Greg Lindsay's Blog

April 01, 2016  |  permalink

Brandchannel: The Serendipitous Futurist

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It’s not an April Fools’ joke. Interbrand’s news arm, Brandchannel, has an interview with me following my talk at the agency back in January. I’ll skip editor Shirley Brady’s introduction and repost the Q&A here:

Greg, what can smaller, newly emerging cities learn from larger, established cities?

It’s worth noting at the start that the world has only really begun to urbanize. Urban populations are expected to double between 2010 and 2050 thanks to population growth and migration, and urban land cover – the ground beneath our feet – is expected to triple during that time. So we can expect wild profusions of cities, most of which will look more like Shenzhen than Charlotte – skyscrapers sprouting next to villages next to empty fields next to slums.

The most important thing these emerging cities can learn from London or New York or Tokyo is to resist the urge to wipe the ground clean and build gated cities that look great in renderings but are sterile in real life. New York’s Little Italy and Nolita were slums a century ago; Tokyo was bombed flat after World War II. Both were rebuilt by many hands with the freedom to make what they wanted. If brandchannel’s readers really want to win the “fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” or the loyalty of the emerging middle class, they should forget about Shanghai and Dubai and focus on the needs of people in Dharavi and Kibera – sponsor the infrastructure they need to become the cities they should be.

Your talk focused on optimizing cities, office design and connected mobility. How do these three areas connect when imagining the future of urbanization?

Cities thrive from intensity – both the creative intensity of residents and the intense use of infrastructure. So when it comes to the future of work and the future of mobility, I’m interested in how we can steer cities and society away from sterile, singular uses – the office, the car, the suburb, the mall – toward fluid, more intense ones. That’s why I’m a big proponent not only of coworking (which has entered the mainstream with WeWork’s eye-opening $10 billion–and more recently, $16 billion–valuation), but any development that leads away from conventional commercial real estate toward more publicly mixed uses.

The same thing goes for mobility. The near-term goal for urban mobility shouldn’t be cycling lanes, autonomous cars, or Uber, but a “mobility-as-a-service” platform combining every mode to make transport easier and more accessible. I guess the question is: how do you bring the most people – and the most diverse set of people – to the same place at the same time? Because as a century’s worth of urban sociology and economics tells us, that’s when the magic happens.

Which brands do you see playing the largest role in New Cities’ Connected Mobility Initiative?

Well, Toyota, obviously – the initiative is underwritten by the Toyota Mobility Foundation. The two brands looming largest in my research – as seemingly unstoppable forces, if not the villains – are Google and Uber.

Google, of course, reintroduced the notion of autonomous cars five years ago as if no one had ever thought of them before outside The Jetsons. But General Motors had first broached the idea at the 1939-1940 World’s Fair within its Futurama exhibit (the most successful design fiction exercise of all time, I should add), and robotics researchers were making headway on the idea before Google seeming hired them all. But thanks to the company’s heft, success, and halo around the future, the company has come to be seen as synonymous with autonomous cars, and that’s not the case as automakers race to write their own software and introduce their own models. But Daimler’s Dieter Zetsche is right to be wary about the combination of Google’s market share and mind share.

As for Uber, I think it’s to urban mobility what Walmart famously was to retailing – a deceptively cheaper, easier, friendlier alternative to small, local players, that has stoked a consumer backlash against taxis and used it (along with a deceptively large lobbying operation) to rewrite legislation, giving it the ability to build a parallel transportation that threatens to create a two-tiered system in which people who ride transit are second-class citizens with second-class options. (Just look at what Walmart has done to small towns across America when it comes to retailing options.) Whether they know it or not, transit agencies are in a fight to the death, and they can’t win by digging in their heels. They’re going to have to innovate and rebrand themselves if they hope to survive.

What’s an emerging technology trend that you believe is actually working against human connection?

I always tell this story: I met my wife in 2003 after crashing a party. I was early to meet friends at the bar next door, and rather than stand at the bar, nursing a beer and looking lonely, I decided to crash. If today’s smartphones and social networks had existed then, it’s likely I never would have met here – I’d still be standing at the bar, toggling between Twitter and Tinder. We’ve been extraordinarily successful at building social networks that link us to others around the globe, but we’ve done a terrible job at creating them for local contexts. I think two of Tinder’s competitors – Hinge and Happn – are interesting starts, but we have far to go.

If you had to choose brands to start a new city on Mars, which would you choose and why?

I’d start by asking Weyland-Yutani Corporation (from the Alien franchise) to recruit colonists; they’re not afraid to innovate in hostile environments. I’d also sign up (Blade Runner‘s) Tyrell Corporation to staff the menial jobs. I just connected on LinkedIn with their new training coordinator, Roy Batty; he’s great. Although given what happened when Elon Musk decided to give drivers sort of-self-driving cars, maybe not Tesla.

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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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