Greg Lindsay's Blog

May 13, 2020  |  permalink

The Big Rethink: The How, What, and Where of Work

On May 12th, I hosted the sixth episode of The Big Rethink: Cities After COVID-19, NewCities’ Webinar series on how the virus has impacted cities. Joining me along with 500+ attendees were Canadian Union of Postal Workers president Jan Simpson, Googleplex architect Clive Wilkinson, Cisco’s public sector chief growth officer Munish Khetrapal, and Jamira Burley, head of youth engagement & skills at the Global Business Coalition for Education. Click to watch the replay above; the episode description is below.

In the context of COVID-19, the term ‘essential’ has gone beyond defining indispensable activities and labor during a time of crisis and entered the realm of Orwellian doublespeak. The pandemic has only accelerated a much larger conversation being led by market forces, the development and accessibility of technology, and other mega-trends about what is essential –and by definition, non-essential– about work in cities.

On this episode of The Big Rethink, we take a deep dive into the how, what, and where of the future of the urban workforce. We’ll discuss the dissonance in naming workers as essential whilst not providing protections or a living wage, why the Fourth Industrial Revolution requires skills-friendly cities, and whether the modern brick-and-mortar office will itself soon be deemed as non-essential.

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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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