I’m delighted to announce I’ve been selected as one of the inaugural Urban Tech Fellows at the Jacobs-Technion Cornell Institute’s Urban Tech Hub, which is located on Cornell Tech’s campus on Roosevelt Island in New York City. I’m excited to work with the hub’s director Michael Samuelian, research + program manager Nneka Sobers, and urbanist-in-residence Anthony Townsend — a former and future collaborator — along with my fellow fellows Paul Salama, Cara Eckholm, Mirtha Santana, and Rasmi Elasmar.

The focus of my year-long fellowship will be The Metaverse Metropolis, which you can read about in more detail here. Watch this site for additional details in the coming year!

Earlier this year, my friend Brian David Johnson — a fellow futurist and director of the Arizona State University Threatcasting Lab — recruited me to help write and edit a report for NATO(!) on the implications of “emerging disruptive technologies” such as artificial intelligence, quantum computing and cryptography, robotics, and so on. He had assembled a group of interdisciplinary experts to imagine, scheme, and write stories using his “threatcasting” technique of concretely imagining how people might respond to future threats, and in turn, how to mitigate them. Here are the research questions they were asked:

What are the future implications of Emerging Disruptive Technologies (EDTs) on the future of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) warfare? How might EDTs increase the lethality and effectiveness of WMDs in kinetic warfare? How can civic leaders and public servants prepare for and mitigate projected threats?

Given these were being asked under the long shadow of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this was heavy stuff. The final report has just been published, and I’m proud to be list as a co-author alongside Brian, the United States Military Academy’s Natalie Vanatta and Jason C. Brown, and the historian James Carrott.

The report is available for download here, but here’s a brief excerpt from the introduction to give you a flavor of our findings, and why we should all take the threat of nuclear weapon use in Ukraine very, very seriously:

In the coming decade, state and nonstate adversaries will use EDTs to attack systems and populations that may initiate and accelerate existing geopolitical conflict escalation. EDTs are expected to be used both in the initial attack or escalation as well as a part of the detection and decisionmaking process. Due to the speed of EDTs, expected confusion, and common lack of human oversight, attacks will also be incorrectly attributed, which has the capacity to escalate rapid geopolitical conflict to global military conflict, and ultimately, to the use of nuclear WMDs. The use of EDTs in the shadow of nuclear WMDs is also expected to create an existential threat to possible adversaries, pushing them to “lower the bar” of acceptability for using nuclear WMDs. EDTs will enable and embolden insider threats, both willing and unknowing, to effect geopolitical conflict on a global scale.

In addition, the combination of multiple EDTs when used together for attacks will create WMD effects on populations and governments. Furthermore, EDTs will be used by adversaries to target and destabilize critical infrastructure systems, such as food, energy, and transportation, etc. that will have a broader effect on populations and governments. EDTs will enable adversaries to perpetrate a long-game attack, where the effect and attribution of the attack may not be detected for an extended period—if ever.

To combat these future threats, organizations will need to conduct research and intelligence gathering paired with exploratory research and development to better understand the state of EDTs and their potential impacts. With this information, organizations will need to conduct collaborative “wargaming” and planning to explore a range of possible and potential threats of EDTs. The knowledge gained from all of these activities will inform future training and best practices to prepare for and address these threats.

Organizations will also need to increase their investments in EDT related domains, necessitating countries to not only change how they fight, but also evolve their thinking about deterrence. Expanded regulation, policy making, and political solidarity among members will take on an increasingly more significant and expanded role. Broader government, military, and civilian cooperation will be needed to disrupt and mitigate some of these future threats in conjunction with broader public awareness. All of these actions will place a higher value on cooperation and shared resiliency among NATO members.

My fall speaking tour kicked off out west this week with the RE/MAX Commercial Symposium in Tucson on Tuesday, followed by a short hop to Denver for the Colorado Commercial Real Estate Symposium. (Are you sensing a theme?) My talk in Denver was covered by The Denver Post, which made me sound maybe a little more alarmist than I had intended. (Okay, it was exactly the level of alarmism I was aiming for.) From their story:

People who relocated during the pandemic favored areas at higher risk of disruption due to climate change, but they may come to regret those moves over the long term, futurist Greg Lindsay told a gathering of the Denver Metro Commercial Association of Realtors on Thursday morning.

“Americans are moving in the wrong direction,” Lindsay said of migration patterns during the pandemic, and even before. “Markets are underpricing climate risk.”

