While visting NBBJ – the architects of Amazon’s, Google’s, and Samsung’s new campuses – in Seattle last month, I sat down to talk about cities, inequality, and the future of work. Please enjoy each of the resulting short films below:

Ahead of my talks on cities and serendipity here in Aspen, I spoke briefly with genConnect about what makes a great city. (Hint: it involves Tinder.)

I’m in Aspen this weekend for the tenth annual installment of the Aspen Ideas Festival, where I’m moderating several sessions on a new track named “The Metropolis.” The first, “Future Megacities and the Fate of Millions” brought together Shining Hope For Communities’ Kennedy Odede, McKinsey’s Shirish Sankhe, and the Sante Fe Institute’s Luis Bettancourt for a lively and wide-ranging conversation on cities, slums, and how to build better versions of each.

Video of the session is above; the official description is below:

A generation ago, New York and Tokyo were the world’s only megacities. By 2025, the UN predicts there will be 37. All but a handful will be in the developing world. The fate of millions, then, rests on the question: what will life in these megacities look like? While density is an almost universally celebrated urban characteristic, rapid population growth can also result in poorly planned, congested, and unsafe settlements, leading many to ask: Are slums the inevitable urban form of the future? How might big data and progressive planning ensure that even the fastest growing cities are places of opportunity for the billions that will live in them?

I’m proud to announce the Motor Cities Project, the culmination of more than a year of research and the start of years of work in Detroit. Launched last week as an official commitment to action at the Clinton Global Initiative America conference in Denver, the Motor Cities Project is a two-year pilot project by the World Policy Institute and Pilot Projects Design Collective to repopulate and revitalize Detroit using lessons learned from thriving communities in developing world megacities.

The Associated Press coverage of the announcement is below; the official press release is after the jump.

Motor City Project to spur economic growth in northwest Detroit neighborhood

By Associated Press

A plan to spur economic growth in a northwest Detroit neighborhood was announced Tuesday during the 2014 Clinton Global Initiative America meeting in Denver.

The Motor City Project will highlight the use of available resources like manpower, vacant land and empty buildings to make the area attractive to potential and current residents seeking to start their own businesses.

It also will help new arrivals work through cumbersome city codes and other red tape to operate home- and neighborhood-based businesses, World Policy Institute Senior Fellow Greg Lindsay said.

Lindsay said zoning rules in many U.S. cities make it difficult for entrepreneurs to operate out of their homes or garages, but such “microenterprises” have been successful in poorer countries.

He pointed to the practice of salvaging wood, countertops and other materials from abandoned houses in Detroit and selling it to retrofit homes.

“That’s what happens every day in places like Nairobi,” Lindsay said. “They are starved for resources. People realize everything they have is an asset.”

The Detroit neighborhood chosen is a mix of homes and small manufacturing. It is anchored by Focus: Hope, a social and economic services agency.

As part of the project, a so-called Resilience Center will be created to attract “urban homesteaders and migrants from other neighborhoods, cities and countries to relocate to the area,” the World Policy Institute said in a release.

Staff also will work with entrepreneurs to find funding and other support for their ventures.

“We want to create this pop-up community center where we would bring in new arrivals and help them acclimate to their conditions,” Lindsay said.

The two-year project is in the design and development phase and is starting with in-kind contributions. It hopes to expand with partners from the Clinton Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative. The initiative was establish in 2005 by former President Bill Clinton. It brings together foundations, business and government leaders to develop solutions to challenges impacting people around the world.

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Last month in Dallas, I moderated a session at the New Cities Summit on the importance of global air hubs – a particularly appropos topic given the location, which is the largest metropolitan region in United States that doesn’t sit beside or straddle a major body of water. Instead, DFW has one of the world’s busiest airports at its core. Airport CEO Sean Donohue and Boyd Aviation’s Mike Boyd joined me for a fun and lively conversation on the future of aviation and why DFW is perfectly positions to be the only hub you’ll ever need connecting Asia and Latin America.

Back in May, I interviewed Zipcar and Buzzcar founder Robin Chase at New York Internet Week, in a session titled “The Driverless Car: Heaven or Hell?” (The short answer: it could be Heaven, but will probably be Hell.) Robin was game to answer my questions despite the hurricane of noise onstage. (Please pardon my shouting – I couldn’t hear myself think.) The video is above; enjoy.

I’m proud to announce Katrina Szabo and I are runners-up in the inaugural Space Forward Ideas Competition to imagine the future of the workplace. Our entry was titled “Serendipity Engine,” and you can read about the concept below, as well as download Katrina’s design of the space in PDF form at the bottom.

Welcome to the Serendipity Engine, a workspace dedicated to the discovery of people, ideas, and opportunities – one made possible by a unique confluence of place and technology. It covers the entire social spectrum of work, from a lounge and yoga studio for meeting coworkers, to an auditorium for classes, to locked rooms for total concentration. And it’s open to anyone willing to share their goals, skills and time when they’re present.

