Touring has been quiet this winter due to the holidays, but will resume in the spring. Below is the current list of past and future appearances, always bound to change. If you’re interested in helping to arrange a speaking appearance, please send me an email.

December 12, 2012. Seattle, WA.
Commercial Brokers Association.

May 16, 2012. Louisville, KY
Kentucky CCIM

May 15, 2012. Kansas City, MO.
CREW

May 11, 2012. New York, NY.
Fordham University. Open to all.

May 3, 2012. New York, NY.
World Policy Institute 50th Anniversary and Celebration.

May 1, 2012. Seattle, WA.
Commercial Brokers Association.

April 27, 2012. New York, NY.
New York University.

April 19, 2012. New York, NY.
Studio-X X-Cities series. Free and open to all.

April 18, 2012. St. Petersburg, FL.
American Real Estate Society.

April 10, 2012. New York, NY.
Studio-X X-Cities series. Free and open to all.

April 5, 2012. Hillsboro, OR.
Intel 2012 Trendspotting Summit.

March 29, 2012. Albuquerque, NM.
Albuquerque Downtown Action Team.

March 20, 2012. New York, NY.
Studio-X X-Cities series. Free and open to all.

March 12, 2012. Muscat, Oman.
The Sinbad Lecture.

March 11, 2012. Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
Middle East Facilities Management Association.

February 21, 2012. New York, NY.
Studio-X X-Cities series. Free and open to all.

February 15, 2012. Washington, DC.
Research In Motion.

February 14, 2012. New York, NY.
Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

January 24, 2012. Seattle, WA.
Teague.

November 14, 2011. New York, NY.
World Policy Institute Political Salon.

November 10, 2011. New York, NY.
L2 Innovation Forum.

November 7, 2011. Montreal, QC.
The Association of Corporate Travel Executives.

October 31-November 1, 2011. London, United Kingdom.
The Airport Operators Association.

October 20, 2011. New York, NY.
Asia Society New York. Registration required. Open to all.

October 14, 2011. Phoenix, AZ.
CCIM Live.

October 13, 2011. Ottawa, ON.
Ontario Professional Planners Institute.

October 5, 2011. New York, NY
Columbia University, Committee for Global Thought.

October 4, 2011. Destin, FL.
Gulf Power Economic Symposium.

September 27, Washington D.C.
The National Building Museum. 6:30 PM. Reading and discussion. Admission required; open to all.

September 20, 2011. New York, NY
Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

September 18, 2011. Brooklyn, NY
Brooklyn Book Festival. 4 PM at Brooklyn Historical Society Library. Free and open to all.

September 17, 2011. Queens, NY.
“Foreclosed” Open Studios. 12-6 PM at MoMA PS1. Open to the public.

September 15, 2011. Champaign, IL.
TEDxUIllinois. Free; visit the site to request an invitation.

September 3-4, 2011. Decatur, GA.
The AJC Decatur Book Festival. Open to the public.

August 29-30, 2011. Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Medical Travel Meeting Brazil.

June 29-30, 2011. Chicago, IL
The Clinton Global Initiative: CGI America.

June 18, 2011. Queens, NY.
“Foreclosed” workshop presentations. 2 PM at MoMA PS1. Open to the public.

June 7, 2011. New York, NY.
The New York Public Library. 6:30 PM. Discussion and signing. Free and open to all.

June 6, 2011. Washington D.C.
Intelligent Cities Forum.

May 23, 2011. Dubai, UAE.
DIFC Economics Workshop.

May 11, 2011. Denver, CO.
Metro Denver Aviation Coalition.

May 10, 2011. Denver, CO.
Tattered Cover Book Store. 7 PM. Reading and discussion. Free and open to all.

May 7, 2011. New York, NY.
Pecha Kucha #11, “The Dimensions of a New City.” 11:29 PM at the Old School Gym, 268 Mulberry Street.

May 7, 2011. Queens, NY.
“Foreclosed” preliminary presentations. 2 PM at MoMA PS1. Open to the public.

May 2, 2011. Chicago, IL.
CoreNet Global Summit.

April 28, 2011. New York, NY.
The Frequent Traveler Awards.

April 20, 2011. New York, NY.
Talking Books with the Architectural League of New York. McNally Jackson Bookstore, 7 PM. Free and open to all.

April 14, 2011. Brooklyn, NY.
The Futurist and Kite Flying Society of Galapagos Art Space. 7 PM. Registration required. Open to all.

