This week, I received an unusual but irresistible request: appear on WBUR Boston’s podcast Open Source to help host Christoper Lydon unpack the word “neoliberalism” alongside CUNY’s Corey Robin, “Labor of Love” author Moira Weigel, and queer activist Yasmin Nair. Neoliberalism has been the world’s modus operandi since 1979, and might best be described as “markets in everything” – all the world’s a transaction, or should be. Lydon asked me to hold forth on the global supply chains, the aerotropolis, Uber, and cities, and I did so with my usual torrential speed. You can read WBUR’s description of the program here:

In recent weeks, our comments section has been filled with request to define a term we use constantly on this show: neoliberalism. For people who like buzzwords parsed and spelled out, this hour’s for you.

There are countless avenues that neoliberalism can lead us through: from the dismal science of efficiency and austerity to the dismal politics in Washington on both sides of the aisle. In our neighborhoods, neoliberalism may mean the defunding of our public schools as well as the deregulation of our public services. It’s driving impulse may be the ruthless privatization of everything in existence: from parking meters to prisons. It’s affective influence can transform our personal relationships, both intimate and platonic; gamifying our everyday relationships and turning the dating pool into a competitive market. Through the co-option of feminist and anti-racist struggle, it can disguise class enemies as “woke” allies. Through the commercialization of our artistic works and the corruption of our scientific research, it can convert our greatest human achievements into metrics on a spreadsheet.

So, instead of pursuing a single definition in this show, we’ve enlisted an all-star cast of public thinkers to discuss where they see neoliberalism creeping into their daily life and work.

In 2015, the New Cities Foundation approached me about a research fellowship studying urban mobility. I told them I was interested, but only if I could unequivocally take a stand against Uber and its implicit campaign to monopolize first taxis and then public transport. Without batting an eye, they said yes.

My final report, published last fall, made the case that Uber and its fellow transportation network companies would fatally undermine public transport by siphoning the most affluent (and therefore politically influential) riders away from subways and buses into the backseats of late-model sedans. Declining ridership would force transit agencies to first cut budgets and then quality, creating a downward spiral of customers fleeing to private services – which in certain cases already cost less than transit in cities such as New York, Boston, and Washington due to massive subsidies. (Uber posted a $3 billion loss last year.) The result would be a collapse in public transport and epic traffic congestion, as a multitude of individually rational decisions produced a collective meltdown.

Needless to say, this wasn’t a popular opinion at the time, when I expanded upon my theory at length in a podcast with London Reconnection’s Nicole Badstuber and Transit Center’s Zak Accuardi.

I doubled down in January with an op-ed in The Guardian arguing Uber’s multi-billion-dollar burn rate indicated it needed to achieve a near-total monopoly before the subsidies ran out. Shortly thereafter, Uber’s annus horriblis began, starting with the #deleteuber campaign and then widening into public allegations of internal sexual harassment, aggressively deceiving regulators, stealing Google’s autonomous vehicle research, and engendering enough ill will to lose more than 200,000 customers (and counting).

Then the other shoe (or the other other shoe) dropped this week with a report published by former New York City Department of Transportation deputy chief Bruce Schaller arguing Uber and Lyft, et al. have tripled in size in New York in the last eighteen months, producing demonstrable gridlock. Meanwhile, bus ridership has plunged by 25% since 2009, and subway ridership fell last year for the first time this century. “It’s hit a point where people are choosing to travel by ride-hailing because the subways have become intolerable,” the Regional plan Association’s president Tom Wright told The New York Times.

Perhaps the most remarkable quote from that story comes from a member of the Manhattan Institute, a self-described “free market think tank” :

Nicole Gelinas, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, said ride-hailing apps were able to lure riders with artificially low prices because they were subsidized by an influx of cash by investors. The apps have made it easier for people to travel by the “most inefficient mode of transportation possible,” she said.

When you’ve lost the libertarians, Uber, it’s game over.

I’m thrilled to join my Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream teammate Rafi Segal and the amazing architects Susannah Drake, Sarah Williams, and Brent Ryan in imagining the next hundred years of New York’s and New Jersey’s climate change-ravaged coastlines on behalf of the Regional Plan Association.

