Last summer, I was invited by Anthony Townsend and Bryan Boyer, on behalf of the Bloomberg Aspen Initiative on Cities and Autonomous Vehicles, to flesh out six scenarios for autonomous vehicles, and how we would get there from here, so to speak. The final results have just been published by the National League of Cities, and I highly encourage you to click through for the brilliant ideas and gorgeous accompanying illustrations. The introduction is reproduced below:

The unstoppable forces of automation and artificial intelligence are changing the way we move through, work in, and design cities.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) are already on our streets, with pilots taking place in cities nationwide. Before long, we can expect to see thousands of autonomous vehicles on roadways, autonomous buses and transit vehicles providing rides, and autonomous conveyors shuttling back and forth on sidewalks making deliveries.

The full story, however has not yet been written. While we will inevitably see rapid expansion of autonomous transportation in commercial trucks, driverless buses, trains, shuttles, and more–transportation systems as a whole will also be revolutionized. Yet this change comes at a time when our shared networks – vital arteries for commerce and interaction - are already clogged.

So while technology has the potential to address the challenges facing these platforms for commerce and human interaction, effective government will be critical in pushing innovation forward. That future is already starting to unfold, but cities can prepare themselves to play a more informed, active role in shaping it.

This is why at the National League of Cities we have developed–and continue to work on–a series of research reports and analyses to help city leaders prepare for these shifts.

Explore the links below to see four possible futures that describe what AVs could mean for cities. The scenarios, developed by the Bloomberg Aspen Initiative on Cities and Autonomous Vehicles, and reported by journalist Greg Lindsay, are part and parcel of NLC’s larger initiative to provide city leaders with the tools that they need to build our cities of the future.

For cities that want to get up to speed quickly on key facts, emerging trends, and urban policy issues raised by the arrival of autonomous vehicles and found out more about how cities are taking a hands-on approach to learning, Bloomberg Philanthropies has published a primer and a global atlas of city-led AV pilots covering more than 100 city-led AV pilots worldwide.

(CityLab has published my writeup of January’s “Where the Robot Meets the Road: Autonomous Everything” event at URBAN-X in Brooklyn. Please find the full recap published below.)

New York City 2025. Autonomous stuff is here, and it’s stranger than anyone imagined. In the wake of Hurricane Hermine, the MTA rebooted with AV buses and real-time routing. On the fringes of Queens, self-driving “dollar vans” aid immigrants in evading deportation. The New York Public Library has deployed autonomous libraries to replace shuttered branches, while a startup billing itself as Uber-for-garbage is using bots for peer-to-peer trash-picking. Looming over all is Amazon, which has mounted cameras across its entire delivery fleet, offering a drone’s-eye-view labeled “presence-as-a-service.” As mayor of a cash-strapped metropolis, you may choose only one of these schemes to support – so, which will it be?

This was the question posed to more than a hundred attendees at “Where the Robot Meets the Road: Autonomous Everything,” the second in a series of events exploring the potential impacts of autonomous vehicles. Hosted by URBAN-X – the Brooklyn-based urban tech accelerator built by MINI and Urban Us– guests perhaps expecting startup pitches were instead asked to vote with their wallets (or in this case, tokens) for the best new public good. The five competing proposals had been developed earlier that day by several dozen designers, policy experts, urbanists, technologists, and city and state officials (“the dudes in suits” as one put it), in an effort to think concretely about what an autonomous world should look like, rather than what automakers and technology giants would like it to be.

Design for the unintended consequences

Led by designer Bryan Boyer, who originally created the workshop along with futurist Anthony Townsend for the Bloomberg Aspen Initiative on Cities and Autonomous Vehicles, participants were tasked with turning autonomous vehicle (AV) hype inside-out. Forget glossy corporate brochures and consultants’ 2x2 matrices, they were told. Rather than letting private services run roughshod over cities (again), how could they use automation to solve existing challenges unique to the city? From healthcare to employment, education, and aging, participants were asked to imagine what equity might look like in an age where AVs proliferate.

