Choose Your Own (Popup City) Adventure by Denisa Lepadatu

This is a guest post, first published on Denisa Lepadatu's Substack and shared here with permission. The views are Denisa's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Edge City.  

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After having spent the month of June at Edge Esmeralda (Healdsburg, CA), I learnt the basic lessons of “pop-up city survival”:

• Pop-up cities are Choose Your Own Adventure stories. You’re in charge of your time and there’s no playbook to follow. Some days are about sunrise meditation and locking in the co-working area, other days are about hopping from place to place like a born-to-be social butterfly. This flexibility forces you to develop good time management skills and, if you appreciate that, it’s easy to structure life and its moving parts to achieve what you want in the pop-up.
• Turning FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) into JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out) won’t always work. I missed too many morning writing sessions to have any joy left about it.
• Approach it with curiosity and confidence. It’s a safe space for trying out, failing, and enjoying failing. And if you win, there’s always a “stranger” who will root for you.
  • Note: in an environment that curates for the open-minded, ambitious, and intellectually entertaining folks, no one is quite literally a “stranger”. It’s like flowers in a botanical garden: you may not look much alike but leaves in the wind speak the same language.

You’d think that, with this basic playbook etched in the back of my brain, coming into Edge Lanna (in Chiang Mai, Thailand) would be a deciphered adventure, with clear rules and plans set out. Instead, it felt more like stepping into the newly-written fictional world of a familiar author: comfort balanced by adrenaline rushes and confusion, and ultimately, self-discovery and surprise.

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12,000 km away from the Californian adventure, the plot had novel settings and characters, and I had forgotten the intensity of such a place. I entered phases of

1. Adaptation,
2. Deeply-rooted enjoyment, and
3. “I can’t believe this is ending, my bucket list is growing, my friends are here for 3 more days only, the day has 24 hours but luckily the sauna is open 12 of those so I can soak my sadness and FOMO in the steam there”.

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The first week of programming was the reason I joined Lanna. Having co-organized the longevity biotech week, my “Adaptation” phase (where am I and who is everyone?) forcedly overlapped with the bulk of work to be done – bringing in our international speakers and getting the Lanna residents excited about longevity biotech, all logistical aspects considered.

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The deeply-rooted enjoyment stems from nothing more than… existing there. I split my days between health improvement, cultural exploration, serendipitous and planned encounters with people, and work. In short, holistic self-improvement. Each day differs from the previous and the next, but one thing stays true: you could easily accomplish most of the above on a mere walk to and from an event venue. i.e., get a healthy dose of exercise, chat with others walking in the same direction, and see enough of the local daily life and environment.

Speaking of events, the co-curation of the programming (having everyone contribute with interactive and fun sessions throughout the weeks, considerably more than the Edge City team itself would or could organize) is what makes the place special. Most of the time I felt like a homeschooled child, asking questions to those who spent lifetimes learning about my curiosities, side by side with (literal) kids half my age. It takes a village to raise a child, except we all alternated between being the child and the village.

Other times, I felt like a teen bathing in the amount of exploratory things I could do in this new space. The sun hits your face, you don't know where you’re going and anything about the language, but you’re determined to find the cute underrated cafes (usually in someone’s backyard). Cultural novelty truly adds up to the experience: the taste of pad thai and mangosteen (although I never ate Thai food before or after), the 7/11 entrance beep, the daily walks on the bridge across the river.

A considerable amount of social engineering goes into making sure no one feels alienated. If I were to choose one thing Edge City is best at, that would be maximizing chance encounters and deep conversations through the types of events organized, venue layout, activities, questions asked, etc. To a certain extent, finding your best people becomes a numbers game. Once your circle reaches a golden ratio of friends and acquaintances, social satisfaction makes the whole place feel like a friendly neighbourhood.

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Or, like a college campus. I find the analogy of a pop-up city to a revamped, short-term college campus genuinely true. You live with friends (it’s a high-trust, easy-access community), with unbounded freedom to explore and access to knowledge. Edge City specifically is an aggregation of third spaces to me, where home, work and social spaces are combined, and inhabited by well-curated folks you want to spend time with.

Leaving this space is hard. Not enough people talk about the mental, emotional, and physical, state one enters once the pop-up city is over. Like a wave’s backwash, Chiang Mai emptied out after the end of Edge Lanna and the community reverted to its decentralized state. Past experience tells me that if birds of a feather flock together, these “birds” are amongst the most likely to prove intentionality, – and to intersect again and again in few-months-long loops.

Until the next one.

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This is a guest post, first published on Denisa Lepadatu's Substack and shared here with permission. The views are Denisa's own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Edge City.