This transcript is generated with the help of AI and is lightly edited for clarity.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
Cities are the platforms that we build our lives on. So if our cities are unhealthy, or if our cities are inefficient, then our lives are unhealthy and inefficient. On the other hand, if we can build them to be beautiful, supportive places, then we can live better lives. And that sounds very grandiose, but I think it’s, it’s true. If your electricity is unreliable, it’s somewhat unlikely that you’re going to develop the next amazing technology. If you have a great transportation system, the possibilities are endless for the people that you can meet and the opportunities that you have access to. So I think really cities are—begin to define what is and is not possible in your life.
REID:
Hi, I’m Reid Hoffman.
ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.
REID:
We want to know what happens, if in the future, everything breaks humanity’s way. What we can possibly get right if we leverage technology like AI and our collective effort effectively.
ARIA:
We’re speaking with technologists, ambitious builders, and deep thinkers across many fields—AI, geopolitics, media, healthcare, education, and more.
REID:
These conversations showcase another kind of guest. Whether it’s Inflection’s Pi or OpenAI’s GPT or other AI tools, each episode we use AI to enhance and advance our discussion.
ARIA:
In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it’ll take to get there.
REID:
This is Possible.
REID:
Today, over half of the world’s population lives in cities and their population growth isn’t slowing down. According to the United Nations, by 2030, this number will swell to about 5 billion. Much of this urbanization will unfold in Africa and Asia—bringing huge social, economic and environmental transformations.
ARIA:
Cities of the future will have to get even more creative and innovative when it comes to organizing infrastructure and transportation. Not to mention the issues that are already prevalent—like housing costs and environmental pressures—which add even more weight to what cities are already handling.
REID:
How we have shaped cities and used technologies has always influenced our quality of life. So how can we begin designing cities in a way that is beneficial for our growing population and the environment? How can we ensure that city planning of the future will leverage smart infrastructure, renewable energies, and green spaces? How can we prepare for a sprawling of city dwellers in the next 25 years and beyond without decreasing our quality of life? It’s a big challenge, but also a huge window for positive change. That’s why we’re doubling down with a second episode on the future of cities. If you want to check out our recent conversation with California Forever founder and CEO Jan Sramek, it’s a nice complement to today’s episode with our guest, Devon Zuegel. As the founder and president of the Esmeralda Institute, she’s focused on how smart design, urban economics, and infrastructure can be built to create new cities from scratch.
ARIA:
We spoke to Devon in the middle of her new project called Edge Esmeralda, a pop-up village where the best and brightest future thinkers live, work, and ideate near each other. The month-long experiment took place in northern California and is a prototype of her permanent city: Esmeralda. Esmeralda was inspired by her childhood experiences in Chautauqua, a pedestrian-forward town in western New York that organizes talks, performances, and community events all summer long—organically fostering community bonding. She is inspired to create places where we can continue to learn and connect with one another. Her work tries to answer the question: How can we optimize cities to unlock human potential?
REID:
Here’s our conversation with Devon Zuegel. Devon, welcome to Possible. Before we jump into the future of cities, I want to ask you about something you’ve written. You’ve noted that Steve Jobs’s description of computers as “bicycles of the mind” doesn’t go far enough. As I often describe AI as a steam engine of the mind, I’d love you to say more about your statement.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
Okay. Well, with this question, I have something else in mind that may go in a different direction. I like to think of computers as gardens that you end up cultivating over time, and there’s a bunch of different ways in which that metaphor can go in different directions. But for me, the best aspects of computing are being able to cultivate software ideas and relationships over time. For example, I have been taking notes on my computer ever since I started having one. And seeing notes accrete over time and turn into knowledge, as opposed to just little fragments of ideas. And some of the projects that I’ve worked on ended up starting just as a note that I took randomly at 2:00 AM and then, you know, three years later, I added a little note to it. And treating it like a garden that you have—you have to pull the weeds, you need to organize things and things can really grow and flourish over time. But the key aspect of that metaphor is that it does take time. So you need to make sure that things that are unproductive stimuli are sort of removed from the garden, otherwise they’re going to take over and your whole garden will turn into a jungle. So I think thinking of computing as a living, breathing medium that you have to improve over time is really important.
ARIA:
Well, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I feel like the way that you’re talking about your computing environment, like perhaps is how you also think about, you know, the future of cities and towns and you need to cultivate it. You need to create it. These are the kind of things we’re going to be shaping. And so that’s—again, today you are the second guest in a row—we’re sort of talking about the future of cities, communities, sort of all of these aspects. And you’ve probably studied a lot of cities. Do you have a favorite fictional city that you could tell us about that you think about when you’re sort of creating the cities of the future?