The RPA, in conjunction with the Rockefeller Foundation, has commissioned an ideas competition ahead of the Fourth Regional Plan – the once-in-a-generation long-term vision for the tri-state area. Our team was chosen by an all-star jury including former HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan and Foreclosed curator Barry Bergdoll to grapple with the insurmountable challenges of sea-level rise. From the RPA’s press release:

Rafi Segal A+ U and Susannah Drake have collaborated on several design competitions and taught together at Harvard’s GSD and at the Cooper Union School of Architecture. Together with Sarah Williams, Brent Ryan and Greg Lindsay, will work to design and address key ecological infrastructure challenges and threats posed by climate change to the region’s coastal areas. Their interest in dispersed urbanism and emerging forms of collective housing, along with urban ecological infrastructures, climate change and mobile technologies will allow them to address the pressing challenges of the Bight corridor. A series of future scenarios, from new strategies on managed retreat for vulnerable coastal areas to novel restoration strategies must be developed to manage the continued loss of fragile marsh lands. There is an opportunity to recast and restructure this corridor as an impactful ecological, infrastructural, and community asset, enhancing the region’s ecology and resiliency.

We have until June to propose strategies and tell our stories – wish us luck.

While in Dallas Monday to speak at the annual luncheon of Downtown Dallas, Inc. (more on that later), the morning hosts of Fox 4 News invited me on to discuss the mammoth airport at the heart of the Metroplex, and how I square the circle of the DFW Aerotropolis and the resurgence of downtown Dallas. Short version: the best cities are locally close and globally connected. Watch the clip above for more.

Last summer, the International Association of Public Transport (UITP) invited me to Brussels to help draft its bi-annual Public Transport Trends report with regards to connected mobility. Detailing the challenges and opportunities posed by ride-hailing, “mobility-as-a-service,” and autonomous vehicles, I forcefully argued against Uber and in favor of public transport bodies launching their own services, or at least partnering closely to extend coverage. (For this, Uber’s participant representative me as a luddite.) The executive summary is available here.

The Internet of Very Bad, No Good Things
FEBRUARY 13th, 2017
WORKSHOP: 1pm-5pm (invite-only)
PANEL: 6-8pm (open to public)
A/D/O: 29 Norman Ave., Brooklyn NY

Featuring:
Susan Cox-Smith, Principal, Changeist
Greg Lindsay, journalist

What do an army of Russian Twitter trolls, a hotel ransoming BitCoins to keycard-hijacking hackers, and a social media CEO pondering a run for the presidency in 2020 have in common? They all sit in the speculative sliver of a Venn diagram comprised of the Internet of Things, “surveillance capitalism” as practiced by the stacks, and governments unafraid to flex their muscles as far as “the cyber” is concerned.

Reflecting the A/D/O Design Academy’s theme of “Utopia vs. Dystopia,” this special event is divided into two parts. The afternoon is an invitation-only workshop led by Changeist principal Susan Cox-Smith, using the Thingclash framework for considering cross-impacts and implications of colliding technologies, systems, cultures and values around the Internet of Things. The evening is a public discussion moderated by journalist Greg Lindsay of the group’s darker scenarios, and the steps researchers, designers, technologists, strategists, policy makers and citizens can take to think more clearly, comprehensively and long-term about how we create a brighter future for all.

[Updated March 3, 2017: Susan Cox-Smith has recapped the event over at Medium:

Watching our participants work through the layers of various Thingclash workshops over the last year, we wanted to add some new levels of thinking for this iteration. In anticipation of this, we decided it might be time to introduce some (extra) chaos into their deliberations. Acknowledging the uncharted circumstances playing out in political settings around the world, we introduced “The State” card, as a final round of play. Delivered in a brown envelope, each team was advised that The State was dissatisfied in some way with their scenarios, and they were asked to fulfill an additional request, or describe how they might negotiate with this unknown external entity.

This new wrinkle led participants to imagine ways to shift or change their Things in new, and increasingly interesting ways. Among other things, the teams better recognized the implications of collecting and sharing user data without permissions, impacts on privacy, and the necessity of clear opt-in, or opt-out processes. Improving a Thing’s usefulness for People and Places was no longer just about UX, or fancier bells and whistles.

In the final round, the teams created fictional stories based on the critical realizations they had made about their scenarios, to share with the other participants. These stories were then presented at the public panel discussion later that evening, and this generated both interesting questions, and lively discussion, about how the IoT has so quickly become deeply embedded into our lives–despite huge gaps in security and accessibility, not to mention the common expectation that users must adapt their behaviors, so designers and developers can ignore the Thingclashes they sometimes create.

