Telamon Ardavanis is head of partnerships and scouting at Edge City, a society incubator founded by Janine Leger and Timour Kosters that gathers people working at the frontiers of technology, science and culture into month-long popup villages around the world. He joined in 2024 and has co-hosted several editions, among them Edge City Lanna in Chiang Mai in the autumn of that year, and was one of the residency leads for Edge City Patagonia in San Martín de los Andes, Argentina, in late 2025.
The programme has run in Healdsburg in northern California, in Buenos Aires alongside the Crecimiento movement, and in Denver, Austin, South Africa, Bhutan and Goa. Its residencies and hackathons deal directly with the Free Cities subject matter, covering special economic zones, urban planning, new cities and governance, and the organisation works on new city development partnerships of its own.
A popup village is a partial answer to a problem the movement usually approaches by building. Instead of founding a jurisdiction and waiting for people to arrive, it assembles the people first, for a month, and finds out what they actually want from a place; several permanent projects have come out of that sequence rather than the other way round.
He grew up in South Africa, was educated in Germany and Finland, moved to the United Arab Emirates and then applied for visas to reach the American innovation economy, and he gives that history as his reason for the work. Innovation hubs have historically been geo-fenced, and a village that travels is one way around the fence.