The International Herald Tribune is dead; long live the International New York Times. As part of a special section to commemorate today’s first edition, I was asked to contribute an op-ed on the future of cities. I’ve posted it in its (brief) entirety below:

A People App for City Crowds

By GREG LINDSAY

Co-director of the World Policy Institute’s Emergent Cities Project

I caught a glimpse of the city of the future last fall while crossing the street in San Francisco. I recognized someone I’d never seen striding toward me – because my iPhone warned me he was coming. Paul Davison runs Highlight, an app that maps users’ Facebook profiles to their phones’ GPS, producing a social network tethered to the sidewalks rather than splayed across cyberspace. If this century truly belongs to the city – and by its midpoint, four in five of us will live in one – then how should we best bring another few dozen cycles of Moore’s Law to bear on it? More than highways or skyscrapers, cities are the product of our personal encounters. Rather than wire our cities with sensors and run them from hidden control rooms, give me an app that can pick a new face out of a crowd – call it “serendipity-as-a-service.”

(Originally published at TheWeek.com on September 4, 2013.)

How closely connected are the futures of transportation and economic growth? As our urban centers grow, how do we rethink what urban mobility means? What does the next age look like?

Aerotropolis in globalization trends
Social Interaction Potential in urbanization
Technology innovations streamlining transit
Robot cars and their potential impact on transportation
The role of the smartphone in easing our commutes

Chris Riback: You’ve written about the ways airports today serve as hubs for globalization. What do you mean?

Greg Lindsay: Historically, transportation has defined the size and shape of cities. Venice and Amsterdam were defined by their docks; Chicago and midtown Manhattan by their railroad terminals, and every city since Los Angeles has been defined by the car.

Today, the only form of transport capable of moving people and goods at global speed and scale is air travel, which despite the misery of the TSA and the triple-digit price of oil is still breaking passenger records every month globally. Sooner or later, the tremendous flows of passengers and cargo through the largest hubs could cause them to start spawning their own cities, the strange urban form known as the “aerotropolis.”

Examples include Dubai Рwhich used its airport and hometown airline, Emirates, to transform from a backwater into the leading entrep̫t of the Middle East and even North Africa; Louisville and Memphis Рa pair of fading rustbelt cities first saved, and later held captive to the overnight hubs of UPS and FedEX, respectively; and cities in central and western China like Zhengzhou and Chongqing, which are desperately building infrastructure to connect themselves to the global economy.

Study after study demonstrates how job growth, capital flows, and investment correlates with good air access – otherwise, you’re out of sight, out of mind.

CR: Another project of yours explores emerging cities and both the formal and informal economies that drive them. How does transportation matter as you look at potential economic winners and losers?

GL: First of all, what is a city, really? It’s not the sum of its infrastructure, but of its people – and especially the connections between people. Cities are really agglomerations of social networks.

A team of researchers at MIT led by Wei Pan argues that the reason cities become more productive – and thus wealthier – as they grow more populous is because you’re compressing more of these networks into the same space, creating greater potential for serendipity and collaboration, which in turn leads to innovation and ultimately to economic growth.

A major criticism of this argument is how bigger isn’t always better when it comes to cities. Tokyo and New York may profit from their size, but what about Karachi, Sao Paulo and Lagos? The MIT team hypothesized that the answer may have to do with transportation – Tokyo and New York have the transit systems to easily compress large numbers of people each workday in their cores, while Sao Paulo and Lagos have hellishly long commutes.

A professor at Utah named Steven Farber has come up with a new metric called “Social Interaction Potential” to measure the possibilities of meeting someone in a given city, taking your commute into account. He found that auto-driven sprawl has a huge drag on our ability to meet other people, and may be perpetuating economic inequality in American cities. So clearly, transportation has a huge role to play in the health and wealth of cities.

CR: As you visit urban centers globally, what transit innovations seem most remarkable?

GL: When I was in the Philippines this spring, my American hosts railed against the “Jeepneys” – WWII-era U.S. military jeeps retrofitted into private minibuses. They’re cramped, polluting, and often dangerous, stopping and starting on highways to pick up passengers without warning. And yet it’s informal forms of transit like these which represent the transportation future of megacities such as Manila, Mumbai, and Bangkok.

