January 10, 2017  |  permalink

Q&A with the World Future Energy Summit

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I’m headed to Abu Dhabi next week to speak at the World Future Energy Summit about sustainable transport and connected mobility. In advance of that talk, the organizers quizzed me at length about disruption, the Law of Connectivity, and whether we need to break up with cars. (Yes.) Our discussion follows:

How do we take practical steps to achieve urban sustainability and to make transport more climate friendly?

One way of framing the question is to think about the future we’re trying to avoid, a future the science fiction author Bruce Sterling once described as: “Old people, in big cities, afraid of the sky.” He was alluding to the triple dilemma of global aging, urbanization, and climate change.

This is the future we’ll have to grapple with – how do we help a population that’s likely to grow old before they grow rich stay in their homes leading healthy and hopefully happy lives even as temperatures and sea levels rise?

The first thing we’ll need is more cities – a lot more of them. Where will we build them? The Arabian Gulf is interesting to me for that reason, as it has become the emblem for instant urbanism. But to focus on how to build more ‘Abu Dhabis’ or ‘Dubais’ is to miss the bigger picture, which is that most people will live in slums by 2050 unless we help them build better cities first.

That’s why the real technology breakthroughs won’t be at the high end – but ultra-affordable, modular, humane housing that can be more or less built by hand, with solar panels on every corrugated tin roof powering clean, electric, autonomous tuk-tuks that might replace one of the biggest sources of carbon emissions and air pollution on Earth. (The latter already kills more people in Africa every year than malnutrition and unsafe sanitation combined).

Masdar City in Abu Dhabi is an experiment in building sustainable cities, and we certainly need more of those. But we also need the blueprints for future cities anyone can build if we want to see new technologies adopted in time to make a difference.

The bigger questions will be around governance and finance – who’s going to recognize the right of people to live where they are and to build a home? Who’s going to pay for the necessary infrastructure – plumbing and roads – and ensure they’re public goods rather than private amenities? The opportunities for win-win solutions could be enormous – imagine giving away a house in order to build, own, and operate the panels on the roof?

To what extent can new technology promote more sustainable transport behaviors?

Cities are always formed around whatever the state-of-the-art in transportation is at the time. Today, the state of the art is the smartphone (and the cloud computing behind it). The ability to coordinate and orchestrate multiple modes is more important than any mode itself. Which is how you get Waze, and Uber, and eventually autonomous vehicles – the routing and provisioning of vehicles becomes more powerful than the mode in question. Done right, this could be a powerful force for good in cities – replacing solo drivers with shared, electric, autonomous vehicles supplementing transit would do wonders for reducing carbon emissions, noise and air pollution, and freeing the streetscape for other uses.

The dominant mode of transport in megacities across the Global South isn’t the train or the bus or even the private automobile – it’s an informal minibus like Nairobi’s matatus or Manila’s jeepneys. In Manila’s case, jeepneys – oversized jeeps that cost little but belch exhaust and are terrible unsafe – still carry nearly half the city’s commuters. If we can manage to replace these fleets with clean, quiet, inexpensive electric vehicles, the impact on emissions and quality of life would be enormous. That’s where the greatest gains might come.

Will public transport enjoy a resurgence in the future transport scenario?

I certainly hope so, but I’m not optimistic. Uber is the best-known and most valuable new mobility service in use, and it’s massively subsidizing fares as part of its plan to use the efficiencies generated by network effects to price itself below public transit. The lower costs of autonomous vehicles will only accelerate this trend – the Boston Consulting Group predicts that AVs carrying three or more passengers would quickly destabilize rail ridership – which means it is incumbent on public transport operators to quickly incorporate these tools into their own networks and use them to reinforce mass transit.

In earlier interviews, you’ve talked about the ‘hijacking of natural systems as potential technology platforms’. That sounds quite sinister in intellectual property terms.

I wasn’t trying to sound sinister! It was more of a gloss on Arthur C. Clarke’s third law: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.” As we’ve already seen in efforts to harvest jet fuel from algae and farm spider silk at scale, I think the great opportunities in synthetic biology will be the creation of new, biological manufacturing platforms. But we should absolutely be worried about the intellectual property implications of this – what would it mean to own the IP on oil, for example? In addition to a code of ethics for synthetic bio and the like, we should also consider creating a civilization commons to ensure no one is paid a licensing fee for the building blocks of reality.

You’ve also spoken about how Virtual Reality could be used as a sustainable alternative to travel. Could you expand on this potential development?

While researching my book Aerotropolis, I coined the “Law of Connectivity:” every technology designed to circumvent distance only increases our need to travel. This law has been observed from the invention of the telegraph to the present. We are travelling more than ever, at every scale – within cities, between them, and across continents. While VR could one day fulfill its early potential as a totally immersive substitute for face-to-face conversations, I’m doubtful – and even if it doesn’t, that doesn’t necessarily mean the law will be repealed.

Which countries are best suited to integrating disruptive transportation models?

The countries best suited to integrating new modes of transport are the ones that already have a rich mix of options with policies to support them. I’m thinking about cities like Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, New York and London – places where shared, electric, autonomous vehicles can supplement, rather than replace, strong transit networks. The Middle East is making great strides toward this, too, with metros in Dubai and soon Riyadh. Having flexible and far-sighted policies are important, too – how we regulate road space and parking in a world of AVs will be critical.

What are the policy imperatives in bringing about more sustainable transport?

I think it’s telling that Los Angeles – the city that invented car culture! – just passed a measure by 70% of voters that will raise more than US$100 billion for transportation projects over the next several decades. That’s incredible. But cities will need to be incredibly smart about policy, and will need to withstand legal challenges from private actors like Uber on their ability to regulate new entrants accordingly. For example, central London’s congestion pricing zone quickly removed 60,000 private vehicles from the streets when it was introduced. In the last two years alone, Uber has put 20,000 vehicles back thanks to a loophole for livery cabs. What will happen when AVs arrive? Without thoughtful and airtight regulation – including thorough congestion pricing – these problems will only get worse.

