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Futurist, urbanist, writer for Fast Company, and author of the bestseller Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next
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"Engaging, intellectual style with excellent content for target audience."
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About Greg
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Greg Lindsay is a contributing writer for Fast Company and author of the international bestseller Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, which examines how and where we choose to live in an interconnected world.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, The Financial Times, McKinsey Quarterly, World Policy Journal, Time, Wired, New York, Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, and Departures. He was previously a contributing writer for Fortune and an editor-at-large for Advertising Age.
Greg speaks frequently about globalization, innovation, and the future of cities. He has spoken to a diverse range of clients including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Boeing, the World Policy Institute, the Asia Society, Columbia University, and the National Building Museum.
He is a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management. Greg is also a fellow of the Hybrid Reality Institute, exploring the co-evolution of humans and technology. He’s been cited as an expert on the future of travel, technology and urbanism by The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, the BBC and NPR, and has advised André Balazs Properties, Teague, and FedEx Corporation.
Greg has helped develop the Passenger Economy project with Intel and he is “urbanist-in-residence” at BMW Mini’s urban tech accelerator URBAN-X.
He graduated from the University of Illinois with a degree in journalism. Greg is a two-time Jeopardy! champion (and the only human to go undefeated against IBM’s Watson).
See keynotes with Greg LindsayWhile the world awaits a vaccine, how will we inoculate our cities, workplaces, homes, and families against another pandemic? For example, how will fluid organizations balance the mental- and physical health of employees with new remote/office work hybrids? Will social distancing kill mass transit and ridehailing in favor of driving alone — or will cities turn streets over to cyclists, scooters, and pedestrians?
How will deliveries, “dark kitchen,” and automation threaten to turn retailing and restaurants inside-out, threatening main streets, mom-and-pops, and real estate as we know it? And where will millennials — now the victims of a second financial crash — choose to raise their children, “Generation C?”
Drawing on his research and foresight work for NewCities, the Atlantic Council, MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, the Bloomberg Philanthropies, and dozens of recent interviews, Greg Lindsay delivers a sweeping view of how the pandemic and resulting economic crash will alter the trajectory of our lives for decades to come.
Yes, there are many young people who prefer the urban core, but today’s fastest-growing cities are actually Sunbelt metros, like San Antonio, Phoenix and Dallas. Furthermore, huge outflows of people are moving from “superstar cities” due to the lack of affordable housing, a trend that we could expect to grow as Millennial’s start families. In this game changing session, Greg cuts through confusion and stereotypes surrounding millennial’s housing preferences and outline a new suburban formula that will entice this generation.
Speaker Greg is a leading voice on Millennial migration and how we can anticipate and build for their changing lifestyle.
Keynote by Speaker Greg Lindsay
The robots are coming to steal your job… or are they?
Keynote by Speaker Greg Lindsay
How did China become the “world’s factory?” Why are Americans checking into Bangkok for heart surgery? How did Africa become a breadbasket for the Middle East? And how did Qatar, of all places, win the World Cup in 2022? What all of these things have in common is that they were made possible by the world’s explosive growth in air travel.
Keynote by Speaker Greg Lindsay
Humanity is officially an urban species – more than half of us live in cities. Our numbers will double by 2050 to more than 6 billion people, equal to the number of people alive on Earth right now. To house them, India must build the equivalent of a new Chicago every year; China must build a new New York.
Keynote by Speaker Greg Lindsay
Keynote by Speaker Greg Lindsay
It’s a given that Chinese companies don’t innovate. Or, if they do, it’s at the direction of either the state or foreign investors, both of which are pouring billions of dollars into traditional corporate research parks and traditional R&D.
Keynote by Speaker Greg Lindsay
Innovation is fundamentally social. Case study after study has shown that the best ideas are more likely to arise from a casual chat around the water cooler than any scheduled meeting. They are the result of serendipity – a chance encounter at the right time by the right people, regardless of their rank, affiliation, and department or whether they even work for the same company.
Engaging, intellectual style with excellent content for target audience.
Deirdre Toner
What is the message you hope people take away from your presentations?
That there are tremendous challenges and opportunities facing us in cities, which stand to be transformed yet again by technology and sheer numbers. Americans tend to think of cities as unnecessarily dirty, expensive, and crowded, but the truth is that cities are humanity’s most important creation — the places where goods and ideas are exchanged and where civilizations propel themselves forward. Understanding how cities work, avoiding the mistakes of the past, and building better ones — on a scale and at a speed never seen before — is vital if we’re to survive and prosper on a planet with 9 billion people by 2050.
How are your keynotes unique?
The aim of my talks is to expose audiences to the biggest picture trends a year or more before they read about them in magazines or books. As William Gibson once said, “the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed.” As a journalist, my job is to write dispatches from the places where the future is already thick on the ground. My talks combine fresh reporting with scholarly research and a storytelling style that’s anything but dry. I’ve sat through plenty of dry presentations — I try to do the opposite of that.
What direction is the development of cities headed?
Humanity is officially an urban species — more than half of us, some 3.5 billion people, now live in cities. Over the next forty years, that number will double, while the size of the built environment will triple. We will build more cities in the next forty years than we have built in all of history until now, which is leading to all kinds of urban experiments — “smart cities,” “eco-cities” and the “aerotropolis” (i.e. cities built from scratch around airports). The challenge is how do we design these places so they create opportunities for billions of people while staving off an environmental catastrophe?
How would you define effective urbanization?
The best cities are serendipity machines — they bring people together in close proximity to create new connections, which in turn spread ideas and create new work, new industries and opportunities. They are dense, educated, inclusive, places connected to networks of other cities and communities via strong transportation and telecommunication links. The question is how we should go about improving them — what combination of policies, investments, and technologies will yield outcomes that accentuate these strengths? And what are the urban networks that will reshape the economic geography of this century?
What is the message you hope people take away from your presentations?
That there are tremendous challenges and opportunities facing us in cities, which stand to be transformed yet again by technology and sheer numbers. Americans tend to think of cities as unnecessarily dirty, expensive, and crowded, but the truth is that cities are humanity’s most important creation — the places where goods and ideas are exchanged and where civilizations propel themselves forward. Understanding how cities work, avoiding the mistakes of the past, and building better ones — on a scale and at a speed never seen before — is vital if we’re to survive and prosper on a planet with 9 billion people by 2050.
What types of audiences benefit from your keynotes?
I’ve spoken to a wide variety of receptive audiences. Most recently I was in Portland addressing technologists at Intel who are trying to get a handle on what the cities of the future will look like. The week before that I was in Albuquerque, speaking to community leaders about global city networks and the importance of place; and I’ve recently given talks to architects at New York’s Museum of Modern Art; to policy-makers at Columbia University and Brown University, and to real estate professionals in Dubai and beyond. I’d like to think anyone interested in the future of the city would benefit from hearing me speak.
What is the best experience you have had as a keynote speaker?
I don’t know if it’s the best, but I really enjoyed speaking to thee audience of engineers and ethnographers at Intel. They peppered me with questions afterward and seemed genuinely curious as to how mobile computing will enhance cities rather than harm them — which is good, considering Intel is the one making the chips that make everything else possible!
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