Events Are Cities. Organizers Are Mayors

The elevated model for event organizers who build, govern, and protect pop-up cities—proofed by this summer’s conferences

The events industry is the vast ecosystem behind conventions, trade shows, conferences, festivals, and brand experiences—a powerful engine that moves people, money, and ideas. As offices went hybrid and remote, these gatherings absorbed the social, professional, and even romantic collisions that used to happen at work. Think of each event as a pop-up city: it needs infrastructure (routes, signage, Wi-Fi), culture (tone, inclusion, wellness), safety (from harassment to crisis readiness), sustainability—and a vibrant, well-governed social life. That is the Mayor of Your Niche mindset.

This summer, the boader events industry put that mindset onstage. From MPI, PCMA, ASAE, SITE, ADMEI, ELX, DI, WXO, ILEA and CEMA to local chapter summits—and from flagships like Connect, BizBash, Cvent, and Freeman’s Camp Buck—plus hybrid and virtual touchpoints like Eventastic—the calendar read like a nonstop, high-end summer school. Hundreds of sessions unspooled across ballrooms, boardrooms, lounges, and, yes, the occasional back room, while thousands more exchanges bloomed in corridors, coffee lines, and hotel lobbies. The content dazzled; the real triumph was structural. These gatherings didn’t just fill agendas. They modeled how to build, govern, and safeguard a temporary city.

The progress we’re making

You can see it on the floor plan and feel it in the rooms. Neurodiversity has moved from quiet accommodation to open design principle, reshaping layouts, sensory spaces, and session formats. DEI—loud in the culture wars—has quietly settled in as a professional baseline; women headline, queer presence is visible, age is being remixed, neurodivergence is honored. Wellness isn’t a side table anymore; it’s baked into menus, schedules, and quiet rooms. Facilitation is evolving from lecture to participant-driven learning that respects different styles. And sustainability has moved from fringe to master plan, with waste reduction, smarter materials, and carbon awareness written into the build. These aren’t extras. They’re the civic services that make people want to return to your city next year.

I’ve been saying this for more than 50 years: if you run an event, you’re the mayor of your niche. I didn’t learn that in a convention hall—I learned it in Washington, D.C., during my Washington Dossier years, out every night with senators, cabinet secretaries, ambassadors, and, yes, actual mayors. Their number-one skill set? Event organizing. Dinners, press conferences, galas, parades, ribbon cuttings—the civic choreography of power itself. Flip the analogy and it still holds: if organizers are mayors, mayors are also organizers. One room, curated carefully, can shift relationships, set agendas, change narratives. I’ve watched it for decades.

From bonfire to badge scanner

The job is ancient. The first “city planners” tended the bonfire—choosing the site, setting the time, deciding what stories were shared. Guild masters ran their halls like civic centers where trade, apprenticeship, and fellowship intertwined. The nineteenth century raised world’s fairs and industrial expositions—monumental temporary cities built to awe and exchange knowledge. The twentieth century perfected the rhythm: water cooler by day, bar by night. The ’60s and ’70s added the cautionary chapter—male-dominated sales meetings where alcohol flowed, women were decorative, and the line between professional and personal blurred. That reputation lingered long enough to be a warning label. Today’s mayors lead with a different ethos.

Pioneer mayors

Not every mayor inherits a skyline. Some lay the first streets by hand. The pioneer mayors—the ones staging their first, second, third shows—are working with borrowed pipe and drape, volunteer sheriffs, and a map that changes between breakfast and lunch. It isn’t perfect. It isn’t supposed to be. It’s evolution in public.

Think of the first years of the great shows. Imagine the original hardware fair when prototypes rattled in suitcases and the only AV cue was a nod. Picture the earliest CES, rooms too small for the ideas inside them, lines down the hall, founders taping booth signs while pitching investors between sessions. People met the future of their industry for the first time in those corridors—and they kept coming back because the city felt new and necessary.

Pioneer cities run on adrenaline and improvisation. The agenda is a little lopsided, the wayfinding handwritten, the credentials misprinted—but the collisions are real. You can feel the current when strangers become colleagues before the coffee cools. That’s the magic of building a city from scratch: the first citizens become stewards, and the map you draw today becomes tomorrow’s main boulevard. Edition by edition, duct tape gives way to data; a shared spreadsheet becomes a control room; quiet corners become sensory-friendly lounges; diversity shifts from aspiration to operating system; safety evolves from a checklist to a practiced muscle; sustainability moves from a line in the deck to a rule of the road. Every great show was once a first night.

Running the whole city

A real mayor doesn’t just cut ribbons; they steward economy, infrastructure, culture, safety, and reputation. The parallels are exact. Your economy is sponsorships, exhibitor revenue, attendee spend. Your infrastructure is shuttles, signage, Wi-Fi, access. Your culture is the tone you set from the first email to the closing chord. Your safety plan covers everything from medical response to harassment and trafficking prevention. Your nightlife—receptions, dinners, lobby bars—can be delight or liability depending on how you govern it. Hosted-buyer programs and VIP salons can be marketplaces for trust; they also need bright lines so commerce and community don’t get confused.

