May 16, 2011  |  permalink

What Are You Really Afraid Of?

The International Herald Tribune’s Roger Cohen sat next to an architect at a dinner party the other night, heard about the aerotropolis for the first time, and today’s he fretting about our ugly, discontinuous, unsustainable world. You can read the whole column here, but there isn’t a whole lot in it that hasn’t been raised elsewhere (including Will Self, the white British writer who is shocked, shocked! at the exploitation of Bangladeshi laborers in Dubai and the UAE.)

Cohen’s pivot line is this: “In a rosy view, Airworld serves the winners as it sets losers on an upwardly-mobile path with a basic wage. But I find a darker image insistent: of a frenzied world chasing its tail even as it devours scarce resources.” The only striking thing to me about that sentence is that you could substitute “globalization” (or, to be more specifc, “neoliberal globalization) for “Airworld” and the meaning remains the same. For a critic like Self, who savaged the book (while praising the writing – thanks, I think), it would appear his larger fight is with globalization itself. So he walks to the mouth of the Thames, and walks across Dubai, and walks from London to New York (via Heathrow) and pretends (like Thoreau pretended, really) to get back in touch with the land. But the truth is that globalization is neither purely good nor purely evil – if it was the latter, it would have collapsed by now, rather than continually solving its contradictions and crises by expanding its reach and intensity and drawing more people into the fold.

“The Chinese are not remotely interested in what the U.K. thinks, but they are very interested in London,” the architect tells Cohen at dinner, which is fitting considering the U.K. is stagnant while London remains the world’s pre-eminent financial center, one which its former socialist mayor Ken Livingstone imagined as a “Singapore of the West,” its destiny untethered from Britain’s. The 600 million Chinese lifted out of absolute poverty between 1990 and 2005 by its export-based economy don’t care what Cohen and Self think either, which is why construction of these cities will go on regardless of the consequences.

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May 09, 2011  |  permalink

Aerotropolis: Where I’ll Be Next

Just a quick note to say I’ll be jetting into Denver tomorrow night for a 7:30 PM reading at the Tattered Cover in Highlands Ranch, followed by discussion and Q&A. In advance of the reading, Westword’s Thorin Klowsowski interviewed me about the book and its various themes.

Later this month, I’ll be back in Dubai for a day-long workshop at the Dubai International Finance Center, hosted by DIFC chief economist Dr. Nasser Saidi. Attendance is free and open to the public. If you happen to be in the emirates that day, drop by.

 

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April 04, 2011  |  permalink

The Book Tour: Week 2

Almost there. The second week of the tour is finished – Dallas-Fort Worth, Seattle, Portland, and Berkeley. All that remains of the “official” tour (i.e. the extended time away from home) is the World Affairs Council of Northern California on Monday, followed by the Art + Design Museum on Los Angeles on Tuesday night (although BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manough is sharing the bill for that one) and the PSFK Conference in New York on Friday. Then it’s onto Memphis next week for the Airport Cities conference, which is always… interesting, to say the least. And there are dozens of random events and conferences after that. Please keep an eye on the event calendar for the complete list.

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1. Monday morning, I met my friends Bridget and Sergio at the Starbucks on the baggage claim level of Terminal 1, where the part were about to depart for Honolulu on their honeymoon. I gave them some reading material as a wedding present. From there, I was off to Dallas-Fort Worth, with a quick book-signing (but no reading) at the Hudson Bookstore in Terminal A at DFW. I spent the afternoon on the phone with SmartPlanet’s Andrew Nusca, the transcript of which has just been published here.

Monday night, I had dinner with The Wall Street Journal’s Scott McCartney, who writes the must-read “Middle Seat” column for the paper every Thursday. I was mildly surprised to learn that Scott has lived in Dallas for decades, but it makes sense when you consider that two of the six largest U.S. airlines – American and Southwest – are both based there.