Some public officials already see AVs as a lever with which to enact rules and regulations that have been stymied by political inertia, including road pricing, reduced parking, and redesigned streets. AVs may or may not make traffic congestion worse, “but they do create an opportunity to imagine a different status quo,” Boyer said, “and some cities will act on that immediately.”

The ones that have tend to be in Sunbelt states such as Arizona, Florida, and California where sprawl is the prevailing pattern. That pattern undoubtedly played a role in the death of Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, AZ on March 18 after she was struck by an autonomous vehicle while crossing a street. Arizona has the highest rate of pedestrian deaths in the nation, which experts attribute to its exceptionally wide streets – the same “wide open roads” Gov. Doug Ducey touted when welcoming autonomous vehicles to the state. One reason Herzberg died, argues Alissa Walker, is because “the state prioritizes cars over the lives of pedestrians.” Herzberg’s tragic death underscored the goal of the workshop. Only by taking the wheel early can policymakers steer AVs in human-centric and locally-appropriate directions.

Simultaneously, “autonomous vehicles” is a misnomer, Boyer argued. Autonomy will take the form of robots first, and they’re already here – as deliverybots, pet pack mules, or self-driving suitcases. “Your first robot probably won’t be a car,” he said. And while one robot may be cute, what happens when they become a swarm? San Francisco has already banned robots from most sidewalks for this very reason. Thinking about autonomy as a technology or standalone service won’t help predict unintended consequences.

“Autonomous” isn’t a technology or service, it’s a system

With that warning ringing in their ears, teams self-assembled and set to work drafting solutions tailored to specific provocations. Prompted to sketch the contours of autonomous ‘movers’, one team combined self-service AVs with a white-glove version of the cloud-for-your-stuff startup MakeSpace. Other early ideas included autonomous health clinics, farmer’s markets, stereos, and even prisons – but only during periods of low ride-sharing demand, of course.

It gradually became apparent to participants that the central assumption of autonomy – moving people more swiftly and cheaply from A to B – was incorrect, or at least incomplete. Assuming cities remain hard-pressed to deliver public services and that marginalized communities will be the first to lose them, the future of autonomous health isn’t a self-driving ambulance but the clinic in lieu of a hospital. “Is there a new urban edge/core dynamic to be had?” asked Richard Tyson, then the principal strategy director for intelligent systems at Frog. And if so, will AVs be the method for doing more with much, much less?

As the workshop entered its final hour, Boyer asked five teams to choose a single idea and develop their sketches into systems. How would their scenarios collide with other aspects of the city as they scaled? The dollar van team, led by the Regional Plan Association’s Mandu Sen and Arup’s Francesca Birks, began by asking how autonomy might make a difference in the working-class immigrant suburbs of Long Island. A point-to-point AV shuttle offers more than just the ability to make do without a car, they argued. Using secure open source software, activist and legal aid groups could provide safety and anonymity to undocumented migrants during their commutes.

Meanwhile, the autonomous bus team grappled with the implications of a transit system that never traces the same route twice. A hyper-optimized fleet that never loses money isn’t necessarily a just one, argued Code for Maine’s Nick Kaufman. How would communities accustomed to lobbying for better service refute an algorithm insisting it could never be profitable? Only by publishing the underlying data would cities and their citizens be able to understand these conflicts, and hopefully resolve them.

That evening, as audience members listened to representatives of each team make the case for why they – as stand-ins for the Mayor of New York – should select their proposal, urban anthropologist Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman was chosen to give the bus pitch last. Not only would they travel smarter routes, she argued, but the buses would also become the autonomous arm for city services, helping the city prepare for and evacuate residents ahead of disasters. “This is more than solo bubbles moving around our streets,” she said. “This is about people moving together and taking charge of their streets and their city.” Her team won in a landslide.

“We shouldn’t be thinking about what’s possible with the technology we have,” she said afterward. “We should be thinking about serving people and using autonomy to give an extra nudge to what we know works.”

