Burning Man: Is this the world's most ambitious urban experiment? Featuring urban planner Bryant Tan
Once a year, up to 80,000 people arrive on a dry lakebed in Nevada and build one of the state’s largest cities: Black Rock City (Burning Man).
It’s a temporary city where residents bring their own infrastructure, build neighborhoods, make art, produce programming, help strangers, volunteer, manage waste, and create much of the civic and cultural life themselves. Then they dismantle it, pack it out and start learning how to build it better next time.
Burning Man is easy to dismiss from the outside as spectacle or chaos, but as each sequin and wood screw is packed from this year’s festival, we think Burning Man’s own pop-up metropolis deserves a serious look.
In this WRLDCTY podcast, meet Bryant Tan (AKA Level), an urban planner and one of the people responsible for shaping the placement and design of Black Rock City.