November 25, 2011  |  permalink

Fast Co.Exist: Can South America China-ify Its Economy Without Destroying The Amazon?

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(Originally published at FastCoExist.com on November 22, 2011.)

It’s the largest infrastructure project you’ve never heard of: An $83 billion, decades-long effort by a dozen South American nations to tilt the continent’s economic axis from North-South to East-West (and from the United States toward China). At stake is not just the economy of the continent, but the future of the Amazon, as many of the roads intersect biodiversity hotspots, including Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park and its 846 million barrels of untapped oil.

The Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA) has managed to keep a low profile because it’s really 10 projects in one, a series of locally financed corridors carved through the Amazon and Andes aimed at integrating neighbors’ economies and opening the continent’s hinterlands to drilling, mining, and industrial agriculture. Three-quarters of Amazonian deforestation occurs within a 30-mile strip along its highways, which makes the IIRSA’s plan especially dangerous. With a third of IIRSA’s projects already under construction–including a trans-oceanic highway that will shave three weeks off shipping soybeans to China–the challenge is to mitigate its potentially ruinous environmental consequences. But considering the decentralized nature of the meta-mega-project, where does one begin?

That’s the self-appointed task of The South America Project, a network of Latin American architects and academics who hope to prevent the spread of gated company towns and slash-and-burn sprawl in IIRSA’s wake. The SAP kicked off last month with a symposium at Harvard organized by founders Felipe Correa, an assistant professor of urban design at the university, and Ecuadorean architect Ana Maria Durán Calisto.

“Throughout its history, South America has had a resource extraction economy,” says Correa. “If you go back to the first Jesuit outposts, they represent a form of company town.” Fast-forward to the 17th-century silver mines at Potosí, the commodity-based booms and busts of Argentina and Paraguay in the 1940s and ‘50s, and Brazil’s oil and soybean boom today. “The question is: What stays in South America, and how do you direct the capital for these projects toward social investments that go beyond pure resource extraction?” says Correa.

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November 25, 2011  |  permalink

Fast Co.Exist: The Economics of Disaster: Fragile Supply Chains Tossed By The Storm

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(Originally published at FastCoExist.com on November 11, 2011.)

The city of Bangkok is underwater and it’s likely to stay that way for weeks. Besides the myriad Thai people displaced, there are other concerns: hard drive manufacturers are swamped. Western Digital is the world’s largest maker of disk drives, and it’s Thai factories account for 60% of its total production. They’ve been closed now for nearly a month. Global shipments are expected to fall by nearly 50 million units in the fourth quarter, according to IHS iSuppli, a drop of 30%.

Analysts at iSuppli and Gartner have repeatedly warned of higher disk prices in the new year (when the shock will have rippled through the entire supply chain), lower prices (and profits) for other component manufacturers squeezed by the likes of HP and Dell, and even a race to lock up high-capacity storage for the brewing arms race in the cloud between Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple.

“Surely one of the inevitable impacts of this is that never again will so much be concentrated in so few places,” Gartner’s John Monroe told The New York Times this week. But that only raises the question of how Thailand became the weakest link in the first place–and whether the computing industry (or, really, any industry) can still afford to situate itself entirely in the path of climate-related disasters.

“It’s just by chance that Western Digital has the majority of its production there,” says Fang Zhang, an analyst for iSuppli. She adds that hard drives have been a mainstay of Thailand’s technology industry for decades. “It wasn’t planned.”

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November 09, 2011  |  permalink

Fast Co.Exist: Former “Seasteaders” Come Ashore To Start Libertarian Utopias In Honduran Jungle

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(Originally published at Fast Co.Exist on November 4, 2011.)

The seasteader-in-chief is headed ashore. Patri Friedman (that’s Milton Friedman’s grandson to you), who stepped down as the chief executive of the Peter Thiel-backed Seasteading Institute in August, has resurfaced as the CEO of a new for-profit enterprise named Future Cities Development Inc., which aims to create new cities from scratch (on land this time) governed by “cutting-edge legal systems.” The startup may have found its first taker in Honduras, whose government amended its constitution in January to permit the creation of special autonomous zones exempt from local and federal laws. Future Cities has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to build a city in one such zone starting next year.

Seasteading, i.e. the creation of sovereign nations floating offshore, is enshrined in libertarian thought as an end-run around the constraints of stodgy nation-states. The idea has received plenty of (mocking) mainstream coverage, most recently in a Details profile of Thiel, in which Friedman outlined the new startup he had in mind:

One potential model is something Friedman calls Appletopia: A corporation, such as Apple, “starts a country as a business. The more desirable the country, the more valuable the real estate,” Friedman says.

