(Originally published by Frog on September 22, 2015. Interview with Frog’s global editor Amy MacMillan.)

Cities around the world are struggling to solve transportation problems, and many are looking to Greg Lindsay and his colleagues for guidance.

As a senior fellow of the New Cities Foundation – where he leads the Connected Mobility Initiative – and a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management, Greg is in the forefront of innovation in transportation. frog sat down with Greg to discuss what mobility means to him and why car companies and designers alike should focus on bringing together different modes of transportation.

You recently gave a keynote at the New Cities Summit in Jakarta, where you defined mobility as three interconnected concepts: transportation, mobile phones, and economic/social mobility. Can you talk about the relationship between these concepts, and how together they equal the current definition of mobility?

They have always been linked, but now they are coming together explicitly in various ways. The relevant thread that runs through my research is that cities have always been formed physically and spatially by whatever the state-of-the-art was in transportation at the time. The transportation aspect of mobility defines our environments, which then defines our access to opportunity and our ability to make the most of that opportunity.

For example, recent research by my colleagues at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management looked at the relationship between mass transit, walkability, and private car ownership as they relate to the accessibility of jobs. To no one’s surprise, neighborhoods in New York City that have some of the highest per-capita incomes and the highest accessibility to opportunity are the ones that have the highest mobile shares for transit-walkability versus private cars.

And then the opposite is true. The neighborhoods in New York that have some of the lowest incomes and highest unemployment rates are transit deserts. So you can see the relationship between transportation and social and economic mobility, and you can see it throughout the world. (The riots that rocked Brazil in 2013 started with protests in São Paulo over a $0.19 transit fare hike.)

Not only is the smartphone the third important element of this interconnected definition of mobility; it is also the defining transportation technology of our time. The smartphone allows us to design and provision different services that can bind together public and private forms of transportation to create increased access to mobility, which can then in turn preserve and enhance the right people have to their city.

The city is an important part of the transportation conversation. In that same talk, you said that in the first 50 years of this century we will triple our urban land cover. If you think about that growth strictly through the lens of transportation, do you see the ability to connect different transportation services as the most important focus area for designers in this space?

Yes. NYU Stern’s Shlomo Angel has used satellite data and other sources to predict that urban land cover – literally, the urban ground under our feet – will triple by the middle of this century. Other researchers at Yale and elsewhere have used weather satellites to capture how Indian cities are sprawling horizontally while global cities such as New York, London, and Tokyo are building taller and denser. China’s cities, naturally, embody both trends simultaneously.

It’s Angel’s view – one shared by many economists – that the functional limit of a city is the size of its labor shed. If you live at point A anywhere in the city, are you able to commute to point B? If not, you’re really no longer part of that city. If we accept this as true, we must massively rethink transportation networks – how do we combine linear mass transit with other modes to mitigate congestion while extending accessibility?

We need to start designing meshes that bring formerly conflicting modes – trains and automobiles – together.  It will require all sorts of extant political and economic arguments about how we make data from public transit services open, how we convince the private players (like Uber, which famously doesn’t play nice with anybody) to make their data and services available, and how we provision the mesh as either a public or private good. I personally believe in the public good approach, because we know what effective transportation can do for economic development and personal opportunities – but none of these questions have been decided yet. We will only sort them out if we are committed to connecting various forms of transportation, instead of insisting that one mode is more important than the other.

The New Cities Foundation has recently announced the Connected Mobility Initiative, which will explore mobility solutions with support from the Toyota Mobility Foundation. Why is Toyota a good partner for this work?

The initiative is still in the early planning stages, but one could certainly do worse than having the world’s largest automaker for your partner. Toyota, like its rivals, is thinking hard about avoiding the disruption that befell U.S. railroads, which thought of themselves as railroads first and transportation companies second. They had the opportunity to invest early in airlines and declined due to a lack of imagination. That’s how you end up with Amtrak.

Car companies seem eager to avoid that fate by thinking hard about the mesh I described earlier. In this future, perhaps you not only buy a car from Toyota, but also access to Toyota’s mobility mesh, in whatever form that takes. Ford is taking steps in this direction by partnering with the peer-to-peer car-sharing service Getaround, which not only creates value for Ford owners, but allows them to earn cash to make their payments. (More evidence why we should stop calling it the “sharing economy” and start calling it the “austerity economy.”)

In a similar vein, Daimler bought RideScout, which pulls together various transit options into a single app so people can decide if they want to drive, walk, or take public transportation. Add a single-fare payment system to that and you’ve got yourself the beginning of a mesh. It wouldn’t shock me if Toyota were poised to start taking steps in this direction.

We’re seeing new business models around transportation, such as those you just mentioned, pop up almost every day. What do you expect to see next?