How can we use simple communication tools such as smartphone apps or even SMS text messaging to connect drivers with a central dispatching service, transforming a cut-throat, dangerous business into an adaptive one that’s both easier and safer for riders and delivers higher wages to drivers? Who cares about Uber? – show me a taxi startup for the Global South that changes the lives of its drivers.

CR: What’s next? If transit and transportation excellence are so closely tied to a location’s prosperity, what trends do you see as urban centers look for the next stage of growth?

GL: My biggest fear is the impact of robot cars on cities. While I think they could be advantageous for terrifically dense ones like Manhattan – in you never have to park or drive, and every taxi smoothly glides along to the next stop – they could breathe new life into exurban sprawl. Will long commutes matter if you can watch a movie, or sleep, or (most likely) work the entire way there? The impact on land-use patterns could be terrifying.

That said, I think the most important transportation technology of the moment is the smartphone, which is best appreciated on foot. The ability to locate and discover things nearby (via Foursquare, etc.) and people (via mobile dating and other ambient location networks) has enriched how we perceive and use the city.

The future of urban transportation, I hope, is locally dense (and slow), and globally connected (and approaching the speed of sound).

(The furniture designer Innovant kindly asked me to rant for a while on the future of the workplace and why the boundary between the office and the city-at-large are blurring together. This is part two; the first half is farther down the page.)

DH: You’ve written about Google and mentioned them at the IIDA event. Innovant has seen three global RFPs from them in the last four years, which is an extreme example of a company undergoing rapid growth at rapid speed. If you can speak to this, how do such companies deal with the chaos of space planning, workplace strategy, and establishing standards under these conditions?

GL: As a journalist, I’ve never been on the inside of such hyper-growth, so I can’t really speak to that. However, I am fascinated that the biggest cloud company in the universe is massively investing in physical space. The second Googleplex (i.e. the Bayview Campus) and London headquarters are evidence that Google values proximity.

DH: Do you think your amazement that Google is investing so much money in physical space relates to the idea of “engineering serendipity” that you’ve promoted? Are they really able to think in those terms when they’re moving so quickly?

GL: Yes, I think so. One example is Google’s “people analytics” group. The company was prescient enough to create a dedicated data analysis group to study how people in the company actually work. Eventually, most companies will follow suit in molding functions of HR and facilities management to actually manage people and space together as a single unit – or at least they should.

Another responsibility of Google’s people analytics group is to manage social interactions among Googlers. There’s a reason the Googleplex has a bee-keeping club, and it’s not to keep employees at the ‘Plex 20 hours a day, which is how such programs are typically seen from the outside. Instead, they’re trying to figure out how to mix employees in unforeseen combinations that go beyond corporate roles and politics.

I’ve seen the chronic coffee machine and water cooler metaphors come up frequently in this context. When companies try to figure out how to increase workforce cohesion or introduce people, the solution is invariably adding or moving the coffee machine around. After all this time, we seem to have no better idea for bringing people together than to leave food lying around the office kitchen, as if you were trying to attract a pack of wild animals. I’d be curious to track the people analytics group’s results, which may suggest new social modes for bringing people together.

The third example is Campus London, where Google has stacked an incubator, an accelerator, and two floors of co-working beneath a satellite office on the top floor. Google’s presence is the draw for the entrepreneurs who work there, while the appeal for Google is this hive of activity beneath them they can keep tabs on, learn from, and hire from. I think this is an interesting lesson for companies – especially considering we talk all the time about the benefits of industry clusters. Though the work clusters may not be competitive, they’re close enough to drive innovation.

DH: You also mentioned Facebook at the IIDA event, describing how Zuckerberg was very vocal in the design process with Gehry. How does Facebook measure up in the world of companies growing so quickly when they’re the ones driving the design of their workplace?

