March 16, 2011  |  permalink

The BookCourt Reading, March 14, 2011

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March 14, 2011  |  permalink

“...the plan of a city was all that you saw…”

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“Nancy,” by Alex Prager.

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March 13, 2011  |  permalink

Aerotropolis, Live and In Concert

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A week after launch, the Aerotropolis tour is gearing up with the first public reading on Monday at my local independent bookstore, BookCourt. The reading, which starts at 7 PM, is free and open to all, and there will be wine, I’m told (while supplies last). BookCourt is at 163 Court St. (at Pacific), barely a block from my house, and equally close to Floyd, where we’ll be repairing afterward. If you’re in New York that night (and not, at say SXSW – why do social media promoters fly to Austin every spring to hang out? Hmmm…) please come!

Monday’s reading will be followed on Wednesday by a private event in Atlanta (please email me if you’d like to attend; space is limited), and non-stop touring the week after that: Boston, Chicagoland, and Dallas will be up first.

In the meantime, the reviews keep coming in. Last weekend, The New York Times Book Review described the book as “ambitious,” “bracing,” intriguing,” and “to be congratulated for their bluntness and their provocations.” (Also: “overwrought and overstuffed.”)

The Telegraph reviewed it in conjunction with Ed Glaeser’s Triumph of the City: “As both of these fascinating books show, when we talk about the future we are more often talking about what is actually happening today… a vigorous charting out of the counter-intuitive territory that will turn many people’s idea of hell into an urban paradise.”

The Financial Times reviewed the book in this weekend’s edition, which concludes with: “All of which underlines the most interesting idea raised by this book. Past transport innovations – ships, trains and then cars – helped create many of our greatest cities, but in a world made flat by globalisation, their successors will be the ones that embrace the jet and the aerotropolis. Their residents may not think this is the way they want to live next, but they may not have much choice.” Exactly.

If you haven’t read last month’s WSJ essay or FTexcerpt yet, both Salon and Gizmodo published excerpts this week.

I also made several radio appearances, including NPR Marketplace, The Takeaway, and The Monocle Weekly, with Tyler Brule. Stay tuned for more to come.

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March 04, 2011  |  permalink

It’s Here!

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At long last, Aerotropolis is on bookstore shelves, in stock at Amazon, and available as an e-book. The reviews so far have been admiring:

• Bloomberg BusinessWeek: a “fascinating and important work.”

• The Wall Street Journal: “The authors are undoubtedly right.”

• The Economist: The authors “convincingly put the airport at the centre of modern urban life. What may appear to be merely a means of travelling from the inconvenient edge of one city to the edge of another is becoming, whether by design or as a result of millions of personal decisions, the centre of the metropolis.”

• The Independent: “Greg Lindsay has thoroughly investigated the key aerotropoli and the corporate and city players involved with them. His writing is clear and assiduously detailed, and his chapters on China are particularly thought-provoking. This book will become required reading for economists, business studies students, architects, urban planners, sociologists – and more than a few novelists and essayists.”

Please keep an eye on this space for future media appearances, including NPR’s The Takeaway on Tuesday, March 8th, and Marketplace on Thursday, March 10th. Order yours now.

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March 04, 2011  |  permalink

The Wall Street Journal: Cities of the Sky

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(Last weekend, The Wall Street Journal published an original essay based on the book, in which I laid out some of the more dystopian trends discussed within. The complete essay is reproduced below.)

To arrive at midnight at Terminal 3 of Dubai International Airport, as I did recently, is to glimpse the pulsing, non-stop flow of the new global economy. The airport, which runs full-tilt 24/7, is packed at all hours. Nigerian traders bound for Guangzhou mix with Chinese laborers needed in Khartoum, Indian merchants headed to clinch a deal in Nairobi, and United Nations staff en route to Kabul.

Dubai’s recent financial woes have forced the tiny Gulf state to scrap or scale back some of its more outlandish development schemes, including The World, an artificial archipelago shaped roughly like a world map. But one project has not flagged: the new concourse for Terminal 3. With construction continuing around the clock, the annex to what is already the world’s largest building is desperately needed to accommodate the fleet of 90 Airbus A380s ordered by Emirates, Dubai’s government-owned airline.

Lighting a cigarette in his modest airport office during a meeting two weeks ago, Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed al-Maktoum, the chairman of Emirates, laughed as he recalled the widespread doubts that Emirates could pay for–and fill–its superjumbo jets. But it can, and it has, and despite the downturn, Dubai has stuck to its plans to develop the world’s largest airline from the world’s busiest hub. In public statements, Sheikh Ahmed has equated the future of Dubai with the future of Emirates, calling his country’s mammoth airport the center of a new Silk Road connecting China to the Middle East, India and Africa.