2. Tuesday afternoon, I was the guest of the World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth and the Greater Irving-Las Colinas Chamber of Commerce, which joined forced to host a luncheon and reading in my honor. The lunch was held at the recently completed Irving Convention Center, which wouldn’t look out of place in Rotterdam but it pretty bold (and beautiful) for Texas. I wrote about the ongoing densification of Las Colinas (which has more occupied office space than downtown Dallas) for FastCompany.com last spring. The talk was a hit, if book sales were any indication.

3. That night, it was off to Seattle. On Wednesday afternoon, KUOW’s Ross Reynolds and I talked about airports, the aerotropolis, and Boeing on “The Conversation.” Audio clip available here. Later that evening, I talked at Town Hall about the “Warfare State,” China, and global supply chains, which touched off a lively discussion about China’s efforts to strip mine Africa in order to boost exports and keep its economy growing at all costs – real estate and investment bubble be damned. And then my friends Steve & Rachel joined me for a locavore’s repast at Sitka & Spruce.

4. Thursday morning, Jeff Schectman and I spent a solid half-hour hashing out air travel and globalization for his show “Specific Gravity” on Napa’s KVON radio. After catching my flight to Portland (aboard a nice, new Q400 prop plane by Bombardier), I checked into the Ace Hotel (there was no typewriter with my reservation, unfortunately) and spent part of the afternoon chatting with Stumptown Coffee buyer Aleco Chigounis, who was leaving for Central America the next week on his latest hunt for coffee farms to work with as part of Stumptown’s Direct Trade program. This summer, he’ll be off to Africa. “The non-stop KLM flight was a game-changer,” he said. After flying from PDX to AMS, he can get to just about anywhere in Africa, transforming a resolutely local business into a global one. But such stories were mostly lost on the audience at Powell’s that night. “I read your book at the library, and I disagree with just about everything in it,” is how the first attendee greeted me. For Powell’s sake, next time please buy a copy.

5. I took off for San Francisco on Friday morning, then schlepped to Berkeley, where my friend Eva had hastily organized a talk under the aegis of Cal’s Architecture Research Colloquium. I was grateful that anyone bothered to show up on a gorgeous Friday afternoon to listen to me ramble about instant cities for an hour, my voice shot and feeling a little feverish. But it was so worth it.

6. I spent the weekend hanging out in San Mateo and Oakland with Mel, Teemu, Lindsey, and Nora, eating cheese, more cheese, and still more cheese.

7. Tonight, I’ll be speaking at the World Affairs Council of Northern California about the future of cities. Please come if you’re in the Bay Area. Tomorrow, it’s off to Los Angeles for an event at the A+D Museum with BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh.

Other coverage you may have missed:

• I appeared on BBC World’s “Fast Track,” talking about air travel and the aerotropolis.

• The Louisville Courier-Journal quoted me in a story about the UPS hub and its effect on the city.

• The Faster Times ran an excerpt from the book actually set at the UPS WorldPort.

• And PSFK ran a short interview with me ahead of the conference on Friday.

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April 02, 2011  |  permalink

Instant Cities for Sale

Tim Harford, the “undercover economist” (i.e. Britain’s answer to the Freakonomics dynamic duo) asks “is it time to outsource cities?” He correctly notes (as I told BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh last month) that cities are white-hot at the moment, alternately seen as the key to cracking climate change, as a tool for lifting millions out of poverty, and as they next great technology investment opportunity.

Harford mentions the aerotropolis in passing, then dismisses transportation infrastructure as less important than regulations, using Paul Romer’s charter cities as his primary example. But Romer would be the first to tell you (as he told me) that a charter city in the middle of nowhere (as defined by neoliberal economic geography) with the perfect rules will still fail to attract foreign investment without the necessary infrastructure, and that for any sufficiently advanced economy, that infrastructure is air travel. There’s a reason why Songdo is much further along than, say, Sejong City, the phantom future capital of Korea. Connectivity matters.

