Greg Lindsay's Blog

May 30, 2016  |  permalink

An Interview With BritishAmerican Business

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(BritishAmerican Business – a membership organization of business leaders in New York and London – interviewed me for the most recent issue of their quarterly magazine. The unedited version appears below.)

Explain the concept of a city that is an aerotropolis, which is an idea “coined” in your book Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next? What relevance does it have in cities today?

The thread running through my book and current work is that the shape of cities has always been defined by transportation. Whether London’s docks, Chicago’s railyards, or Los Angeles’ freeways, each was shaped by the state-of-the-art in transportation at the time. So it stands to reason that in a global era, we should start to see cities form around the only mode capable of transporting us around the world – and if you look closely enough, we have. Heathrow, for example, has profoundly shaped the development of west London and the Thames Valley, while Gatwick supporters point to the existence of a “Gatwick Diamond” home to 45,000 businesses. And once we had traced the contours of these airport cities, someone would try to build one from scratch – the “aerotropolis” of the title. And that’s happening, too, in places like Dubai, Doha, the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor, and, of course, China. But I think the lesson for most cities is that they need to be locally close and globally connected – the former to create places with a human scale and quality of life that attracts talent, and the latter to allow that talent to apply themselves anywhere in the world. After all, America’s biggest exports are services.

The rise in prominence in cities has been truly unprecedented in recent years and there is an enormous amount of pressure on the social fabric of the city, including infrastructure and the environment. What do you think are the future solutions to dealing with rapid urbanisation and what approaches are cities taking?

The science fiction author Bruce Sterling once mordantly described the future as “old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky.” He was referring to the confluence of rapidly aging societies, mega-urbanization, and climate change. No one has done an especially good job of tackling the challenges posed by any of the three, let alone the wicked problems emerging from all three – such as the Syrian refugee crisis and its political fallout, or climate-accelerated urban migration. In the best case scenario, we’d see the public and private sectors work in concert to re-invest heavily in infrastructure, using carbon taxes to pay for everything from new mass transit to solar micro-grids to technologies that haven’t been invented yet. Barring Bernie Sanders’ promised political revolution, that won’t happen, and we’re going to be faced with the same situation we have today – appeals to the private sector for innovative financing schemes and PPPs to pay for innovations we pray will be silver bullets. The mega-cities of the Global South face an even starker challenge: building (and rebuilding) faster than natural disasters can destroy them. The Philippines, for example, was hit with the three most destructive typhoons in its history in just three years from 2012-2014. We’re going to need lighter, cheaper, faster, and more resilient infrastructure to stay ahead of these stresses.

What is your notion or vision of a ‘Smart City’ and what trends or concepts do you think will be a game changer in terms of improving the metropolitan environment of businesses and citizens?

Let’s never forget that “smarter cities” was an IBM buzzword coined during the nadir of the 2008 global financial crisis to capture a sliver of the trillions of dollars in stimulus spending surely on the way – and never arrived due to austerity. I still have two major problems with the way the phrase is used today. The first is that it’s primarily focused on infrastructure, not people. The idea (which has since become the foundation of the “Internet of Things”) was that everything would be studded with sensors, and the data generated from those points would be used to make power grids and water mains 10% more efficient. That’s fine as it far as it goes, but it’s a prosaic vision at best, and the devil is in the details. The second problem is that it’s based on the same totalizing surveillance as Facebook, Google, Uber, etc. – give all of your data to a single entity in exchange for a service. A truly smart city would be one that helped people find and connect with each other in new ways without the necessary evil of an intermediary, which is what cities have always done. I’d like to see a smart city where instead of Uber, you have stronger public transit (reducing the need for cars altogether) and more local cooperatives. I’d also like to see the traditional office give way to moe shared workspaces geared toward industries and purposes other than tech startups – where people, aided by real-world social networks, could discover new collaborators, clients, investors, etc. faster than ever. A truly smart city isn’t about infrastructure, but people; it’s not about all-encompassing platforms, but small networks, loosely joined; and most of all, it’s not about efficiency, but discovery.

In your view, taking a struggling city like Detroit as an example, what can we learn from a city such as this? How can it regenerate itself?

Detroit is the flip side of the tidal wave of urban migrations sweeping the Global South — the spiritual capital of the Global Rust Belt that was once a city of two million before hollowing out and losing two-thirds of its population to its suburbs and beyond. Detroit is currently being hailed as a comeback story, but that comeback only benefits a handful of residents downtown (where Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert has purchased and refurbished dozens of properties) while residents in farther-flung, historically black neighborhoods are facing mass eviction, mass demolition, and the failure of basic services. So what can we learn from Detroit? One lesson is that policies blind to the realities on the ground — whether having to do with mortgage foreclosures, blight remediation, budget cutbacks or more — can irreparably destroy neighborhoods, communities, and people’s lives. The second is that there is a mismatch between the depopulated cities of the Rust Belt and the millions of migrants searching for homes. Enterprising mayors like Oliver Junk, of the small central German city of Goslar, have made migrants the centrepiece of their strategies for offsetting demographic decline. I’d like to see changes to immigrations policies allowing cities more leeway to attract or even sponsor migrants in exchange for guaranteed residency or investment. Why let oligarchs in Manhattan and central London have all the fun?

What is the Connected Mobility Initiative that you are currently leading on and what insights can you share with us so far?

The Connected Mobility Initiative is a project by the New Cities Foundation, with support from the Toyota Mobility Foundation, to explore how transit agencies and other public sector officials are grappling with the popularity of transportation network companies such as Uber and Lyft — not to mention the looming possibility of autonomous cars — and how they might use those same technologies to improve and extend their services. Because simply saying “no” to these developments clearly isn’t working. While I’m still sifting through my findings, a few trends are clear. In Washington D.C., which was quick to welcome Uber and Lyft as well as invest in bike-sharing, there are signs of how these services have changed real estate development patterns as residents increasingly forgo car ownership (and the need for parking). Meanwhile, Transport for London is pondering how it might bring such services under its aegis — rather than compete with them — and a Finnish startup is betting the way to do that is to create an app and a platform potentially combining every mode of transport — they call it “mobility-as-a-service.” São Paulo is hoping improved data analytics might help relieve some of the pressure on its overcrowded trains and buses as it adds more lines, while Manila is just hoping to make some sense of the riotous mix of private transit services the majority of inhabitants rely on for commuting. The architect Cedric Price once said, “Technology is the answer; what is the question?” I’m just trying to ask those questions.

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Greg Lindsay is a generalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a non-resident senior fellow of the Arizona State University Threatcasting Lab, a non-resident senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative. He was the founding chief communications officer of Climate Alpha and remains a senior advisor. Previously, he was an urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and augmented reality at urban scale.

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