This conversation isn’t happening in Silicon Valley or Detroit, or wherever else the only people around the table are VCs, engineers, and robotics Ph.Ds. Taming the autonomous vehicle demands a human-centric approach to their design – and not only the vehicle, but how the service works and for whom. This, in turn, requires bringing many more stakeholders to bear on the challenge – from policy experts to ordinary citizens – to ensure what works is given a nudge rather than disrupted and broken worse than before. That’s one reason why MINI and URBAN-X hosted this workshop and conversation in Brooklyn as part of ‘Robot Meets the Road’: an ongoing series exploring the future of autonomous cities – and how to use those robots to make them more efficient, livable, and equitable.

Last summer, I was invited to participate in a declassified, off-the-record workshop at Sandia National Laboratories as part of its long-range planning efforts. Our task: imagine the “future of population and Earth systems” circa 2050. Heavy stuff from the people who brought you both the Manhattan Project and essential research into photovoltaic solar panels. A public high-level summary of the event is copied below; my only criticism is that it doesn’t reflect my personal efforts to get the group thinking about post-corporate, post-nation-state forms of human organization. (Once again, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.) Still: don’t tell Rick Perry what the good folks of Sandia are up to.

***

What dynamics and key questions might shape global security, population, and Earth systems in 20 years?

Climate change, population growth, and resource constraints threaten national and global security, stability, and peace
Climate change, exponentially increasing population, and constrained resources will continue to impact unrest and conflict at multiple scales. Drought, food shortages, sea level rise, and increasing storm frequency and intensity will contribute to the destabilization of social, economic, and political systems. Interdependent dynamics of migration, urbanization, and economic inequality will be complicated by religious and ideological extremism and ethnic conflict. Together, these dynamics will create a global system of unparalleled complexity.
• How might individuals, societies, and governments balance shifts in resource supply and demand as a way of maintaining security, stability, and peace?
• To what extent will increasing resource demand and declining supply create increasingly fragile social and governance systems, the collapse of which further contributes to cascading unrest, insecurity, and conflict?
• How might populations, governments, and corporations respond as parts of the world become more accessible or less inhabitable?

Rapid technological innovation promises solutions, however unintended consequences could exacerbate problems
Public and private sector innovations in sensing and data analytics have the potential to significantly increase our ability to anticipate and understand the complex relationships between Earth systems, population, and conflict. Simultaneously, innovations designed to provide solutions to climate change and resource constraints (e.g., geoengineering, genetic modification, desalination) may create unintended consequences at various scales. The inability of governance systems to keep up with the pace of technological change may create turbulent social and economic shifts.
• How might advances in autonomy change the nature of work and affect industrialization, inequality patterns, and migration?
• To what extent might the combination of technological and governance innovations enable populations to anticipate, withstand, manage, adapt, and recover from emerging challenges?

Shifting patterns create opportunities for new actors to drive change in an increasingly polarized world
Emerging state and non-state powers will challenge and transform the international norms and agreements shaping global security. Shifting patterns in climate, globalization, industrialization, demographics, and wealth may contribute to the rise of non-state actors driven to address these global problems. All the while, political polarization and mistrust in science erode the capacity of governments to adopt policy and develop technologies that can adapt to future challenges.
• To what extent, and through what mechanisms, will state and non-state actors, including cities and multinational corporations, cooperate to address emerging security challenges?
• To what extent will populations in industrialized and emerging economies choose to and be able to alter resource consumption and reproduction rates?

How might the national security enterprise prepare for emerging national security challenges and opportunities?

Advance the capacity to collect, integrate, and analyze data, and model complex adaptive systems
• Better understand the interdependencies of disruptions to Earth systems with socio-political-technical systems and how all contribute to instability, insecurity, and conflict
• Improve understanding of uncertainty associated with consequences of population and resource management options and risks

Develop tools and technologies that foster resilience, flexibility, and high speed decisions
• Foster partnerships across multi-disciplinary, multi-sectoral experts and institutions to better understand technical solutions to social- and governance-related challenges
• Build collaborations with academia and industry to assure greater resilience for critical infrastructure, including energy, water, food, and sanitation systems
• Encourage basic research, innovation, and risk-taking in Earth systems research and development (R&D)

Enhance existing approaches and explore new ones for more effectively communicating science & technology insights
• Improve science-based policy making by supporting better assessment of complexities, security options, potential consequences both intended and unintended, risks, and uncertainties
• Strengthen public trust in science through broad education and communication initiatives

You can download the entire summary report here.

