Greg Lindsay
Expert on Globalization, Urbanization & Innovation
Greg Lindsay reports from the front lines of globalization. He is the author of the book, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, with John D. Kasarda, exploring how air travel is reshaping how and where we live — in cities effectively orbiting their airports, rather than the other way around. He is a contributing writer for Fast Company, a fellow of the Hybrid Reality Institute, and his insights have appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, Reuters, Travel + Leisure, and NPR. He’s been described as a “devastatingly witty and ironic” speaker, telling stories about our interconnected future, the challenges it poses to our environment, and the opportunities for those prepared to exploit them.
Greg Lindsay reports from the front lines of globalization. He is the author of the book, Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next, with John D. Kasarda, exploring how air travel is reshaping how and where we live: in cities effectively orbiting their airports, rather than the other way around.
On stage, Lindsay has been described as a "devastatingly witty and ironic" speaker, whether he is arguing for cities' continued importance in the era of Google or making the case that China's copycats are also its greatest innovators. He tells compelling stories about our interconnected future, the challenges it poses to our environment, and the opportunities for those prepared to exploit them. They are dispatches from the near future – news we urgently need.
A visiting scholar at New York University's Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management and fellow of the Hybrid Reality Institute, Greg's insights and opinions have appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, Reuters, Travel + Leisure, and NPR, and he has been a guest on CNN, the BBC, and CNBC. Greg was previously a writer for Fortune, an editor at Women's Wear Daily, and an editor-at-large for Advertising Age. His writing has also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Time, The Financial Times, and McKinsey Quarterly. Greg is also a contributing writer for Fast Company, covering cities, sustainability and innovation in his stories for the magazine and in his column "The Butterfly Effect" on FastCoExist.com.
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3. China's Unlikely Innovators -- Its Copycat Kings
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. But 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?
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2. 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.
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1. 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 bid to host 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.
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March 2011Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next
We once built cities around harbors or railroads, leading to Venice, Amsterdam, New York and Chicago. But the cities rising today are taking shape around something else: the airport. These cities have a name – the aerotropolis – and they’re being paved in China, India, and the Middle East as each region prepares to take its place on the world stage. Aerotropolis examines how air travel is responsible for the look and shape – and winners and losers – of globalization to date, exploring in unsettling detail how cities such as Dallas, Detroit, Hong Kong and Dubai are inventing and re-inventing themselves to compete.
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