Like many, Greg has marveled at the Urban Land Insti­tute’s transformation from a real estate indus­try asso­cia­tion into an inspiring force for change through its inter­disci­pli­nary tech­ni­cal assis­tance and advi­sory pro­grams. So, he jumped at the chance to speak to ULI’s Global Gover­ning Trus­tees in Washing­ton about what ULI could become, thanks to CEO Angela Cain’s ambi­tious “Future­scape 2035” cam­paign.

Invi­ted to speak briefly about the trends sha­ping the built environ­ment over the next decade, Greg settled on two—Big Tech’s over­wee­ning desire to divide and con­quer us, and the shock(s) of cli­mate change. Both chal­len­ges demand new forms of civic- and social infra­struc­ture as well as the phy­si­cal kind, and he hopes ULI mem­bers will have a strong role to play in that as well. He’ll revisit this theme in his closing keynote at the ULI Florida Summit at the end of February.

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What would you do if con­fron­ted with an AI doppel­gänger? That’s what Greg was up against in January at Think No More, a threat­cast­ing fore­sight work­shop hosted at the McCain Insti­tute in Washing­ton, D.C. At lunch, futur­ist and prank­ster Harmon Leon drafted Greg into one of his paten­ted AI vs. Human Roast Battles, in which he was forced to lyri­cally con­front an AI of him­self trained on his voice and past talks. It was a vivid exam­ple of the work­shop’s themes around human agency, insti­tu­tions, and con­trol in an era of agen­tic AI—a subject that has dominated 2026 so far.

Earlier that day, Henley & Partners—the global consul­ting firm advi­sing on citizen­ship by invest­ment—published Greg’s contri­bution to the Henley Global Mobi­lity Report 2026, in which he warn­ed about the dangers of joining multi­ple data sets under AI super­vi­sion. Citing past foresight work for the U.S. Secret Service, he explored how a U.S. Customs and Border Protec­tion pro­po­sal to collect social media data and per­so­nal infor­ma­tion from foreign travelers may some­day be wea­po­nized against them. Greg was sub­se­quently quoted by Condé Nast Traveler on how Ame­ri­can travelers should expect the same.

“Americans’ ease of travel is already a bargaining chip in the Trump administration’s brass-knuckle negotiations with foreign governments,” says Greg Lindsay, senior fellow at MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab and an expert on globalization and transportation policy. “It’s reasonable to expect Americans to be caught in a geopolitical tug-of-war for the foreseeable future.”

Watch Greg battle his AI doppelganger
Read his essay for Henley & Partners
Read his quote in Condé Nast Traveler

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Nearly a decade ago, Greg was the found­ing director of strategy at CoMotion—a first-of-its-kind conference and fes­ti­val cele­­brating the future of urban mobility. He returned in Decem­ber to co-host and key­note the inaugural global edi­tion in Riyadh, which convened more than 100 mayors from across the Global South to share poli­cies and forge partnerships.

In addition to co-hosting the main stage, Greg delivered a key­note on “The Aug­men­ted City” and moderated a dis­cus­sion on AI and “sentient cities” with Venice Archi­tec­ture Biennale cura­­tor Carlo Ratti and for­mer president of Costa Rica Carlos Alva­rado Quesada.

Watch Greg’s keynote
Watch Greg’s panel on “sentient cities”

For a second consecutive year, Greg was invited to contri­bute to Emer­ging Trends in Real Estate—the annual flag­ship publi­ca­tion by PwC and the Urban Land Institute—this time under the heading of “From Prop­tech to PropOS: The Emer­­gence of Real Estate’s Auto­nomous Future.”

Combi­ning contem­po­ra­neous exam­ples with spe­­cu­­lative uses of AI “agents” and “digital twins,” he describes how arti­ficial intel­li­gence pro­mises to glue together dis­pa­rate sys­tems. Will the coming year prove him right, or wrong?

Read the essay
Download the report

“The Screen Killed the City” was the title of Greg’s talk at WRLD­CTY in Van­cou­ver. Wea­ving toge­ther the loneli­ness epi­de­mic, screen addiction, quick com­merce, “AI” slop, and his report The Aug­men­ted City, he argued the phy­si­cal world is be­co­ming vesti­gial to the digi­tal one. The task for urbanists, he argued, is to create new public and private spa­ces where being together with other people is more attrac­tive than being alone with our phones.

He expanded on this thesis on the Challen­gers Cities podcast with Iain Montgomery: “Greg doesn’t warm up to get going, he sorta just deto­nates, in both our podcast chat, as well as his keynote.”

“We’ve built an environment,” said Greg, “where people are spend­­ing more of their real lives in inte­rior spaces with the digital world.” 

Watch the keynote
Listen to the podcast

Speaking at Zonda’s “Future Place” conference in Dallas-Fort Worth, Greg explored how Ame­rica’s master-planned commu­ni­ties became test beds in building a new generation of spaces and places instead of screens.

Communities such as Firefly—“a new Acti­ve Family Commu­nity^® designed to get kids to un­plug from the digital world”—and Story­living by Disney—“infu­sed with the imagination of Walt Disney Imagi­neers and mana­ged by Dis­ney Cast with the simple notion of bring­­ing people toge­ther”—under­score the hunger for these concepts.

In Texas, Greg also met with Radical Play Concepts Partners’ Dawson Williams and Nick Clark to discuss their plans for repur­po­sing a vacant medical office building as the first in a new generation of country clubs aimed at mille­n­nial families. Despite the eco­no­mic and techno­logical forces keeping people apart, they’re both hungry to be together.

Read the recap

Greg and his “Unfrozen” podcast co-host Daniel Safarik started a new season featuring the bone-chilling plans for the post-war recon­struction of Gaza (!), a detective novel about OMA’s Rem Koolhaas (!!), and North America’s post-climate change future, to name a few.

Listen to episodes:
No. 104 – Make Gaza GREAT Again
No. 105 – The House of Dr. Koolhaas

No. 108 – NORTH

As part of the inaugural Michigan Mobi­lity Week, Greg was invited by the state’s Chief Mobility Offi­cer, Justine Johnson, to keynote the Mobi­lity Inno­vation Exchange confe­rence. His address focused on Michigan’s once-and-future relation­ship with aerial mobility—inclu­ding the first-and-last test of “Greyhound Skyways” in Detroit in 1946—and the threats and opportunities posed by China and other global compe­titors. “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes,” as Mark Twain once wrote.