Inside this city live two potent subsystems. By day, the water cooler: low-pressure, high-opportunity collisions in coffee lines and lounges where ideas spark almost accidentally. By night, the bar: the social district where relationships deepen, alliances form, and—yes—attraction happens. That’s not incidental; anthropology tells us mating behaviors are braided into human gathering. From the bonfire to the ballroom, people convene to exchange goods, ideas, and sometimes partners—personal and professional. In a remote-first world, events inherit that full spectrum of human purpose.

Construction as governance

You’re not stepping into a ready-made city; you’re building one. You draw the boulevards and choose the plazas. You connect the power grid and the communications network, plan the transportation loops, and write the wayfinding that makes people feel oriented instead of lost. It’s urban planning with a shelf life: up in a day or two, operating at full tilt, then gone—leaving a cultural footprint that lasts long after teardown. Burning Man proves the principle at extravagant scale; a 200-person leadership retreat proves it in miniature. Either way, expectations are real—and so is your obligation.

The stakes

Strip away the branding and slides and you’re left with the most human of activities: people meeting people. Evolution built us for convening—to choose allies, swap resources, share knowledge, find mates. In the pre-remote world, much of that social and even romantic connection happened in the office: the hallway smile, the desk-side chat, the after-work drink. Many met spouses, best friends, and co-founders across cubicles and conference tables. That world largely vanished. Hybrid schedules and remote norms dismantled the casual collisions that kept both networks and personal lives humming. Into that vacuum stepped events—the new office.

By day they function like the ultimate open-plan workspace; by night they become the new after-work bar, where conversation and chemistry—professional and personal—mix freely. The apps noticed, too: location-based dating and networking platforms light up around major conventions as the “city within the city” comes online. Our social fabric now runs through these pop-up capitals.

The human science of a pop-up city

Neuroscience helps explain why the room beats the Zoom. In-person contact can release oxytocin, deepening trust and social bonding; novelty and reward circuits boost dopamine, priming us to explore new people and ideas. Groups often slip into physiological synchrony—micro-alignments in breath, pulse, posture—when they share attention, creating a felt cohesion you can’t download. High-arousal moments—the goosebump line, the surprise encounter—are emotionally tagged by the amygdala and stored with extra priority by the hippocampus, which is why you remember who said what, and to whom, at 11:47 p.m. in the lobby bar.

Social psychology maps the architecture of influence. Weak ties—those quick, cordial connections—are disproportionately powerful for job leads and fresh information. Norms form fast in physical spaces; design a room that signals inclusion and curiosity and people mirror it back. Participation drives commitment and recall; agency is a better teacher than a slide deck.

Sociology zooms out. Events densify networks, compressing months of outreach into days of proximity. They act as “third places”: neutral, recurring commons where community is renewed and reputations are made. The structure of the city—who is visible, who is reachable, where thresholds sit—predicts who thrives inside it.

Anthropology brings the long lens. For millennia we’ve gathered to barter, tell stories, choose mates, invent rituals, settle disputes. Your badge is just a modern talisman for an ancient purpose. Govern well and you’re not staging content; you’re stewarding a human technology that has kept societies adaptive and alive.

And the economics? Look at the Taylor Swift Eras phenomenon—billions in ripple effects across airlines, hospitality, retail, even municipal budgets. Scale it down and the principle holds: a well-run trade show or conference becomes a local engine, seeding deals, hiring, and new ventures. The learning network—what’s taught, tested, matched, and launched in your rooms—moves entire sectors forward.

The downside of being a mayor

Real mayors know the shadows as well as the sunshine. Large gatherings attract opportunists; trafficking networks exploit anonymity and scale. The industry has gotten serious—training staff, partnering with authorities, designing out dark corners. Mental health demands governance, too. The travel grind and social intensity trigger burnout, anxiety, even isolation; the best mayors hard-wire quiet rooms, kinder schedules, and trained humans with real empathy. And crises you pray never arrive still must be planned for. The Tomorrowland fire was a sobering reminder that even world-class productions are vulnerable to the unthinkable; box-checking isn’t readiness. In a noisy political climate, DEI catches heat—but if your city doesn’t welcome everyone, it isn’t a city.

The Mayor’s Manifesto

If you run an event, you are the mayor of your niche—not in metaphor but in practice. While your city lives—three hours or three days—you are responsible for its economy, its infrastructure, its culture, its safety, its sustainability, and its soul. Walk every block. Know every neighborhood. Anticipate trouble. Protect the magic spaces where deals are struck, ideas are born, and friendships take root.

Remember: gatherings aren’t only about learning or commerce; they’re about belonging. Your job is to create the conditions where humanity’s oldest instincts—to connect, to exchange, to build together—can flourish safely and brilliantly. Lead not just for the applause of the moment, but for the reputation that lingers after the lights go down and the streets you built disappear.

In a remote-first world, your event may be the only city your citizens have all year. Lead it with vision and vigilance. Adopt the mayor mindset—and be the mayor your niche deserves.