Devon Zuegel
speaker
216 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Devon Zuegel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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There's also a lot of technical reasons, but... I think the biggest answer is just it's not in the space of things that people think are normal to do. But if you think about it, every town that exists had to be started at some point. Someone was the first person to move in. Somebody built that infrastructure. And I think it's just something that we've done less and less of.
And as that frontier has closed, the physical frontier, more and more of that space has been taken up. And a lot of the really good locations for towns and especially for big cities is probably also taken.
But way before I started working on this project, I've been really obsessed with urban design and in particular street design, because I actually think that streets are the single most important building block in a city. The way that the streets interact and how they interface with buildings and other public spaces is really the thing that defines the feeling of a city, in my opinion.
And I've been studying and writing about it and befriending architects and developers for the last 10 years. And really, my poor husband, every time we travel somewhere, it's really an architecture tour where I talk to him all the time. Like, oh, did you see the setbacks of this building from the street? Like, oh, it's interesting that they're mandating a 20-foot setback here.
And so really the biggest answer I would say is from my travels and just taking really detailed notes and making a lot of observations about the choices that are made in different cities and what works and what doesn't. And it's actually not a binary thing either. It depends on what your goals are. Is this community trying to be an industrial hub where a lot of big manufacturing happens?
Is this trying to be... a resort community where people can relax? Is this a place that's meant to be multi-generational or is it targeted towards a particular generation? And so tracking those things and building a very rich mental model of the specific details has been the most fun thing for me, honestly. That's my favorite thing to think about.
Oh, that's so fun. Okay, I'll give you a little persona of the type of person that I think would particularly love living in Esmeralda. So basically somebody who is an adult who's got a young family, but also maybe their older parents or even their grandparents are still alive. They can all live in this community together, which is my experience at Chautauqua.
I would stay with my grandmother and we'd have three and sometimes even four generations all in the same home. And I think I'd like them to describe it as a place where their kids have a lot of independence. Their kids can get around on foot rather than having to ask to be driven everywhere. A place where there's a really high level of trust within the community.
And when you walk outside, you are very likely to meet people who share your values and those values specifically being a level of learning and creation that but also of invention and building new things. I love the values that Chautauqua has. I think we would build on that, but I'll also point out two major values differences.
I think on one hand, Chautauqua is much more about lifelong learning than it is about building. I think it's more of a place where you absorb a lot of information and experts come and talk. I don't want to downplay the cool things that Chautauquans are doing either, but it's much more emphasis on reading and consuming and learning.
But I think I want to take that and build on it and also create more of a sense of action and people building businesses, creating pieces of art, doing research, that kind of thing. So that's one difference. And then related to that is having it be a sense of more like peer to peer. So in Chautauqua, there's more of this sense that Jane Goodall will come and she'll talk
to you about chimpanzees and she presents on her experiences and people talk about it for a little while, but then it moves on versus Jane Goodall herself being part of the community and then hosting an expedition with the kids in the community to go meet some chimpanzees.
And having it be more of a peer to peer where it's not sage on the stage, but rather the people around you are experts in their field. But you are also an expert in your field and creating that network. So I think those are the key values and experiences that I would love for people to have in this community.
You alluded to the hardware and software before. And so while we're currently building the hardware, which is functionally real estate development, I mean, at the end of the day, we're putting in infrastructure and we're building buildings. And that is what real estate development is. That's the hardware side.
And that has a very important role to play in this, where, as we were talking about before, environments really shape the behavior that we do. And so on that side, we are building infrastructure and public spaces and event spaces where people can have these types of events.
Really, you can think of it like a college campus where we're going to have lecture halls and pavilions and things like that throughout the community that will support this type of activity. On the software side, we've actually gotten things started because it's going to take a while to build all that hardware.
And so we've gotten started with this pop-up village that we organized called Edge Esmeralda. And you can think of a pop-up village kind of like a temporary college campus. We host it in Healdsburg, California, which is 15 minutes south of the property where we're building the hardware. And for this pop-up village, it runs for 30 days each summer.
And many people attend for the whole month, but also a lot of people come for just a week or just a weekend. Last year, we had 1,300 people attend Edge Esmeralda. And this year, we think it might be even a little bit more than that. And with Edge Esmeralda, we're experimenting with a lot of these ideas.
I think last year, one of the key things that we did was we hosted nightly community dinners and they're not required to come. Many people will not come to every single night, but there's always one time and place during the day where you can come together and talk to the other people in the community.
Honestly, we're taking a lot of lessons from how colleges work, like a dining hall where people come and you always know that you're going to bump into some friends and there's going to be a table with someone interesting to talk to. If you don't want to go to the dining hall, that's fine, but it's an option that's available.
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