Never in my wildest dreams while writing Aerotropolis did I imagine airports would become the locus of political protests – especially sustained, passionate demonstrations and occupations that are arguably the strictest test of whether a place is truly “public” or urban. And yet, here we are. The protests ignited by President Trump’s January 27 executive order banning arrivals from seven majority-Muslim nations – an order I vehemently disagree with as well – improbably rallied around the international airports where visitors and legal permanent residents were being illegally detained. Amazing scenes have played out at New York’s JFK, LAX, Washington Dulles, Boston Logan, Denver International and elsewhere as citizens rush to defend our right to free movement and arguably cosmopolitanism itself.

I was honored to be quoted by several journalists writing about the unlikelihood of airports as protest sites. The Los Angeles Times’ architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne quoted my doubts that protests could be sustained (and I hope he proves me wrong):

At overtaxed airports like LAX, those spaces are bottlenecks on the best of days. It was precisely that quality, as vessels of public space easily stoppered, that demonstrators exploited.

But that exploitation cuts both ways. Greg Lindsay – senior fellow at the New Cities Foundation and co-author with John D. Kasarda of the book “Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next” – points out that the in-betweenness of the airport landscape is not simply architectural. It’s also legal.

“The protests illustrated how effectively various authorities could throttle various choke points to deny access,” he told me in an email. “New York Governor Andrew Cuomo had to order the Port Authority Police to re-open the AirTrain to JFK after they had closed it to limit the arrival of protesters via the subway.”

Who knows? Maybe the airport protests will fade as new White House decisions generate fresh controversies. And crackdowns on dissent, as Lindsay notes, may be far easier to execute at an airport than in the middle of a city.

But something tells me that any smart activist who looks closely at the airport protests will see something of a blueprint.

And Curbed’s Alissa Walker quoted my wonder at how even the unloveliest spaces at JFK suddenly became fully urbanized by protestors’ energy:

At LAX, the Tom Bradley International Terminal had recently been refurbished to add more restaurants and shops specifically to accommodate people who were there to welcome arriving passengers. Last weekend, the renovation provided a bright, welcoming environment with food, seating, and restrooms–much like an actual public plaza.

“It was amazing to see,” said Lindsay after attending JFK’s protests. “These pathways that are almost never used, they became temporarily urbanized in a way that they never had been before. You could start to see JFK operate as a real urban space.”

By Monday morning, after a stay on the order had been issued by a federal court, and some detainees had been released, the large-scale demonstrations were over. But many airports remain filled with protesters, pop-up law offices, and family members awaiting news on traveling relatives. The hashtag #OccupyAirports has also cropped up, signifying that this one-weekend stand could potentially evolve into a movement more like Occupy Wall Street, which took over U.S. public spaces for months.

Whose airports? OUR AIRPORTS.

(Originally published by Fast Company on January 19, 2017.)

It’s a tough time to be a Davos Man. Even during globalization’s heyday, the World Economic Forum’s annual summit was mocked for being out of touch, and this year is no different, with the spectacle of billionaires debating how to fix the middle class, and using Pokestops to remind attendees about global sustainability goals. The conventional wisdom is that the WEF’s vision of free markets, falling borders, and globe-trotting do-gooders “is at best broken and at worst dead.” The good news? As last year’s summit proved, the “Davos Consensus” is invariably wrong.

Davos will survive, if only as a place to do deals. But this doesn’t sit well with the World Economic Forum’s paternalistic founder Klaus Schwab, who signed off several years ago on a plan to reinvent the organization from within. The Forum of Young Global Leaders, created in 2004, is the 800-strong group of thirty- and fortysomethings who are being groomed to save the world–or at least run it one day. Their ranks include Chelsea Clinton, Ivanka Trump, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Y Combinator’s Sam Altman, and Noma chef René Redzepi. But as of a few years ago, these youngsters, like their elders, were in it mostly for themselves, the WEF feared. The group’s mission of “improving the state of the world” had plateaued, partly because Schwab was telling them what they should think.

“We’d had some successful projects, but most members were either completely disengaged or only superficially involved to earn kudos,” says the World Economic Forum’s John Dutton, who took over the program in 2013.

Here, in a nutshell, was the paradox of Davos: What’s the point of having a global conspiracy of overachievers if you don’t use it?