Does our love affair with the car need to end?

It’s not about trading one’s car for public transport – given the changes we’re seeing with shared vehicles and AVs, “public transport” might well mean a luxury SUV. But if cities continue to optimize development for the car, they will guarantee a city that is navigable only by car. We built those cities here in America in the middle of the last century; trust me, you don’t want that.

How can the possible negative impacts of disruptive technology be managed responsibly?

It’s not about technology; it’s about politics and economics. Take artificial intelligence and automation, for example. Technology itself is not making people superfluous; technology coupled with our current, wildly unequal societies is responsible for that. We need equally disruptive innovations in politics and economics to keep pace with whatever changes are wrought by new technology.

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January 10, 2017  |  permalink

LAX, the Aerotropolis, and Extrastatecraft

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BLDGBLOG and A Burglar’s Guide to the City author Geoff Manaugh has a deep, deep dive in The Atlantic into LAX’ homegrown counter-terrorism intelligence unit, one designed to both thwart potential threats and collect intelligence on passengers passing through the United States’ single largest entrepot.

Geoff interviewed me for BLDGBLOG when Aerotropolis was published in 2011, and I in turn interviewed him for FSG’s Work in Progress. So he was kind enough to call me for some context on LAX and how it fits into the global network of trade and movement that really defines the world:

Greg Lindsay is coauthor of the 2011 book Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, written with University of North Carolina business consultant John Kasarda. Seen through Lindsay’s eyes, aviation logistics takes on near-psychedelic dimensions. When someone looks at a map of the world, he or she might take in superficial details, like the outlines of nation-states, but Lindsay sees tax-free supply-chain hubs, special economic zones, and transnational land deals. Individual airports, he pointed out, are complexly knit together through global-service contracts and preferred air routes that often defy straightforward geopolitical explanations. What’s more, the value of consumer goods that pass through the LAX-to-Tokyo or LAX-to-Shanghai air corridors often exceeds the GDPs of many nation-states–yet those invisible routes, despite their outsize economic influence, don’t show up on world maps.

The fact that an airport such as LAX would begin to realize its true power and economic stature in the world is not at all surprising for Lindsay–nor, of course, is it news to anyone that airports are increasingly terrorist targets. A piece of infrastructure turning into its own intelligence-gathering apparatus, Lindsay suggested, is just “the natural trickle-down effect of when, after 9/11, the NYPD expanded its own intelligence efforts, deciding that the FBI, CIA, and Homeland Security were simply not good enough. They had to project their own presence.” More to the point, they realized, like LAX, just how much there was to protect–and how badly other people wanted to destroy it.

Today’s threats, whether terrorist or merely criminal, are increasingly networked and dispersed; it only makes sense that an institution’s response to them must take a similar form. It might sound like science fiction, but, in 20 years’ time, it could very well be that LAX has a stronger international-intelligence game than many U.S. allies. LAX field agents could be embedded overseas, cultivating informants, sussing out impending threats. It will be an era of infrastructural intelligence, when airfields, bridges, ports, and tunnels have, in effect, their own internal versions of the CIA–and LAX will be there first.

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January 05, 2017  |  permalink

The Office of the Future Is…an Office

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(Originally published at Backchannel on January 4, 2017.)

When siblings Jonathan Smalley and Melanie Charlton began brainstorming a startup in her Annapolis basement in 2014, they were unwittingly following in the footsteps of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, the pair who plotted the trajectory of their namesake company, Silicon Valley, and ultimately the zeitgeist from the splendid isolation of their Palo Alto garage. But Smalley and Charlton chose a different path, relocating to Washington, D.C. expressly to join the city’s first WeWork outpost. “We had been working from home, alone,” recalls Charlton. “Once we moved in, immediately everything began to change.”

They weren’t looking to change the world; their firm, Brilliant Communications (later shortened to the vowel-challenged Brllnt) would design the apps and sites and services for those who did. So they set out to meet their neighbors through liberally dispensing help, advice, and round after round of Nintendo’s Mario Golf paired with WeWork’s infamous free beer.

What followed reads like a parody of millennial startup culture – Smalley the salesman in his cutaway-collared shirts; Charlton the chic creative lead; her Shiba Inu, Cinna, starring in the annual “Dogs of WeWork” calendar – but it worked. They met 400 people in the office that year, including nearly half their clients, many of whom sat literally down the hall. They acquired a neighboring three-person firm the next year, began pitching for larger business with a trio of others, and poached WeWork’s own community manager to coordinate their efforts. By last summer, Brllnt had quadrupled in size to 16 people, with another half dozen freelancers on call.

“Like anything else, the space is what you make of it,” says Smalley. “If you want to meet people and forge relationships, you can do that – otherwise, it’s just an office. Our approach all along was to build a community inside.”

Brllnt’s symbiotic relationship with WeWork hints at a much larger shift in how we organize work, and where. The startup’s choice of a host was not coincidental. With more than 80,000 members spread across 112 locations in 32 cities worldwide, WeWork represents something new in the annals of the office: a talent pool with the scope and scale of a multinational corporation whose collective brain is there for the picking. Whether it justifies its $16 billion valuation, it’s already one of the biggest beneficiaries of two trends driving the unbundling – and rebundling – of creative work.

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The first trend is how the shared office and the network have replaced the solo entrepreneur in her garage as the incubators for new companies and ideas. “Coworking” didn’t exist a decade ago, and today there are nearly a million people globally working alongside peers who aren’t necessarily their colleagues. Workers in these spaces consistently report making more connections, learning skills faster, and feeling more inspired and in control than their cubicle-dwelling counterparts inside large companies. They also have different expectations from cloud workers content to commute from their couch.

“They want connectivity, they want density, and they want fluidity – the ability to move quickly from role to role,” says Jonathan Ortmans, president of the Global Entrepreneurship Network and a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation. “I think all three things lend themselves especially well to shared work environments.”

