Earlier this summer, I co-organized a month-long 1,300-person "popup village" in Healdsburg, CA called Edge Esmeralda. This gathering was incredibly fun and rewarding in its own right, and it was also a huge accelerant to the creation of the permanent village we are building, Esmeralda.


A huge challenge when building a town is that the feedback loops are very, very long. Instead of accepting this fact, I decided that we have to get creative to find ways to learn and adjust, because within a few years we will literally be laying our plans in concrete.

Edge Esmeralda was essentially a prototype to learn about how we want to approach building the Esmeralda permanent community, both the "hardware" (urbanism, infrastructure, architecture, etc) and the "software" (events, programming, culture, etc).



The Edge Esmeralda "popup village" was 30 days long, and it took place scattered throughout a charming 11,000-person town in Sonoma County called Healdsburg. This extended gathering gave us an opportunity to put our ideas into practice and learn firsthand which ones we want to incorporate as we the permanent community — more importantly, which ones we'll want to leave behind, or at least adjust.

These learnings ranged widely, such as:
  • What makes a great town square
  • How to integrate kids while maintaining expert-level programming
  • Where to provide the lightest amount of structure and routine for the group to allow the emergent creativity of the attendees to make awesome things happen
  • How to approach local outreach to make existing residents feel included
  • Which restaurant layouts and acoustics make for the best nightly community dinners
  • How far apart is too far apart for things to feel easily accessible on foot

It's hard to capture EE in a blog post — it was really more of an ecosystem like a college campus or city than a single tracked event — but these stats will give you a sense of what the month looked like:
  • ~1,300 people joined us during the month of June
    • 80 kids attended Edge Esmeralda
    • 6 weeks old & 86 years old, the ages of the youngest & oldest attendees
  • 25 expert-led program tracks
  • 551 sessions throughout the month
    • 93% were organized by attendees, with just 7% planned directly by the Edge Esmeralda organizing team!
    • 167 unique session hosts
  • 3x increase in Bird Bike usage in the town during the event – and that doesn’t even count the bikes people rented or brought, separate from Bird, which was a much larger number!
  • 350 redwood trees funded by donations from a solar-powered night market, organized entirely by attendees

The coolest thing to me is that our design principles focused on emergence, so we didn’t actually know precisely what would happen. Instead, we created the container and then watched it unfold. In other words, all the cool things that happened were because the attendees saw it as an opportunity to make something awesome out of it.

One of my favorite examples was the Solar A-frames project, catalyzed by Nick Foley and Anson Yu/ Over the course of a few weeks, they led a group of attendees to build an A-frame made out of solar panels up in a formerly burned redwood forest close to town, which ended up hosting the spectacular Golden Future Night Market and the memorable Closing Ceremony.


I feel incredibly lucky to have gotten to collaborate with Edge City to make Edge Esmeralda a reality. It's one of the most rewarding things I've ever worked on, and they were incredible partners in bringing this to life.

"Edge Esmeralda was one of the weirdest, wildest, most ambitious, most unexpected — and most fun — things I’ve ever watched unfold in Healdsburg."
— Simone Wilson, Healdsburg Tribune

In fact we had such a good time, and so many people asked us to do it again so they could come longer next time, that we have decided that we're going to organize Edge Esmeralda again! Mark your calendars: May 24 - June 21, 2025. Hope to see you there!