Wrong as in moving from cooler northern coastal areas and the upper Midwest to the Sunbelt. Wrong as in moving to Arizona and Nevada, popular states that suffer from ever-increasing temperatures and worsening drought. Wrong as in flocking in large numbers to coastal Florida and Miami, where rising water levels could submerge vast swaths of land in coming decades if powerful hurricanes don’t scrape them first.

Read the rest here.

Nearly a decade ago, as geopolitical competition, economic dislocation, technological disruption, and climate change began their breakneck acceleration, my friend Parag Khanna and I wrote an essay for Reuters asking, “Where will you live in 2050?” Assessing risks around the globe, we took a stab at identifying the regions most likely to adapt to mounting complexity through a combination of good governance and climate resilient. (The punchline: Parag promptly moved to Singapore, opting for governance. I later chose Montréal, prioritizing the opposite side of our equation.)

Not content to spitball ideas in op-eds, Parag took our musings a step further — recruiting some of the most talented minds in climate science and software engineering, he built an analytics platform combining climate models, real estate valuations, and socio-economic trends. The result is a forecasting tool expressly designed to steer investment toward the (currently undervalued) resilient regions of tomorrow. Meet Climate Alpha.

I’m delighted to join the company — which officially launches today — as its chief communications officer, helping to tell our story. Follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates, or drop by our News page for press mentions and Insights for analysis of our own. More to come.

Condé Nast Traveler’s Tom Vanderbilt was kind enough to quote me in his roundup of futuristic new cities from around the globe, ranging from Saudi Arabia’s NEOM to Oceanix’ proposed floating city off the coast of Busan, South Korea, to more prosaic efforts like Egypt’s new administrative capital. I couldn’t help but pour a little cold water on the idea:

Might any of these projects live up to the outsize dreams of their creators? The jury is out. “What makes a successful city is that it possesses a level of social and economic complexity,” says Greg Lindsay, a senior fellow at MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab. “Most of the city builders I’ve worked with still struggle with understanding how to build that.” The desire to create iconic architecture and high-tech infrastructure often overlooks all those bottom-up, unsexy things that make a city tick.

Read the rest here.

My friends at Cartus — the corporate mobility specialists every Relo knows intimately and few others do — invited me to speak at their client conference this spring and then invited me back onto their podcast, which you can listen to here or below. (Apple, Spotify, and other formats are available as well.)

Here’s what you’re missing:

From futuristic technology to providing for highly skilled workers in a competitive talent market, this bonus episode takes a deep dive into the future of mobility. We explore remote work, flexibility in the workplace, and mobility challenges and opportunities across the world.

In this fast-paced episode led by Cartus’ Dalia Begin and Trevor Macomber, listeners will learn valuable insights and knowledge provided by two-time Jeopardy Champion, Greg Lindsay. Don’t miss it!

I’m honored to have been asked to deliver the opening keynote at Central Houston Inc.‘s State & Future of Downtown event on Nov. 4th. Just to give you a taste of what’s to come, CHI’s Kim Scates and I caught up on what I’ve been working on. Video above — don’t watch if you don’t want any spoilers on my upcoming projects!

The Thomson Reuters Foundation’s Carey L. Biron was kind enough to include me as the fly-in-the-ointment in his recent story on online grocery delivery’s effects on cities. While most of the sources quoted gush about its prospects to alleviate food deserts (doubtful, given their focus on non-perishable, high-turnover SKUs), I sounded a more cautious note, one familiar to anyone who read my Bloomberg Citylab story with Lev Kushner from last December. Here’s my brief contribution:

Prioritizing delivery services can end up “damaging the cityscape,” said Greg Lindsay, a senior fellow at NewCities, a global nonprofit.

In an effort to be as close as possible to customers, some delivery groups have taken over storefronts as “microwarehouses” and logistics hubs that can detract from street life and thus potentially hurt other shops, he said.

“It was already hard enough to make it as a small business, and this makes it harder to survive,” he said.

Read the entire thing here.

(Update: Please find video from the session embedded above.)

Please join me next week for a Webinar (stop groaning!) on June 8th at 2 PM EDT with the folks at Coldwell Banker Commercial about the future of cities, downtowns, the office, and more. Here’s the lowdown:

Coldwell Banker Commercial’s quarterly CBC Chatter, a virtual discussion diving into the industry’s hottest topics, will be exploring the Future of Cities. Host Daniel Spiegel, Senior VP and Managing Director of Coldwell Banker Commercial, will be joined by Greg Lindsay, journalist, urbanist, and futurist; and Tracy Loh, computer scientist, urbanist, and scholar.

To RSVP, click here.

(Originally published May 24, 2022 by UNDP Global Accelerator Labs. Written with my Global Partnership for Informal Transportation colleague Julia Nebrija and UNDP’s Eduardo Gustale.)

