I’m typing these words at 35,000 ft. while winging my way home to New York from Kitzbühel, Austria — the Aspen of the Tyrol — where I’ve just wrapped the busiest speaking season of my entire life with a closing keynote to Re.comm. As the world shifts to holidays mode — and I return my focus to both Climate Alpha and The Metaverse Metropolis — here’s a brief recap of where I’ve been and whom I’ve addressed this fall.

The season kicked off in September with a trip out west to speak to RE/MAX Commercial in Tucson, followed by back-to-back trips to Scottsdale and Denver, the latter for the Colorado Commercial Real Estate Symposium, which was covered by The Denver Post. From there, it was off to Chicago for Coldwell Banker Commercial atop the Willis Tower, then back to New York for the Fast Company Innovation Festival (covered here) and a panel on real estate and the Metaverse at Realcomm’s NYC CIO Property Technology Forum.

As the calendar and leaves turned to October, there was a virtual address to Moss Adams’ Building Opportunity 2022 conference (video here) then back onto the road for Lightbox PRISM in Scottsdale (covered here).

After a brief stop in NYC for the Hudson Gateway Association of Realtors Global Real Estate Summit, it was off to Portsmouth, NH for a quintessential New England fall weekend speaking to Maine Strategic HR on how the intersection of remote work and climate change might spur a demographic shift back in their direction. (That conversation was continued in The Boston Globe.)

The fall wrapped with a few final legs in Quebec — for the Canadian Automobile Association — and Houston (covered with video here) before a final sprint from Austin to Orlando for Business Facilities LiveXchange Emerging Industries 2022 (a gathering of site selection experts) and then hopping a trans-Atlantic flight to Kitzbühel, where I ran into none other than Carlos Moreno (picture below), the mastermind behind the pedestrianization of central Paris and leading advocate of “15-minute cities.” It was the perfect way to wrap the year. So, now where to?

The good folks at Central Houston Inc. — the organization championing and improving the core of America’s third-largest metro — invited me to keynote their annual luncheon on November 3rd. I was asked to help frame the opening remarks by Mayor Sylvester Turner (pictured below) and Central Houston Inc. CEO Kris Larson’s address on the state — and future — of downtown with a glimpse of what other cities are doing around the U.S. (and world). Click on the video above to watch my short-and-sweet keynote.

My book Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next is more than a decade old but still holds up surprisingly well, despite a pandemic that grounded global air travel for nearly two years. A pair of recent data points jump out: U.S. air traffic has reached 95% of 2019 levels, defying naysayers who claimed business travel (and thus aviation) would never recover in the era of Zoom; and the Saudis taking the logic of the aerotropolis emirate of Dubai to its logical conclusion. From CNN:

As Saudi Arabia continues to develop as a tourist destination, it’s making plans for big things—specifically, one of the world’s biggest airports.

The King Salman International Airport, due to be built in capital Riyadh, will have no fewer than six parallel runways, allowing 185 million passengers to pass through annually by 2050. Built over the current King Khalid International Airport, it will sprawl over a whopping 22 square miles and is due to be designed by starchitects Foster + Partners, who have dubbed it an “aerotropolis.”

Luke Fox, Foster + Partners’ head of studio, said the airport would “reimagine the traditional terminal as a single concourse loop, served by multiple entrances.” The site will include over 4.5 square miles of retail outlets, “residential and recreational facilities,” and logistics space.

Aviation isn’t over yet.

Nora Taylor, host of CBC Radio’s Spark radio show and podcast, invited me on to discuss early pandemic-era efforts to organize mutual aid efforts through the same corporate productivity tools remote workers relied on to continue business-as-usual: Slack, AirTable, Google Docs, and more. I’m in good company:

Big Tech aims to solve large social issues, from housing to urban transportation. We discuss tech solutionism with Paris Marx, host of Tech Won’t Save Us podcast, author of Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation. And, with massive layoffs happening all over Silicon Valley, and the sale of Twitter throwing social media into chaos, is it time to rekindle the cooperatives movement in tech? Nathan Schneider, professor of media studies at University of Colorado, Boulder and director of the Media Enterprise Design Lab, talks about tech co-ops. Then, Greg Lindsay, urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech University and a senior fellow at MIT’s Future Urban Collective, talks about peer-to-peer solutions focused on mutualism and solidarity in times of crisis.

Listen to the whole episode here.

Henley & Partners — the consultancy that more or less invented citizenship-by-investment — invited me to speak at 16th annual Global Citizenship Conference on the subject of the Metaverse, digital assets, and sovereignty.

This is an area of great interest to me, both because of my current “Metaverse Metropolis” fellowship at Cornell Tech, and the panel I hosted last year featuring Gabriel Abed — Barbados’ ambassador to both the UAE and the Metaverse. What does sovereignty means in a virtual context, and how does the de-territorialization of citizenship translate back to the physical world?

To explore these questions, I was joined by Nirbhay Handa, Group Head of Business Development at Henley & Partners; Aliya Das Gupta, Senior Vice President, Business Development at Sygnum; Bril Wang, Chief Executive Officer of Cryptic Labs, which built the blockchain underpinnings of Palau’s digital citizenship; and Raagulan Pathy, VP of Asia Pacific at Circle.

Click on the video above to watch; my modest contribution to the conversation runs from roughly the 9:30 to 12:30 minute mark.

