Greg Lindsay

Greg Lindsay

Montreal, Quebec, Canada
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Publications

  • Hacking the City

    The New Republic

    In Newcastle, Australia, Marcus Westbury has grappled with the questions that have consumed struggling cities for decades: How do you turn a place around without money or resources, and by empowering residents rather than displacing them? Renew’s success has made Westbury a minor celebrity on these issues at home. In August, he published a book, Creating Cities, recounting the lessons from Newcastle’s transformation, and the following month he hosted a national television series, Bespoke…

    In Newcastle, Australia, Marcus Westbury has grappled with the questions that have consumed struggling cities for decades: How do you turn a place around without money or resources, and by empowering residents rather than displacing them? Renew’s success has made Westbury a minor celebrity on these issues at home. In August, he published a book, Creating Cities, recounting the lessons from Newcastle’s transformation, and the following month he hosted a national television series, Bespoke, asking whether Australia’s maker movement contains the seeds of a new economy. But his vision for pairing people with places isn’t just applicable in Australia. It has the potential to transform how we think about conventional urban development, how cities are used, and who they are for.

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  • Engineering Serendipity

    Medium

    I’d like to tell the story of a paradox: How do we bring the right people to the right place at the right time to discover something new, when we don’t know who or where or when that is, let alone what it is we’re looking for? This is the paradox of innovation: If so many discoveries — from penicillin to plastics – are the product of serendipity, why do we insist breakthroughs can somehow be planned? Why not embrace serendipity instead? Because here’s an example of what happens when you don’t.

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  • Workspaces That Move People

    Harvard Business Review

    Few companies measure whether the design of their workspaces helps or hurts performance, but they should. The authors have collected data that capture individuals’ interactions, communications, and location information. They’ve learned that face-to-face interactions are by far the most important activity in an office; creating chance encounters between knowledge workers, both inside and outside the organization, improves performance.

    The Norwegian telecom company Telenor was ahead of its…

    Few companies measure whether the design of their workspaces helps or hurts performance, but they should. The authors have collected data that capture individuals’ interactions, communications, and location information. They’ve learned that face-to-face interactions are by far the most important activity in an office; creating chance encounters between knowledge workers, both inside and outside the organization, improves performance.

    The Norwegian telecom company Telenor was ahead of its time in 2003, when it incorporated “hot desking” (no assigned seats) and spaces that could easily be reconfigured for different tasks and evolving teams. The CEO credits the design of the offices with helping Telenor shift from a state-run monopoly to a competitive multinational carrier with 150 million subscribers.

    In another example, data collected at one pharmaceuticals company showed that when a salesperson increased interactions with coworkers on other teams by 10%, his or her sales increased by 10%. To get the sales staff running into colleagues from other departments, management shifted from one coffee machine for every six employees to one for every 120 and created a new large cafeteria for everyone. Sales rose by 20%, or $200 million, after just one quarter, quickly justifying the capital investment in the redesign.

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Projects

  • The Bight: Coastal Urbanism

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    Once in a generation, the Regional Plan Association produces a long-range vision for the tri-state region. Due out later this year, RPA’s fourth regional plan, A Region Transformed, will propose investments and policies that will shape how we develop as a region over the next half century. This blueprint for the region’s future will reflect our vision of shared prosperity, health and livability, resiliency and good governance.

    With the right strategies and political will, the New…

    Once in a generation, the Regional Plan Association produces a long-range vision for the tri-state region. Due out later this year, RPA’s fourth regional plan, A Region Transformed, will propose investments and policies that will shape how we develop as a region over the next half century. This blueprint for the region’s future will reflect our vision of shared prosperity, health and livability, resiliency and good governance.

    With the right strategies and political will, the New York-New Jersey-Connecticut metropolitan area could be a place that fulfills its promise of equal opportunity; a coastal region that shows the rest of the world how to adapt and prosper in an age of rising seas and temperatures; and a global hub that harnesses its immense resources and innovative talent to make this fast-paced, expensive metropolis an easier, healthier and more affordable place to live and work.

    In an effort to drive policy with good design, the Fourth Regional plan identified four corridors in the metropolitan region — the Highlands, the Coasts, the City and the Suburbs — each representing a common set of needs and opportunities. Four design teams were selected to work on these four corridors, each with a different approach to design and to representation. This diversity of work created a heterogeneous set of design materials -- an essential asset in the context of a regional plan with an extensive scope of issues, enormous geography, and most challenging of all, a time horizon to mid-century and beyond.

    The corridor framework allowed for the development of designs that transcend the limits of a given place, while anchoring innovative proposals for future change. Collectively, the four corridors identified and explored the diverse, and often contradictory, demands and concerns that coexist in the greater region.

