Stacia Wilson

Stacia Wilson is co-founder and chief community officer of Meridia, a planned town near Austin, Texas, organised as a set of boroughs, each with its own character and its own governance experiment. Its published design goals include car-free walkable neighbourhoods with mixed-use centres, nontoxic construction, permaculture and regenerative agriculture, a vetted high-trust culture, and economic instruments such as externality zoning and a Georgist land rent. Her co-founder is Billy Tetrud, the project’s chief executive.

Her training is in anthropology, and the decade before Meridia was spent building communities rather than companies: lifestyle brands, dance communities, church planting, and international pop-up co-living houses where dancers could live and work remotely in Cancún, Rome and Tokyo, each one run with local organisers.

That is an unusual preparation for this field, and it shows in which half of the problem she works on. A new settlement is normally designed as a legal and a physical object, a charter and a street plan. The part that decides whether anyone stays is whether the people in it can live together, which is a question about culture, membership and trust rather than about rules.

She writes about sensemaking, liberty, technology and culture on her Substack, How to Change Your Mind, was a Young Voices contributor published by Free the People, and has spoken on panels at FreedomFest.