The Zurich Institute envisions a high-agency society with the knowledge and technology to pursue prosperity, meaning, and abundance.

Zurich is where most of us met, around ETH. It is also a place that started the way we want to work.

Before Rome, the Helvetii, a Celtic people, most likely held a settlement on the Lindenhof hill above the Limmat. The Romans called it Turicum, probably a Latin form of an older Celtic name. Its oldest written trace is a tombstone found on that hill in 1747, naming the statio Turicensis: a customs post on the waterway from Lake Zurich down the Limmat to the Rhine, where goods passing between two Roman provinces were reloaded and taxed at two and a half percent.

Turicum was never a capital. It was a crossing, where people, goods, and ideas met and were accounted for. Two thousand years later the same place governs itself commune by commune and is home to one of the world's great technical universities. Knowledge, technology, and self-government at the scale where trust forms: that is the high-agency society we envision, already sketched in one small city.