The second, more powerful trend is the steadily climbing number of freelance, independent, contingent, and temporary workers – more than 53 million Americans at last count, including 2.8 million freelance business owners. Survey research by the economists Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger suggests that nearly all of the 10 million jobs created between 2005 and 2015 fall under this heading, attesting to the rise of the “gig economy.” This structural change is exhilarating if you’re armed with a laptop, Obamacare, and a high hourly rate; not so much if your family needs a steady paycheck.

This stems from the fact that corporations are quietly hollowing out. A third of the average company’s workforce was contingent or contractual in 2014, according to the supply management firm Ardent Partners, which expects this percentage to rise to 45 percent this year. At the opposite end of the spectrum, solo entrepreneurs have steadily increased spending on freelancers. In 2013 (the last year for which IRS data is available), contract workers comprised 36 percent of sole proprietors’ labor costs, up from 20 percent a decade earlier.

As a result, entrepreneurs have more freedom than ever in assembling talented teams, as Brllnt’s founders would attest. The trick is finding them – then vetting, negotiating with, working with, and ultimately paying them. And this has to happen somewhere – we can’t all be digital nomads.

WeWork and its forerunners literally sit at the convergence of these trends. Rather than going to work at a “job” with your “colleagues” in an “office,” your workplace becomes the local embodiment of what the McKinsey Global Institute has dubbed “talent platforms” – the online exchanges connecting people to projects, talent, and resources. In typical McKinsey fashion, the firm estimates that these platforms – including everything from Uber to Upwork and LinkedIn – could add $2.7 trillion to global GDP by 2025. The next target for disruption is the office itself.

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Why is this happening now? The one-word answer is technology. The slightly longer explanation comes from the economist Ronald Coase and his Nobel Prize-winning work on the nature of the firm. When the “transaction costs” of contracting with talent are high – as they were in 1937, when he formulated his theory – companies hire and compensate employees internally, producing post-war behemoths like General Motors or IBM. But when they’re low and falling, due to the rise of the Internet and the collapse of organized labor, you get 50 million gig workers and counting.

One result is that new kinds of organizations appear – smaller, ad hoc teams that are loosely joined and agile – along with new institutions to support them. This is where companies like WeWork come into play, by adding a physical space in which potential coworkers, clients, and partners can cross paths, and by offering services that make it easier for them to connect.

WeWork, it’s worth noting, is neither the world’s largest office space-as-a-service chain nor the most profitable – that would be Britain’s Regus, worth roughly a third as much on paper. WeWork’s great innovation was to convince companies of all sizes that sharing an office with hundreds or even thousands of strangers was an opportunity instead of a liability. Today, a tenth of the Fortune 500 maintains at least a part-time presence there, totaling more than 11,000 members nominally belonging to the likes of Microsoft, McKinsey, Salesforce, and Dell. Once paranoid, corporate tenants have at last grown comfortable rubbing shoulders in the mix.

Management consultants have evangelized for years about business “ecosystems.” As in the food chain, even apex predators are enmeshed in a complex web of partners, suppliers, customers…and prey. But until the advent of shared workspaces, these relationships rarely manifested in the workplace (unless you were a consultant). Today, you might meet a client or investor while pouring yourself a mimosa; tomorrow, she might invite you to work out of her office.

This is already the case in Holland, where one of the country’s largest insurers has taken the unusual step of welcoming strangers inside. A few years ago, Interpolis partnered with the Dutch free coworking chain Seats2Meet to share spaces within its buildings. The first, located inside its headquarters and furnished with vintage carousel horses, has become a popular outpost for visiting customers, alumni, and curious employees. “It’s a place where my colleagues can meet people from the outside and immediately build something with them,” says Bob van Leeuwen, the Interpolis strategist who conceived the project.

Though it’s fun to imagine your future co-founder might be sitting behind you, most of us can’t afford to wait. Which is why WeWork, Seats2Meet, and others are building their own talent platforms to compete with LinkedIn, gambling that curated propinquity will trump the latter’s size (and degrading signal-to-noise ratio). At WeWork, for example, community managers frequently consult the company’s own social network to assist members in finding the right UX designer – which is how Brllnt met several of its clients. As machine learning and social network analysis tools such as Conspire and Collaboration.ai are brought to bear on these networks, it’s not hard to imagine algorithmic matchmakers spotting these latent connections well in advance.

Because as Brllnt’s co-founders will tell you, the value of shared workspaces stems from face-to-face conversations with your peers. “As we’ve scaled our business, we’ve managed to scale our partnerships” with other firms,” Smalley says. “They’ve given us insight into problems we had to later face.” According to one survey of coworkers, 84 percent had consulted with fellow members, 60 percent had created new friendships, and nearly half (46 percent) had “innovated” in collaboration with another member. Working together makes you smarter.

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One reason startups and soloists are leaving their garages, basements, and office spaces is the increasing strength and ease of digital workflow tools, which make it possible for one to work from anywhere – thus inspiring them to rethink where they should work. Between Slack, HipChat, Dropbox, and Asana, we’re living in the golden age of hyper-intuitive collaboration tools. But what’s been missing are equally intuitive apps for everything else – negotiating who does what for how much, ensuring the work gets done, that deadlines are met, people get paid, and the tax man is satisfied. That’s especially true of tasks unique to partnerships that dissolve as quickly as they form.

As Stowe Boyd, a consultant and futurist who’s worked with Microsoft, Google, and IBM, among others, sees it, most of today’s collaboration tools are outdated, and leave out key parts of the process. For example, “the trickiest part – negotiation – is handled over email or a telephone call and never captured in the project itself.” Building a platform that does all of that while obscuring enough of the underlying complexity to be useful is a lot harder than writing another chatbot.

The largest such network to date belongs to Upwork, the freelance marketplace created from the 2014 merger of Elance and oDesk. With ten million members earning more than $1 billion annually in gross annual billings (of which they tithe 10 percent), Upwork has invested heavily in matchmaking, monitoring, payment, and managing reputations, gradually compressing its average time-to-hire from three days to three hours. “We’re online dating for businesses and freelancers, except we know what happens after they meet,” says Rich Pearson, its senior vice president for marketing. “We know how many people they hired, what skills they actually used, and what their performance rating was.”