We ran a project last year at NYU, named “Reprogramming Mobility,” that forecasted four different scenarios for transportation circa 2030. (My colleague Anthony Townsend deserves the kudos for this.) One scenario imagined what would happen if Google were to buy Tesla and Uber, and partner with Solar City in the bargain. In two fell swoops, Google would be able to offer you an autonomous electric car, solar panels on your roof to help power it, and a Nest thermostat to manage the exchange. Throw in Google Fiber, and you can start to imagine a future of homes halfway off the grid, where Googlemobiles comprise a packet-switched network of rolling electric grid storage, which is what Tesla’s already thinking. Given Google’s investment in Sidewalk Labs to figure this out, maybe it happens in the next five years instead of 15.

Helsinki is another place to watch, as they recently announced plans to stitch together public and private forms of transportation into a single service through an app allowing people to choose and pay for one path from A to B across various modes of travel. The Millennial leading this project doesn’t see much difference between public or private modes; she just wants them to interoperate, and to that end, she’s helping set up new mobility providers offering service packages similar to your mobile-phone contract. (Being a Finn who grew up during Nokia’s heyday, she has a very different view of mobile telcos than we do.)

Just a ferry ride away is Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, which is arguably the world’s most technologically advanced society – or at least the most technologically provisioned, with thousands of government services available online. Tallinn made the decision a few years ago to offer public transit to residents for free, on the basis that A) it was already heavily subsidized, and B) the benefits in terms of social mobility and economic opportunity outweighed the costs.

In general, I like to refer to all of these developments as the “post-Uber era,” not in the sense that Uber is going to go away, but because Uber has set the terms until now. You’re either with them or against them. I think that’s about to change. In the future we are going to see public-private hybrids and other partnerships that fracture the discussion and give cities more to consider than whether or not to let Uber operate legally.

You’ve said that the shape of our cities is defined by transportation – how will the shape continue to change as our modes of transportation evolve?

I’m glad you asked, because maybe the greatest financial impact these new technologies will have is on land values. Every new mode of transportation to date has physically re-shaped the city and our approach to it, and it’s a sure bet it’s happening again with the smartphone – just ask the Washington D.C. developers paying tenants’ Uber bills rather than building them parking spaces – and perhaps soon with the autonomous car.

We know these new modes will change the shape of our cities, but the specifics remain to be seen. This is part of what we are investigating with the Connected Mobility Initiative; hopefully we’ll get some clues out of this project.

(Gensler was kind enough to include me in a roundtable of experts on the future of Work in 2025. My interview with Eva Hagberg Fisher appears below.)

GREG LINDSAY
is a senior fellow of the New Cities Foundation and the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative. His topics include the intersection of the office, the cloud, and big data.

In 2025, will we all be working on projects?

Greg Lindsay: Like Hollywood? There’s definitely the trend. What’s missing is the kind of coordination platforms that would allow people to do this in an empowered way. The sharing economy as it exists now is based on centralized work platforms where the benefits of coordination accrue to an app’s owners, not its users. But what if the Hollywood model merged with the coworking model, for example? You’re not just renting space there–and paying quite a premium for it–but joining a potentially deep roster of talent that can be assembled into ad hoc teams depending on your availability. There have been some interesting experiments with this, but no one’s been able to make it work at scale. While I think it would work best if someone assembled these teams in person, face to face, it may be LinkedIn’s true calling to become the world’s largest talent agency, harnessing all that Big Data about people’s skills and interests. I don’t think the entire future will work this way, but with 40 percent of the US workforce already “contingent,” it’s really just a question of how big a piece it will be.

Does the Internet of Things figure here?

GL: I’m a lot less interested in an Internet of Things than an Internet of People. I’m more interested in an office that knows who I should work with and is happy to make introductions than one that dims the lights.

Most of the discussion about the Internet of Things revolves around the notion that we’re going to make work 10 percent more efficient. I think that’s a dead end. The Internet of Things is already telling people to deliver packages or restock shelves quicker, even if they burn out. Robotic efficiency should be the goal for robots, not for people. But the prevailing logic is the same as what led us from the expensive personal empowerment of Robert Propst’s Action Office II, to the deadening efficiency of the cubicle. What’s the equivalent of the cubicle in the Internet of Things? That’s the question we need to be asking.

What would I like it to do? First, I’d like it to increase our sense of agency and control over our work environment. Second, I’d like it to bring buried or invisible people and resources to our attention. And when it finds them, how will they be presented? Will our days consist of being thrown together with new coworkers by artificial intelligence fiat? Or will we have a choice?

What does this mean for organizations?

