Now that the endless tour has wrapped up for the summer (before resuming again in the fall), if you’d like to hear me speak about the book (or anything at all, for that matter), please click on any of the links below for radio interviews and podcasts recorded over the last few months. Keep checking this page for regular updates.

1. American Public Media/NPR “Marketplace”

2. New York WNYC 93.9 FM, “The Brian Lehrer Show”

3. NPR “The Takeaway”

4. Public Radio International, “Living on Earth”

5. Chicago WGN 720 AM, “Mike McConnell”

6. Southern California KPCV 89.1 FM, “AirTalk”

7. Atlanta WMLB 1690, “Conversations with David Lewis”

8. Seattle KUOW 94.9 FM, “The Conversation”

9. Napa KVON 1440, “Specific Gravity”

10. London, “The Monocle Weekly” Edition 89

11. Blog Talk Radio, “Conversation Crossroad”

12. Blog Talk Radio, “Southeast Green”

(Originally published in the 40th Anniversary issue of Spirit, the in-flight magazine of Southwest Airlines.)

Make no mistake, moving is living,” vows the corporate hyperflier Ryan Bingham (as played by George Clooney) in Up in the Air, and we’ve clearly taken his lesson to heart. We are all frequent fliers now. Nearly 800 million passengers flew through America’s airports in 2010, 50 million more than at the start of a decade marked by 9/11, triple-digit oil prices, and burst bubbles. Heavily trafficked hubs with initials like ATL, LAX, and DEN–the modern-day American crossroads–are practically cities in their own right, with daily populations in the six figures. And extreme travelers like Ryan Bingham–one of an estimated 300,000 men and women to have flown more than a million miles, equal to two round-trips to the Moon–find themselves speeding up, not slowing down.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Communications technology was going to ground us by linking and shrinking the world, and, in doing so, set us free. The world would flatten. Road warriors would beat their platinum cards into plowshares. It hasn’t happened. The question is, Why? And how will our lives be reshaped in a world where, in a direct contradiction to conventional wisdom, our business experience is now more uprooted than ever?

For 20 years, we’ve heard how email and videoconferencing would eliminate the need for cross-country meetings. AT&T once promised us we could attend them from the beach. “You Will,” it assured us. We don’t. It’s a seductive vision, especially in a time of reined-in budgets and expense accounts. But smartphones and Skype are more likely to kill the office than the business trip.

There’s a paradox at the heart of our enduring need to connect. Call it, well, the Law of Connectivity. Every technology meant to circumvent distances electronically, starting with the telegraph–the original “nervous system of commerce”–has only stoked our desire to traverse it ourselves. The Internet is the ultimate example. If the first decade of its growth was fueled by e-commerce (which put more goods in the air than anyone could have imagined), the second decade has been propelled by social networking. Facebook added 500 million friends in just five years, a third of everyone on the Internet. When you add up the wall posts, status updates, and friend requests exchanged daily, the number of connections quickly spirals into the trillions. Only a few years ago these weak ties didn’t exist, or at least you couldn’t tug on them. Facebook is the first (and possibly last) tool for keeping tabs on practically everyone you’ve ever met–and yet our wanderlust has only deepened.

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(Originally published at AdAge.com on June 13, 2011.)

Perhaps it was inevitable in a country that is building cities at an unprecedented pace that the city itself would become a brand, and that Western architects would quietly become marketers.

Last summer’s 2010 World Expo in Shanghai was the largest marketing campaign in history, lasting six months, drawing 73 million visitors, and spending $58 billion to demolish and rebuild large swaths of the city, all to sell the message “Better City, Better Life.” The Chinese had already bought it.

Between 1990 and 2005, China’s urban population more than doubled, from 254 million to 572 million—an increase equal to the total population of the United States. Over the same stretch, China added a staggering 600 million members to its emerging middle class—nearly all of them in cities. China expects to add another 350 million urban residents by 2025, this time in hundreds of small cities poised to explode in size.

While peasants waited hours to tour faux Roman ruins and other sights, China’s mayors skipped the Expo to tour the city’s most fashionable neighborhood. Nestled in the winding streets of the French Concession, Xintiandi (“New Heaven and Earth”) is Shanghai’s answer to Manhattan’s SoHo—an upscale shopping district packed with outdoor cafes and pedestrians. But Xintiandi is largely the creation of one man, billionaire developer Vincent Lo.

Mr. Lo inherited the site in the mid-1990s, after city officials had proposed knocking the entire area down. “They’d tried many times to rehabilitate the older building stock, but the economics had never worked,” said John Kriken, Xintiandi’s master planner and a consulting partner at the architecture firm of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. The answer was to transform a borderline slum into an urban theme park covering hundreds of acres, complete with its own artificial lake and room for future high rises. Land prices have since quintupled.