GL: I don’t think this makes Facebook much of an outlier since I imagine Google gave NBBJ a lot of input. Facebook is evolving, hiring, and adding new functions so quickly that the company believes it must be able to spawn out a whole new product group at a moment’s notice. The result is that it’s very reluctant to conform to planted physical space. Instead, they’ll just mount work surfaces on castors so they can rearrange the space as necessary. I think this is: A. Really interesting, B. It’s similar to the urban dynamic I write about, which describes why cities work so well, and C. If I were an architect it would scare the hell out of me because they’re basically saying, “You can’t figure us out. You can’t design spaces for us that morph as quickly as we need them to, so just give us a big box.”

DH: We’ve seen sit-to-stand workstations established as a standard in Scandinavian countries and other parts of Europe at a rapid pace. In the US, however, that’s been lagging. Recently, Innovant has seen a surge in requests for adjustable height desks. Do you think this notion of adapting our workplaces for health and safety reasons is a real and sustainable shift, or is it just a trend?

GL: I don’t have informed opinion on this, though I would say yes. I think it’s a real trend, which is part of the larger notion of choice and the awareness that people no longer have to sit in an uncomfortable chair at an uncomfortable desk. Instead, they’re demanding a range of motions and a range of environments for work.

As Nilofer Merchant put it, “Sitting is the smoking of our generation.” I’ll be curious to see whether this achieves the status of a crusade, though it will be hard to trace its origins since there seems to be a greater acceptance of design and choice in the US. I certainly think the desire for public space and a range of motions at one’s desk are a part of a larger trend.

DH: Based on what you know about how work is changing, how do you envision the workplace of the future?

GL: The key is that it’s not just a workplace. The workplace of the future is merged intimately with the other environments around it. You’ll have environments that exist either to put your head down and work alone, or you’ll be involved in socializing; either you’re plugged into the cloud or you’re really involved in physical space with people while executing multiple work modes at once.

The workplace of the future won’t start by walking into an elevator lobby or parking your car outside a suburban office complex and going inside to sit at a desk, where there’s nothing but desks and there’s nothing but work. I imagine the street intersecting with the building, so that the moment blurs when you walk into the office out of what today would be a coffee shop, restaurant or retail complex.

The people you’re working with are not necessarily your professional colleagues. You chose that space because it’s designed for the kind of work you want to do and it houses the kind of people you need to work with (or not work with). I imagine you won’t necessarily be choosing where and how you work based on who is paying you. Instead, you’ll base your decision on a space’s relevant functions, which will blend with the city somehow.

The word I keep coming back to is permeability. We need to break open the walls of the office to allow other elements in. This will allow the office to leak out into the city and the city to leak into the office. I think the next step is to determine exactly how that looks. We’ve begun talking about multiple environments in a workplace, but when we take that further, the discussion will be about the environments of the city and vice versa.

DH: What I find most exciting about your vision is the notion of choice –

GL: Exactly! Choice, something we don’t normally associate with going to work.

DH: Right, it’s empowering to think that someday we’ll have the choice to flow throughout the office (or even out of it) in an attempt to find the right workspace.

GL: I don’t think this change will come because employers are more enlightened, which is what we’re seeing with technology companies now. Anybody who’s involved in knowledge work knows what it takes to come up with good ideas. What makes a good working environment on paper is a diversity of opinions and backgrounds, a certain environment, and a certain mental mindset to even be able to think warm thoughts and come up with good ideas. Employers are going to give you the flexibility of choice so they can better harness your work, not because they’re warm and fuzzy. They simply want the best work from you.

DH: What will it take to convince employers that giving employees the flexibility of choice will produce the best work?

GL: Everything I’ve said so far is a mix of anecdotes and hypotheses. The real question is whether we can test any of this – what new styles of work, collaboration, and organization are emerging in cities? What kind of environments will be disrupted by these shifts?  What solo- vs. group work patterns exist, how are they evolving, and how can they be mapped, understood and enhanced? How can new ways of organizing work in cities make people more creative, productive and happy? And what are the benefits of doing so– better retention rates? Higher productivity? Greater innovation? And how do we measure any of this?

I’m putting together a team of architects, data scientists and researchers to explore some of these questions. I’ll let you know when we have some answers.

(The furniture designer Innovant kindly asked me to rant for a while on the future of the workplace and why the boundary between the office and the city-at-large are blurring together. Below is the first half of the interview; the second runs next week.)