Thanks to the jet engine, Dubai has been able to transform itself from a backwater into a perfectly positioned hub for half of the planet’s population. It now has more in common with Hong Kong, Singapore and Bangalore than with Saudi Arabia next door. It is a textbook example of an aerotropolis, which can be narrowly defined as a city planned around its airport or, more broadly, as a city less connected to its land-bound neighbors than to its peers thousands of miles away. The ideal aerotropolis is an amalgam of made-to-order office parks, convention hotels, cargo complexes and even factories, which in some cases line the runways. It is a pure node in a global network whose fast-moving packets are people and goods instead of data. And it is the future of the global city.

This may come as a surprise to Americans, many of whom have had it with both flying and globalization and would prefer a life that’s slower and more local. In the wake of the financial crisis, the bywords for the future have often been caution and sustainability. But there is no resisting the relentless, ongoing expansion of the world economy, and the aerotropolis–fast, efficient, far-reaching and filled with generic “world-class” architecture–embodies it. In places like Dubai, China, India and parts of Africa, cities are being built from scratch around air travel, the better to plug into the global trade lanes overhead.

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March 04, 2011  |  permalink

The Financial Times Weekend Magazine Excerpt

The Financial Times’ Weekend Magazine excerpted the Introduction to Aerotropolis this past weekend, along with a brief review by its aerospace correspondent, Pilita Clark. “Someone smart came up with the title of John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay’s book,” her editor wrote. “Aerotropolis – The Way We’ll Live Next is an astute blend of the intriguing, the beguiling and the faintly menacing, writes Pilita Clark. But is it true? Are we really heading for a world where we build our cities around our airports instead of the other way round? That depends on who “we” are. And how we define an aerotropolis.”

Indeed. The FT has the full excerpt here, but unfortunately the magazine isn’t published here. You’ll have to make do with the screenshots below, but take my word for it, the story looks great.

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March 04, 2011  |  permalink

Now It Can Be Told: How I Beat IBM’s Watson (When Jennings and Rutter Couldn’t)

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It already feels like a million years ago (have the machines taken over yet?), but it’s been barely twelve months since I schlepped to IBM’s Eero Saarinen-designed research campus in Westchester to spar with Watson, it’s then-secret, now-famous Jeopardy!-playing supercomputer. I thrashed him three times only a week after he’d gone undefeated against his human opponents, and I’ve been dining out on it ever since. If you want to hear the story (and it seems everyone does) I wrote about the experience for both Fast Company and McKinsey Quarterly, noting in each story that Watson had me playing his game in no time, hop-scotching all over the board and racing to find Daily Doubles ahead of him. This was not new. As I noted in the McKinsey Quarterly story:

I was hardly the first person to try and beat a computer at its own game rather than stick to a human one. World chess champion Garry Kasparov, in the third game of his match with IBM’s Deep Blue in May 1997, chose to open with the esoteric Mieses Opening1 in a deliberate attempt to drag the computer out of its well-practiced repertoire of openings. It worked, but required Kasparov to abandon his repertoire as well. The game eventually ended in a draw.

Kasparov lost that match three games later in crushing fashion, leading Newsweek to dub his defeat “The brain’s last stand.” Rather than be embittered by his loss and computing’s subsequent hostile takeover of chess, Kasparov has become a proponent of man–machine collaboration. In “freestyle” tournaments, human–computer teams running the most basic commercial software have managed to crush the best chess programs on the market, which in turn had crushed most grand masters. “Having a computer program available during play was as disturbing as it was exciting,” he wrote in the New York Review of Books.

“The machine doesn’t care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory,” he added. “It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine, and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn’t good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn’t been done that way before. It’s simply good if it works and bad if it doesn’t. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.”

Jennings tried similar tactics against Watson, but the machine was simply too fast. You could tell Jennings was ticked, but at least he didn’t cry like Kasparov. As I predicted for Fast Company before the match:

So that’s my strategy, and it worked for me. But Jennings and Rutter will be facing a much tougher opponent—you would think Moore’s Law alone would have made Watson that much tougher by now—and he, in turn, will be battling much better players than I. But I had one other advantage they won’t—I felt no pressure to win, let alone on national television with a $1 million first prize on the line. The computer doesn’t feel it either, and this time around, that gives him the edge.

My money’s on Watson (although just how well he buzzes with his new electro-mechanical “hand” is anyone’s guess). I just hope the humans don’t cry this time. That would be so like us.