“When we started, we thought no one would ever eat outside in Shanghai,” said Mr. Kriken. But Xintiandi was a big hit upon completion in 2003, inspiring copycats around the city. Today, Mr. Lo’s Shui On Group is one of the most sought-after developers in China, and its most popular product is clones of Xintiandi. “Every government official in charge of redevelopment is trying to take advantage of their city’s heritage,” added Mr. Kriken. But with so much money and entire downtowns at stake, they also want a model that’s proven. As a result, Lo is busily building sequels in the second-tier cities of Hangzhou (“Xihu Tiandi”), Wuhan (“Wuhan Tiandi”), and Chongqing (“Chongqing Tiandi”), among others.

Rome may not have been built in a day, but China is building the equivalent every two weeks, having added as much new housing last year as the entirety of Spain’s, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit. One reason is demographics, but another is sheer greed. Land prices doubled across China in the wake of the global financial crisis, as billions of dollars in stimulus funds sloshed into real-estate speculation. Entire “ghost cities” of sold-out apartments have appeared as storehouses of wealth.

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(Originally published at FastCompany.com on June 14, 2011.)

1. Enter The Shanzhai

In 2004, a Taiwanese electronics firm named MediaTek unveiled its latest product—a cell-phone-in-a-box aimed at manufacturers, equipped with everything they needed to make the guts of a working phone on one chipset. Write some software, add features, and snap a plastic case on the front and you’ve produced a new model. It was an immediate hit with China’s notorious counterfeiters, the shanzhai.

In 2004, MediaTek sold 3 million of its chips; six years later, its sales had soared to 500 million, more than a third of the worldwide market. Nearly half of those went to shanzhai. The sudden ability to design, manufacture, and ship millions of dirt-cheap handsets in total secrecy led to an explosion in Internet-enabled devices in China. “Five years ago, there were no counterfeit phones,” the sales manager at a Chinese component manufacturer told The New York Times in 2009. “You needed a design house. You needed software guys. You needed hardware design. But now, a company with five guys can do it.”

After conquering China, smuggled shanzhai phones made spectrum so valuable that India’s telcos allegedly bribed government ministers to get their hands on it for $40 billion less than it was worth, triggering an ongoing scandal that might bring down the government. Once India cracked down, however, the shanzhai were forced to look for new markets further afield, to the Middle East—where the glut of cheap phones would help enable the Arab Spring.

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(Originally published at FastCompany.com on June 9, 2011.)

1. Google’s Robot Cars

Testifying before the Nevada State Assembly in April to have the state legalize its driverless cars, Google lobbyist David Goldwater asked the state’s transportation committee to “imagine a time when we will be able to call our public transportation on our cell phones or smartphones and tell it to come to our door to pick us up, without anybody in it, take us to our job, and be released to go perform the same service for somebody else.”

But a world filled with robot cars may have consequence even their creator can’t predict. Driverless cars would be a perfect match for car-sharing services such as Zipcar or Getaround, gradually replacing the idea of car ownership with “mobility-as-a-service.” That, in turn, may lead to a precipitous fall in car ownership—as high as 50%—while breathing new life into suburbia and creating more congestions as the pain of commuting lessens. And what would halving the number of cars on the road mean for the Detroit Three—and the taxpayers who’d like the rest of their bailout back?

Six months before that hearing, when they were first reported in The New York Times, Google’s test cars had traveled 140,000 miles with only one accident. (A car was rear-ended while stopped at a light.) Since then, its car czar Sebastian Thrun—a former Stanford AI professor who won DARPA’s autonomous vehicle competition in 2005—has been vocal about the possibilities of cars without drivers, including fuel efficiency and fewer fatalities. And, perhaps most importantly, a future without horrible commutes.

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(Originally published at FastCompany.com on June 2, 2011.)

1. China’s Ghost Cities

In November 2009, Al Jazeera English correspondent Melissa Chan discovered  the nearly empty “ghost city” of Kangbashi on the steppes of Inner Mongolia, equipped with six-lane highways, an opera house, art museum, and a stadium. The city immediately became a symbol of China’s housing bubble, which has resulted in 64.5 million empty apartments across the country—enough to house a third of its urban population.

Stranger still is the effect that the bubble, burst or not, has already had on the prices of commodities around the world. And how those prices have lead to technological innovation. And how rapid innovation means more e-waste. And how that means more opportunities for recycling and a booming recycling business. Put another way, throwing out your cell phone is the financial equivalent of mailing a check to China.

While Kangbashi became the latest example of China’s overbuilding (on par with the empty New South China Mall—the world’s largest), the city is actually a complete success. Its sold-out apartments are second or third homes owned by the residents of Ordos, the city next door. Ordos is the capital of China’s coal and rare earth metals mining boom, with a GDP-per-capita estimated to be higher than Beijing.

A year ago, Bank of America-Merrill Lynch economist Ting Lu paid a visit to Kangbashi, noting in a subsequent report that owners in the neighboring city “are so cash-rich that they really don’t bother to rent their [empty] apartments.” As Tsinghua University economist Patrick Chovanec explains, Kangbashi owners are treating their empty homes as “‘a store of value,’ like gold.” A city that found riches deep underground is building another city skyward.

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(Originally published at FastCompany.com on May 26, 2011.