DEVON ZUEGEL:
Ooh, one that jumps to mind is the way that Oxford is depicted in The Golden Compass, which was my favorite book growing up. It’s based on the real Oxford, but it has this sort of fantastical magical aspect as well. And it’s focused around this little girl named Lyra. And she spends her time running around the streets of Oxford with her friends, and she’s sort of raised by professors in Oxford. And a lot of the early parts of the book began with her, like causing some mischief and then having to escape over the rooftops of shops and running down the alleyways. And the thing that I find so evocative about this is that it really feels like an environment that’s designed to create kids who have a lot of agency and independence. The world that it’s set in is before the car.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
So she, even though she’s like, I think, eight, nine years old, she’s running around completely unsupervised because no one’s worried that she’s going to, like, get hit by a car. There’s a little society of children that she’s, she’s sort of the queen of. She ends up having all these games that she plays in that environment. But at the same time, she has the support of experts on all sorts of, in all sorts of domains because they’re the professors at Oxford. And so every once in a while they’ll grab her off the street and pull her in and teach her about physics or like have her learn something about theology. And I think that that’s such a cool environment—one that’s really supportive of independence for young people.
REID:
As you know, Possible is about sketching our brightest version of the future. And one thing that’s interesting about futurism—whether literature, film, art—is, it always intends to include a vision of the city of the future. So what is it about futuristic cities that captures the human imagination and given your work, yours?
DEVON ZUEGEL:
Yeah. Well, this ties back a little bit to the question about computers, I think. Cities are the platforms that we build our lives on. And so if our cities are unhealthy or if our cities are inefficient, then our lives are unhealthy and inefficient. On the other hand, if we can build them to be beautiful, supportive places, then we can live better lives. And that sounds very grandiose, but I think it’s true. If your electricity is unreliable, it’s somewhat unlikely that you’re going to develop the next amazing technology, because it turns out that you need electricity to do a lot of things. But by contrast, if you have a great transportation system, the possibilities are endless for the people that you can meet and the opportunities that you have access to. So I think really cities are—begin to define what is and is not possible in your life.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
And I like to use the platform metaphor because it’s kind of like how with the iPhone, the APIs that the iPhone gives you access to end up determining what developers can create and what experiences can be built on top. And so if they’re—you know, until the moment when the iPhone had GPS, Uber was just not possible. You simply could not build something like Uber on the iPhone. So I see cities as expanding sort of the palette of tools that we have at our disposal to create better lives for ourselves and our families and for our friends.
REID:
Before we go to the next thing, one quick kind of amplifier—not surprising from one of the co-founders of LinkedIn and other things—is, I tend to think of things in networks. So say also a little bit about this—the city as a network—in terms of how you’re thinking, because again, with your computer and the ecosystem, I think that notion of the fact that you’ve got a number of parts in density working together is one of the things that creates the magic. And I’m curious about a little bit more color on that from you.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
Yeah, it’s such a useful metaphor here. Like one of the classic aspects of network theory is the more nodes you add to the network, the more value there is. And value could be defined in a lot of different ways. You know, if it’s the number of telephones on a network, then now suddenly the number of conversations that are possible grows exponentially. I think similarly—I think of cities as places of opportunity. Maybe it’s the opportunity to find a job that you really like. Maybe it’s the opportunity to meet your significant other—somebody who you’re going to spend the rest of your life with. And so it’s, you know, one of the reasons why young people tend to go towards cities like shortly after college—is because it’s the place where they can kind of see the whole range of humanity and possibility, and meet all sorts of different types of people and explore different ideas.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
And then they tend to find their partner, because the dating market in a city is just much deeper and richer than if you go to a small town. In the ideal world, everybody could have access to everything that was going on at all places. I think in some crazy sense of the world, all people will end up living in one in the same exact city. Now there’s reasons why that doesn’t happen. And I’m not even sure if that should happen because there are a lot of other constraints that need to be taken into account. But I think it’s interesting to see countries like Japan or France or Argentina where the primary cities of Tokyo, Paris, and Buenos Aires, they’re by far the dominant cities. People go there because it’s the number one place and it’s the biggest catchment of talent.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
And I think that’s following this sort of network scaling law, where the more people who are there, the more valuable it is. And it turns into this, this flywheel. And I think it’s interesting to contrast against the U.S., where there’s really no one, obviously dominant city. Like New York is the biggest city and probably the single most attractive, but it doesn’t have like a third of the country’s population unlike a place like Buenos Aires. And I think it’s—there’s a lot of reasons for that. Part of it’s because it’s a bigger country. And I use Buenos Aires because my husband is originally from Argentina and it’s been fascinating to see how that country interacts with its city. Basically, everybody ends up in Buenos Aires at some point or another. And what that means is that people can stay close to their families.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
They have much closer relationships, like across generations. And then at the same time they’re doing that without compromising on opportunity, because opportunity is in the same place where their family is. Whereas in the U.S. you end up in this sort of disjointed network. If you’re in the film industry, you’re going to go to L.A. to be in the movies, but maybe your family is in Chicago. And, people end up sort of pulling apart their networks. Basically the bigger a city gets, the more opportunities there are and the more you don’t have to leave a single place.
