Building a City

The literal act — and the broader movement — of intentionally designing and constructing new human settlements or neighborhoods as an alternative to the incumbent urban landscape.

The concept gathers three distinct threads in Kyle’s corpus:

• Physical community experiments: Nat Eliason’s 2021 announcement of making “building a city” his new work focus — anchored around Third Places, community design, and Austin as a testing ground.
• Crypto-native governance: Vitalik Buterin’s interest in Crypto Cities — using blockchain primitives to design new governance and economic structures for urban settings.
• Co-located learning institutions: Tiago Forte’s vision of bundling the best community-based courses with guidance counseling in a great physical location — “the university reinvented but radically more cost-effective and impactful.”

Together these point at the City Building thesis: that intentional new places — whether startup-town, crypto-coordinated city, or co-learning campus — are a next-generation institution-building opportunity.

Where this appears

• Announcement! My New Work Focus… (tweet) — Nat Eliason on making city-building his focus (Jan 2021).
• Crypto Cities!… (tweet) — Vitalik Buterin on crypto-native urban governance (Nov 2021).
• Eventually Someone is Going to… (tweet) — Tiago Forte on bundling co-learning into a physical location (Oct 2021).