So the World Economic Forum turned to a team of artists, designers, and data scientists to reinvent the program. The goal was to transform a clubhouse in the Alps into an incubator for social enterprise. And that’s how Shaffi met Eli.

Shaffi Mather, founder of India’s Ziqitza Health Care, claims to operate the largest ambulance company in the Global South. But that wasn’t enough, so a few years ago, “I started thinking about emergency response in the other 90% of the world,” where his network would never reach. Then at the 2013 Young Global Leader Summit in Myanmar, Mather found himself paired with Eli Beer, founder of United Hatzalah of Israel, which fields a free, motorcycle-riding fleet of more than 3,000 volunteer medics. They were part of a conversation circle including public health experts and VCs charged with creating what Mather had envisioned.

What they came up with is MUrgency, a global medical response network employing any means necessary to get doctors where they are needed the most. “It could be a nurse coming by bicycle, or a doctor arriving by Uber,” Mather says. Three years later, MUrgency’s medics have answered more than 300,000 emergency calls. Indian industrialist Ratan Tata personally invested in the service last spring, and Mather hints at an impending partnership with a “large emergency response organization” with 160,000 branches worldwide.

“I’ve been able to move ten times faster than if I didn’t have this as a platform,” says Mather, referring to his fellow Young Global Leaders.

This wasn’t by accident. Mather and Beer weren’t matched by chance. MUrgency’s cast of characters were selected by software and then stage-managed by a team from The Value Web, a nonprofit network of facilitators who have worked with a who’s who of nonprofits, ranging from UNICEF and the International Red Cross to the Indian government. With the World Economic Forum’s blessing, they embarked on a three-year experiment to rewire the Young Global Leaders from a loose confederation of thought leaders into a tightly wound ideas factory–without the participants barely noticing.

Their secret weapon was the software created in conjunction with one of their teammates, Brandon Klein. Dubbed “People Science,” his tool melds social network analysis and machine learning techniques to probe for hidden interests and connections between people, and then uses that information to generate new teams. That’s how they knew to match Shaffi with Eli.

Crucially, Klein and his colleagues didn’t limit themselves to LinkedIn profiles. Starting in 2013, at the Myanmar summit where the pair met, The Value Web’s team began collecting granular data about the Young Leaders–not just who and what they knew, but how and why. They didn’t limit themselves to careers or hobbies, either–they asked for the intimate details of their friendships, families, faith, and health.

All of this was then parsed by the software, which started connecting the not-always-obvious dots. The obvious thing would have been to create a members-only social network, or at the very least an app. No way, said Dutton. “They have enough apps. I’d rather they’d be present than distracted on their phones.”

So the machine passed along these suggestions to The Value Web instead. Duly armed with this inside information, they began assembling teams with potential collaborations in mind. At conferences, they replaced the panel sessions that their Young Leaders would be tempted to skip (as their elders do habitually in Davos) with ad hoc exercises that fostered bonding. Afterwards, granular surveys asked participants for the names and context of everything they learned and everyone they met, to be fed back into the software once again.

Together, they created a high-tech-meets-high-touch formula for collaboration. Most remarkably, it didn’t feel coercive or manipulative–members were given the space to discover what they had in common.

You can see the results for yourself. A network map at the onset of the program depicts a loosely coupled network surrounded by a sea of disconnected dots. (Interestingly, the best-connected members are objects of suspicion–it implies they’re inveterate schmoozers.) Fast-forward to today, and you’ll find a tightly knit lattice ready to get to work.

» Continue reading...

(Originally published by The Guardian on January 13, 2017.)

The perceived wisdom is that Uber has disrupted taxis and that private automobiles are next, but what if we’ve misread what is happening in our cities?

Traditional thinking would suggest that UberPool, which allows users to split the cost of trips with other Uber riders heading in the same direction, will always be inferior to public transport. Sitting in the backseat of a Prius may be more comfortable than standing on a crowded bus or train, continues this reasoning, but carpooling can’t substitute for mass transit at rush hours without massively increasing congestion.

This is wrong. In the last six months, Uber has begun offering shared rides for as little as $1 (81p), introduced optimised pickup points that algorithmically recreate bus stops, and started testing semi-autonomous vehicles it hopes will solve its increasingly contentious labour issues.

Never mind the black cabs; Uber is out to disrupt the bus.