ARIA:
Yeah, I love that. I’m glad you’re introducing our East Coast, West Coast battle of New York versus San Francisco right at the start, right at the top of the show. I think it’s also interesting to think that cities are both designed, and sort of organic living, breathing ideas. Even if you have the right people and the right network, you can sort of shuttle them in and out of the right places. Do you have a convening hub? Do you have hackathons? Do you have sort of all of the things that will lead to it being sort of a more dynamic place? And so when you think of cities, are there a few—maybe it’s Buenos Aires or Tokyo—that are sort of your favorite? That you think are best designed? Or some that you’re like: Disaster—these are the worst designed cities. Like how do you think about sort of the best and worst from a design perspective?
DEVON ZUEGEL:
Cities are so high dimensional that it’s—I really struggle to say best and worst, but I can describe in certain dimensions whether cities are really good or bad, I think. I feel like a caricature of an urbanist saying that—but I just have to—Tokyo is an incredible city. It’s the biggest metropolitan region in the world with 38 million people. And yet you walk around downtown Tokyo—as long as you’re not on one of the main streets, you walk like one street off of a main street—and you can hear your footsteps walking around. It’s so quiet and peaceful. And to me that’s really symbolic of something bigger, which is that in Japan they figured out how to live a very dense urban life with a lot of humanity close together and all opportunities in close proximity, but in a way that is still livable and peaceful. And we’re not just like—we don’t feel like we’re living all on top of each other. And I find that so inspiring and optimistic because I think it’s hard for most Americans who haven’t been to a place like Japan to imagine that we could live that close together and still have a very pleasant life. And it goes to show just how much we can sort of squeeze out of a space if we have good design and if we’re thoughtful about our infrastructure.
ARIA:
Totally. And so I want to get to Edge Esmeralda, but before we do, every episode we have an element that is AI generated. And so we’re talking about startup cities, sort of how to build these cities. And I want to ask you about our GPT-4o generated story, which was about a futuristic city called Nova Confluence. And it draws from many of the startup cities you’ve studied. And the story goes through a day in the life of three of its inhabitants, each from a different generation. (For listeners, we’ve shared the story in the show notes so you can follow along.) First, if you didn’t love the story, don’t blame me—it was AI created, so no offense taken. But I want to ask: What did you think of the story? Like what do you think it got right about the future of cities and what would you edit when you’re thinking about startup cities in the future?
DEVON ZUEGEL:
So starting with, one thing I loved about it was it was very multi-generational and followed the life of a grandfather and a mother and I think some kids. So something that bothers me about sort of the way I’ve lived my own life—and I think the environments around me have encouraged, unfortunately—is really segregating people by age. And I think that that is a shame because we have so much to learn from different generations, for one thing. Just wisdom in both directions. I think there’s a lot of, for lack of a better word, synergies. In San Francisco, where a lot of my friends live, raising kids, they’re always talking about the cost of childcare. And, you know, who would love to watch your kids? Their grandparents, they’d love to spend time with their grandchildren.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
And they probably won’t charge you for it. We’ve set up our lives so that we tend not to live very close to our parents. So anyway, I really like that aspect of the story, I think. The part that I did not love was—it described the way that a lot of the folks lived was like in towers. I was imagining these shiny towers with lots of green on the ground and like space between the towers. And this is a form of urban planning that people refer to as “Towers in the Park.” And it’s something that an architect named Le Corbusier first promoted in the 20th century.
Pi:
Hi, I’m Pi. Allow me to offer some context on that subject. Le Corbusier, born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter and writer. He was a pioneer of modern architecture and is known for his bold, functional designs that emphasized the use of steel and reinforced concrete. Some of his most famous works include the Villa Savoye, the Notre-Dame du Haut Chapelle, and the Unite d’ Habitation. Le Corbusier’s influence on 20th century architecture is undeniable.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
I think it is not a great form of urbanism for a bunch of reasons. It’s not really human scale and it ends up detracting a lot from street life. One place that has implemented this model heavily is Singapore, which is a country I admire in many, many ways. But I think the result is that you end up having these like big open public green stretches that look cool from a map. It’s like, oh, there’s so much green space, but then functionally it ends up not being really loved by anybody. It’s just a bunch of big, big swaths of grass and then the towers look impressive. And it feels like the towers are like, designed to be photographed in a magazine or for Instagram or something. But actually living there, it’s not super pleasant. And, you know, you spend all your time going up and down in an elevator.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
A model that I greatly prefer and actually can use a similar amount of land is mid-rise development. Paris is one of the prime examples of this, where Paris is about three times more dense population-wise than San Francisco. And so that means that it can use a lot less land. It’s probably the most beloved city in the world, is my guess. Very few of the buildings go over I think eight stories. Most of them are like six stories. And it’s got amazing street life, great community. So yeah, that’s what I would’ve changed about that story.
