but hopefully experiments like Edge Esmerelda can give us a hint of what sort of north stars to build towards. I certainly left my time in Healdsburg with a sense of hope, excitement, and desire to get to work creating a world where meaning and connection becomes the default mode of being once again.

Thanks to

Cissy Hu

for reading a draft of this essay and inspiring me to share my work online