Pearson imagines managing “private talent clouds” on behalf of customers who could bring reinforcements aboard with a click, rather than after a background check. (He’d better move fast – Work Market already does this on behalf of thousands of customers, including Walgreens and Cisco.) The idea should appeal to entrepreneurs and corporate behemoths alike.

Deloitte, for example, is building what chief talent officer Mike Preston calls “bench strength” – a thousands-strong reserve of expert alumni, niche talents, and part-timers who can be summoned in a pinch. Given the churn of a firm its size (225,000 people worldwide), Deloitte has taken the enlightened view that its true workforce extends into both the past and future of its present employees.

Then there’s the question of how to provide benefits to pop-up ensembles of workers. TaskRabbit co-founder Kevin Busque is tackling aspects of this challenge with his new startup, Guideline Technologies. The goal is to first radically simplify retirement plans for small- to medium-sized businesses and then untether them from employers altogether. To that end, Guideline has partnered with Vanguard, the low-fee mutual fund company, created its own easy-to-use app, and added a solo 401(k) option in which workers can sponsor themselves.

Another company angling to reinvent back-office functions is Justworks, a New York City-based startup striving to shoehorn the legal requirements of HR into an app. “Our goal is to become the ‘employment layer’ for Americans,” says CEO Isaac Oates. “On top are millions of businesses, and on bottom are thousands of governments. And in between is a spaghetti of relationships.”

Left unsaid: the company that can untangle that – or at least sufficiently hide it – has a multi-billion-dollar business on its hands. Justworks, Guideline, and their many competitors are all chasing the same grail: an Amazon Web Services-inspired model allowing virtually anyone to run industrial-strength HR and accounting from their phones.

For a firm like Brllnt – which relies on Slack and runs on JustWorks – the flexibility provided by these tools has already influenced how, where, and with whom they work. Rather than obviating the need to cram into a fishbowl, today’s business climate made sharing a workspace that much more attractive. Despite the hype, technology didn’t end up killing the office. It enhanced and reinvented it, instead.

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December 13, 2016  |  permalink

The Experimental City: Serendipity in the City

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(Gabriella Gómez-Mont, director of Mexico City’s Laboratory for the City, asked me to elaborate on the idea of cities-as-serendipity-engines ahead of the World Summit of Local and Regional Leaders in Bogota in October. Interview by Zoe Mendelson.)

What is “serendipity” in the context of cities?

The original definition described “discoveries, by accidents and sagacity,” of things we are not in search of. Today, everyone remembers the happy accidents and forgets the sagacity, i.e. the latent knowhow and expertise necessary to capitalize on these accidents. Cities are serendipity machines in two ways. One is through the juxtaposition of so many people, elements, and sensations – their tumult naturally increases the chances of a happy accident. The second is social – you are more likely to discover an unsought connection at the fringes of your network, through a friend of a friend or a familiar stranger. There’s a reason young people flock to cities – for serendipitous encounters in life and love!

Why do cities need serendipity?

A decade ago, the physicists Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West discovered an unusual property of cities – they seem to get better as they get bigger. You can measure “better” in any number of ways, including higher wages and productivity. To explain why this happens, Bettencourt (who wrote his doctoral thesis on the Big Bang) argues that cities are neither machines nor natural ecosystems, but stars – “social reactors” compressing dense social networks together in space and time until they fuse at the edges, producing new ideas and relationships instead of light and heat. This meshes well with Jane Jacobs and most economists about why cities exist and why they perform so well. And I would argue the mechanism is serendipity.

Are there certain things cities do that block serendipity?

Anything preventing diverse groups of people and ideas from mixing – racism, intolerance, segregation, concentrated poverty, crime, and so on. How we use and traverse the city matters too: a lack of public and private spaces in which people can meet, converse, and linger; investing in cars and freeways that isolate drivers and then trap them in congestion, and urban districts that lack both texture and a variety of uses. It’s difficult to experience serendipity when there is no one to see, nothing to do, and your very presence is unwanted, if not outright criminalized. For example, the Department of Justice’s scathing report on the Baltimore Police Department highlighted instance after instance of “zero tolerance” policing amounting to clearing the streets of all bystanders. Less egregious (although more insidious) are practices such as spatially discriminatory retail redlining, which starves neighborhoods of places that are neither home nor work for serendipitous encounters with neighbors form ad hoc communities.

How can cities engineer serendipity?

Through encouraging unplanned uses and encounters in public and private space. For example, why are streets given over entirely to cars? Why aren’t we trying to maximize the number of people and activities who can use them? Whether it’s banning cars from city centers, building better blocks through testing different uses, or transforming parking spaces into “parklets,” there are any number of ways to increase their potential for serendipity. In a similar vein, why do we fill the cores of our cities with skyscrapers that are never more than half full at any given moment? We need to blur the line between the office and the street, just as Londoners once did the same by doing business in its pubs, coffeehouses, and “gentlemen’s clubs. In practice, that means propelling work out of the hermetically-sealed office into shared workspaces and other semi-public places, and it also means bringing a variety of new uses into skyscrapers – just as Hong Kong and Singapore have done with great success. We also need fundamental re-investment in public transport to maximize the number of people who can be brought to experience these places.  Cities can engineer serendipity through the diversity of their people, the heterogeneity of their places, and the intensity of their uses.

The Las Vegas Downtown Project tried to engineer serendipity. What did they get right and what did they get wrong?

The Las Vegas Downtown Project consciously tried to engineer what its backers call “casual collisions.” But they did several things wrong. First, they gentrified the areas, displacing long-term residents, small business, and people of color to attract young, mostly white people with an interest or background in technology. Then, they began acquiring or controlling land in order to carefully curate the mix of businesses and uses they wanted to see downtown – which increased property values, but discouraged a real neighborhood from forming. What do you expect when literally one man hand-picks the bars, the restaurants, the co-working spaces, and even the grocery store? Where are the surprises in that? Finally, the layout of downtown Vegas worked against them – long, empty streets with destinations few and far between. It’s not a failure, but after having committed $350 million to the project, it’s not a success, either. They had the right ideas, but botched the execution.

