The ultimate pop-up city in my mind is autonomous cars. Well more like autonomous cities, through a collection of city blocks that move?
How my thinking goes: if you get autonomous cars (which we already have via Waymo) eventually it won't just be to replace Uber. It'll be a new kind of mobile third space: a place to sleep (between cities) or a pharmacy will come to you, or a mobile pizza truck will come to you, or a place for couples to have sex etc (already has happened on Cruise btw, didn't take long)
If you go down this thinking long enough, what used to be stable (storefronts) get is no longer stable, and anything that used to be situated in one place (a shop, a park, a parking lot, the cleaners, etc) the city becomes more movable. You can configure different configurations of shops and cities and nature to come to you or to be configured (by the city, or by groups) in different ways. The Pop-up city becomes more dynamic, a self-assembling and ephemeral city that makes us question, what is a place? 11 replies
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Ofc this already happens in cities already (shops and restaurants, and neighborhoods come and go, they are dynamic and they change over time) but autonomous cities increase this velocity of the cycle of death and rebirth or real estate at a rate previously unseen. Also, it just changes what a restaurant is, for example, or what a store is. Of course to a certain extent services like DoorDash have changed the delivery to be dynamic, meaning many stores that couldn't deliver before, now can at a previously unseen level.
But the stores today are still stationary, they don't move. So what happens when the stores themselves start to move, and become dynamically moving themselves to locations that are the most optimal, or most interesting, you really can start to form neighborhoods that start, ad hoc, or cities that get created only for a short period of time.
Of course a big example of this is Burning Man. It's a the ultimate and penultimate pop-up city of all time. But this is just one case, of what could be 1 reply
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