My friend and fellow futurist Brian David Johnson invited me to join his inaugural podcast for the Corporate Housing Provider Association (the folks who help the folks who furnish long-term stays for road warriors) on the future of corporations, falling transaction costs, and how people derive status (and meaning) in a world without full-time employment. Either listen to the podcast above (I appear around the 10:30 mark), or just read our exchange below.

Brian David Johnson: Today on the podcast, we have Greg Lindsay. Greg is a journalist, an urbanist, and a futurist and speaker. He’s a senior fellow at NewCities and the director of strategy for its offshoot LA CoMotion – an annual urban mobility festival in the Arts District of Los Angeles. He’s also a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Foresight, Strategy, and Risks Initiative, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management, a contributing writer for Fast Company, and co-author of “Aerotropolis: The Way We Will Live Next.” Now, this book Aerotropolis, I cannot recommend more. This is actually the book that introduced me to Greg and Greg’s work. I did not know him at the time. It was so amazing that after I finished reading it, I reached out to him via Twitter and started this conversation because I was so impressed by his work. So it’s a pleasure to have you on the show today, Greg.

Greg Lindsay: Thank you so much for having me, Brian.

BDJ: So, on the show today we are looking at the future of corporations. We’re looking specifically at falling transactional costs – you know, the work Ronald Coase did. Talking about transactional cost and the nature of the firm. And you’ve been doing some really interesting work around thinking about not only what that means for corporations, where we can have, we can spin up a lot of small companies and spin them down. And there’s a lot more freedom of movement because of technology. But you’ve also been looking at kind of how that changes the culture of these corporations. Can you tell us a little bit more about the work?

GL: Yeah, I first got interested in the rise of shared workspaces. Five or six years ago, before WeWork became a $20 billion colossus, it was just another startup in stealth mode. And I actually worked out of their very first office in Dumbo in Brooklyn. And it led me to thinking about why were people choosing to work in these shared workplaces versus traditional office space or traditional employers? And it led me to think about how the culture of the office was changing. If you compare today’s culture of white collar knowledge work compared to what Coase wrote about with transaction costs, you can see that the mid-century firm, the wood paneled office and the huge corporate campuses of IBM and GE and others. I was relating to this notion that it was really hard to find talent. And once you did, you wanted coddle it. You wanted to keep them there as long as possible.

Now, with falling transaction costs, you end up with “Free Agent Nation” and these loosely coupled networks of self-managed, self-driven people who are nesting inside these shared workspaces. They’re using them almost as coral reefs, to basically find their next gig or collaborator. So, I got really interested in the change of the office as a container for doing work to a sort of platform that actually enabled you to work and to find new work.

BDJ: And how does this then change what people value? I know in some of your writing and some of your work you’ve done, you’ve looked at the, in the larger corporations, you’ve got the gold watch upon retirement. You were there for a long time and now in these new more flexible areas, you know, what people want, what people value is changing. What have you seen happening there and what do you think that means for the future of corporations?

GL: There’s a couple of things. Yes, the mid-century corporation had its own hallmarks of success. It was the gold watch. It was the luxury car. It was the suburban house. Any of us who’ve seen Mad Men can immediately envision that era. And that’s obviously changed to this sort of startup culture now which is sort of very studiously casual and relaxed. And it sort of has some rigid hierarchy to date but they’re sort of different. But the other thing it’s done is led to this profusion of different types of status. Right? So not only is there conspicuous consumption. You know, do you have right athleisure clothes? But also conspicuous production. You know, the greatest status signifier in startup culture is who your VCs are and how much you raised in your last round.