But what sets it apart from even the best-designed offices is the Engine itself – an iPhone and Android app talking constantly to the hundreds of Apple iBeacon sensors embedded throughout the space. These sensors note members’ movements, behavior, and proximity to others, using this data to better understand both how the space is used and who’s using it. It’s more than an office – it’s a professional social network overlaid onto real space, in real time.

Given this information along with members’ histories and profiles, the Engine can intervene as well as listen. Coworkers not only decide where they want to work each day, but whom they want to work with – people’s locations are logged by the system. And even if they don’t know their future mentors, co-founders, or funders are present – the Engine is happy to make the introductions.

The hope is to unlock more value from what makes the best workplaces so great – new connections between smart coworkers who have all the room they need to think. All they need is a little serendipity to strike.

Layout of the Serendipity Engine.

What is the Serendipity Engine?

I had the good fortune last week to kick off the first in a series of lectures at the 14th Architecture Biennale organized by the Palazzo Grassi in collaboration with the journal and think tank STREAM, founded in 2008 by architect Philippe Chiambaretta. For the first lecture, timed to the opening of the Biennale, I was paired with the Serpentine Gallery’s (and Swiss Pavilion curator) Hans-Ulrich Obrist, who has more ideas per minute than anyone I’ve ever met. It was terrific fun.

I’m immensely gratified to be included in Annalee Newitz’s list of “10 Books That Could Change the Way You Understand Modern Cities” over at io9. While they’re technically unranked, the first one on the list is Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities, followed by Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, with Mike Davis’ City of Quartz and Saskia Sassen’s The Global City in the top five. I’ve never been more pleased to finish seventh at something.

While in Seattle this week to speak to both the local CoreNet chapter and NBBJ – architects of both Amazon’s new downtown headquarters (seen above) and Google’s Bayview campus – I was interviewed by the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce about my thoughts on the future of workspace. The story and interview by Lynn Porter are published below.

What does Greg Lindsay, a two-time champion on the game show “Jeopardy,” know about designing office space?

You can find out at 11:30 a.m. tomorrow when Lindsay gives a talk at the University of Washington Botanic Gardens. The event is being presented by the Washington chapter of CoreNet Global, an association for people involved in corporate real estate and related services. The cost to attend is $30 for CoreNet members and $60 for non members. Register at http://tiny.cc/ou6wfx/.

Lindsay’s talk is titled “Engineering Serendipity” because he believes the best ideas at work come from a chat around the water cooler rather than at meetings. He said offices ought to be designed to make those chats happen more often.

There’s too much Class A office space on the market worldwide, Lindsay said, and he expects to see corporations shrink their footprints. All that dead office space must be reconfigured to foster collaboration and new ideas, he said.

Owners and developers should seed office buildings with creative types to attract other tenants, he said.

“If you’re in the business of building an office, it’s no longer about throwing up a mid-rise building,” Lindsay said. “It’s about cultivating the people inside it. Having a lot of smart, interesting and creative people can definitely be attractive to a lot of clients.”

Lindsay is a contributing writer for Fast Company, coauthor of “Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next” and a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute, where he leads the Emergent Cities Project.

He is also working with OMA, Rem Koolhaas’ international architecture firm, and the firm’s research studio, AMO, to explore how cities, office space, the cloud and Big Data connect.

Lindsay is also the only person to beat the IBM supercomputer Watson at “Jeopardy” in an untelevised sparring match.

He got interested in workplace design when he did a talk at what is now BlackBerry. The talk got him thinking about how to create a “killer app” for people in cities – one that would introduce people to each other, help them find people around them and analyze why they should know certain people.

All this “led me to a work context,” he said, which is how he got interested in office design as a way to help people be more creative, productive and collaborative.

Lindsay points to a 17-year study of researchers at a higher education campus in Paris. Researchers who had to move from building to building because of an asbestos cleanup did more influential work and published more “because they were bumping into new neighbors,” he said.

Such studies show that serendipitous encounters can lead to big ideas, but he said it’s difficult to know exactly which ones will get those results.

“It’s very hard to find metrics around serendipity,” he said. “How do you measure value around an unknown? Companies are basically doing it with crossed fingers. They know it works they just don’t know when it works. How do you take what many people would call luck and then make it repeatable?”

A number of companies are giving it a shot, Lindsay said, mentioning Amazon.com in Seattle and Zappos in Las Vegas, where CEO Tony Hsieh is building a creative-class company town. Other examples are the redevelopment of 1407 Broadway, an office tower in Midtown Manhattan; and the 5M project in San Francisco that is being designed to attract technology companies, arts groups, small retail shops and residents.

The DJC asked Lindsay about the workplace. Here is what he said:

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