ARIA:
Can you tell our listeners what Edge Esmeralda is? Like, what is its origin story and, you know, what are some of your unexpected discoveries along the way into building this new city and community?
DEVON ZUEGEL:
Absolutely. Yeah. So Edge Esmeralda is a 1,000 person pop-up village that I’m hosting over the course of the month here in Healdsburg, which is a city just about a little over an hour north of San Francisco. Really charming small town. And the impetus for Edge Esmeralda really started when I was a little girl. I went to this—growing up, I went to this community called Chautauqua, New York every summer. It’s the town where my grandmother lives, and my grandma will remind everyone who will listen that we’ve been going there for seven generations. And Chautauqua is really special. I mentioned at the beginning Oxford and how Lyra, this fictional character, could run around and have freedom. Chautauqua also is—because it’s this small town sort of in the middle of nowhere—it feels completely safe for an eight-year-old to have complete independence and just come home before supper, which I realize is how people used to grow up and is just becoming increasingly rare.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
But something else that makes Chautauqua really special is that every summer for nine weeks, there is a series of programming where people come and give lectures. They have their own symphony orchestra, which is wild because it’s a town of 8,000 people. People from Juilliard will often spend the summer in Chautauqua practicing violin and being part of the symphony orchestra there. I have a strong memory of when I was a little girl, Jane Goodall came and talked about chimpanzees and it blew my mind. I was like, “You can live with chimpanzees? That’s the coolest thing ever.” Really, basically, Chautauqua is kind of like a college campus, but for families to live at. And it’s this beautiful multi-generational place where you go home for lunch with grandma and you hang out on the porch and then you go to a lecture in the afternoon. There’s a Boys and Girls Club.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
And a few years ago I brought my now husband there and as we were walking around, he asked me a very simple question, which was just, “Why aren’t there more places like Chautauqua?” And it literally stopped me in my tracks where I was like, “Yeah, why aren’t there more places like this?” Like, I’d always loved it and it was always a very close place in my heart, but I’d never really thought: Why is this place so special? Why isn’t there anything else like it that I know of? And it got me down this path of creating something like that. So I am on a long term journey of creating a new Chautauqua of the West—something that we can have a very similar experience in California and a town that people can live in full time and have it be centered around lifelong learning.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
And Edge Esmeralda, this event that I’m hosting throughout the month of June, is a prototype of that. We are working with the town of Healdsburg to center events and programming around the square. We have a bike rental program where everyone is encouraged to walk and bike everywhere so that they can get out of their cars. And the part that I’m most excited about is that it’s truly multi-generational. I’ve been in a lot of environments over my life that are very intellectual and built around new ideas and innovation—and that’s great—but usually kids and grandparents are missing from that story. And so this has been a place where people are coming and talking about neurotech self-driving cars, and all sorts of really interesting technology. But also, they’ve also brought their children, their spouses, their parents. And we have three or four generations and a bunch of the families who are here. It’s been an awesome experiment.
REID:
We’re going to dive a little bit more into Edge Esmeralda because we’re very curious—the learnings and the experiments. But let me first start with reading something you wrote about Chautauqua, which is, you write, “The lesson I take from Chautauqua is that you can solve the cold start problem by building a ladder of commitment that people can ascend one step at a time.” Tell us a little bit more about that ladder of commitment and then how it leads to building a permanent city. Where does Edge Esmeralda fit within this ladder of commitment?
DEVON ZUEGEL:
Chautauqua was founded 150 years ago. The way it started was a bunch of Unitarian Sunday school teachers decided that they wanted to go camping together. And they went camping for two weeks on Lake Chautauqua in upstate New York. And they taught each other ideas. Many of them didn’t have access to college, so they both sort of shared Sunday school learnings and, and also other science and, and things like that. And they had such a good time that they came back the next year, and the next year, and then they started bringing other friends. And it became this, this really like a festival of ideas that grew over time. People started building little shacks because they thought, “Well, I’m going to be here next year, so instead of putting up a tent, I might as well have a little home.” And over the course of decades, it became a full fledged town.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
You know, the home that my grandmother lives in is a home. It has air conditioning—thank goodness—and it’s got a kitchen and it’s very comfortable. But there was no single discrete moment where people had to think like, “I’m going to make this huge leap of faith in this community that doesn’t really exist.” Instead, it grew organically. And I think with the kind of community that I’m building, I think it’s a really huge sell to ask people to move full-time somewhere. It’s one of the biggest decisions of your life because, as we were talking about, your environment shapes everything. Also at the same time, it’s going to take a long time to build this place. Construction takes a long, long time. So if you marry those two constraints together, I think the natural thing to fall out of that is you need to give people a taste of what that community is going to be like so that they can get a sense of, “That is something that I actually want to experience longer term. I want to buy a second home there, or I want to make this my primary home.”