I was delighted to deliver the opening keynote at the Lightbox PRISM 2022 conference last month on how “software is eating commercial real estate” (and the world, of course). One of my topics was climate change — as you might expect given my work for Climate Alpha. As it turns out, I was only the first among many speakers to raise the subject. From Lightbox’s recap of the event:

In a keynote presentation, Greg Lindsay, chief communications officer of Climate Alpha, a location analysis platform steering governments and investments towards more climate-resilient geographies, discussed how post-pandemic trends and climate change are reshaping the work environment. Lindsay shared that now is an opportune time for us to reimagine what cities and real estate should be. An estimated 40 percent of Americans suffered from some form of climate disaster last year, whether flooding or hurricanes or wildfires or wildfire smoke damaging the air quality in places like the Pacific Northwest and the Rockies near Colorado. Fortunately, technology has given us powerful tools to deal with climate change. 

Changing work habits are affecting the planet. Six times more people are working at home than before the pandemic, and that can’t happen without massive ramifications for the built environment. We’re seeing the rise of new real estate trends, such as individuals who need more space moving into single-family rentals because multifamily can’t accommodate them—and because the U.S. never built enough new homes after the financial crash.

Read the rest here.

The Fast Company Innovation Festival — a virtual mainstay of mine during the pandemic years — returned in-person for 2022, and I had the pleasure of hosting multiple sessions for IBM (at top), FIS (below), Meta (at bottom), and the Indiana Economic Development Corporation (not pictured).

Kicking things off was my fireside chat with IBM’s Jason McGee, general manager and CTO of the company’s cloud business, covered the evolution from “private clouds” to “public clouds” (think AWS), to the inevitable “hybrid clouds.” Here’s a snippet of our conversation:

How did the pandemic help drive this shift, for both good and bad?

What’s interesting is how we got a lot more tactical in an environment like that—how do I solve this problem right now? There’s some freedom in that—people worried less about the strategic ramifications 10 years from then. But now we’re three years out, dealing with all the fallout of the short-term decisions you made, including all your different partners and cloud providers you signed in the heat of it. The stumbling block now is: How do I get a handle on everything I’ve done and bring some consistency to that environment? Because all of that complexity is bogging me down.

The next day, I spoke with Taira Hall, SVP of B2B and strategic innovation at FIS, and her colleague Stephane Wyper, SVP and global head of venture investment, about embedded finance and what it means for the future of the financial industry. What is “embedded finance,” you ask? Good question! From the recap:

The rise of “embedded finance” promises to turn banking and insurance inside out by offering their services as an add-on to other purchases rather than remaining one-stop shops. This not only has the potential to upend these industries as we know them, but also transform our relationships with brands, as customer-loyalty programs morph into personal data–driven credit scores, and every transaction includes financing options. Banks will still be necessary to handle the sticky bits—including risk, regulation, and compliance—while fintech startups rush to offer tailored solutions for small businesses and gig economy entrepreneurs.

Finally, I hosted “You, Me, and the Metaverse,” a panel hosted by, yes, Meta, featuring the company’s VP of Americas Nada Stirratt, George Mason University sociologist James Witte, and Ed3 DAO co-founder Vriti Saraf. Click the link above for video highlights, or just read the description:

As business leaders look out at the exciting and expansive future of the internet, it remains an open question why the metaverse is gaining steam now. In this thought-provoking discussion, discover the changes and advances in technology, culture and commerce that are defining and driving this innovation in real time — and how these developments create an opportunity for businesses to get ahead of the curve.

Can’t wait for next year — although I’ll need more pants.

“As the Sun Belt suffers from increasing vulnerability, the question is can New England benefit from that?” I asked The Boston Globe’s Cameron Sperance in his story exploring whether its climate resilience might spark a reversal of the region’s long-term outflow of residents.

Not so fast, said the other experts quoted. A much bigger factor than climate is the region’s dramatic shortfall of affordable housing — a problem made worse by the NIMBYism of local residents. What good does it do New England to be a climate haven if no one can move there? But that’s all the reason to start planning — and building — for tomorrow’s arrivals now, said my friend and colleague Parag Khanna, the CEO of our startup, Climate Alpha.

“You don’t want this kind of reckless climate gentrification overrunning places where you get crowding out and pricing ordinary people out of the market,” he said. “If you just think with a rigorous scientific lens, you should be thinking about the places that would be more resilient [and] pre-designing in the sense of sustainable technology and enlarging the capacity of those geographies to absorb greater populations.”

Click here to read more.

Isaiah Industries’ Todd Miller recently invited me on his “Construction Disruption” podcast for a wide-ranging chat. Listen to the embedded audio above or hit the link for the podcast platform of your choice. Here’s a little of what we talked about:

As our world grows and evolves, technology and humanity intersect in complex and often unexpected ways. Artificial intelligence is a prime example, as it improves alongside human understanding, making a powerful partner in work and play. We’ve already seen AI create art, write stories, and win at chess and Jeopardy. Who knows what the future holds?

Futurists like Greg Lindsay interpret the web of humanity and technology to predict the state of the world in the next five, fifty, and five hundred years. Greg is a journalist turned futurist, bringing a critical eye to issues like transportation, mixed reality, housing, and urban planning.

In this episode, Greg discusses solutions for affordable housing, troubling traffic statistics, worldwide responses to the pandemic, the air travel boom, and his experiences living across the globe.

The folks at Moss Adams asked me to return as the opening keynote of their Building Opportunity 2022 conference, in a reprise of my opening address two years, during the depths of the pandemic. Needless to say, things have been looking for cities since then. Watch my hour-long virtual address above or on YouTube; an overview is below.

Outmigration from major cities into more rural areas—and a new era of accessibility of goods and services through technology—are changing real estate as we know it. This, in turn, means rethinking who and what cities are for and what they should look like in the future.

Watch our on-demand webcast, The Future of Cities and Urban Planning. With more than a decade of writing and research on globalization, urbanism, innovation, and adaptability, urbanist and futurist speaker Greg Lindsay addresses the impact of recent trends on the future of cities.

This is one webcast in our four-part virtual 2022 Building Opportunity Conference.