Who or what projects are getting it right?

My favorite example is Renew Newcastle, which started in a depressed downtown city in Australia. Instead of buying properties or deciding what the area needed, its creator – an arts festival organizer named Marcus Westbury – borrowed spaces temporarily and invited residents to use them. The project acted quickly and cheaply to use vacant storefronts as intensely as possible, without prescribing how people should use them. The result is a revitalized downtown for a hundredth of the price of the Downtown Project. Instead of remaking itself for an itinerant “creative class” as dozens, if not hundreds of cities have done, Westbury sought to catalyze Newcastle’s latent energy and talent by creating places where people could pursue their passions in public, thus generating a host of new activity around them. There wasn’t a plan or a desired outcome – the project unfolded organically.

This is what I mean by “engineering serendipity.” Cities don’t need to attract outside talent or capital or coffee bars – they need to do a better job of unlocking the buried potential of their places and through them, their people. Platforms like Renew handle the engineering. That particular project isn’t a panacea, but it is the lightest, cheapest, most successful model I’ve seen to date.

We like to roll our eyes at the ideas of the Modern City. What will urbanists be rolling their eyes about two generations from now?

That we ever spent so much time staring at Facebook and Twitter. Social networks will still be with us – in fact, they’ll matter more than ever – but the success of Pokemon Go points toward a future in which our social networks are overlaid and enhanced by the city. A game encouraging us to go outside and meet our neighbors and strangers is a good start.

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December 07, 2016  |  permalink

AECOM and the Future of Cities

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In October, I was honored to be the opening keynote guest speaker at AECOM’s annual Global Leadership Conference in Beverly Hills. AECOM is one of the world’s largest engineering and construction firms, with $18 billion in annual revenus and nearly 100,000 employees. It built 1 World Trade Center, designs Olympic Games, and runs America’s national laboratories, among its far-flung activities.

The conference brought together 500+ principals from around the world to learn how to make the company greater than the sum of its many parts. My job was to survey the landscape of a fully urbanized 21st Century, explaining why the challenges posed by climate change, energy, cyber-attacks, and governance would require ever-greater levels of collaboration and cross-pollination. (Hat tip to Keller Easterling’s “The Action is the Form” for the quote pictured above.)

Video of my talk isn’t publicly available online, but I’d be happy to share it privately. Please contact me for details.

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December 02, 2016  |  permalink

Reading the “City of Trump”

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Futurists like to talk about “inflection points” when the range of futures suddenly shifts. Some are instantly obsolete, while others lurch from improbable to possible, and possible to frightening plausible. This year has been full of them – most notably Brexit and Trump – which for urbanists like myself has meant the end of the presumed “triumph of the city,” and the beginning of open economic and socio-political war with their own hinterlands.

What will cities look like in the Age of Trump? my Fast Company colleague Mark Wilson asked. I didn’t hold back:

Urbanist journalist Greg Lindsay imagines a darker scenario in which all public transit is handed over to private corporations. Imagine Uber running trains with surge pricing on your way to work each morning. Individual neighborhoods might be tolled on entry, effectively cutting off parts of the city to people without the means to pay. Consider having to pay $2.50 every time you go shopping in Tribeca or commute to your job in SoHo–perhaps through an RFID-powered deduction system that tolls users seamlessly across the city.

Such changes would put painful financial pressure even for middle-class city residents, and create deeper schisms within cities that are already socially and economically segregated. (In a very real panic of evaporating federal funding, the Chicago Transit Authority is currently trying to rush through a $2.1 billion grant before Inauguration Day.) “It’s hard for me to come up with deals that are win-win-win,” says Lindsay. “I personally can’t find an example where the will of the people has been done by [private investors].”

There’s also a more practical problem with privatization–which tends to work better for big, monetizable projects, and worse for smaller, necessary ones. Just look at a recent example from Chicago. In 2008, the city had an eager buyer to privatize its parking meters, which involved one lump-sum payment in exchange for 75 years of private rights. The deal immediately led to price hikes that required so many quarters that meters soon overflowed, unusable, and citizens were ticketed as a result. But when Mayor Emanuel floated the idea of a public-private infrastructure trust, in which investors would replace critical infrastructure components, it foundered.

“It failed because no one wanted to replace the boilers in schools; they wanted to buy Midway Airport,” says Lindsay of the pitfalls of privatization. “The size of the deals are out of whack . . . and it creates the incentive to give away the game to get all the money you can.”

While Fast Company grapples with the implications of a Trump presidency (and I’d encourage you to read the entire series), Curbed’s Alissa Walker and her colleagues have assembled a list of “101 books about where and how we live.” As they explained:

This isn’t necessarily the same-old list of famous urbanism books, although plenty of them are represented here. These are books about making cities, but also books about how cities have made us, whether it’s our own hometown or somewhere on the other side of the planet. These are books that examine how cities change, and sometimes end up alienating the people who built them. There are plenty of brand-new books on this list because they reflect what people are thinking about today, which, in light of current events, may be very different from what they were thinking about just two weeks ago.

I was pleased and honored to see Aerotropolis make the list (in addition to another recent list of the “best books about living in the city”) and also to be asked to contribute a choice of my own. I selected Joan Didion’s Where I Was From, which mixes the autobiographical with incisive reporting – the qualities in her work that inspired me to become a journalist in the first place. I was especially moved by her section on Lakewood, California and the “Spur Posse” – the teenage sexual predators who were an early manifestation of the white working class dysfunction described in books like J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy. My explanation:

“The most trenchant passages for me concern Lakewood, California–the massive prefabricated suburb nicknamed the “Levittown of the West”–and how the mostly white, mostly working-class community gradually becomes unglued by the closure of the local aerospace factories in the early 1990s. ‘What does it cost to create and maintain an artificial ownership class,’ Didion asks rhetorically. ‘Who pays? Who benefits? What happens when that class stops being useful? What does it mean to drop back below the line? What does it cost to hang on above it, how do you behave, what do you say, what are the pitons you drive into the granite?’”