Harford points to Romer as a perfect example of the “real radicalism and the real insight: that building cities could become a business in its own right.” And yet he completely overlooks the real actors in this regard: technology companies like Cisco and Living PlanIT (which I’ve covered at length elsewhere) building smart cities at the behest of local and national governments, and mega-developments like Lavasa, which is the product of Cisco, Wipro, and the Hindustan Construction Corp., which expects to float the city in an IPO. And then there’s Singapore, which is consulting on a pair of “eco-cities” in China and is advising other cities and nations on how they can be more like Singapore – it’s franchising itself, in other words. Harford’s definitely right to pick up on the “instant city” trend, but there’s a lot more to it than what he mentions.

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March 27, 2011  |  permalink

The Week In Reviews

More mentions of the book have appeared in the past week. A sampling:

1. Reviewing the book for Barnes & Noble, Adam Hanft – a longtime contributor to Inc., Fast Company, and NPR’s Marketplace – concludes:  “This is a big and often wobbly book; like a giant jet heading down the runway, it does its share of shaking and rattling. But once it gets airborne, the flying is largely smooth and the views are a dazzlement. High-Def visions of the future always run the risk of a smug certainty, and Aerotropolis does suffer from that barreling conviction. But it is ably researched and creatively constructed, a prismatic display of the future of the global economy through a sharp and revealing new lens. It makes the mind travel.”

2. Video game designer, critic, and Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost posted a long and very thoughtful review, reaching an interesting conclusion: “As I finished reading Aerotropolis, I couldn’t help but feel that I’d rather have played it’s cover instead. I’d rather have had a visceral but systemic sense of how this century’s cities might optimally work according to Kasarda’s vision than a romp through a dozen stories that support it. Perhaps our age isn’t Instant so much as it is Connected. True, connections imply flows, and those flows are getting increasingly rapid. But connections also require entities, both things that regulate flows and the things that flow between them. And those things and connections include not only people and parcels, freight and food, but also the couplings between social conditions and material objects and financial systems and industrial processes and on and on…Aerotropolis underscores the fact that the story of the twenty-first century will not be one of stories, at all, but of systems instead. The airport city is just one example, yoked to so many others like airliners to a hub. Living effectively under such conditions requires more than just new logistical and industrial infrastructures–it also demands new conceptual infrastructures, new ways of discussing and debating these new ways of living.”

3. The Wandering Aramean, Seth Miller, admits he’s “scared” by the corporate, competitive logic of these cities: “Not all of these aerotropolii will be successful. There are simply too many competing to offer the same services in concentrated regional centers. Some will almost certainly succeed and it will provide a boon to the local economy of the winners. Right up until the competitor down the road offers up cheaper, faster and better services a couple years later. Moving the factories is an expensive undertaking, with short-term effects on to the balance sheet of the company in question and with potentially devastating long-term repercussions to the aerotropolis that loses the business. The book is an interesting read and definitely worth checking out, both from a global economics and a aerophile perspective. And I actually believe that most of the predictions of growth are likely to come true; all current evidence certainly supports them. I just fear for the fallout that comes with those developments and its impact on the global economy. For someone to win big in these efforts someone else is likely to lose badly.”

4. Edge Perspectives’ John Hagel writes about the book in the context of experience design: “Designing for flows becomes the core of system design.  The emphasis also shifts from design of static systems to design of evolving systems. Rather than optimizing for the present, the challenge becomes designing in ways that accelerate evolution. What would it mean to design the systems we live and work in to continually evolve our ability to experience more and more flow, especially the flow of people and ideas? Aerotropolis, an intriguing new book by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, suggests that increasingly our cities will be designed around massive airport facilities that help to maximize the flow of people from city to city and reduce the risk of cities turning inward as they grow in scale.”

5. The National, the state-funded newspaper of Abu Dhabi, describes the book’s vision as “bleak” (which is hilarious when you consider most Americans find the UAE pretty bleak) but concedes “the case that emerges looks soild. Indisputable, even,” especially the “thoughtful” chapter on Dubai and the hubs of the Gulf’s big three airlines.