DEVON ZUEGEL:
And people really want to know, who are my neighbors going to be? What are the values of this community? And so Edge Esmeralda, I joke, it’s kind of like a giant timeshare presentation because it’s giving all these people a chance to experience that lifestyle in a small town similar to the one that we are looking to build as a village. And it’s also, frankly, been really useful for me because I’m also seeing, even though I have so many learnings from Chautauqua, there are some differences. And, namely, the biggest one is just that the target audience is different. I’m targeting people on the West Coast as opposed to folks on the East Coast. So being able to see what is working well and what’s not working well this June is also informing the design of the village as we build it.
REID:
You’re kind of midway through the path of this experiment. What are you learning so far?
DEVON ZUEGEL:
Oh man. So one of the things that I was both most excited about and most nervous about was incorporating families into the whole thing. So I’ve hosted many events over the last few years. It’s something that—most of them have been smaller, like 150 people for a weekend—and they’ve been really focused on intellectual, community, and innovation, and building things like that. And notably, those have been like really high octane intensity situations where everybody there is really on it—has like a scientific background. And so I wondered, is it going to just ruin it to have kids in there? You know, I love kids, but you know, if you’ve got a two-year-old like screaming in the middle of a presentation about gene editing or something, like it’s going to be a little hard to [laugh] have that balance.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
That was something that we tried to design for here, where instead of having that extremely high intensity three day event, we thought, “Okay, let’s figure out how to make it so it’s a whole month, which allows you to have some events that are adults only and really focused and expert level. But then there’s still some family oriented events.” It’s been really cool to see how that has played out. And, and I mean, I’m biased, but I actually think it’s worked really well and it’s been, it’s made me really happy to see that. One of the things that we’ve done is, for the community dinners that we have each evening, they begin at 5:30 PM and they run till eight so that kids can go to bed afterwards and it doesn’t cut into their bedtime. We’ve also had some events, like, we did a little science experiment where we got biodegradable balloons and filled them with a material that can block some of the radiation that comes from the sun—which could reduce greenhouse gasses.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
And the kids loved it because it’s balloons and it’s science and you’re outside. But it was also like genuine actual science to try to improve the climate. That’s been really cool. And I’ve checked in with a number of the adults to be like, “Hey, is the programming as deep as you would like? Or do you feel like it’s not?” And they said, “Oh, it’s great because I can go to the adults-only stuff if I want intensity and I can go to the kids stuff if I want to have it be more integrated multi-generationally.” So that’s been really cool learning. I feel like we could still do better, you know, this is like a first prototype, but it shows that it is possible to achieve both goals at the same time.
REID:
No, I think that’s a great learning relative to—there’s an obvious through line in a bunch of what you’re thinking between, you know, blending generations and having the generations benefit from that generational blend and that being true in the programming you’re doing in Edge Esmeralda. And that working is awesome to hear.
What would you say is the top positive surprise so far from Edge Esmeralda, and what would you say is the top negative surprise? I wonder maybe a positive surprise is something you were expecting to happen or, or just was awesome. A negative surprise was like, “Oh, that’s something we need to improve and fix.”
DEVON ZUEGEL:
Ooh, yeah. I’ll start with the negative one. I think I really underestimated how challenging it is to do logistics across a town. I’ve always run events, frankly with amazing event coordinators too. I’m not running at all. We’ve always done things in a single building or a single property and with a few buildings maybe. And let me just say, it’s way harder to do logistics when it’s scattered across a town. I don’t need to get into the details of why that is, but I think as a result, some things have been messier and more confusing for people than they need to be. Like, one thing about Chautauqua that I love so much is that the event pavilions are scattered throughout town. So that was what we were trying to recreate here in Healdsburg, but I hadn’t realized how logistically intensive that is.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
And, logistics are everything. What’s that famous general, it’s like “Logistics eats strategy for breakfast.” And I think it’s completely, completely true. And logistics are dramatically underrated by everyone, including me, clearly [laugh]. But that’s something we can improve on and we’ve learned. And even a cool thing about having a month-long event is that stuff that goes wrong the first few days can be improved. And I think it’s already going more smoothly than at the beginning of the month. Positive—I knew this was going to happen, but seeing it in the flesh just feels so good—is people bumping into each other on the street and having, just like seeing their neighbors and friends. One thing that we did to create this was we made sure—there’s a beautiful bike path in Healdsburg that runs from the plaza to up north. And we tried to place all of our venues along the bike path and we’re calling the bike path Serendipity Lane, which allows people to bump into each other as they’re going around. It also, crucially, gives you a way to avoid people if you’re trying to have alone time. So you just go orthogonal to the path and you don’t have to interact with people. And it’s really critical to have that as well because it’s nice to be surrounded by people, but sometimes you need some quiet time.