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  • Divining Providencia

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    Assembled by the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and Pontificia Universidad
    Católica del Ecuador (PUCE), DIVINING PROVIDENCIA: Building a Bio-Cultural Capitol for the Amazon outlines a conceptual framework for the design and development of strategies for a new inland port town of Puerto Providencia, in the Ecuadorian rainforest. The design of Puerto Providencia represents a unique opportunity to demonstrate and test a “best management practices” (BMP) approach to the development…

    Assembled by the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and Pontificia Universidad
    Católica del Ecuador (PUCE), DIVINING PROVIDENCIA: Building a Bio-Cultural Capitol for the Amazon outlines a conceptual framework for the design and development of strategies for a new inland port town of Puerto Providencia, in the Ecuadorian rainforest. The design of Puerto Providencia represents a unique opportunity to demonstrate and test a “best management practices” (BMP) approach to the development of Amazonian cities through a new model of urbanization: one that is formally unique, socially just and ecologically progressive. This document is intended to serve as an initial armature upon which the work, intelligence and concerns of representatives from all levels of the Ecuadorian government, central and local can be built, as will that of experts in the fields of infrastructure, economics, labor law, ecology, etc.

    This joint effort is part of a larger initiative named South America Project (SAP; www.sapnetwork.org), organized by Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. SAP is aimed at examining the as-yet-unstudied land use impacts of a $82 billion intercontinental transportation and communications network currently being constructed in South America, whose purpose is to a) expedite exports to the Asian market of resources extracted in S.A. via its Pacific ports; b) facilitate resource and energy trade and sharing among and between South American countries. Under a seed grant from Harvard’s David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, SAP calls upon the expertise, resources and ideas of South America’s--and the world’s-leading architecture, planning and design schools, and charges them with producing a set of implementable design proposals that demonstrate how the development of the continent’s hinterlands that will inevitably result from this investment can be sustainable and enriching of, rather than damaging to its cultural and environmental surrounds.

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  • The Garden in the Machine

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    Developed for The Museum of Modern Art's Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream exhibition, "The Garden in the Machine" is a proposal for transforming the inner-ring suburb of Cicero, Illinois, to better meet the living and working needs of its residents. The exhibition is the culmination of research and design work that began in May 2011, when five architect-led teams were chosen by MoMA to examine new architectural possibilities for five separate U.S. suburbs in the context of the recent…

    Developed for The Museum of Modern Art's Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream exhibition, "The Garden in the Machine" is a proposal for transforming the inner-ring suburb of Cicero, Illinois, to better meet the living and working needs of its residents. The exhibition is the culmination of research and design work that began in May 2011, when five architect-led teams were chosen by MoMA to examine new architectural possibilities for five separate U.S. suburbs in the context of the recent foreclosure crisis. To take on Cicero’s specific challenges, Jeanne Gang assembled a diverse team, including Roberta M. Feldman, Theaster Gates, Greg Lindsay, Kate Orff, Rafi Segal, and a number of other experts on varied subjects from finance to environmental remediation.

    Cicero, a former factory town, struggles with the foreclosure of its industrial properties as well as its homes. With its abandoned factories and subsequently vanished jobs, Cicero’s high immigrant population is faced with unemployment, poverty, and environmental degradation.

    “The Garden in the Machine” demonstrates how the remains of Cicero’s industry—its lands, building materials, and existing rail infrastructure—could be transformed into healthy and thriving neighborhoods. It proposes using nature and technology to improve the land, while combining housing and jobs within new, flexible live/work structures interwoven with a variety of public green spaces. In addition to this architectural vision, the project proposes revised zoning and a different form of ownership, one that allows citizens to purchase and sell shares corresponding to the live/work units they occupy. With the increased economic opportunities created by these proposed conditions, Cicero could become a successful “arrival city” where America’s newest residents can pursue their own, uniquely 21st-century American Dreams.

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  • "Aerotropolis: The Way We'll Live Next" (FSG)

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    We once built cities around harbors or railroad terminals, which led to the familiar shapes of Amsterdam, Venice, New York and Chicago. But the cities built to take advantage of a hyper-competitive global economy are taking shape around something else instead: the airport.

    These cities have a name – the aerotropolis. They’re rising around China, India, and the Middle East as each region prepares to take its place on the world stage. They are to our era of instant gratification – the…

    We once built cities around harbors or railroad terminals, which led to the familiar shapes of Amsterdam, Venice, New York and Chicago. But the cities built to take advantage of a hyper-competitive global economy are taking shape around something else instead: the airport.

    These cities have a name – the aerotropolis. They’re rising around China, India, and the Middle East as each region prepares to take its place on the world stage. They are to our era of instant gratification – the Instant Age – what terminal cities like downtown Chicago and Manhattan were to America’s Gilded Age in the latter half the 19th Century.

    Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next explores how air travel and transportation are largely responsible for the shape and scope – and winners and losers – of globalization. It also examines how cities such as Hong Kong, Dallas, Detroit and Dubai are changing (or being built anew) to reflect the interests of corporations that effectively scattered pieces of themselves across the world, relying on the Internet and Airbus planes to tie themselves together.

    But who are these places for? The companies that profit from marginally leaner operations? The leaders, each one a little more ruthless than the last, jockeying to land them? Or the planners, architects, and sages given carte blanche to raise islands from oceans and plant tarmac in desert? Published by 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Aerotropolis tells the story of how the Jet Age and the Net Age have given way to the Instant Age, and wonders what cities will be its offspring.

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