Future Cities follows this approach, describing its mission as bringing “Silicon Valley’s spirit of innovation to the implementation of cutting-edge legal systems in new cities,” most likely in the role of the cities’ master developer. Citing laissez-faire entrepots such as Hong Kong and Singapore as examples, the company’s founders believe that strong property rights and business-friendly regulation are key to creating jobs, stimulating investment, and lifting millions out of poverty, a la China’s special economic zones. “The evidence is much stronger,” Friedman replies when asked if he’s building another libertarian utopia, “that rule of law, fairness, and a lack of corruption leads to more economic growth than low taxes.” (Not that they’re mutually exclusive, as Singapore demonstrates.)

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October 11, 2011  |  permalink

How Did China (Of All Places) Trigger the Arab Spring?

My talk from last month’s TEDxUIllinois.

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September 25, 2011  |  permalink

“Not-So-Smart Cities” — My NYT Op-Ed

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Sunday’s edition of The New York Times includes my op-ed on increasingly ambitious “smart cities” – which I’ve been covering for Fast Company the last two years. The ultimate aim of these efforts is to build an “urban operating system” capable of playing SimCity for real. The op-ed begins below:

The Southwest is famously fertile territory for ghost towns. They didn’t start out depopulated, of course – which is what makes the latest addition to their rolls so strange. Starting next year, Pegasus Holdings, a Washington-based technology company, will build a medium-size town on 20 square miles of New Mexico desert, populated entirely by robots.

Scheduled to open in 2014, the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation, as the town is officially known, will come complete with roads, buildings, water lines and power grids, enough to support 35,000 people – even though no one will ever live there. It will be a life-size laboratory for companies, universities and government agencies to test smart power grids, cyber security and intelligent traffic and surveillance systems – technologies commonly lumped together under the heading of “smart cities.”

The only humans present will be several hundred engineers and programmers huddled underground in a Disneyland-like warren of control rooms. They’ll be playing SimCity for real.

The rest of the op-ed is available here.

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September 22, 2011  |  permalink

Studio Gang’s “Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream”

Last Saturday was the culmination of nearly five months’ of work by five multidisciplinary teams of architects, planners, artists, landscape urbanists, public housing advocates, economists (and me) on behalf of MoMA for the forthcoming exhibit Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. The final public presentations of the workshop phase (and the near-final exhibits) were held on September 17th. I had the honor and privilege of being asked by Studio Gang’s Jeanne Gang (a 2011 recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant) to work on policy and research for her team. Here’s the video of Jeanne’s final presentation; I make a brief cameo at the 19:30 mark. The next time you’ll see us, it’ll be at MoMA from mid-February through the end of July.

Watch live streaming video from museummodernart at livestream.com
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September 22, 2011  |  permalink

Aerotropolis Update

Six months on, it may look like the book has come and gone, but it hasn’t. (At least, not yet.) A few quick updates:

1. There are still a pair of public events on the calendar. Next Tuesday in Washington D.C., I’ll be reading from the book and talking about the future of cities at the National Building Museum (6:30 - 8 PM; admission required). Then, on October 20, I’ll be participating in a discussion about sustainable urban transport at the Asia Society in New York.

2. Writing for Fast Company, Michael Valkevich compares the aerotropolis to Lando Calrissian’s Cloud City and asks whether airport cities can ever be real places. Personally, I’m skeptical; but he’s not.

3. And then there’s this.

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September 22, 2011  |  permalink

The Collected Works of @Wise_Kaplan

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We had a first, of sorts, at last week’s TEDxUIllinois – the first TED Talk delivered by a fictional Twitter character. The character in question was @Wise_Kaplan, the brainchild of former New York Observer editors Jim Windolf and Peter Stevenson, who modeled him (and his twin @Cranky_Kaplan) on their former boss, legendary newspaper editor Peter Kaplan (who may or may not be tweeting himself under @Real_Kaplan… and @Kaplan_Premium). Confused? Don’t be.

Wise and Cranky were an inside joke for New York media reporters until Slate verified their creators’ idenities in a story last year. What started as a diversion blossomed into a pair of endless picaresques told in 140-character installments: 

Wise and Cranky are the children of a lost New York. From breakfast until deep into the night, they travel back and forth between the city and the bedroom community of Larchmont, N.Y., charting a path among Manhattan’s decaying cultural landmarks and greasy-spoon diners. Their heroes are the ghosts of jazz greats, long-dead stylists, and midcentury entertainers. In another time, Wise Kaplan and his démodé tastes might have found a home in the pages of a dime novel: The character is self-possessed but chronically bemused, the sort of guy who has just re-emerged into the world after decades in his own head. Stevenson and Windolf describe him as “all anxiety.”

Over the summer, an anxious Wise lamented publicly that he had never received a major award or invited to give a TED Talk. So I invited him to speak at TEDxUIllinois, naturally. Windolf and Stevenson were game, and we settled on one of Wise’s recurring motifs – “Lessons in Journalism,” a rapid-fire series of tweets espousing hilariously cynical advice (“An easy way to become an online star is to make like the Internetâ„¢ is beneath you”) and non sequiturs (“Hire a guy to slip drugs into your coffee every morning”). We arranged that Wise would address the crowd live, “in-person.” The audience reaction was… puzzled.

