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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Appearances
but then it's not quite what people want. And it doesn't quite actually encourage the type of community that I'm interested in. That would be a real shame. And so trying to figure out ways to tighten that feedback loop is really important. And the pop-up village is one way that we do that, where we've brought it really close to the property.
And this summer when we hosted, I'm planning to bring people to the property and we'll go on hikes around it. I'll show people the site plans and get their reactions on what they think, get their feedback. It was also interesting, Healdsburg, which is the town 15 minutes south where we're hosting the Papa Village.
Healdsburg is a really charming little walkable town as well, centered around a plaza, basically a town square. And I got to get a lot of hands-on experience of seeing how the different... aspects of urban design in Healdsburg informed the way that people interacted with each other in Edge Esmeralda.
And there were a lot of really great things that we want to learn from, like having that central plaza is amazing for what we're doing. People always know to find each other in the plaza. But then there's other aspects like right near the plaza, there's a super wide road called Healdsburg Avenue, which has a lot of fast cars.
And I noticed every time I have to cross from the plaza to the other side, there's this friction where I'm like, oh, it better be really worth it for me to get to the other side of this road compared to the other direction, which has like much more narrow roads and easier to cross. That event has really tightened the feedback loop.
I've also organized over the last few years what I call traveling neighborhoods, where I basically invite friends and friends of friends to come travel with me in different places in the world that have inspired what we're trying to build. A recent one was this beautiful town in Costa Rica called Las Catalinas.
And I could talk for days about Las Catalinas, but there's a lot of things that I am inspired by in that community. And I could have just gone there by myself. But when you go somewhere by yourself, you don't fully experience what it's like to live there because you don't have your community.
Whereas I was down there with, I think, about 20 people and we were there for a whole week and we experienced what it was actually like to be there embedded in more of a community. Of course, not the same thing as living there full time and having a job, but it simulates the experience more. Long story short is I spent a lot of time thinking about how to get those feedback loops.
And I actually think that the fact that feedback loops are so long and frankly getting longer in real estate is a big part of why people don't like a lot of the stuff that gets developed. And I could speak for days about why those feedback loops are getting longer.
So Las Catalinas is really spectacular. I highly recommend that people visit. So Las Catalinas is on the west coast of Costa Rica, and it's comprised of 1,200 acres, which is approximately the same size as Golden Gate Park in San Francisco or Central Park, give or take. So it's a lot of land.
And Las Catalinas has a really interesting model of development where they've decided that they're going to preserve 1,000 out of the 1,200 acres as natural rainforest. And then the remaining 200 acres will be developed into basically an Italian hill town on the side of the Costa Rican coast. So it's as beautiful as it sounds.
Right now, they've developed 20 of the acres, which is not that much land. It's got about 200 homes and it's got 10 restaurants, a hotel. Something that's really striking about Las Catalinas is that in the 20 acres, it's completely car-free. In other parts of their development, they're going to have some car access. But in the first phase, it was completely car-free.
And I went there thinking, how is this going to work? I don't really get it. But something magical happened when I was there, which is I realized that once you take cars fully out of the equation of a residential neighborhood, suddenly everything can be a lot closer together. Because I think Something most people don't realize is that cars take an incredible amount of space.
I urge you next time you go outside to just look around and really think about how much space is devoted to cars and getting them around. Some of that space is totally warranted. I want emergency vehicles to be able to access my home if I have a problem and being able to drop off my groceries is really nice. There's a lot of really good use cases for cars, but it is a trade-off that we have made.
And I think people are not often aware of that trade-off of just how much space is taken. And so Las Catalinas can fit a lot into 20 acres. 200 homes in usual American development would take multiples of that space usually when you have cars involved.
And so just getting to experience what that was like and realize that I think we can push that idea farther of having more car-free or car-light spaces. I really like studying things that are extremes on a particular dimension because I think that you end up learning a lot about the limits of the system.
And I expected to hit up against the limits of that system much sooner than the extreme that Las Catalinas took it to.
I think it's really interesting to look at how cities across different places and times have developed based on different local constraints. Like historically, we've piled on a lot more rules over the years and over the centuries of how places get built. And it used to be that cities were much more developed by like an organic process.
So when you go to old towns in Europe or Asia or anywhere, places that were built hundreds of years ago, they tend to have more human scale winding streets. And it's almost more like a garden that's been left to overgrow, but it grows in interesting ways. And you can tell pretty quickly how planned a place has been.
And I think a shift that I've seen over time is it used to be that we wouldn't plan cities very much at all. And I had some real problems, especially as we started living more densely with each other. There would be more issues of cholera in the water system, which would kill a lot of people like real, real problems that precipitated more planning problems.
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