March 17, 2017 | permalink
Anyone who follows me on LinkedIn knows I have a fondness for collecting titles, but my latest may be my favorite: the Fast Company Urbanist-in-Residence at URBAN-X. It requires some explaining.
URBAN-X is a startup accelerator for nascent companies with an urban bent, whether that has to do with mobility, real estate, pollution, trash, or wayfinding for the blind. The accelerator is a joint venture between SOSV – the world’s largest accelerator program with hundreds of graduating startups per year, like scratch-and-win lottery tickets – and BWM MINI, which houses the program in its Brooklyn combination restaurant/co-working/makerspace, A/D/O. Why MINI? Because BMW executives realized the Mini Cooper’s brand equity is greater than the car – hence the effort to transform it into a lifestyle brand comprised of MINI Living, MINI Fashion, and more. (Presumably, we can one day expect to live in a global MINI-branded co-living chain equipped with cars from ReachNow, BMW’s American car-sharing program.
My role is the result of a deal between Fast Company and URBAN-X to advise the startups-in-residence on the peculiarities of cities and file dispatches on their progress. (Pre-seed round startups, I’ve learned, are a lot like toddlers – they constantly grasp at the nearest, shiniest thing.) In the meantime, TechRepublic has a nice round-up of the eight startups in the current cohort, three of which have “sense” in their name.
I’ve also agree to host or participate in several events at A/D/O this spring, including the kickoff festival in Janaury, last month’s “The Internet of Very Bad, No-Good Things,” and next month’s event with The Kingdom of Happiness author Aimee Groth on April 3rd.
Next up is “Where The Robot Meets The Road” on March 30:
Where The Robot Meets The Road
The rise of Uber and advent of autonomous vehicles herald a new era in urban mobility while threatening to disrupt public transport infrastructure. How can cities reconcile these competing models while preserving the public interest?The format of this event will be a participatory panel discussion led by our Urbanist-in-Residence Greg Lindsay, in conversation with:
• Zack Wasserman, Head of Global Business Development at Via On-Demand Transit.
• Corinne Kisner, Director of Policy and Special Projects at NACTO.
• Varun Adibhatla, Founder of ARGO and Adjunct Instructor at NYU’s CUSP.This event is our kickoff event of our monthly URBAN-X Dialogue Series. During these events we will hold off-the-record, participatory conversations to discuss critical questions around the impact of urban technologies in our lives. We believe that dialogue is a fundamental element for understanding the complexity of our diverse personal universes, and the starting point of better solutions for a brighter urban life.
And yes, there will be beer. Please register here; I hope to see you there.
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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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