6. The Columbia Spectator, the student newspaper of Columbia University, noted darkly (and satirically) that “If Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport were to become its own country, its annual workforce and user base would make it the twelfth most populous nation on Earth. The 12th most populous nation on earth is a sadistic land, dominated by a legitimized Big Brother who seeks to protect us from an alleged onslaught of murderous terrorists. It is a land where the rich and the poor are segregated from the moment the main terminal doors open, where the class system is laid bare and actually denoted by signs.” Truly the way we shall live next.

7. The Los Angeles Times, The Week (subscription required) and New York Post were also kind enough to mention it. “The book conveys the excitement of the engineers, developers and problem solvers working to shorten the commute for businessmen and women and the goods they set in motion around the world,” the LA Times said in its review. “The aerotropolis is a time machine,” Lindsay writes, and “time is the ultimate finite commodity.”

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March 27, 2011  |  permalink

The Book Tour: Week 1

The first week of the tour is in the books – Cambridge, Chicago, and Kankakee, Illinois. Up this week: Dallas-Fort Worth, Seattle, Portland, and Berkeley, CA. The full schedule is here. In the meantime, here are a few highlights:

1. The tour actually started with a few out-of-town previews in Louisville and Atlanta. The latter was sponsored by the Jacoby Group, developers of Atlantic Station and “Aerotropolis Atlanta” – the remediation and replacement of a former Ford auto factory next to the airport with 5 million square feet of dense, mixed-use office and retail space. Green Building Chronicle’s Ken Edelstein covered the event, making the excellent point that Atlanta’s biggest problem is its connections on the ground – this is perhaps the most sprawling city in America we’re talking about. While I was in town, radio host David Lewis talked with me about the book. Our conversation is available here.

2. Harvard Book Store was kind enough to host me in Cambridge, where Sophie’s family – including her parents, sister, aunts, and cousins – made the schlep from across New England to cheer me on. I brought a special guest star in the form of Issa Baluch, the founder and former owner of Dubai’s Swift Freight, who pioneered the practice of shipping goods by boat from China to Dubai, then airlifting them to landlocked African cities – making the shipments both timely and affordable for African traders. One of the audience members recorded the talk on his iPad; a low-fidelity download is available here.

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3. Upon arriving at O’Hare from Boston Logan on Tuesday, I proceeded immediately to the Vosges Chocolate boutique in Terminal 3 for what I’d like to think is the world’s first airport author tour stop. The boutique’s employees listened attentively while a few bewildered passengers staggered by. Par for the course in Airworld.

4. That night, at the Cliff Dwellers’ Club on Michigan Avenue, Studio Gang founder Jeanne Gang and I amiably discussed the future of cities for The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, focusing in turn on global, sustainable, and instant cities. A podcast of the event is available here.

5. On Wednesday night, my friends Samantha & Rory Nugent and Kelly & Andrew Haley hosted a book party at the Erie Café, inviting friends and family to hear me read a selection about the long-ago proposed third Chicago airport near Peotone. One of the attendees – Roosevelt University School of Policy Studies director Paul Green – was township supervisor of neighboring Monee when the airport plans were announced nearly 30 years ago. When they aren’t throwing parties for someone they haven’t seen since grade school, Samantha and Kelly help raise money for the Eleanor Foundation, which helps single working mothers achieve economic independence.

6. The party was followed by a reading at The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square, which was followed in turn by beer and bratwurst next door at the Brauhaus with friends – including poor Lisa, who had a lot of playing cards hidden behind her ears, courtesy of the roving table-side magician – the “world’s second-best,” according to his business cards.