1. The Cloud of Smog.

The companies of the cloud—the so-called “information factories” of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple, among others—have collectively achieved a scale of which old-school factories could only dream. The cloud is, however, quite dirty. It takes a lot of carbon to run all the servers that power it. And since more carbon means more money, these companies are doing everything possible to make their operations as efficient as possible.

Just as Henry Ford met economies of scale with a level of vertical integration never seen before or since—amassing railroads, mines, and even rubber plantations to supply his factories—the cloud companies are coping with their billowing carbon footprints with their own version of integration. They’re making advancements in data center design, hardware, and even remaking the electrical grid itself.

Storing 1.2 zettabytes of information (that’s more than a trillion gigabytes) requires the construction increasingly massive data centers whose voracious appetite for power consumes 3 percent of U.S. electricity, while personal devices comprise 15 percent of home electricity use—a figure projected to triple by 2030, equivalent to the demand of the American and Japanese home markets combined.

Much of this electricity comes from coal, the cheapest and dirtiest source available. For example, Apple’s eagerly-awaited cloud music service will most likely be housed at its new data center in Maiden, North Carolina, which is expected to draw on an astounding 100 megawatts supplied by Duke Energy, which generates 61 percent of its output from coal.

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(Originally published at FastCompany.com on May 23, 2011.)

1. Get to the chopper. On May 2, four helicopters carrying two-dozen U.S. Navy SEALs snuck into Pakistan bound for Abottabad, flying low to avoid detection by radar (that was switched off anyway). Leading the way were a pair of Sikorsky MH-60 Black Hawks modified for extra stealth, including radar-absorbent coatings on their skin and tail rotors with extra blades, dampening the noise. These and other features were borrowed, analysts would later speculate, from the RAH 66 Comanche—a stealth helicopter prototype canceled by the Pentagon in 2004.

You know what happened next: The commandos landed inside Osama bin Laden’s compound before the occupants knew as occupants learned they were there. (Neighbors later reported they didn’t hear the choppers until they were on top of them.) But one of the Black Hawks lost lift upon take-off and clipped its tail on the wall of the compound. The SEALs blew it up before escaping, preventing the top-secret technology from falling into Pakistan’s hands. Or so they thought.

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(Originally published at FastCompany.com on May 5th, 2011.)

On Thursday, technology giant IBM announced the 50 recipients of its inaugural “Smarter Planet Faculty Innovation Awards,” in essence a $10,000 grant for designing classes geared toward the technologies, markets, and applications in which IBM has a vested interest—urban transportation and health care apps, for example.

Pace University associate professor Christelle Scharff, an associate professor of computer science, won for “Across Cities for Cities,” which would connect students in New York with teams in Delhi, Dakar, and Phnom Penh to develop mobile apps for each city, such as one locating the nearest public transit or emergency room. San Jose State’s Chris Tseng will set his students to work designing health care informatics apps. And students at Australia’s RMIT University will learn how to deploy sensors across cities and generate new streams of data. Grants will be distributed to researchers at 40 universities in 14 countries, with the classes in question beginning next fall.

The program is a no-brainer for IBM, mobilizing university resources and training the next generation of programmers to grapple with the complexities of urban computing. But what if the smartest solutions to urban problems don’t necessarily lie in computer science departments? Shouldn’t they be teaching this stuff in architecture and planning departments as well?

They are—at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago this semester. The class is the brainchild of George Aye, a professor of design at SAIC, a former IDEO consultant, and the founder of his own Greater Good Studio.

“The premise was: all of these corporations—IBM, Apple, Facebook, GE—are saying, ‘We have data, we’ll get the data, look how awesome the data is,’” Aye said. “It’s an information land grab. It’s like gold dust. But no one is asking what happens once you get it,” or realizing just how incomplete it is. So he and his 18 graduate students (only one of which had studied programming) would figure out what to do with the data at hand.

For help, Aye turned to Urbanscale founder and Everyware author Adam Greenfield, and to John Tolva, the former IBM executive appointed last month to be the new CTO of Chicago. After a series of boot camps to bring both the teacher and students up to speed, they set out to tackle the infamous six-way intersection in Wicker Park known as “the Crotch.” Aye, who himself served time at the Chicago Transit Authority, chose the Crotch after a former Chicago Department of Transportation employee-turned-bicycling advocate named Steve Vance published a Google Map mash-up of bike crashes across the city—the Crotch was one of the worst. Dividing his students into teams, Aye asked them to imagine “smarter” traffic incidents—how to prevent them, and how to resolve the tangle of victims, witnesses, bystanders, and police more quickly when they do happen.

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PSFK CONFERENCE NYC 2011: What’s Next? A Panel On The Future from Piers Fawkes on Vimeo.

In April, PSFK founder Pier Fawkes graciously asked me to speak on a panel about the future with my friend Alli Mooney and my fellow Hybrid Reality Institute member Ayesha Khanna. (The video was finally made available now.) As you might expect, I held forth at length on cities and why they’re the locus of so many converging interests.