GL: That they should stop prizing hierarchy and secrecy. The greatest lie that Frederick Winslow Taylor ever told is that management always knows best. We need to encourage and empower people to “work out loud,” to share what they’re doing, what they have to offer, and what they need help with.

Tools can help with this. One that interests me is Hylo, which offers a goal-oriented social network overlay on top of real communities–whether coworking spaces, alumni networks, or neighborhoods. Hylo lets people work out loud in the cloud by posting so-called “seeds” to it–as in, “Here’s what I have to offer” and “Here’s what I’m looking for.” The software does the sorting by running in the background and looking for opportunities to match your needs and abilities with others. Hylo calls it a “serendipity engine.” Tools like these will change organizational culture as people see the benefit of making public what’s often kept hidden or secret now, so others can find it and respond to it.

Have you experienced the Internet of Things?

GL: I was part of an experiment at Fast Company, where we wore sensor-packed badges that tracked our movements and conversations. One thing we learned is that the best-connected person in the office wasn’t the editor in chief or his deputies, but a new hire whose job touched multiple departments. The next question, which we didn’t ask, is how a person like this affects everyone’s performance. What if she makes everyone 10 percent better in their jobs? How do you compensate her for it?

My personal Internet of Things nightmare is that my employer-issued Fitbit forces me to work at a standing desk after it decides I’ve been sitting for too long. I probably do too much sitting for my health, but I’ve decided that this will be my vice in life. If sitting is the new smoking, I’m going to slouch my way through whole cartons of unfiltered cigarettes.

I had the pleasure of delivering a keynote address at the Federation Internationale de l’Automobile’s annual Mobility Conference in London on September 16 about the future of urban transportation – autonomous cars, car-sharing, ride-sharing, cycling, walking, and various permutations and perverse outcomes of each. A short interview following my talk is posted above; a transcript is below.

Q. It’s almost five years since your book, Aerotropolis, was published. Does its forecast of a world of urbanisation built around airports as central transportation hubs still hold true?

A. I think air travel matters more than ever. When the latest rankings for airports came out last year we saw six or seven per cent growth rates in Asia-Pacific and around the world. The notion of air travel connecting the world and the notion that the world is speeding up rather than slowing down is still valid. I think people are reaching out and reaching further than they have before.

Q. With more than half the world’s population living in cities, urbanisation is the future. In your opinion what are the main transportation issues this raises?

A. The first question is what is a city for? Cities are not the sum of their roads or infrastructure. The most interesting thinking I’ve seen recently comes from some physicists, who are positing the idea that cities are essentially stars and instead of the sun, where you’re compressing hydrogen into helium, you are taking social networks of people, compressing them in time and space and what comes out is ideas, quality of life, productivity, everything we need to advance human civilisation.

Q. So the question is what infrastructure do we need to compress those people in space and time?

A. That’s the trouble we’re having now with the automobile paradigm. We are reaching physical limits on how dense we can make the cores. I think when it comes to cities we need to upgrade transit, make them more walkable. I think we need to change the way we live and work. Buildings need to become more multi-use; the typical office building is 40 per cent empty at any given moment. That’s crazy.

Q. All the indicators point towards the coming decades being a period of enormous transition in the world of the automobile. Are we heading towards cities predicated on on-demand transportation?

A. Totally. That’s the great revolution with the smart phone. We now have the ability to not only summon mobility on-demand but the data that comes off the back end of that allows us to coordinate formerly individually private vehicles on scales we could never previously imagine. We already know, for example, that with Uber and Lyft, a quarter of their journeys in the San Francisco peninsula or Los Angeles are to metro or train stations. We’re seeing the extension of transit that way. It will be interesting to see how people choose to enrol their cars in car-sharing programmes, how they make them available to others, how they choose to use mobility services such as Uber. I think we’re going to start to see a revolution in the car not just being a private vehicle but a service I call when I need it. That’s quite the cultural shift.

Q. Is there an element of wishful thinking in the world of autonomous vehicles when you consider the possible infrastructural changes that may need to be made and the possible difficulties in implementing operational standards?

A. The automobile as we know it is highly standardised by all sorts of international agencies. Computing operates on a completely different paradigm, where you fight over standards, where companies clash until one can muscle the other into finally submitting. Imagine your car doing that at 90km/h, where your car is trying negotiate with another car over a protocol that only half works. There is a lot of work that needs to be done on how cars are going to talk to each other. All the competing vehicle manufacturers are going to want their own versions, with their own safety tolerances and government is way behind on negotiating open standards for this. Really we should have one standard and it should be the equivalent of TCP/IP for autonomous cars, but no, I think we’re going to thrash it out for a while first.

The reSITE Festival in Prague has posted my special lecture on “engineering serendipity” at this year’s conference. Please click on the link for my slightly-longer-than-a-TED Talk version of my TIME Magazine/Medium essay on the subject.

