Infrastructuring Pop-Up Cities with"Social Layer": Designing Serendipitous Co-Livings for Temporary Intentional Communities

2025-11-19

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of fostering spontaneous, serendipitous, and sustained social connections in temporary co-living communities (“pop-up cities”). To this end, we designed and empirically validated “Social Layer,” a non-conference system grounded in the principle of *scaffolded spontaneity*—balancing structured support (e.g., identity management, schedule coordination, RSVP functionality, and social discovery) with openness to preserve participant autonomy, privacy, and lightweight governance. Deployed and iteratively refined via participatory observation across five countries in real-world settings, Social Layer demonstrated effectiveness in supporting short-term communities of 100–200 people over 4–8 weeks. The study distills design principles for social-layer infrastructure tailored to flash cities, significantly enhancing connection quality and self-organization capacity. It contributes a reusable, socio-technical design framework for transient urban communities.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: The sharing economy
• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications

Abstract

After the pandemic, a new form of"pop-up city"has emerged -- co-living gatherings of 100-200 people for 4-8 weeks that differ from conferences and hack houses. These temporary intentional communities leverages existing urban infrastructure, blending daily life (housing, meals, care) with self-organized activities like learning, creating, and socializing. They coordinate bottom-up programming through an"unconference"system for identity, calendaring, RSVP, and social discovery that fosters spontaneous, serendipitous, enduring ties. This paper examines the design of"Social Layer,"an unconferencing system for pop-up cities. We studied its real-world deployment in ShanHaiWoo (Jilin, China, 2023), muChiangmai (Chiangmai, Thailand, 2023), Edge Esmeralda, Edge Esmeralda (Healdsburg, CA, USA, 2024), Aleph (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2024), and Gathering of Tribe (Lisbon, Portugal, 2024). Our findings distill: (1) the strong concept"scaffolded spontaneity"-- infrastructural affordances that balance structure with openness, amplifying participant agency while maintaining privacy and lightweight governance; (2) design implications for design researchers working on pop-up cities.

Problem

• Designing unconferencing systems for temporary intentional communities
• Creating infrastructural affordances that balance structure with openness
• Fostering spontaneous social connections in pop-up city environments

Innovation

• Social Layer unconferencing system for pop-up cities
• Scaffolded spontaneity balancing structure with openness
• Infrastructural affordances for privacy and lightweight governance