They move millions, employ hundreds of thousands, and support the sizable informal sector in urban economies. They are informal, or entrepreneurial transit modes (think ojeks, tuktuks, jeepneys, matatus or collectivos). They are reliant on the market: people need to go places, and these services fulfill that need. Urban mobility systems in the rapidly growing metropolitan regions of the Global South are privately provided transport modes that have emerged to meet the demand for cheap, flexible mobility.

The UNDP Accelerator Labs announced a new UNDP research agenda in partnership with NewCities’ Global Partnership for Informal Transportation last October, 2021. We came together with the shared goal of making informal transportation more visible on a global scale. 

Our work advances the UNDP Accelerator Labs’ focus around informal economic activity using the Lab’s network learning prototype, which aims to transform centrally driven knowledge management and R&D into a distributed model that acknowledges diversity and continuous change across multiple local contexts. With informal economies as a priority area for us to test out new ways of learning, transportation is a first sectoral cut.  We are keen to explore all sides of informality, including its positive contribution in terms of providing service to those with mobility needs not currently served by formal systems.

Informal Transportation: an asset or a problem?
For many, informal transportation is a normal part of everyday life. It is highly visible on the streets of cities across the Global South but remains much less visible in mainstream mobility and transportation practice, investment and policy. 

Too often the world of informal transport is viewed as a problem to be solved. Yet, informal transport provides us with a window into how people want and need to move. Through a set of specific learning questions, we want to explore the potential of this important sector and eventually, we hope, showcase the opportunities that exist to provide better mobility for all. 

As a first step, our review, “Applying Learning Questions on Informal Economies to Informal Transportation,” takes a preliminary look at how these systems work. We consulted literature and interviewed current experts to develop an in-depth understanding. The learning questions explore the perceptions and motivations within the ecosystem of informality, focusing on drivers, operators and passengers. We questioned the incentive to formalize and the risks that may result from it. We looked at the role digital technologies are playing in making the sector more accessible, efficient and profitable, while also considering who it leaves out. We investigate the impact on the environment and try to understand the opportunities to improve sustainability and weave in solutions to move us forward on the Sustainable Development Goals.

Throughout the review, we are concerned with issues of equity and aim to identify those most affected and to understand the challenges they face. Next, we will look for policy models that offer a hybrid between the positive attributes of both formal and informal transportation.

Can we find an opportunity to focus on the worker, rather than the service? 
The predominant assumption is that informal transport should be formalized. We are looking at the risks and incentives of that assumption. Our work thus far suggests that there is an opportunity to investigate how outcomes might change if we focused on formalizing the drivers and their vehicles, instead of formalizing the services. One expert we spoke with, Aishwarya Raman, from the Ola Mobility Institute argues that current definitions of “formal” and “informal” uselessly strive to regulate services, rather than centering on the rights and protections of the workers themselves. She points to India’s new labor codes of 2019-2020, which enshrined the legal status of gig workers and extended social security benefits such as maternity leave, disability insurance, gratuity and health insurance regardless of employer. While these reforms still await implementation, she believes they hold the potential to transform labor’s relationship with the government and platforms alike. 

How can we shift the focus to integration rather than formalization?
As technological capabilities begin to outstrip those of formal public transportation when it comes to booking and payment, the question is how and where to integrate the two. In India, in 2020, for example, Gojek launched GoTransit for seamless multimodal trip planning across its own services and the Jakarta MRT. Will super apps fold formal transportation into their platforms? If so, who will determine public policy for these hybrid entities and how will they make these choices?

Is digitalization already introducing a degree of formality to informal transport? 
The speed and impacts of digitalization over the last two to five years cannot be overstated. In fact, digitalization has introduced a degree of formality to informal transport. By requiring drivers to submit credentials, wear uniforms and submit to GPS-based tracking and surveillance, platforms such as Gojek, Grab, and Ola, for example, have clearly instituted some formalization of the sector, but to what extent is up for debate. Policymakers will need to determine whether and how to ensure interoperability across markets and between players, or even the development of digital public infrastructure and interfaces. 

Watch this space.
In the next phase, the UNDP Accelerator Labs will continue to explore these questions in informal transportation. So far, we are working with UNDP Accelerator Labs in Bolivia, Guatemala, Lebanon, Kenya, North Macedonia, Togo, and Zimbabwe. 

Read the first set of insights and stay tuned as we continue to share our learnings and (mis)adventures on approaching informal transportation from the bottom up. If you wish to contribute, please contact us at accelerator.labs@undp.org.