(This post originally appeared at Global Solution Networks on July 10, 2015.)

School is out, summer holidays are just getting started – this might just be the busiest season on the urbanist’s conference calendar. A year ago, my June schedule included the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, the New Cities Summit, the launch of the Amsterdam Institute of Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, the Clinton Global Initiative America, and a special “cities” track at the Aspen Ideas Festival. This year, I limited myself to just two events, which was less exhausting, but also meant missing:

• Future Cities Catapult’s Dan Hill and Architecture 00’s Indy Johar debating the future of urban governance at MakeCity Berlin. “How do you design systems? How do you visualise them?” Johar asked. And Hill replied: “Once you apply a system lens to wicked problems you see different leverage points to start acting… We are thinking too straight from cause to effect, but from a systems perspective we realize it’s 3rd, 4th level implications. The city will become a central economic unit as corporate lifespan decreases from 70 to 10 years, and it needs long-term stability.”

• Back-to-back talks by married urban academic rock stars Saskia Sassen and Richard Sennett on creating more open, permeable, cities at the Future of Places conference in Stockholm, organized by UN-Habitat, the Ax:son Johnson Foundation, and Project for Public Spaces. Much of the conference was devoted to drafting an agenda for public space at next year’s Habitat III conference. (Expected to be a once-in-a-generation event, the conference will take place in October 2016 in Quito, Ecuador.)

• Listening to the Rebuild Foundation’s Theaster Gates and author Charles Landry engage with the 32 winners of the Knight Cities Challenge in Detroit. Landry described the evolution from “City 1.0”‑ a hierarchical, rigidly public and private model– to “City 3.0” in which hybrid organizations empower residents to make and shape their cities to their needs.

And that’s just what I happened to follow on Twitter last month.

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I was busy at last month’s New Cities Summit in Jakarta. In addition to my keynote, I was also invited to join a panel titled “Can Cities Really Save the World?” As the token journalist on the panel, I was inclined to say no. I was joined by Ahamed J. M. Muzammil, Mayor of Colombo; the State Bank of India’s Siddhartha Sengupta, and Patrick Regardh, head of strategic marketing for Ericsson. We were ably moderated by Nick Clark, the environment editor for Al Jazeera English (“Not Al Jazeera America,” he was quick to correct me.) The entire session is above.

The New Cities Foundation has posted the video of my opening keynote, “The Urban Moment,” from this year’s New Cities Summit in Jakarta. Click on the video above for a fifteen-minutes overview of mega-urbanization, mobility, and the right to the city.

(Photo credit: reSITE)

After seven weeks of travel to Miami, Orlando, Chicago, Dubai, Seattle, Istanbul, Jakarta, Tokyo and Prague, my spring tour is over. Below are a few photos taken at the annual reSITE conference in Prague (where I gave a brief talk on “engineering serendipity”) along with a few additional images from the New Cities Summit in Jakarta, where I was honored to deliver the opening lecture. If you need me, I’ll be locked in my office writing through September, at least.

(Photo credit: reSITE)

(Photo credit: reSITE)

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On May 19, Microsoft Research’s Justin Cranshaw kindly invited me to present on my obsession du jour, “engineering serendipity.” Click through for the complete talk, which unfortunately is too large and wide to present here.

I’m delighted to announce I’ve joined the New Cities Foundation as a (non-resident) senior fellow for 2015-2016 to lead its new Connected Mobility Initiative. This year-long research project will continue the line of inquiry that began with consulting on New York University’s “Reprogramming Mobility” research, as well as my own report for the University of Toronto’s Global Solution Networks initiative. From the foundation’s site:

Urban mobility is evolving rapidly as one million people move to cities every week. Change is also being driven by other factors such as technological innovations, increased constraints on energy use, deep changes in the structure of urban economies, shifting lifestyles and new ideas about urban design.

We launched the Connected Mobility Initiative with support from the Toyota Mobility Foundation to address the critical need for metropolises worldwide to find viable mobility solutions of the future.

The Initiative will produce an in-depth report outlining early examples of public sector-led innovation around connected transportation, with the aim of distilling lessons for the public sector officials, technology vendors, and citizens necessary to bring these visions to fruition in different cities worldwide.

We have appointed mobility expert Greg Lindsay as New Cities Foundation’s Senior Fellow to lead the Initiative from 2015-16. Greg Lindsay is a journalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is co-author of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next and a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management.

Over the next 12 months, Greg will share his insights into the future of urban mobility at the New Cities Foundation’s global events including the New Cities Summit and Cities on the Move.

The Initiative was launched in June 2015 and the report will be published in the summer of 2016.