While California may be the world’s fourth-largest economy, the state continues hemorrhaging residents due to the cost of housing. Why can’t California build the affordable, resilient housing it needs to not only retain young residents fleeing to other states, but attract new ones?

That question was the subject of his opening keynote and subsequent education session at PCBC — the annual flagship conference of the California Building Industry Association. Citing “chain drain” (see above) as the primary reason why homebuilding struggles to achieve the economies of scale seen in other industries, he explored how the intersection of climate disasters, insurance, and technology might offer a mechanism to tighten the industry’s supply chain.

Following his keynote, Greg joined Builder Innovator’s John Galante on the show flow for an interview further explicating his ideas.

Watch Greg’s interview with Builder Innovator

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In honor of Pokémon GO’s 10th anniversary, Greg framed his keynote at FWD50 — the world’s leading government digital transformation conference — through the lens of “the good, the bad, and the weird.”

The good: Pokémon GO has brought together multi-ethnic, multi-generational groups of players in public space on a scale rarely seen. The bad: According to researchers at Purdue University, the distracted drivers playing the game may have injured as many as 30,000 Americans in its first six months alone. The weird: The game’s creators have spent a decade distilling player data into a centimeter-accurate “visual positioning system,” which it is now using to train delivery robots... and autonomous weapons systems.

The lesson: cities do not, in fact, have to take the bad and the weird with the good. So, how can they get better at anticipating the externalities of new urban technologies?

Watch “The Good, The Bad, and The Weird”

Greg co-hosted a “threatcasting” work­shop at the inaugural Make­Shift confe­rence in New York with inCitu’s Nick Kauf­mann, challenging parti­ci­­pants to imagine the future of privacy, surveil­lance, and micro­target­ing. Once teams had created Black Mirror-style mad libs, Nick repro­du­ced their stories in XR using inCitu’s platform, literally embed­ding potential future in Man­hat­tan’s street grid.

This was effectively the kickoff of Greg’s appoint­ment as a 2026–2027 urbanist-in-resi­dence at the University of Toronto’s School of Cities, which will build off his land­mark report, The Augmented City on behalf of Cornell Tech. Watch this space for more.

Watch “Surface Tensions:
Threatcasting the Augmented City”

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Greg made a side quest to Guatemala at the behest of Grupo AG, one of Latin Ame­rica’s leading steel- and circular materials companies and the largest recy­cler in Central America.

Invited to speak at a dinner honoring dozens of local construction and real estate firms for their for use of “living steel,” he did his best to connect the dots between Guatemala's unique demo­graphics as both a relatively young and still-urbanizing nation, the next gene­ra­tions’ real estate needs, desires, and spaces, the mounting climate catastro­phes facing the nation, and how the construction industry must evolve to meet all of these challenges.

While he was in Guatemala, Greg sat for an interview with news site La Hora on the future of cities. Link below.

Watch Greg’s interview

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What do stars, cities, and business events have in common? Each is a fusion reactor of sorts, alter­na­tely pro­du­cing heat and light, or new ideas and connections. That was Greg’s message to the Events Industry Council — the voice of the busi­ness events indus­try on advocacy, research, pro­fessio­nal recog­­ni­tion, and stan­dards — in Washing­ton on Global Meetings Indus­try Day on May 6.

Face-to-face meetings are essential to both business and society, but AI alter­nately threatens to disrupt (or promises to en­hance) it depending on what we value — which more than anything else, is simple connection.

Watch Greg’s keynote

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We need to do a better job at building places we love, otherwise we will just dis­card them.

Greg joined Dr. Fanni Melles on her long-running podcast (427 episodes and count­ing!) What Is The Future For Cities? (WTF4C) to dis­cuss climate adaptation and reuse, cities and seren­dipity, and much, much more, as he always does.

Listen to the podcast

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We’re playing SimCity for real. That was Greg’s message at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Com­mission’s annual State of the Region summit in Columbus to nearly 900 local civic leaders. The game that radicalized a generation of accidental urba­nists has been reborn as AI-powered digital twins, generative cities spun up in real time, and AR overlays — the latter of which helped pass Columbus’s 2024 LinkUS transit referendum. But as machine intelligence scales, being together face-to-face becomes even more valuable, not less.

Following the keynote, Greg joined MORPC’s chief strategy officer Joseph Garrity on the Grow­ing Better Together podcast for a wider-ranging conversation on cities and scaling laws, the lone­li­ness epidemic, and what Columbus might learn from Tulsa Remote.

Watch Greg’s keynote
Listen to the podcast

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Greg returned to Austin for the third year running to attend South by Southwest, this time to host “Seeing is Believ­ing” — a main program panel hosted by inCitu at the intersection of XR, urban planning, and cli­mate resilience — and to once again host sessions at the Fast Com­pany Grill and its sister venue, Inc. Founder’s House.

Sessions at the former included the future of tra­vel (pictured) — how can tech help us be present in the presence of others? — and the main­stream­ing of crypto. (🧐️) Over at Inc., he hosted a discussion on sustain­abi­lity certi­fi­ca­tion and tracing in the age of agentic commerce. (Not pic­tu­red: a weekend of scooter rides, robotaxi rides, breakfast tacos, and frozen margs.)

Watch “Seeing is Believing”
Read/Watch the future of travel
Read/Watch sustain­abi­lity certification
Read/Watch the main­streaming of crypto?