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Greg Lindsay

travels from Canada

Futurist, urbanist, writer for Fast Company, and author of the bestseller Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next

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5 out of 5 stars

"Engaging, intellectual style with excellent content for target audience."

Deirdre Toner - American Society of Landscape Architects, Illinois Chapter See all references

Reasons to book Greg Lindsay

  • He has helped develop the Passenger Economy project with Intel and he is “urbanist-in-residence” at BMW Mini’s urban tech accelerator URBAN-X.
  • Greg speaks frequently about cities, mobility, innovation, and globalization, including appearances at 10 Downing Street, the United States Military Academy, Sandia National Laboratories, the OECD, Harvard Business School, the MIT Media Lab, and the Aspen Ideas Festival.
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Our keynote speaker Greg Lindsay is the author, with John D. Kasarda, of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, which examines how and where we choose to live in an interconnected world. He speaks and writes frequently about the intersection of transportation, urbanization, and globalization, as well as innovation and the future of cities.

Reasons to book Greg Lindsay

  • He has helped develop the Passenger Economy project with Intel and he is “urbanist-in-residence” at BMW Mini’s urban tech accelerator URBAN-X.
  • Greg speaks frequently about cities, mobility, innovation, and globalization, including appearances at 10 Downing Street, the United States Military Academy, Sandia National Laboratories, the OECD, Harvard Business School, the MIT Media Lab, and the Aspen Ideas Festival.

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 TimesThe Wall Street JournalBloomberg BusinessWeekThe Financial TimesMcKinsey QuarterlyWorld Policy JournalTimeWiredNew YorkTravel + LeisureCondé Nast Traveler, and Departures. He was previously a contributing writer for Fortune and an editor-at-large for Advertising Age.

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 TimesUSA Today, CNN, the BBC and NPR, and has advised André Balazs Properties, Teague, and FedEx Corporation.

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 Lindsay
Special Virtual Keynote by speaker Greg Lindsay

Inoculating the Planet: Life After COVID-19

While 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.

Keynote by speaker Greg Lindsay

The New Suburbia

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.

  • Understanding how new forces are transforming expectations and lifestyle choices for the Millennial generation
  • Exploring why urban Millennials are opting for smaller metros or suburban/exurban fringes of large metros and taking their lifestyle preferences with them
  • Identifying community features and urban amenities Millennials desire such as walkable neighborhoods, co-working spaces, transportation alternatives and other hallmarks of their youth
  • Recognizing the opportunities these new forces and trends will enable, including neighborhoods, new uses and new products and services, recombing once-tired formulations of live, work and play.
Keynote by speaker Greg Lindsay

The Metaverse Metropolis

The Metaverse” may be the future, but what is it? While Mark Zuckerberg hopes you’ll never leave your home again, in reality the next generation of the Internet will beckon us outside, into a world in which information is everywhere — if you can see it. Welcome to the real-world metaverse, where you can change reality like changing a channel.

How will this change our relationship to each other and to the world? How will these reality channels transform where we live, how we shop, and how we move through enchanted worlds? Drawing on his “Metaverse Metropolis” project at Cornell Tech university, Greg Lindsay offers real advice and lessons from the technologists, designers, and experts building this real-world metaverse.

Keynote by speaker Greg Lindsay

Where Will You Live in 2050?

Nearly half of Americans were victims of a climate disaster last year — whether fire, floods, heat waves or hurricanes — with insurable losses of more than $100 billion. As people wake up to the realities of climate change — and the growing threat to their homes, livelihoods, and families — many are beginning to ask, “Where should I live someday?” Fortunately, we have answers. Combining climate science with demographics and using artificial intelligence, we can predict tomorrow’s more resilient regions.

Climate change isn’t just a story about mounting catastrophes, but also opportunity — if we harness the right technologies, policies, and political will to build back better elsewhere. Drawing on his work with the startup Climate Alpha, Greg Lindsay offers cutting edge analysis and maps to explain why and where a warming world may still have shelter for us all.

    Keynote by Speaker Greg Lindsay 

    Autonomous Everything: AI, the Future, and What We Can Do About It

    The robots are coming to steal your job… or are they?

    • Advances in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and automation all point toward an autonomous world – one in which perception, prediction, and action are embedded in machines.
    • Autonomy will not only transform how we work, but also how we move, think, discover, decide, and deceive. In this wide-ranging talk on the promise and perils of AI, the author, and futurist.
    • Greg Lindsay explores how autonomy is already upending society — and how we can use it to build a better world.

    Keynote by Speaker Greg Lindsay

    The New Geography

    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.

    • The combination of the Internet and jet engine is redrawing the world map, creating new winners and losers among countries, cities, companies, and all of us. In his new book Aerotropolis, Greg Lindsay explains the rules, threats, and opportunities of the new highways in the sky.

    Keynote by Speaker Greg Lindsay

    Instant Cities

    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.

    • Cities have become the battleground for every challenge facing us: poverty; education; climate change; and resource depletion, just to name a few. We must learn to build better, smarter, greener cities if we’re to survive.
    • Having studied first-hand these new cities rising across Asia, Greg Lindsay describes the lessons we can learn from them, and how we can use this knowledge to rebuild our cities at home.

    Keynote by Speaker Greg Lindsay

     Rehousing the American Dream

    • The foreclosure crisis that began in 2007 signals an end to the “American Dream” of universal suburban home ownership, however it also represents an opportunity to imagine a more equitable, sustainable, walkable and ultimately more affordable urban future.
    • Last year, Greg Lindsay joined a team of architects, artists, environmentalists, and economists to rethink suburbia as part of an exhibit for New York’s Museum of Modern Art titled Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. In describing their project, “The Garden in the Machine,” he offers the blueprints to building a better suburb for the next generation of Americans who will call them home.

    Keynote by Speaker Greg Lindsay

    China’s Unlikely Innovators — Its Copycat King

    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.

    • The outfits that have the most in common with our most innovative start-ups are China’s copycat kings, the shanzhai.
    • Working in teams as small as a half-dozen people, the shanzhai are estimated to produce nearly half of China’s 500 million cell phones each year. Inexpensive shanzhai phones have connected India’s rural poor and helped trigger the Arab Spring. More recently, the copycats have gone legit, innovating too quickly for foreign brands like Nokia to keep up. What lessons about doing in business in China can we learn from the shanzhai, and what threat do they pose to unsuspecting sectors?

    Keynote by Speaker Greg Lindsay

    Engineering Serendipity

    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.

    • For innovative companies like Google, working in a traditional office has proven to be a dead end. Instead, they are busy engineering serendipity, harnessing social networks and new ways of working designed to cultivate the discovery of new ideas, even going so far as to invite strangers in off the street to work side-by-side with their employees. Journalist Greg Lindsay will share techniques for how cities, companies, and individuals alike can learn faster via engineering serendipity.

References

Engaging, intellectual style with excellent content for target audience.

Deirdre Toner

American Society of Landscape Architects, Illinois Chapter
10.09.2014

Interview with Greg Lindsay

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!

See keynotes with Greg Lindsay
Non-binding request for Greg Lindsay

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Greg Lindsay
Greg Lindsay

5 out of 5 stars

"Engaging, intellectual style with excellent content for target audience."

Deirdre Toner - American Society of Landscape Architects, Illinois Chapter See all references

Keynote topics with Greg Lindsay