ARIA:
So I love the values that you’re using to build this. I think Reid and everyone who knows me is sick of me talking about the 15 minute city, or how excited I am for my eight-year-old to just disappear and, you know, come back in time for dinner. But one of my questions is that small towns sometimes don’t survive because they’re too small to have the diversity or dynamism that you need for jobs, for the economy, for that network to grow. So my question for you is like, can—like Chautauqua, I think you said it was 8,000 people—so can these cities or small towns work with 8,000 people to create those jobs? Or does that rely on remote work? Which I would posit is not increasing and not going to take over, but you can debate me on that. Or do we need to build an Edge Esmeralda or Chautauqua that’s like 50,000 people or 100,000 people? Like can we have the dream where the jobs are there too? And does that mean we need to build a bigger city? And does that work? Can you have a bigger city that’s just as safe and exciting and serendipitous as the one you’re trying to create?
DEVON ZUEGEL:
Oh man, there’s so many good questions in that. So I think, to start, Chautauqua is 8,000 people in the summertime, but in the winter, because it’s also really close to Canada and cold as heck, there’s very few people who live there. I actually don’t know the count, but it’s like hundreds. It reduces by an order of magnitude. I think that’s relevant for this conversation because it’s a place that people go in the summer. A major target audience that they have is public school teachers who have a lot of time in the summer.
ARIA:
But if you were going to build it full-time, I feel like isn’t that the dream? To build the full-time city.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
It is. And so Chautauqua to me is incomplete. I love it to death. It’s like one of my favorite places in the world, but it’s not a full-time community really for most of the people who go there. And the core reason for that is because it has no jobs. Like, there’s not really opportunity there long term. One of the challenges it has is it’s quite far away from any major city. And so I’ve been looking at building my community within a driving distance of major cities—within like an hour or two hours. And I think that’s within the catchment area that is more reasonable. People are not going to do that commute every day, but they could do it once a week, maybe spend an evening in the city. I think I do disagree with you on the question of remote work.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
I think it is going to take over for a lot of jobs—not everything. There are certain things that you’re going to always do in person. But I do think it’s going to keep increasing both in terms of the quantity of people who do it, and also intensity of people that do it. So, and I think like to, to what we were talking about the network effects of cities, I think the internet can actually play a huge portion of that role. I still think that there’s nothing quite the same as being in person and having those types of relationships and, and physical proximity. But I think that some of the opportunity to find jobs, even find significant others and all the other things that you might want to find in a city—those increasingly do happen online, which increases the area that people can, can live in, and form tight-knit communities. One other thing is that I think historically people have shaped—they’ve chosen where to live primarily based on where jobs are. Now that you can have your job over the Internet, there’s new demographics of people who can decide where to live based on other values that they have without compromising on having great economic opportunity. So—
ARIA:
Yeah. And do you have a target size? You know, when you do build this city, how big do you want it to be?
DEVON ZUEGEL:
I think the bigger, the better. You asked the question actually. If you scale it to a 50,000 person city or bigger, can you maintain a good quality of life? And again, I point to a place like Tokyo, which I think has an incredible quality of life. It’s just a lovely, lovely place to be. And it’s 38 million people. So I think it’s a question of being good at coordinating on infrastructure and being really thoughtful with design. It is completely possible. Are we good at it? No, [laugh]. We being North America and some other places too, but in North America, we have not mastered this art, but it’s been done for thousands of years actually. We’ve known how to build cities well and I think it’s more unlearning some bad habits that we’ve learned in the last hundred years—kind of going back to our roots about how cities can function.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
So I think it’s completely possible to scale it to a large number. In terms of my particular project, I would love for it to be larger, but I think as an initial, I’m first starting with a smaller scale. I refer to it as a village with low thousands of people. Partially because, frankly, in California it’s really challenging to get approvals for anything bigger than that. But also because I’m a big believer in prototypes and experimenting and learning at a smaller scale, and so I want to start there. But one day, you know, if you told me that there’s a jurisdiction that would be thrilled for me to build a 50,000 person city with some of these principles, I would be very excited about that opportunity. So let me know if you know anybody [laugh].
ARIA:
I love it. Let’s do it. Yeah, let’s prototype and go.