So, it has these changing symbols. And the other thing I found is that just like every other media that we participate in, it’s fractured. Right? None of us watch the same television. We all have our own filter bubbles. The same thing has happened with taste and culture as well. There’s a sort of portable culture.

A friend of mine named Stowe Boyd has this notion of “work culture” versus corporate culture. Work culture is the culture that we take with us from job to job wherever we go. And that’s also a sort of culture of taste and style that we take with us. And so you know, you have these sort of portable workforces that are going from place to place. And that’s sort of what I think too. If you go to a lot of different offices, you see they have the same very clean aesthetic. You know it’s been called the Brooklyn style or air space or other things. And I think that’s partly responds to the fact that yeah, we expect that workers have their own tastes and they want this workplace to look the same.

That’s why WeWork is managing offices for IBM. Because the workers IBM wants to hire expect to work at We Work. They don’t expect to work at a suburban IBM campus. Remember the classic line “Culture eats strategy for breakfast?” Well, in a macro sense, the opposite is true. The strategy of how you hire and find talent is actually producing these new sorts of culture.

BDJ: Yeah and I think what’s really interesting about that, and as you can apply it in thinking about the future of corporations and what people want, is you say we’ll have different space requirements. What people value. People will gravitate to a certain space or a certain area because it embraces that culture. Right? It embraces like you said, the startup culture or this culture of the gig economy or what have you. And a lot of it is driven by these sort of underlying forces. I think both falling transactional costs as well as the increasing digital nature of corporations. Right? We’re seeing more and more companies becoming digital in nature.

So, my last question to you Greg is, so as you look out to the future of corporations and sort of what the business of doing business looks like, where do you see things going?

GL: Well, if you follow Coase’s idea to its logical conclusion, you end up with the heat death of the corporation. It completely atomizes and it’s all individuals. Which hasn’t been the case. That’s been happening for 20 years, and instead of flattening out into everyone is an entrepreneur, instead you have the rise of these new networks forming – networks of small firms, networks of entrepreneurs, or freelancers. I think we’re still in the early stages of that evolution, seeing what new corporate organisms will emerge. And at the very top, you see these continuing waves of consolidation. But even then, these corporations, these huge corporations are hollowing out.

Perhaps workers will organize around platforms istead. People have pointed to companies such as Upwork and Uber as examples of these huge platforms that have arisen to organize certain types of work. It’ll be interesting to see what the interplay is between physical face-to-face workspaces and these platforms? Will we have guilds reemerge, for example where you exist in peer networks where you are helping each other learn or helping each other find work? I think we’ll start to see the rise of corporate to corporate coworking. We will see teams from different companies who have the same roles but different employers will work side by side because, you know you’ll have less corporate politics. But they’ll be able to help each other solve problems faster if they’re non-competitive.

So, this notion that you work for one company and you go to the same job in the same space five days a week is going to change pretty quickly, I think. And then the other thing, the long term trend is that historically it’s been about control. You know, companies controlled you and in exchange for the control, they gave you perks. They made you come to the office. They monitored how much you worked and how long you worked. And today, they’re trying to do that digitally, right? Either they’re watching your screenshots or you have this sort of people analytics on the rise. But there’s always been a strive towards autonomy in that. And I think the real cutting edge there too is just how much autonomy are these companies willing to give their employees or the people they work with to really solve problems with no instructions or to really enrich themselves. And I think that’s going to continue to be the cutting edge as well.

BDJ: Well, Greg Lindsay, listen. Really amazing things for us to keep an eye on and for us to kind of dig into. But we want to thank you so much for being on the podcast today. We really really appreciate it.

GL: Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure.

In celebration of NYCxDESIGN, the MoMA Design Store teamed up with La French Tech – a tech startup ecosystem supported by the French government – to host a discussion on the French tech ecosystem, why France has become such a hotbed for tech startups in the last year, and how the ecosystem will progress in the future. As moderator, I was joined by Christian Brun of the French startup iSKN, Laetitia Gazel Anthoine, founder of Connecthings, and French business leader Pascal Cagni to host a rollicking conversation in SoHo tonight.

