Greg Lindsay
About
Greg talks about how cities‐as‐a‐service are changing how we live, work, move, and more – and the new real estate, services, and business model opportunities this creates.
Audiences leave with an understanding of how to recognize the changes technology and innovation have brought to urban environments and how to leverage the opportunities these disruptions have created.
Greg Lindsay is a journalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker, director of applied research at NewCities and director of strategy at its mobility offshoot CoMotion. He is also a non-resident senior fellow of the Atlantic Council’s Foresight, Strategy, and Risks Initiative, a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management, and co-author of Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next.
Past clients include: Intel, Samsung, Starbucks, Audi, Chrysler, Hyundai, Tishman Speyer, British Land, André Balazs Properties, Emaar, and Expo 2020.
About Greg Lindsay - Journalist, Speaker and Expert on the Future of Travel, Technology & Urbanism:
Greg Lindsay is a non-resident senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, Arizona State University’s Threatcasting Lab, and the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Strategy Initiative. He was the founding chief communications officer of AlphaGeo and remains a senior advisor. Most recently, he was a 2022-2023 urban tech fellow at Cornell Tech’s Jacobs Institute, where he explored the implications of AI and augmented reality at urban scale.
Greg speaks about the future of cities, mobility, technology, security, and work, including appearances at 10 Downing Street, the United States Military Academy, Sandia National Laboratories, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Harvard Business School, MIT Media Lab, and Aspen Ideas Festival.
He also speaks to companies (Microsoft, Deloitte, Gensler, Ford, Starbucks), organizations (U.S. Conference of Mayors, Canada Council for the Arts), member associations (ULI, NAHB, NAIOP, SIOR) and universities (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, NYU, McGill).
He’s been cited as an expert by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, USA Today, CNN, NPR, BBC, and CBC Radio.
Greg’s also a partner at the advisory firm FutureMap, and has advised Intel, Samsung, IKEA, Starbucks, Audi, Hyundai, Tishman Speyer, British Land, André Balazs Properties, Aldar, Emaar, and Expo 2020, along with numerous G20 government entities. Previously, he was urbanist-in-residence at BMW MINI’s urban tech accelerator, URBAN-X, as well as director of applied research at NewCities and founding director of strategy at its mobility-focused offshoot, CoMotion.
Topics
What Greg Lindsay Talks About:
The Way We’ll Live Next
OFFICES ARE EMPTY. Downtowns are dead. The suburbs are Millennials’ future. At least two of these truisms are wrong, but why? Employees may be grudgingly returning to the office, but work-from-anywhere is here to stay. That doesn’t mean the end of the work week, but new ways and patterns of living and working together closer to home, with more flexible real estate and employment to match. That, in turn, means rethinking who and what cities are for.
Forget downtowns versus their suburbs; how can we imagine new uses for old high-rises and new districts to replace dead malls? Because behind the scenes, inflation and technology is turning retail, groceries, and dining inside-out through data, delivery, and automation. And above all looms the threat of climate change and the opportunities of AI and spatial computing to transform the Internet — and the world — as we know it.
Drawing on his research and foresight work for Cornell Tech, Climate Alpha, and MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, Greg Lindsay explores the urban and real estate implications of our never-normal landscape and explains why the future will be less remote and more human than you might think.
Autonomous Everything
THE ROBOTS ARE COMING – not to steal your job, but to invent entirely new ones. Recent advances in artificial intelligence such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT coupled with automation point toward an increasingly autonomous world in which agency and personality is embedded in thinking machines. Autonomy will not only transform how and why we work, but also how we think, discover, decide, and even deceive ourselves.
What we imagine and produce will take strange new twists and turns as AI increasingly predict, suggest and convince us do it. In this wide-ranging and eye-opening talk on the promise and perils of AI, Greg Lindsay explores how autonomy is already upending society, and what we can learn from organizations such as NATO, the U.S. military, and the Secret Service about what to do about it.
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 asking, “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.
Recent Publications
Greg was a smooth, polished, and beguiling speaker, alternately informing, challenging and making his audiences laugh!