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February 20, 2011  |  permalink

Nokia’s Jetsetter

From The Financial Times’ mini-profile of Nokia’s new-ish CEO and “burning platform” memo author Stephen Elop:

Mr Elop has been criss-crossing the world on business flights – nearly 60 since starting the job – as he gets to know a company that still has by far the industry’s widest global reach.

When the CEO of the world’s largest telecommunications platform company needs to hop a flight a dozen times per month to discover just how bad things have gotten, that’s a pretty powerful testament to the need for face-to-face contact. Or at least an iPhone.

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February 11, 2011  |  permalink

China’s Mall of the Emirates

I’m in transit at the moment in Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport on my way home from a few days in Dubai, where I split my time between smarter cities and airports, alternately learning everything there is know about the former from Pacific Controls CEO Dilip Rahulan and chatting amiably about the latter with His Highness Sheikh Ahmed bin Saeed al Maktoum, who chairs Dubai’s airports, department of civil aviation, and Emirates Airlines. One thing I couldn’t help but notice on this trip (besides the view from the bar on the 123rd floor of the Burj Khalifa) was the ubiqutious packs of Chinese tourists. They snaked endlessly in lines at the airport, crowded the lobby of my hotel while waiting for tour buses (I heard more ni haos on this trip than as salam alaikums) and carried a minimum of four shopping bags everywhere they went.

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As it turns out, I was in Dubai for the confluence of Chinese New Year and the Dubai Shopping Festival, when everything in the tax-free emirate is discounted still further. I describe the increasing trade and tourism links between China and the Arab world at some length in Aerotropolis, arguing that Chinese foreign direct investment may ultimately help Dubai’s economy get back on its feet. Tourism from China to the UAE has soared since the emirates landed on China’s “approved destination” list in the fall of 2009. Chinese tourism to Dubai soared 57 percent in the first half of last year, totaling 81,900 tourists in all.

The numbers should be even higher this year with Egypt out of the picture. The National reported a week ago that “hoteliers, restaurateurs and retailers throughout the Emirates are reporting a surge in Chinese visitors ringing in the Year of the Rabbit…Some might also be extending their stay in the UAE instead of continuing on to planned trips in troubled Egypt, experts say.”

This is just a taste of what the rest of the world can expect. The United Nations’ World Tourism Organization estimates there will be 100 million tourists departing China annually by the end of this decade – an estimate one Dubai economist I spoke to considered laughably conservative. The National also described how the emirates are rolling out the red carpet:

Luxury retailers say the rise in Chinese visitors started last year and they are expecting a wave of shoppers.

“The Chinese clientele is coming to Dubai, which was not seen before,” says Valerie Chapoulaud, a president of Louis Vuitton who oversees southern Europe and the Middle East.

Businesses are pulling out all the stops to attract more visitors than last new year and convince them to boost their spending, with special promotions that run for a couple of weeks into the Lunar New Year, even to the end of the month.

Many hotels are offering special meals and a la carte menus, while others have rolled out golf, spa and overnight packages for guests who visit over the next couple of weeks.

The retailer Bloomingdale’s says it plans to double its number of Chinese-speaking staff to cater for a growing number of customers.

“China is a massive market,” says Mr Goddard, and the Chinese New Year period is “going to be a huge opportunity for getting Chinese nationals to the Middle East. Anything that promotes the Chinese market would be good for the long term.”

Global spending by tourists from China was up 17 per cent in 2009 from 2008 to US$43.7 billion (Dh160.5bn), according to the UN World Tourism Organization.

Once again, Dubai profits from its neighbors’ misfortunes. Last month (i.e. before January 25th), New Silk Road author Ben Simpfendorfer spoke with Egyptian tour operators hoping to win a larger piece of the China action:

The CEO of an Egyptian tour company made a similar point to me this week in Cairo. He said the government has done a good job of increasing tourist arrivals to Egypt from just a few million to 13 million in the past decade. But he wondered whether the figure might have been 30 million if more money had been spent on tourism infrastructure. “What we need is some Chinese investment”, he said wishfully.

It’s interesting then that some of the new floating hotels travelling between Cairo and Aswan are “made-in-China”. So China is at least making such investment cheaper.

But what about Chinese tourists? They are anecdotally visiting Egypt in growing numbers. But from a relatively low base. They also prefer discount packages, and I hear that Brazilians, for instance, still outspend them significantly. It doesn’t help that Chinese tourists are more likely spend money on luxury goods, such as Louis Vuitton bags, while travelling abroad. And for that, it’s better to visit Dubai, not Cairo.

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February 09, 2011  |  permalink

Aerotropolis: The Book Trailer

Cue the portentous voiceover: “In a world…”

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About Greg Lindsay

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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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