The folks at Procurious – the social network for procurment executives, AKA the people who run the world, or at least sign contracts for it – asked me to speak about engineering serendipity at their Big Ideas Summit in London last week. Above is a two-minute preview of my talk, which covered unknown knowns, WeWork’s staggering 220,000 members, eavesdropping over pints in the alleys of London, and weaponized Twitter bots. You had to be there.

(Ahead of reSITE 2018 ACCOMMODATE in Prague next month, our media partners at Citylab published an interview with myself and reSITE founder and chairman and founder Martin Barry. Please find it republished below.)

Housing has been identified as the number one issue of today’s cities by leading architects and planners, Teddy Cruz, Jean-Louis Missika, and Carl Weisbrod – all keynote speakers at reSITE events over the last three years. That’s where the theme of the reSITE 2018 Accommodate event, June 14-15 in Prague, begins. For this annual event, reSITE is inviting fifty international guests to explore the challenge and its solutions from all angles, including planning, design, technology, and new economic and social models of co-living and cohousing. Greg Lindsay, guest curator of reSITE, and Martin Barry, reSITE’s founder, speak about the theme of the upcoming June event.

Q:What do you define as the most pressing housing challenges cities face today?

Martin Barry: From Bordeaux to Belfast and Tokyo to Tel Aviv, cost of living has become one of the most pressing puzzles of our generation. As cities face increasing challenges to fund affordable housing solutions, we need to utilize new technologies and diverse partnerships. We need to build more and build closer to city centers or transit hubs. We need do it in a way that can open alternative ownership models that provide higher quality housing at affordable costs and a flexible structure. Increasing supply simply isn’t decreasing cost. If cities want to remain competitive, they should look no further than ensuring that people can find a good and affordable place to live.

Greg Lindsay: It’s become clear that the most beloved qualities of our cities have transformed them into luxury goods, and a process that started in London or New York a decade ago is trickling down into one city after another. Having a “right to the city” means having the right to live in the city, and that’s why we need new strategies, technologies, and protections to build homes for all of us. We need to build more housing where people want to live; we need to do it without the mass displacement of the people who live there now, and we need to stop financializing it.

Q: What are the new and expected trends related to housing and living in cities?

Greg Lindsay: As an American, I think it’s interesting that the dream of a single-family suburban home is receding for rich and poor alike. Soaring home prices coupled with stagnant incomes and austerity are leading some to reconsider collective housing, while at the very high end of the market, “co-living” offers wealthy residents housing as a membership club. Why pay a lease or a mortgage when you can sign up for a room in one city and then float to a luxury building in another? Home ownership has become either an unattainable ideal or a drag, depending on your tax bracket.

Martin Barry: Student housing in Europe is trending and there is a need, with over 7 million international students in 2020, compared with 4.1 million in 2014. However, the market in cities like Amsterdam, Lisbon and London will soon be saturated with ultra-luxury student apartments, which are more like 5-star hotels than the creaky flats that I lived in when I was in school. It’s a great sector for us to pilot new types of housing alternatives, because younger people have different expectations about how they want to live in the future city. We can test new ideas of co-living and intergenerational living as part of this trend.

Q: Why do we need to cooperate across disciplines?

Greg Lindsay: No single discipline or profession can solve this challenge. We need to rethink in parallel the design, construction, financing, and use of homes if we have any hopes of creating better cities. Simply building more housing isn’t enough; neither is designing a more beautiful or practice house, or finding ways to build them more cheaply, or with less money down. We need to think holistically and discover how one solution might reinforce another.

Q: What are your program tips for reSITE 2018?

Martin Barry: Alternative ownership, financing and regeneration models are driving the conversation about housing around the world. We will expand upon each of those at reSITE this year. Jeanne Gang is a practicing architect and a MacArthur Fellow, whose work at a recent MoMA exhibition “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream” will be a highlight. Reinier de Graaf’s first book “Four Walls and a Roof,” will be revealed at the event, where we expect him to lambaste apathetic architectural ideals and explain that architecture will always be flawed as long as humans conceive, create and build it.

