March 19, 2017 | permalink
(Photo credit: Thomas Garza Photography.)
This year is shaping up to be my busiest yet in terms of speaking, moderating, and making public appearances, and this winter has been no exception. It’s been a whirlwind three months – and that’s on top of the birth of our second son, Whitaker Dow Lindsay, on New Year’s Day! As the calendar turns to spring, here’s a quick recap of my sleepless winter:
The year began with a day trip to Los Angeles to judge AECOM’s Urban SOS awards, organized in conjunction with the Van Alen Institute and Rockfeller Foundation. This year’s competition, titled “Fair Share,” required multidisciplinary student teams to submit proposals for “sharing economy” services that actually involved, you know, sharing. The winning submission from Washington University, “First Class Meal,” proposed repurposing underutilized United States Post Offices for local food storage and distribution. They received a cash prize of $7,500 and $25,000 worth of in-kind contributions from AECOM to realize their plan.
From there it was off to Abu Dhabi to speak at the World Future Energy Summit (pictured below), where I framed the challenges and opportunities in terms of what might be called George Gilder’s Second Law: “In every era, the winning companies are those that waste what is abundant in order to save what is scarce.” What does that mean for mobility in an era of autonomous electric vehicles wasting both abundant solar electrons and unpriced roads? How will they conserve the most valuable resource of all – our time?
One theme of the winter has been the unintended consequences of the Internet of Things. At the launch festival for BMW MINI’s new Brooklyn workshop, A/D/O – where I’m the Urbanist-in-Residence at its in-house startup accelerator, URBAN-X – I interviewed MIT roboticist Kate Darling on robots and empathy, and tortured her pet dinosaur on stage (pictured below). A few weeks later, Changeist’s Susan Cox-Smith hosted a private workshop and public event at A/D/O exploring the ramifications of the IoT (Internet of Trump). And the week after that, I was in Chicago, warning of the perils of Big Data and the IoT at the IC Bus Innovation Summit – because really, what can go wrong with an Internet-connected school bus?
The remainder of my talks – for the commercial real estate investment group Accesso Partners, the independent commercial broker associations CORFAC and CORE Network, and the annual luncheon of Downtown Dallas Inc. – focused on how cities are moving away from single-use suburban malls and office parks toward shared workspaces, renewed public spaces, and a new mobility paradigm to support them. It’s a theme that will resonate a lot this spring in upcoming talks and workshops in New York and Oslo on autonomous vehicles. More soon.
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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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