September 09, 2022 | permalink
Condé Nast Traveler’s Tom Vanderbilt was kind enough to quote me in his roundup of futuristic new cities from around the globe, ranging from Saudi Arabia’s NEOM to Oceanix’ proposed floating city off the coast of Busan, South Korea, to more prosaic efforts like Egypt’s new administrative capital. I couldn’t help but pour a little cold water on the idea:
Might any of these projects live up to the outsize dreams of their creators? The jury is out. “What makes a successful city is that it possesses a level of social and economic complexity,” says Greg Lindsay, a senior fellow at MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab. “Most of the city builders I’ve worked with still struggle with understanding how to build that.” The desire to create iconic architecture and high-tech infrastructure often overlooks all those bottom-up, unsexy things that make a city tick.
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Greg Lindsay is a generalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is a 2022-2023 urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he leads The Metaverse Metropolis — a new initiative exploring the implications of augmented reality at urban scale. He is also a senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, a senior advisor to Climate Alpha, and a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative.
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