Greg Lindsay: An emerging theme is top-down plans for large-scale regeneration – such as LSE Cities’ Richard Burdett and his role in remaking east London following the 2012 Summer Olympic Games – versus bottom-up craftsmanship, as demonstrated by the Turner Prize-winning architects of Assemble and the Mumbai-based research group URBZ. Resolving that tension productively will go a long way toward achieving our goals for housing.

reSITE 2018, the annual international forum showcasing better solutions for our urbanized world, sponsored by CityLab, will present 50 international speakers from 30 countries including architects Jeanne Gang, Michel Rojkind, Sou Fujimoto and Reinier de Graaf. Over 1,000 audience members including architects, planners, bottom-up innovators and municipal and private sector leaders will also attend on June 14–15, 2018 at Prague’s Forum Karlin.

To register and learn more, including about reSITE’s “Women Make Cities” discount promotion, which is available for all the women in architecture, design, NGOs and city leadership, visit reSITE.org.

About the event:
reSITE 2018 ACCOMMODATE
June 14-15, 2018
Prague, Forum Karlin
Register at reSITE.org

LA 3.0: Development and Design for the New Los Angeles from Woods Bagot on Vimeo.

Back in February, Woods Bagot – Australia’s largest architecture firm – invited me to moderate and speak at “LA 3.0,” a half-day conference exploring the ongoing transformation of Los Angeles. Come for me, stay for LADOT’s Seleta Reynolds…

I’m delighted to announce that “Bight: Coastal Urbanism” – a re-imagining of New York and New Jersey coastlines after 50 years and several feet of sea-level rise – will be exhibited this spring at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, also known as the Venice Architecture Biennale. Along with my teammates Rafi Segal, Susannah Drake, Sarah Williams, Brent Ryan, and Benjamin Albrecht, our work will be featured by the GAA Foundation and European Cultural Centre as part of the former’s “Time, Space, Existence” exhibit at the Palazzo Mora.

If you make your way to Venice this summer, I hope you’ll check it out.

As New York finally thaws after a brutal winter – if you can call four Nor’easters in March “winter” – here’s a quick recap of my speaking schedule this year to date.

• I started the year in Orlando at the International Builders Show, speaking on behalf of the National Association of Home Builders. I was back in town a few weeks later to speak to the Urban Land Institute’s Central Florida chapter. In between, I hosted a workshop and public presentation on future uses of autonomous vehicles at URBAN-X in Brooklyn. Speaking of AVs, I spoke in San Antonio to the members of the American Traffic Safety Services Association – the highway workers who are arguably the most at risk from self-crashing cars. I ended the month moderating a panel on electric mobility at BMW iVentures’ inaugural Urban Mobility Forum in New York before hopping a transcontinental flight to Los Angeles for Woods Bagot’s “LA 3.0.”

• March was mostly about mobility. Dodging yet another Nor’easter, I spoke in Boston to the senior leadership of the design and engineering firm VHB before driving home after all planes and trains were canceled to catch an early morning flight to Chicago, where I moderated a session on mobility-as-a-service at the Shared Use Mobility Conference. But that was just a warm-up for the following week’s flight to Auckland to deliver the opening keynote at ITS New Zealand’s T-Tech Transport Innovation Conference.” If that wasn’t enough, on the way home, I laid over in Victoria, British Columbia to offer the Canadian Home Builders Association a whirlwind tour of the next twenty-five years. (They seemed less enthused about 3D-printed houses made from cultured meat.)

I hit the road again next week for CIBC’s 23rd Annual Real Estate Conference in Toronto, followed by Procurious’ Big Idea Summit in London before a May homestand in New York with NAIOP, CoreNet, MSCI, and MoMA. (Then the real fun begins, with trips to Riga, Prague, and Venice in early summer.)

Needless to say, please get in touch if you’d like me to make a stop somewhere in between!