Placemaking vs. Mission-Shaping

The article, written by Venkatesh Rao, argues that popup cities such as Edge Lanna in Chiang Mai, Thailand, show a central tension between placemaking, which creates a space people want to live fully in, and mission-shaping, which creates a context for specific projects. Rao notes that Edge Lanna is one of about a dozen popup cities in the region, and that he is there to help run Protocol Worlds, a week-long simulation of holographic cities. He describes the Ethereum ecosystem as a nomadic scene with no fixed geography, and says the popup city movement is a placemaking-oriented extension of it. He also says Vitalik Buterin helped inspire the Zuzalu-descended popup cities, and contrasts them with Balaji Srinivasan's Network School in Malaysia.