From loss-making to profitable monopoly
Its principal weapon is not renegade AVs or all-knowing algorithms; it’s cash. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest Uber’s passengers pay only 41% of the true cost of each ride – a figure since challenged for mistakenly including now-staunched losses in China.

Still, the figures raise red flags about Uber’s strategy: is losing $3bn annually the sign of a sustainable business, or the product of predatory pricing? “Uber is wildly unprofitable,” tweeted the economist Justin Wolfers, “[which] suggest that prices will rise once they’ve succeeded at monopolising the industry.” Perhaps to his credit, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has never denied this.

The most important question surrounding Uber is not whether it is a platform or a transportation company, or whether its drivers are employees. It’s whether it can only recoup its investors’ billions by building a monopoly (or at least duopoly with Lyft) on the ruins of public transportation – and it may not take much to tear it all down.

In Washington DC a vicious cycle of declining ridership and service on the city’s Metro culminated in last spring’s “Metropocalypse” – a system-wide shutdown followed by a year’s worth of emergency repairs requiring the closure of entire lines for weeks at a time.

Stranded commuters abandoned transit in droves while Uber, Lyft and other services pounced, offering shared rides priced below the cost of a Metro ticket. Unsurprisingly, Metro ridership has plunged, creating a $67m shortfall in its budget.

London’s fare surge
This week’s London tube strike was a harbinger of what comes next, with stranded riders reporting Uber fare surcharges as high as 450%. As a spokesperson explained, “without this pricing, there would simply be no cars available”. Meanwhile, the number of licensed private-hire vehicles in London has nearly doubled from 59,000 in 2010 to more than 110,000 by the middle of 2016.

Ride-sharing and autonomous vehicles could prove to be an especially combustible mix if and when the technology is perfected. The Boston Consulting Group predicts a shared AV carrying three people could cost operators less on a per-mile basis than rail.

Passengers at the edge of the network would presumably be the first to defect for convenience, triggering shocks throughout the balance sheet. Even a modest decline in numbers, BCG argues, could tip well-managed transit systems into the red.

Support for public transport
So what are cities to do about the would-be disruptors tunnelling into their transit systems? First, do no harm. As the US magazine Slate recently noted, cities across America are partnering with Uber to strengthen weak transport links and then using its looming inevitability as an excuse to not improve their own service. Diverting funds to pay for blanket subsidies will only hasten the public system’s implosion.

That said, one of the rich ironies on US election day was voters’ embrace of public transport in sprawling cities such as Atlanta, Seattle and Los Angeles.

While LA Metro builds new rail lines, the city’s Department of Transportation has commissioned its own trip-planning app from Xerox, receives traffic snapshots from Waze and is exploring how best to combine various modes such as buses, bike-sharing and electric car-sharing to build a seamless system greater than the sum of its parts.

Los Angeles’ efforts trail more ambitious experiments in Helsinki, Hanover, Manchester and Birmingham, all of which are dabbling with “mobility-as-a-service” – monthly transport subscriptions combining car-sharing and taxi rides, for example, with unlimited public transport. The hope is to retain riders and woo residents away from their cars (and Uber) by making the whole of these services greater than the sum of their parts.

My own recommendations [pdf] are that simply banning Uber won’t work, and neither will battling its labour practices in court. Staving off disruption will require leveraging every tool at cities’ disposal, including lane access, parking regulations and incentives to shift the peak of rush hours commutes, to create communities that are at their best when served by mass transit – and could never be built around a million Ubers.

Each year, the architecture, engineering, construction, and services firm AECOM – the people you call when you need an Olympics or an aerotropolis built from scratch – hosts a student design competition named Urban SOS. This year’s installment, held in conjunction with New York’s Van Alen Institute and the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities initiative, was titled “Fair Share.” Each of the four multidisciplinary finalists grappled with creating a “sharing economy” prototype that lives up to its name – unlike AirBnB or Uber. (Click on the archived livestream below to see me get into it with my fellow judges about Uber around the 50:00 mark.)

After intense deliberations with my fellow judges following the teams’ final presentations on January 10th at AECOM’s headquarters in Los Angeles, we selected “First Class Meal,” a proposal for repurposing closed and underutilized United States Post Offices as neighborhood food distribution centers in food deserts. Created by a team of architecture and public health students at St. Louis’ Washington University, they’ll receive a cash prize and $25,000 of in-kind work from AECOM to make the project a reality. The competition’s official press release is after the jump.

» Continue reading...