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7. Thursday morning, I drove down to Kankakee for two events hosted by the Kankakee Public Library and the Kankakee Chamber of Commerce. Sticking with the local angle, I read once again from the Peotone airport section, but the audience preferred to ask questions about my Jeopardy! experiences. Someday I’ll accomplish something that overshadows my game show appearance – maybe the next book. The after-party that evening was sponsored by my mother – who even baked an Aerotropolis cake! A podcast of the evening session is available here.

8. Friday, I attended my friend Bridget’s wedding. She’s leaving for her honeymoon Monday morning – naturally, we’re having breakfast at O’Hare before she’s off to Honolulu aboard United Airlines Flight 1, and I’m off to DFW aboard AA for Week 2 of the tour.

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March 18, 2011  |  permalink

Next Up: The Left Forum

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If you’re around this weekend, I’ll be participating in the Left Forum – the largest American gathering of its kind devoted to thoughtful discussion of issues facing the political left – on Saturday as part of a panel titled “Intelligent Cities: The good, the bad and the ridiculous.” I’ll be joined by Columbia University’s and The Global City author Saskia Sassen, Urbanscale’s and Everyware author Adam Greenfield, and the Hybrid Reality Institute founder Ayesha Khanna. Our session runs from 12 PM to 2 PM at Pace University. Stop by for coffee with a splash of dystopia.

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March 18, 2011  |  permalink

Narita International Airport: Various Curious Scenes of Airplanes, 2005

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Yamaguchi Akira’s “Narita International Airport: Various Curious Scenes of Airplanes, 2005” is on display at New York City’s Japan Society as part of the show “Bye Bye Kitty!!! Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art,” which in turn is the kickoff to Asia Week.

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March 17, 2011  |  permalink

Aerotropolis: one of “10 Ideas That Will Change The World.”

And I thought “The Way We’ll Live Next” was immodest. Writing for Time, Pico Iyer describes the aerotropolis as one of ten ideas “that will change the world.” That Pico Iyer – the author, nomad, and “global soul” who elevated jet lag to a heightened state of consciousness – would feel a spiritual kinship with the idea is no surprise, but his conclusion is somehow more radical:

The days when we built our airports around cities now seem distant; in the new, mobile century, we build our cities around airports. For most businesses, it’s more important to be close to Bangalore or Shanghai than to be near the next suburb over. And as we complete “the annihilation of space by time” that Marx predicted, and as connectedness becomes more urgent than rootedness, airports are not just becoming cities. Cities are becoming like airports – places to leave from more than to live in.

Read the whole thing here.

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March 17, 2011  |  permalink

BLDGBLOG vs. FSG’s Work in Progress

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In an interesting – and I would say successful – experiment, BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh interviewed me for his site, and then I turned around and interviewed him for Farrar, Straus and Giroux’s Work In Progress site. For those of you who are wondering, Geoff is the better interrogator. Exhibit A:

BLDGBLOG: It’s easy to see how all this can sound quite technocratic and dystopian–which makes it all the more interesting that you open the book with an unexpected pair of quotations. One is from Le Corbusier, the other from novelist J.G. Ballard. To anyone familiar with Ballard’s work, in particular, I might say, this seems like a strangely subversive gesture against the book’s own premise; it’s like opening a golf course community and saying you were inspired by Super-Cannes. Why did you choose these quotations, and what effect were you hoping they would have?

Lindsay: I’m so glad you brought that up. I’ve been curious what people would make of it. What I love about Ballard is the kind of dark irony of his work, which is something I find in Koolhaas’s writing as well. They know the future is slick and disposable, and they revel in modernity’s contradictions. They know how dark globalization’s undercurrents are, but go on despite–or even because of–them. The book reviewers who said the aerotropolis had “forgotten” a soul completely missed the point–these cities never had souls to begin with. That’s why I find them fascinating!

The Ballard and Le Corbusier quotes should be read as a flashing red light, signaling to the reader: Caution: Unreliable Narrator Ahead. You’ve been warned. Especially that Le Corbusier quote: anyone who knows anything about urbanism who encounters that quote should immediately have their guard up–which was my intention all along.

» Continue reading...

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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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