REID:
Let’s talk a little bit more about technology. So we mentioned one piece of technology that makes a big difference in city construction: remote work. There’s also density and road distance. What are some other intersections between technology and cities that when we think about cities of the future that you would go, “Here are some things to particularly highlight for people to pay attention to in making cities better, more human, better networks,” et cetera.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
So a concrete example—one of the reasons why it’s challenging to build good places is because there are really long feedback loops. To get a single building built in San Francisco can take like a decade, and that’s a long freaking time [laugh]. And what that means is that we—it’s really hard to learn from our mistakes. Imagine if you’re trying to learn to ride a bicycle and you get to ride it for like five minutes once a decade. You’re not going to learn very fast and in fact, by the time you get your next five minutes, a decade from now, you probably forgot everything from your first ride. We have a really hard time adjusting for things that we’ve learned and adjusting to conditions and real estate is usually built with the assumptions of like a decade before which is really unfortunate.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
And so I think things that can increase the speed are really, really important. One such category can be making it faster to construct. Construction alone, that one step can take a long time. So that’s exciting to me. I have a friend who’s actually here at Edge Esmeralda, his name’s Nick Foley, and he’s built beautiful 3D printed buildings and he’s got these really cool pods up in Mendocino that are completely off the grid. And actually part of Edge Esmeralda is he’s building solar A-frames where it’s basically like an A-frame teepee. And, instead of wood on the walls, it’s got solar panels. I’ve been blown away—over the course of just the last week they went from having no solar A-frames to having like a completed one and we’re going to have some of the attendees camp out there.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
They’re going to build a bunch more over the next few weeks. I found it really inspiring to talk to him because he’s like, you know, it doesn’t need to take so long to build buildings. It’s kind of self-imposed. There’s a lot of things that we do to slow ourselves down—some of which are valid because safety and inspections are important—but some of which are really just shooting ourselves in the foot. So anything that we can do to reduce the cycle time I think could be really valuable. Just as one concrete example.
REID:
Let’s talk a little bit about how we should approach cities as a society—namely, regulations and we should want to have happen and want not to have happen. Kind of the design principles, policies, et cetera. So say a little bit about zooming out to what would be the philosophical manifesto.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
I’ll take a human angle on it and then I’ll also take an environmental angle. And I think they dovetail really nicely. On the human angle, it comes back to what we were talking about with networks, where to the degree possible, getting more people in proximity to each other so that they can meet each other, share ideas, create opportunities with each other. That’s really the end goal. Now there’s limitations to that where the most extreme version of that is that we all live in a single room on top of each other piled upright. And obviously no one wants to live that way. But, within that goal, balanced with comfort, I think is critical. And I think better design can get us way further than where we are today. I’ll give just one concrete pet peeve of mine, which is like the width of roads.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
They’re way too wide. They do not need to be so darn wide. There’s really no reason for it. It’s expensive. It makes everything physically farther apart, which you don’t really think about it, because like, oh, each road is only like an extra few feet here and there, but you duplicate that across a city and now suddenly just everything is spread out. I think most of our roads could be half the width and suddenly everything would be closer together. Things would actually be more pleasant and walkable. So anyway, there’s a lot of very low hanging fruit like that, I think. Some of which we’ve seen people take advantage of by building parklets, expanding bike lanes, widening sidewalks, things like that. But we could go much further. So that’s, I think, one goal. I think from an ecological perspective, it’s also trying to use less land would be really powerful.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
One thing I find a little unfortunate about the environmental movement over the last few decades is that it seems like it’s mostly a focus on enjoying nature rather than actually protecting it. And that’s probably a controversial thing to say, but when I think of the people I know who are most environmentally conscious, they tend to drive a Subaru and they’ll go up to Tahoe and enjoy nature. And I love that they can do that. I support that. But I think we need to recognize that having a cabin in the woods is actually not great for the woods. There’s a lot of trees that have to be cut down so that you can drive to that cabin. It’s not a popular statement among really anybody, but it is the reality. Versus if you live in a place like Manhattan your whole life you have a much lesser carbon footprint.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
Now, I’m not saying that we have to stop going to Tahoe, but I think understanding that we’re actually making those trade-offs is really important for us to be serious about the trade-offs that we’re making. And I think one way that we can do this is by being more thoughtful with our design so that we can live closer together and use less land. One last thing I’ll say on that is that in California there’s this law called the California Environmental Quality Act. The short version of CEQA, and CEQA was designed to protect the environment, which I think is a great goal. Unfortunately, CEQA has ended up being used to functionally disperse development, because the way that it works is CEQA only kicks in once you have a development project of a certain size, which sounds reasonable, right?
DEVON ZUEGEL:
You think, “Oh, when you have a big project, we need to understand the impacts versus if you’re just building a single home, we don’t need to worry about it.” The problem is that the emergent effect is that we discourage chunked development meaning bigger apartment units that have more units inside of them. And we encourage more sprawling dispersed development. And the tragic effect is that we end up having single family homes that sprawl out into the countryside and consume way more landscape than if we were to build in a more thoughtful, designed, clustered way. So I would love to see laws like that change so that we can actually encourage the type of development that’s both good for people and good for the environment.
