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⚠️ UPDATE: LOCATION CHANGE [10 OCT 2024] Due to floods, our previous location has been rendered unavailable for October. The new Seapunk HQ will be at the Furama Chiang Mai. More details below.
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Hello world, friends old and new!
It’s September 2024 as I write this, and there’s some super-interesting stuff happening over the next couple months that you might want to be part of.
So here we go 🙃
Popup villages are an exciting new innovation in how we gather, live, learn, and innovate.
Zuzalu, the first experiment (two hundred people coming to live together over two months) happened just last year, and over a dozen popup villages have already sprouted worldwide.
From this October, Chiang Mai in northern Thailand will be home to the largest-ever season of popup villages to date, with over a thousand people coming from around the world to spend weeks living in proximity, across a wide range of popup village themes and activities, some open to all.
What makes this extra special for me, as a Southeast Asian, is that Southeast Asia (SEA) isn’t usually seen as a frontier of curiosity, innovation, and experimentation. We’re more used to being on the back-end of supply chains, sending students to brighter futures abroad, and modest aspirations of becoming a regional hub.
But couldn’t SEA be more? We sit on both problem-spaces (like rising sea levels) and resource-banks (like megabiodiverse rainforests) that don’t quite resemble the ‘developed’ world, but might have much to offer the planet. We still have some access to indigenous traditions and intact ecosystems. We have a generation of digital natives and a flux of global digital nomads. We have among the world’s most fertile food systems and richest food cultures. What interesting ideas and innovations could come, first and fresh, from SEA?
This is the central question behind the idea of Seapunk — a quest, inspired by the solarpunk movement, for fresh, authentic, solarpunk (sustainable, hopeful, subversive, human) imaginations for SEA. Seapunk futures.