Earlier this summer, the marketing team attended an IIDANY Facilities Forum focused on the topic, “The Evolving Workplace: Change or Adapt?” Moderated by David Craig, Associate Principal at Cannon Design, the discussion featured insights on the evolving workplace and what this means for our industry from two workplace innovators, Greg Lindsay, Contributing Writer for Fast Company, and Bart Higgins, Director at ?What If! . 

We were particularly excited to hear from Greg as we had posted his New York Times article, “Engineering Serendipity,” on our blog. This post summarized Greg’s commentary on workplace policies by the likes of Yahoo! and Google, describing how a company can boost employee creativity and productivity by engineering social interactions.

Greg agreed to elaborate on some of his ideas for our blog, including explorations into what he calls “the blurring of the office and the city.” Read on for his insights into 21st century ways of work and places for work.

Deborah Herr: Gensler’s recent survey effectively pointed the finger at open plan environments for declining workplace effectiveness. Are you noticing a looming shift away from open plan or seeing any real trends that address these complaints?

Greg Lindsay: The open plan office is never going to go away, just like the cubicle is never going to go away. But what I find most interesting is the recognition that one size does not fit all. In the ongoing quest to squeeze every good idea and every last bit of productivity out of people, we’ve realized that working at one, generic environment for 8 or 10 hours a day is ineffective. Instead, we need to physically mode switch on a moment to moment basis to glean every last bit of efficiency out of people.

DH: Speaking of these modes, have there been any suggestions about what the “right” ratio would be for these modes? Is there a certain balance of “we” and “me” spaces that we should aim for in a single workplace?

GL: That‘s the $64 billion question. You’ve highlighted the absurdity of someone, somehow publishing research with the “right” ratio based on the number of hours we collaborate. Though it probably won’t be right, we will convince ourselves that it’s right enough.

I imagine the companies that try to do this are going to end up going in two directions. Either they’re going to oversimplify it and get an office with one really intense environment and one really collaborative one. Or, they’ll have eight different work modes in a single office. In this case, the office becomes a fantasy land of different working types, which I would imagine is good for sales, but difficult for most companies to implement. This is why I’m personally more interested in work and city relationships. This would involve encouraging people to leave the office to find different work modes and in the course of that discover something new – whether it be a new idea or new people.

Ultimately, I think the larger notion of “the office” is reaching its functional limits. The struggle to come up with new ideas, push faster and move farther has exposed us to these limitations. The innovation we strive for requires face-to-face, high bandwidth communication, but we still try to do it in an environment where you see the same people day after day. These two trends are in inevitable conflict.

DH: The idea of the office reaching its limitations would alarm a lot of people in my industry. We will have to wait and see, but I can hardly imagine the day when someone may say, “You don’t need to be sitting at your desk for me to realize that you’re being productive.”

GL: Well, it’s a question of, “What is your desk?” I don’t think the desk will ever go away. Desks will be around as long as we’re typing on a device. Instead, it becomes a question of, “What is your desk that is not your desk at your employer?” I think this question will lead us to all sorts of fascinating answers – it will be a desk at someone else’s office, or a temporary desk in a co-working space. Rather than choosing between two or seven environments in one office, you might have two or three environments in your employer’s office with multiple workspaces located across the city. It will be interesting to see how this network of workspaces evolves, which is separate from the ongoing design evolution of desks and chairs.

To me, the more interesting question of what should alarm Innovant is the notion that people find the office to be so ineffective that they’re willing to take their laptops and work in sub-optimal conditions just because they can. If people are willing to shed the productivity-enhancing elements of the office in favor of choice, we are failing them somehow. Perhaps we need to balance this by designing better environments for work outside of the designated office.

DH: You’ve mentioned technology as having a significant role in the evolving workplace. This was obvious at NeoCon 2013 where a lot of big industry players focused on technology as a way to mitigate some of the problems of open plan environments. What sorts of tools or technology do you see contributing to workplace effectiveness?

GL: One longstanding problem that people are interested in solving is the need for systems that track employees down when they’ve been encouraged to wander. I’m dubious that furniture or office equipment makers will be able to design software that can iterate fast enough or function as well as the offerings from software companies.