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October 31, 2016  |  permalink

The 2016 Fall Speaking Season

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One of my speaking agents refers to fall as the “silly season” – the brief window between the summer and winter holidays when work has everyone’s undivided attention. Which means it’s the season I seemingly spend all of my time on the road. This week, I’m off to Tokyo to host the New Cities Foundation’s third annual Cities on the Move, which is themed to my new report, “Now Arriving: A Connected Mobility Roadmap for Public Transport.” Here’s both a recap and a preview of my silly season this year:

• The future of work, innovation, and the office. The season kicked off with a visit to Haworth, the Holland, Michigan-based office furniture manufacturer currently engaged in a 200+ person trial of sociometric badges and sensors (a subject I know a little bit about.) Later in September, I co-headlined future-of-work conferences for the brokers at Cushman & Wakefield UK (video snippet at bottom) and the architects of Detroit-based SmithGroup JJR – the oldest continuously operating architecture firm in America. I also offered my thoughts on the future of cities and innovation to 500+ worldwide Deloitte partners in Amsterdam, and an architecture class at MIT – the latter were far more dubious than the former. And the photo above is from my first trip to Tokyo this year, for the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader Summit, where I explored how a uniquely powerful combination of data, social network analysis, and human touch have led to a blossoming of new projects and collaborations by attendees.

• The future of urban mobility and transportation. November’s theme is transportation, with a talk at TransitCenter about “Private Mobility, Public Interest” preceding my trip to Tokyo. Later this month, I’ll speak at the annual client conference of USAA RealCo, along with a dinner presentation in Bordeaux, France to the leadership of the national rail giant, SNCF. And mobility will also be the topic of my talk at the World Future Energy Summit early next year in Abu Dhabi.

• The future of cities, mobility, housing, work…and whatever else I can think of. Given that cities are systems of systems, it’s hard to talk about the future of multi-family housing, for instance, without touching upon all of the social, technological, economics and other factors shaping cities. Which makes me a popular choice for commercial real estate groups looking to mix it up a little. In addition to talks at the Urban Land Institute’s Orange County/Inland Empire chapter and the brokers of CORE Network in September and the National Association of Home Builders in December, I delivered the keynote at the University of Texas at San Antonio College of Business Embrey Real Estate Finance and Development program’s Founder’s Council Luncheon in October.

• The future of AECOM. AECOM is arguably the most important architecture, engineering, and construction firm you’ve never heard of. Would you like to host an Olympics? They can deliver it for you wholesale. Would you like a new airport to go along with that? It’s one of their specialties. AECOM designs cities-from-scratch, built 1 World Trade Center, runs national laboratories – you name it, they do it. Which is it why it was such an honor to follow the CEO as the opening guest keynote of the company’s global leadership conference in Beverly Hills in October. My role was to discuss the wicked problems and global challenges the world is facing, and how AECOM can only meet them if it collaborates across its many far-flung divisions to find solutions.

• The future of…the future? My favorite talk of the fall was introducing 80+ alumni of Harvard Business School’s Owner/President Management program to the practice of “applied foresight” (i.e. futurism). After briefly introducing them to the topic, the entrepreneurs broke into teams inside the theater of the Faena Miami Beach to create and test their own future scenarios, including outlining products and services they might offer circa 2030 or so. Not bad for a Friday morning’s work!

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October 31, 2016  |  permalink

Now Arriving: A Connected Mobility Roadmap for Public Transport

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I’m pleased to announce the publication of Now Arriving: A Connected Mobility Roadmap for Public Transport,” a report published by the New Cities Foundation with support from the Toyota Mobility Foundation. In a nutshell, it explores what mass transit and other forms of public transportation must do in the face of imminent disruption by private mobility services such as Uber, Didi, Lyft, and Grab et al., along with the imminent arrival of autonomous vehicles and how they might be best deployed. Spoiler alert: public officials can’t simply curl into a fetal ball or ban them outright or earmark taxpayer dollars for subsidized Uber rides in lieu of building their own system. They must take maximum advantage of both these new technologies and their authority to operate, regulate, and manage transportation systems to offer an alternative that’s more comprehensive and appealing than any one mode or service. No small task, I know.

The report focuses on four cities – Washington D.C., London, São Paulo, and Manila – each of which represents a facet of the opportunity and crisis facing public transport. Washington is currently in the throes of the “Metropocalypse,” making the city the inadvertent testbed for alternate forms of connected mobility. Transport for London may just be the world’s best transport authority, but even it was not prepared for how effortlessly Uber subverted congestion pricing to jam its streets once again. São Paulo is gridlocked at every level, leading a small band of transport engineers, startups, and students to search for ways to find slack in the system. And Manila faces permanent gridlock as residents ditch riding smoke-belching “jeepneys” for cars. But what if the future of public transport is algorithmically-guided, electric, (autonomous?) jeepneys?

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The final section of the report is devoted to practical recommendations ranging from drafting “mobility-as-a-service” and autonomous vehicle roadmaps to rethinking zoning and abolishing parking minimums to incentivizing commuters to wait fifteen minutes to lessen the strain on the system. The entire report represents more than a year of research and more than hundred interviews with public officials, private mobility services, experts, and commuters themselves. It also represents the culmination of nearly three years of writing about the future of urban mobility, including but not limited to:

• New York University’s 2014 report “Sin City vs. Sim City.”

• That essay also spawned a March 2014 report for The Atlantic’s CityLab on SHIFT – a hyper-ambitious mobility-as-a-service startup that shut down in 2015 shortly after concluding beta-testing.

• Anthony Townsend – the author of Reprogramming Mobility – and I wrote an op-ed for Quartz arguing we should focus on autonomous buses rather than cars. They offer a quicker, cheaper, easier, and more effective solution to America’s transport woes than the inherent complexity of trying to automate every vehicle on the road.