ARIA:
And so, as you know, last week on the podcast we spoke to Jan Sramek of California Forever. And I would love to hear your take as someone who is thinking about startup cities and how they’re built. What do you think of the project and, and what can we learn from it?
DEVON ZUEGEL:
I am so excited about the project as somebody who’s been obsessed with cities for a long time and someone who’s born in California and lived my whole life there. It’s honestly kind of brought a tear to my eye when I first heard about it. I love the state of California and—but I think that we have really lost our way in terms of the way that we develop towns and cities. And so reading the proposal for California Forever to create the first real city in a hundred years in the United States is incredible to me.
REID:
All right, so—rapid fire. Is there a movie, song or book that fills you with optimism for the future?
DEVON ZUEGEL:
I’m going to pick none of those three and it’s going to be an ad. Have you guys ever seen the SolarPunk Chobani ad? I never would’ve expected that my favorite piece of art would be a Chobani advertisement, but it’s beautiful. Sort of Studio Ghibli style animation of a woman who lives in a multi-generational household on a farm with a very dense city in the distance. And so it’s this awesome, like, there’s density but then also very close access to nature in the city. And there’s a dog running around with a prosthetic leg. He seems really happy catching a Frisbee. There’s machinery helping them pick apples so it’s less labor intensive to do farm work. And it’s just this beautiful ad that I watch probably once a month just because it’s so, so beautiful. It just really captures the energy of the kind of lifestyle that I would love to have and I think would also be better for the earth and better for all sorts of people.
ARIA:
So is there a question—could be personal or professional—that you wish people asked you more often?
DEVON ZUEGEL:
One thing I think a lot about—and whether or not people ask me about it, I tell them about it anyway—is [laugh] like the question of like, why is this building the way it is? Or why are cities the way that they are? And often like grounded in a concrete question. And I think there are so many rules that we’re following all the time when we build buildings that people do not really realize. One of them comes to mind is setbacks from the street—requirements to have the building a certain distance from the street, which again sounds like a good idea—but it has completely transformed the way that we build cities, in my opinion, for the worse. And the reason I want people to ask me these questions is because I think people don’t realize how centrally planned cities are.
DEVON ZUEGEL:
I think people think of the U.S. as this bastion of the free market or whatever, for better or for worse. But actually our land use and the way that our inbuilt environment is constructed is one of the most regulated things about our environment. And I think for the most part, most of those regulations have actually just resulted in less livable cities which I just find to be deeply tragic. If you go to Manhattan, the single most desirable neighborhood I think is like West Village, which every single building in West Village would be illegal to build today basically [laugh]. This is true across the country. Like the places that people love the most are typically things that, you know, the fire department would not allow. And you think, “Oh, well the fire department should take precedence, right, because of safety concerns?” Well, the things that they’re usually concerned about are like turning radius for their fire truck—sounds reasonable until you realize that they could buy a smaller fire truck. And so, I think we just need to get a little bit more creative instead of having safety-ism drive everything—say, yeah, we do care about fire safety, but how do we do it in a way that doesn’t compromise everything else that we care about?
REID:
Where do you see progress or momentum outside of your industry that inspires you?
DEVON ZUEGEL:
So many places. One specific one is that renewable energy sources—like wind and solar—have become cheaper than non-renewable sources like coal and natural gas in recent years. I remember over the course of my life, I remember thinking it would be nice if we had an electric future, but it felt a little out of grasp and over the last few years it went from like a dream to a reality really, really quickly.
ARIA:
Final question. Can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve if everything breaks humanity’s way in the next 15 years, and what’s the first step to get there?
DEVON ZUEGEL:
This is cheesy, but I think anything is possible. I mean, one of the things I get from traveling around the world is seeing things that I take for granted in the place that I live and realizing like it doesn’t have to be this way—both for good and for bad. You know, like there’s things that we’ve figured out that other countries have not figured out and there’s things that other countries have figured out that we have. But I think life could just be so much better. We could spend more time with our families, we could be healthier. We could have less noise pollution, [laugh] we could work on interesting problems that we care about instead of spending all of our time commuting. I just think that so much is possible, but first realizing that often the biggest constraint to that—those possibilities—is ourselves and figuring out how to remove some of those constraints. And also just realizing that it is possible so that you go for it. I mean, the number of people who have told me that what I’m trying to do is like, “Oh, that’s a utopian community. That’s not really possible, right?” And I’m like, I grew up going to one my whole life. Like it is possible. And sometimes you just need an example in front of you to realize that it’s possible.
ARIA:
Awesome. Thank you so much. As Reid said, we could talk for hours. Appreciate it.
REID:
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network. It’s hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Katie Sanders, Edie Allard, Sara Schleede, Adrien Behn, and Paloma Moreno Jiménez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, Ben Relles, Parth Patil, and Little Monster Media Company.