This is why I’m interested in the potential use of social networking or GPS tracking systems to figure out who’s nearby. At some point, I imagine that as a function of employment we’ll all have an employee badge app on our phones or we’ll wear badges that contain these functions. A recent New York Times story described retailers using smartphones to track people’s movements through their stores. Eventually, we’ll do the same for the office – or we should. Once you do that, you can perform all sorts of interesting big data analysis of who’s actually working and where. I imagine that this would be the grail for a lot of companies since the org chart is the barest approximation of who’s actually working together. Once you understand what’s really going on, you can start rearranging the office in real time. It will be interesting to see how an office manager of the future might intervene on the fabric of an office to either support employees or shake things up a bit.

Yahoo asked me to appear on Daily Ticker, its television show-without-the-television, to talk the best U.S. airports to be stranded in during a long flight delay. Having once spent the better part of a month being stranded at airports on purpose, they came to the right guy. Video is above; Morgan Korn’s accompanying story is below:

Flying has its obvious advantages and drawbacks but there’s probably one aspect of air travel that all passengers equally abhor: delays.

Airports are one of the least enjoyable places to spend hours on end with strangers, children and over-anxious travelers. According to FlightStats, a company that provides statistics on airline performance, major international airlines arrived within 15 minutes of their scheduled time at an average rate of 75.8% in June, down from 80.7% in May. North American airlines were on time 73.6% of the time in June versus 79.9% in May. The Honolulu International Airport (HNL) was the No. 1 airport in North America in the on-time departure category at 86.3%

Greg Lindsay, author, transportation expert and frequent flier, says delays can be an enjoyable experience—but it all depends on the airport.

Lindsay, who flies three weeks out of every four, knows a thing or two about airports: in 2005 he lived in more than a dozen of them as part of a journalism assignment for Ad Age. Airports are “really, really lonely” places, he says; yet they can offer unique and refreshing respites. For instance, at the San Francisco International Airport (SFO), travelers can wait out flight delays at the Aviation Museum & Library, which offers free exhibits and educational programs about the airline industry. What’s also cool: the museum lobby resembles a passenger waiting room from the 1930s. Lindsay says the food court at United’s San Francisco terminal may be the airport’s biggest draw: vendors serve locally sourced and prepared delicacies, a locavore’s dream.

“You hope you can get laid over in San Francisco,” he quips.

American Airlines’ (AAMRQ) terminal at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport has also been described as a food lover’s paradise, with a wide selection of Tex-Mex and Cuban cuisine. And the newly updated terminal also has lots of play areas for children, a major plus for harried parents.

Lindsay strongly suggests that travelers facing long delays should splurge for a day pass at one of the airline clubs or lounges. For $25 or $50, individuals have access to free Wi-Fi, drinks, snacks, “humane” bathrooms and peace of mind, he notes.
“Airlines’ once exclusive clubs are now totally open for business,” he notes. “It’s well worth it to get off the main floor.”

Delta’s sky clubs at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) and Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport (ATL) are Lindsay’s favorite airport lounges. Delta’s (DAL) JFK club recently opened after a four-year, $1.4 billion renovation and travelers may never want to leave it: six shower suites, a relaxation room, 400 seats, more than 50 workspaces, views of New York City and an outdoor terrace. (A new survey by research firm CoreBrand named Delta as the least-respected brand in business; Coca-Cola and Pepsi tied for first).

As for the worst airports to get delayed at, Lindsay immediately thinks of two: Kansas City International Airport (MCI) – “it was designed in a different era… the departure is tiny, cramped and really horrible” – and Chicago’s O’Hare Airport (ORD) – “some parts are mired in 1975 and you can smell the cheese popcorn in the hall.”

Remarkably, Lindsay says he doesn’t have one horrible delay story despite all the time he’s spent in airports. But as an experienced flier, he knows how to avoid delays when possible.

“The worst airport to be delayed at is anywhere on the East Coast in the summer,” he says. “If you fly after 3pm, you deserve what you get.”

My rapid-fire keynote at Worktech13 New York this spring.

