March 17, 2011 | permalink
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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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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