• Near the end of 2014, I wrote a report for the University of Toronto’s Global Solution Networks initiative on such innovative public-private partnerships as Digital Matatus, EMBARQ, SMART, and G-Auto – a dry-run of sorts for “Now Arriving.”

• More recently, I spun out my Manila research into a lengthy feature for Popular Mechanics on jeepneys asking “Can the World’s Worst Traffic Problem Be Solved?”, followed by an op-ed in the Nikkei Asian Review asking whether the “to download the full report; I’ll leave you with the few first paragraphs below:

“Cities are always created around whatever the state-of-the-art transportation device is at the time,” Joel Garreau wrote twenty-five years ago in Edge City. At the New Cities Foundation, we are intensely interested in the forces shaping the development of new and old cities alike, whether social, economic, environmental, or technological. The aim of the Connected Mobility Initiative is to explore the triple convergence of “mobility” – physical, digital, and socio-economic – and to propose strategies and steps toward more broadly sharing the benefits of this transformation while ameliorating its potentially corrosive effects on public institutions. In the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the then-cutting edge combination of the personal computer and automobile that spawned the suburban edge cities of Garreau’s title. Today, the state-of-the-art in transportation is the smartphone.

It’s not just that smartphones are ubiquitous, with annual sales approaching 1.5 billion handsets, compared to a total of 1.2 billion motor vehicles on the roads. They’re qualitatively different, doubling as a sensor and pocket supercomputer as well as the focal point of a vast data collection and analysis apparatus churning in the cloud. They’re also the locus of 21st century infrastructure spending, as America’s mobile carriers have collectively invested more than $500 billion upgrading the country’s cellular communications grid – roughly the modern cost of the Interstate Highway System. The smartphone’s ability to choreograph transport has supplanted the importance of any one mode, even the automobile. It will remake the city as surely as previous revolutions did.

The most important questions now are “How?” and “For whom?” The advent of mass-produced Model T Fords a century ago had both spatial and political consequences for cities. Jitneys were banned, streetcars demolished, and mass transit became the public’s domain to eliminate competition with burgeoning automakers. Federal funds were marshaled to build freeways and finance suburbia. Meanwhile, systematic disinvestment hollowed out cities, requiring decades to repair and recover. Nearly thirty years passed between the judgment famously (though falsely) attributed to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that, “a man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself as a failure,” and Bogota Mayor Enrique Penalosa’s more recent assertion that “an advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport.”

How will we speak of connected mobility thirty years from now? As an enhancement of Penalosa’s city, or as the moment public transport willingly began to dismantle itself in the face of smartphone-led disruption? It is critical for policymakers to understand that new technologies and services such as Uber, Waze, and autonomous vehicles are not neutral. They embody values and business models that, left unchecked, may run counter to the goals of creating livable and equitable cities – whether intentionally or unintentionally. It’s imperative for transit agencies, public officials and their partners to understand the implications of this shift and to reposition themselves as the stewards of a broader, more flexible networked transportation system.

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October 29, 2016  |  permalink

Urban Land Institute: Future Connectivity and Real Estate

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(Last month, I spoke to the Urban Land Institute’s Orange Couty/Inland Empire’s Multi-Housing Initiative Council about the various forces reshaping the housing market. U.S. Army Captain, graudate student, and intern(!) Samuel Nickles – pictured, far left – wrote a brief recap of my talk, which I am republishing below:)

Greg Lindsay, journalist and futurist, presented “What does Future Connectivity Mean to the Real Estate Industry” at the ULI Multi-Housing Initiative Council’s Annual program on September 15th in Newport Beach. During his presentation, he described the current landscape used for transportation, networks, and urban space management as a “heterogeneity with un-urbanized land areas”. He offered futuristic insights into the evolving constructs of urbanization drawing from other globalizing cities throughout the world. In doing so, developers can best target commercialized dead spaces or “stranded assets” in order to re-vitalize across all lines of interconnectivity. He addressed the following polymorphic areas in which countermeasures could be considered:

Take the Highway, they say. It’s faster, they say.

Dense cities cannot support the population growth with the size growth; this inevitably causes a supply and demand shortage.  This same dichotomy holds true with means of transportation and time. While Google is in its early stages of the “G-road” model of traveling autonomously on the interstate, urban planners are exploring multi-energy efficient ways of commuting to the multi-housing industry. Energy efficient transportation, such as bike paths and ride sharing applications, are at the fore front of innovation. However, bridging the gap between development and innovation could creatively provide emerging networks for economic development.  Collaborating with small businesses offers the potential for a more shared economy by incentivizing consumers (ride sharing vouchers, rental bikes, etc.) and creating a residentially commercialized industry.

Lifestyles of the Urbanite Pedestrian

The ebb and flow of multi-family housing can be widely seen throughout the 1970s and mid-1980s.  Further evidence suggests that the consumers are shifting from the traditional suburb environment to a more efficient, active-based urban lifestyle. This demographic inversion coupled with a minimalistic view of usage is appealing among the contemporary professional. The conundrum is the amount of commercial dead space not being utilized for urban development. Disaggregating unused business spaces and re-vitalizing has both residential and commercial applications. Whether it’s a multi-family housing unit, or a short term, multi-use space, developers can re-utilize once thriving shopping malls or widely used parking garages into a centric-based model of an urbanized micro-economy.

Tactics of Streetscapes

Public Space is “open air” market for profitability across various facets of capital.  Creating center spaces by re-activating dead space optimizing the value of commercial businesses and multi-family housing units. One approach he discussed was tactical urbanization for re-vitalizing areas. This gives creation to poly cultural neighborhoods and city gathering places. Such interventions adopted by municipalities’ places the sustainability back to the individual creating a wider shared economy.

Problems? Blame the Network

When we begin to identify structural holes in digital technology, we start to measure the performance and the collaboration efforts within a work space. The idea of reduced open space in the workplace escapes many, however intrigue others. Residential and commercial entities are utilizing these methods resulting in creating more organic connections/interactions, increasing productivity.