(The complete @Wise_Kaplan TED Talk is after the jump.)

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September 22, 2011  |  permalink

TEDxUIllinois 2011: The Medium is the Message

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Last week, I was in Champaign, IL for the second annual TEDxUIllinois, sponsored by the University of Illinois College of Media, the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Study, and the Knight Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting – the latter in the form of my co-organizer, Brant Houston. The theme this year was “The Medium is the Message,” which was appropriate considering the sponsors, and the fact that Marshall McLuhan would have turned 100 this year. Here was the lineup:

Speakers include Argonne National Laboratory battery and transportation researchers Jeff Chamberlain and Don Hillebrand; Brant Houston, Knight Chair for Investigative and Enterprise Reporting, College of Media, University of Illinois; Larry Ingrassia, Business Editor for The New York Times; Rob Kennedy, President and Co-COO, C-SPAN; Will Leitch, Author and Contributing Writer for New York Magazine; Greg Lindsay, Author and Contributing Writer for Fast Company; Dr. Lisa Nakamura, Professor of Media & Cinema Studies, College of Media, University of Illinois; Lee Rainie, Founder and Director, Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project; Dr. Christian Sandvig, Associate Professor of Communication, Media & Cinema Studies, Library & Information Science, and Research Associate Professor at the Coordinated Science Laboratory, University of Illinois; Joseph Squier, Associate Director, School of Art & Design; Professor, Art & English, College of Fine and Applied Arts, University of Illinois; and John Tolva, Chief Technical Officer for the City of Chicago.

I’ll be posting my own talk in this space as soon as the video’s ready, but in the meantime read The Daily Illini’s somewhat breathless coverage, courtesy my friend Carolyn Lang:

The atmosphere was kinetic as speakers and guests streamed into Beckman Institute on Sept. 15 for the second annual TEDxUIllinois. The event’s theme was “The Medium is the Message,” and the resonance that the topic had with the audience became obvious as smart phones, laptops and iPads glowed in the dimly lit seats of the auditorium. I couldn’t help but recall the policies of so many classes of putting laptops and phones away to “give full attention.” At TEDxUIllinois, this could not have been farther from what was expected…

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September 22, 2011  |  permalink

The Butterfly Effect: Let Them Eat Ethanol and Cash

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(Originally published at FastCompany.com on September 22, 2011.)

Why have global food prices spiked not once, but twice in the last three years, raising the specter of famine and triggering worldwide food riots—including the Arab Spring? Many explanations have been floated, including climate change-related droughts in Australia, volatile oil prices, “food security” export restrictions, and last but not least, feeding China’s strategic pork reserve.

But according to a scientific paper released this morning by the New England Complex Systems Institute, there are only two factors that matter: ethanol and financial speculation. The former is easier to prove. A drop in the bucket only a decade ago, ethanol will consume a remarkable 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop this year, comprising 16% of world corn production and 4% percent of total grain production overall. The paper’s authors mapped the rise of ethanol production to the steady climb of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Price Index since 2004 and found a close fit, much closer than Australia’s droughts (too small), oil price spikes (too late), or China’s craving for pork bellies (big, but not big enough). “Ethanol is much bigger. It’s bigger by a factory of 20,” says Yaneer Bar-Yam, one of the paper’s authors and the president of NECSI.

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The paper’s second claim is more controversial. While ethanol is responsible for the long-term increase in baseline prices, it can’t explain the bubble-and-bust dynamics of 2007/2008 and 2010/2011. So NECSI’s researchers set out to build an all-purpose mathematical model of speculative bubbles, feeding it price data to see if there was another close fit.

What they found refutes the OECD’s findings and confirms the suspicions of Harpers’ Frederick Kaufman—the repeal of the Commodity Exchange Act of 1936 and the deregulation of commodity futures in 2000 transformed the futures markets from an instrument of liquidity to a place to park one’s money. Instead of being a place where farmers and agricultural businesses set reasonable prices, the markets have become just another place for speculation.

“That regulation had limited the ability of investors to invest beyond a certain amount,” says Bar-Yam. “Its repeal enabled the index funds, which in turn opened the door to people who were not in the agricultural investment business to go into the commodities markets of corn, wheat, and so on.”

All of that money—commodity index holdings soared from $13 billion in 2003 to $317 billion in 2008—inevitably caused distortions in the market. “If you look at our figures, you’ll see there’s a huge difference between the futures price or the spot price and what should be the equilibrium one,” Bar-Yam says.

The authors’ recommendations are straightforward and immediate—to drive down prices for the world’s poor, governments must restore financial regulations (including the Commodity Exchange Act) and begin winding down ethanol production. “There is a moral imperative here,” says Bar-Yam. “And from an economic standpoint, efficient allocation and optimality are desirable things,” neither of which are currently being served. And if they don’t, as the authors noted last month in a related paper, the turmoil of Arab Spring may go global.

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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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