Greg Lindsay

Greg Lindsay is a journalist, urbanist, futurist, and speaker. He is the 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 senior fellow of MIT’s Future Urban Collectives Lab, and a visiting scholar at New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management.

Greg Lindsay is been cited as an expert on the future of cities, technology, and mobility by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, USA Today, CNN, NPR, and the BBC.

He’s a partner at FutureMap, a geo-strategic advisory firm based in Singapore, and has advised Intel, Samsung, Starbucks, Audi, Chrysler, Hyundai, Tishman Speyer, British Land, André Balazs Properties, Emaar, and Expo 2020, among many other organizations. He was the inaugural urbanist-in-residence at URBAN-X — BMW MINI’s urban tech accelerator.

Greg Lindsay speaks frequently about globalization, innovation, and urbanization, most recently at Sandia National Laboratories, the U.K. Treasury, the OECD, Harvard Business School, the MIT Media Lab, Deloitte, and McKinsey.

His work with Studio Gang Architects on the future of suburbia was displayed at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 2012. His work has also been displayed at the 15th and 16th Venice Architecture Biennales, the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, and Habitat III. He sits on the board of Aerial Futures, and is guest curator of the 2018 and 2019 editions of reSITE.

His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Harvard Business Review, The Financial Times, McKinsey Quarterly, Inc., The Atlantic, Quartz, The New Republic, Politico, The Economist Group, The World Economic Forum, The Nikkei Asian Review, European Management Journal, World Policy Journal, Next City, Time, Wired, New York, Slate, Marie Claire Italia, Travel + Leisure, Condé Nast Traveler, and Departures. He was previously a contributing writer for Fortune and Fast Company, and an editor-at-large for Advertising Age. He is co-author of the 2011 critically acclaimed international bestseller Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next.

Greg is a two-time Jeopardy! champion (and the only human to go undefeated against IBM’s Watson). He lives in Montréal with his wife Sophie Donelson and their two children.

Latest speech topic – Greg Lindsay: COVID-19 Digital Keynote

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.

Book Greg Lindsay as Futurist and Expert on Cities, AI, Mobility, Innovation, and the Future of Work – live on stage!

A decade ago, Uber, AirBnB, and WeWork didn’t exist. Today, one is worth more on paper than Ford Motor, another more than Hyatt, and the third still eclipses many commercial REITs. Why? The short answer is that there’s an app for all that, but the truth is more complicated — how and where we live, how we move, and how we work are all being disrupted. The rise of coworking, co-living, ride-hailing, and placemaking all point to new possibilities for networking, re-purposing, and more intensively utilizing what was previously just a house, a car, an office, or a street. How we perceive cities, how we use them, and how we find each other within them has been transformed by our ability to connect, to summon services on demand, and to analyze and harness our increasingly sophisticated “data exhaust” (e.g. location data, likes, check-ins, taxi and Uber trips, and more).

Even in the wake of coronavirus, the tracking-and-tracing technologies needed to tame the pandemic will make this future city more likely – and hasten the arrival of autonomy, robotics, and automation. In his talk, NewCities director of applied research Greg Lindsay describes 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.

The robots are coming – not to steal your job, but to invent entirely new ones. 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 we how move, think, discover, decide, and deceive. What we consume — as well as how we produce, transport, and market it — may take strange new turns as robots increasingly predict, suggest and prepare to help us eat do it. In this wide-ranging and eye-opening talk on the promise and perils of AI, author and futurist Greg Lindsay explores how autonomy is already upending society — and how we can use it to build a better world.

A decade ago, self-driving cars were science fiction leftover from The Jetsons. Today, Google and Tesla are leading a breakneck autonomous arms race, as the global auto industry races to build electric AVs at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars. But a self-driving SUV may prove to be the horseless carriage of autonomy – rapidly eclipsed by new species of self-driving scooters, deliverybots, and buildings with a mind of their own. How are these technologies already transforming the way we see, understand, and get around cities? How have they helped China, Japan, and Korea mitigate the worst effects of the coronavirus lockdown? What effects will they have on where we live, work and play, and what are the opportunities and threats for automakers, technology firms, public transit, employers, and developers?

Drawing upon his work with BMW, Intel, MIT, the Bloomberg Philanthropies, Aspen Institute, and the NewCities Foundation, Greg Lindsay offers a tour of future urban mobility and how they promise to transform our cities in the coming decades.

How do we bring the right people and the right ideas to the right place at the right time to create something new, when we don’t know who or where or when that is, let alone what we’re looking for? This is the paradox of innovation — new ideas don’t follow org charts or schedule themselves for meetings. Greg Lindsay describes how organizations like Google, the U.S. Military Academy, United Health Group, and the International Red Cross are “engineering serendipity.” They’re harnessing sensors, social networks, and new ways of working to break down the boundaries between new teams, discover new ideas, inspire collaboration and creativity, and to spur employee engagement, learning, and innovation. How, where, and who we work with will never be the same.

The future isn’t what it used to be. As the pace of social, technological, and environmental change accelerates, organizations are struggling just to make sense of the present, let alone spot threats and opportunities looming just over the horizon. The ability to anticipate, understand, plan for, and innovate around uncertainty has become a critical skill for designers, innovators, and strategists everywhere. As the computing pioneer Alan Kay once said, “the best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

Futurist, author and NewCities director of applied research Greg Lindsay will teach a crash course in exactly that. The practice of creating futures, or “foresight,” offers a toolkit and framework for detecting signals of change, organizing insights, synthesizing possible futures, identifying potential barriers and opportunities, and designing innovative products, services or ideas that satisfy emerging needs. In addition to lecturing on possible futures, Greg is available to lead participants through a fun, fast-paced workshop in which they create futures of their own.