These areas can have mitigating factors that lie in the process of legislation and its relation to the rapidly evolving landscape of innovative economic growth measures. However, many cities have begun to adopt these innovative opportunities as a means of transforming the once traditional suburban landscape into a centric multi-use interconnection hub where people, goods, and services are exchanged at the micro level.

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October 10, 2016  |  permalink

Nikkei Asian Review: Future may lie in ‘intelligent’ informal transport

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(Originally published by the Nikkei Asian Review on October 6, 2016.)

Weaving between cars, taxis, motorcycles and buses are thousands of “jeepneys”—aged, gaudily decorated passenger jeeps each seating 20 people. Festooned with chrome and painted with names such as “Soldier of Fortune,” jeepneys spew black exhaust fumes, block highways with frequent stops, and race each other for passengers.

They are filthy, inefficient, and unsafe. Fortunately, most are also slated for extinction thanks to an imminent ban on vehicles 15 years old or older. (Production of new ones has slowed to a trickle.) But the passing of the jeepney will probably make Filipinos’ commutes worse.

Metro Manila’s 45,000 jeepneys account for 44% of journeys by the city’s 24 million inhabitants—more than double the 18% share of buses and trains. The jeepneys’ share is changing rapidly, however, thanks to an explosion in private vehicles—new car sales have doubled since 2013. The logic is undeniable: Why breathe smoke when you can drive in air conditioning?

As a result, the megacity’s traffic is among the world’s worst, according to users of Waze, a navigation and information app for drivers. Congestion costs $57 million a day in lost productivity, according to the Japan International Cooperation Agency, which predicts the figure may nearly triple by 2030.

This vicious circle is common in south and southeast Asian cities where public transport is scarce or non-existent, whether the vehicles in question are auto-rickshaws (Mumbai), motorcycle ojeks (Jakarta), or songthaew minibuses (Bangkok).

These forms of so-called informal transport are poorly remunerated, barely regulated and clearly inferior to rail and bus rapid transit, but carry millions of passengers daily, providing transport capacity that, although dangerous and polluting, acts as a check on private car congestion.

Not even ride-sharing services such as Uber or Grab can claim that. In fact, former Metro Manila traffic director Yves Gonzalez estimates that both companies have added between 10,000 and 15,000 cars to the megacity’s roads as entrepreneurs buy fleets of vehicles and hire drivers.

That may be about to change, however, as shared electric autonomous vehicles creep into view. “With the advent of autonomy, it will probably make sense to shrink the size of buses,” Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk wrote in a blog post this summer, describing a vehicle that sounds a lot like a self-driving jeepney.

What would it take to make informal transport the solution to gridlock, rather than part of the problem? Three things: clean electric vehicles; streamlined routes; and—ultimately—on-demand, computer guided vehicles, whether autonomous or not.

In the Philippines, at least two groups are working on the first element. Electric jeepneys, known as ejeepneys, were introduced nearly a decade ago by the Electric Vehicle Association of the Philippines. They never caught on, partly because of costs but also because of the short range and low energy density of their lead-acid batteries.

More recently, however, former Filipine congressman Sigfrido “Freddie” Tinga launched a startup company marketing an electric jeepney named the Comet. Tinga’s plan is to sell them to owners of traditional jeepneys for $35,000 to $40,000 each. In exchange, he will hire drivers, collect fares, sell ads, and share the profits.

Like Musk, he firmly believes the future belongs to the jeepney’s successor. “The world will best be served by these 20-seat electric vehicles in a fleet-managed system,” Tinga said.

Once you have quiet, air-conditioned vehicles, the question becomes where should they go? In Manila, as in many cities, there were until recently no maps of informal transport services and no way to know how many routes overlapped. This meant that transportation planners were flying blind when it came to deciding where to put new metro lines or bus routes.

In 2012, government officials set out to map the informal system, aided by the World Bank and inspired by the success of a pioneering effort in Nairobi, Kenya, to map that city’s matatus—informal minibuses ferrying a third of commuters. A team of researchers from New York’s Columbia University and the University of Nairobi used smartphones and hand-held GPS units to document each of the city’s 130 matatu routes, translating this data into information for traffic apps such as Ma3Route.

In Manila’s case, the conclusions of the mapping project were surprising. There were more than 900 jeepney routes—twice as many as the government had expected. The World Bank estimated that using the data to rewrite jeepney and bus routes in a more efficient way would reduce the number of routes by nearly 90%, with a 23% decrease in greenhouse gas emissions—the equivalent of removing 105,000 cars from Manila’s roads.

It remains to be seen whether this plan will ever be put into motion—jeepney drivers typically oppose change, and they are a poor but vocal voting bloc. But in a city where Waze is ubiquitous and Uber and Grab are both wildly popular, it may be wrong to assume that the future belongs to fixed-route trains and buses.

If Musk is correct, commuters across the global south can look forward to riding electric passenger vehicles that never trace the same route twice. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, for example, has outlined a feature named “Perpetual Trip”—essentially a never-ending shared ride as passengers come and go in the company’s ride pooling vehicles.

The Israeli founders of a ride-sharing app named Via were inspired by sherut—Tel Aviv’s answer to the jeepney. “One way to use our technology is to allow cities with large informal systems to centralize their ... services and gain insight on how they’re performing,” said Zachary Wasserman, Via’s vice president of strategy. “We’re talking to people in South America and have had conversations in Africa about how our technology could upgrade [matatus] and optimize them.”

Given the mounting costs of congestion in cities such as Manila, “intelligent” jeepneys could perhaps provide a short-term solution more easily than traditional mass rapid transport systems (which have proven difficult to plan and build) and autonomous cars, which in the end are still just cars.

Just as many emerging markets leapfrogged over fixed telephony to widespread mobile phones, they might be better off leapfrogging trains and buses by using technology to make informal transport more efficient. The Philippines’ love-hate affair with jeepneys—often called the “kings of the road”—may have life in it yet.

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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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