(Originally published August 19, 2013 at NextCity.org)

On the third floor of Paul Robeson High School, a weathered pile of bricks in Crown Heights, Brooklyn that’s closing next spring due to failing graduation rates, an IBM consultant named Ann McDermott is lecturing to a 10th-grade class of mostly poor, mostly black, mostly boys about the history of the Web.

“Does anyone here know what Tim Berners-Lee did?” she asks, referring to the British computer scientist who invented it.

“World. Wide. Web,” one student murmurs, seemingly bored by the question’s ease.

McDermott nods and continues. “He created it so scientists could communicate. Now we use it to watch cat videos.” The class cracks up. “Who knows how a webpage works?”

It’s not an academic question. These students are enrolled in P-TECH – New York’s Pathways in Technology Early College High School – a new model vocational school designed in collaboration between New York City Schools, the City University of New York and, most notably, IBM, for whom McDermott sells servers. The city, one of McDermott’s clients, provides the funds, facilities and students. CUNY applies a curriculum borrowed from its Early College Initiative, in which students earn degrees without ever leaving high school. IBM supplies internships, mentors and volunteers such as McDermott, as well as the promise of a well-paying job upon graduation.

Five years after the world’s second-largest publicly traded technology company began urging mayors to build “Smarter Cities” using Big Data (at correspondingly big prices), Big Blue has taken it upon itself to reinvent one of any city’s pivotal institutions: public schools.

Continued at NextCity.org

Journalist Chris Riback was kind enough to have me on his regular interview series “Conversations With Thinkers.” Following on the heels of his previous interview with the Brookings Institution’s Bruce Katz, we chatted about transportation and the role it has to play in urban prosperity. Audio is above; here’s his description:

It’s no secret that our cities are growing – fast. The World Health Organization reports that today more than 50 percent of the world’s population lives in our urban centers. By 2050, it will be 70 percent. As countries and cities globally consider their next stages of economic growth, more and more it seems that future may tied to one area in particular: Transportation. As our urban centers grow, how do we rethink what urban mobility means? What does the next age look like? Greg Lindsay is a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute and co-author of “Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next.”

In May, I joined the World Policy Institute as a senior fellow to launch the Emergent Cities Project with my partner (and senior fellow) Kavitha Rajagopalan. We were interviewed about the project this morning via Google Hangout. Complete video above. From the event description:

WPJ Editorial Assistant Johana Bhuiyan spoke to WPI fellows, Greg Lindsay and Kavitha Rajagopalan about The Emergent Cities Project. The Emergent Cities Project is a multi-phase venture to create policy proposals that effectively remedy the inefficiencies of the informal economy. Rather than regulating the informal, Rajagopalan and Lindsay propose a bottom-up approach that better incorporates the innovation that informality undoubtedly breeds. By focusing on the relationship between the formal and informal economies within emegent cities and comparing it to the policy solutions presented in cities in the global North, both fellows hope to create policies that establish more successful and efficient emergent cities in the global South.

(Originally published by Reuters on August 6, 2013. Written with Parag Khanna.)

Upon retiring in April after more than four decades as a NASA climate scientist, Dr. James Hansen told Columbia University students he feared “climate chaos” if we do not act immediately to curb greenhouse gas emissions. There are now more than 800 natural disasters worldwide annually, according to the reinsurance giant Munich Re, double the number 20 years ago. That may just be the beginning. The number could skyrocket to 15,000 disasters per year by 2030, said General Electric’s global strategy director Peter Evans, meaning mile-wide tornados like the one that devastated Moore, Oklahoma in May would be the norm.

Cities will bear the brunt of these catastrophes. Even as they become the world’s demographic centers, economic drivers, and political powers, cities face unprecedented risks from cyclones, earthquakes and tsunamis. Hurricanes Sandy and Katrina each caused more than $100 billion in damage, leading catastrophe bond pioneer John Seo to predict that a trillion-dollar storm could hit New York head-on or the Big One could devastate Tokyo sometime in the next decade. Then, there are man-made crises stemming from geopolitical tensions or economic inequality, not to mention pandemics.

Which cities will have the luck, the foresight and the resilience to cope with the convergence of these 21st century risks? Where would you choose to settle with the world of 2050 in mind, given that location, location, location will matter more than ever in a hotter, drier, more volatile world?

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