April 13, 2011. Memphis, TN.
FedEx Corporation.

April 12-13, 2011. Memphis, TN.
Airport Cities 2011.

April 11, 2011. Memphis, TN.
Davis-Kidd Booksellers. 6 PM. Free and open to all.

April 8, 2011. New York, NY.
PSFK New York.

April 5, 2011. Los Angeles, CA.
Architecture and Design Museum.

April 4, 2011. San Francisco, CA.
World Affairs Council of Northern California.

April 1, 2011. Berkeley, CA.
University of California Architecture Research Colloquium.

March 31, 2011. Portland, OR.
Powell’s City of Books.

March 30, 2011. Seattle, WA.
Town Hall Seattle.

March 29, 2011. Irving, TX.
The World Affairs Council of Dallas/Fort Worth and The Greater Irving-Las Colinas Chamber of Commerce.

March 24, 2011. Kankakee, IL.
The Kankakee Public Library.

March 23, 2011. Chicago, IL.
The Book Cellar.

March 22, 2011. Chicago, IL.
The Chicago Council of Global Affairs.

March 21, 2011. Cambridge, MA.
Harvard Bookstore.

March 20, 2011. New York NY.
The Left Forum.

March 16, 2011. Atlanta, GA.
Atlantic Station.

March 11, 2011. Louisville, KY.
Greater Louisville Inc.

February 23-24, 2011. San Francisco, CA.
Global Green Cities of the 21st Century.

October 18, 2010. Shanghai, China.
2010 China Innovation Forum.

October 1, 2010. New York, NY.
“Cities and Eco-Crises,” Columbia University.

August 25-28, 2010. Sao Paulo, Brazil.
Medical Travel Meeting Brazil.

August 2, 2010. San Carlos, CA.
Singularity University.

June 9-10, 2010. Las Vegas, NV.
Realcomm 2010.

April 21-23, 2010. Beijing, China.
Airport Cities 2010.

April 1, 2010. Champaign, IL.
TEDxUIllinois.

September 15, 2009. Atlanta, GA.
TEDxAtlanta.

April 28-29, 2009. Taipei, Taiwan.
International Aerotropolis Conference.

With the holidays upon us, I’m grounded for a while. But a few video clips and images have surfaced from various stops on the Fall leg of my endless tour.

1. On November 14, the World Policy Institute hosted a Political Salon for my book Aerotropolis. Moderated by WPI fellow Michelle Fanzo and hosted by WPI president Michele Wucker and Deborah Berke Architects, I spoke for an hour on the usual topics of cities, air travel, and globalization before realizing that was wine, not water I was sipping. A few photos from the event are available here.

2. Back on October 14, I gave the morning keynote at CCIM Live!, a conference for commercial real estate executives, moderated by Todd Clarke. Clink on the screenshot below for a link to the full-length video.

3. On November 10th, I spoke at the second annual L2 Innovatioo Forum, a sort of TED for the luxury industry. I talked a bit about the shanzhai, China’s copycat kings, and how their bottom-up piracy actually embodies the best hope (or threat, depending on how you look at it) for innovation in China. (The talk was a gloss on my TEDxUIllinois talk in September.)

Combatting the Bamboo Ceiling: Shanzhai Copy Cats by FORAtv

(Originally published at FastCoExist.com on November 22, 2011.)

It’s the largest infrastructure project you’ve never heard of: An $83 billion, decades-long effort by a dozen South American nations to tilt the continent’s economic axis from North-South to East-West (and from the United States toward China). At stake is not just the economy of the continent, but the future of the Amazon, as many of the roads intersect biodiversity hotspots, including Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park and its 846 million barrels of untapped oil.

The Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA) has managed to keep a low profile because it’s really 10 projects in one, a series of locally financed corridors carved through the Amazon and Andes aimed at integrating neighbors’ economies and opening the continent’s hinterlands to drilling, mining, and industrial agriculture. Three-quarters of Amazonian deforestation occurs within a 30-mile strip along its highways, which makes the IIRSA’s plan especially dangerous. With a third of IIRSA’s projects already under construction—including a trans-oceanic highway that will shave three weeks off shipping soybeans to China—the challenge is to mitigate its potentially ruinous environmental consequences. But considering the decentralized nature of the meta-mega-project, where does one begin?

That’s the self-appointed task of The South America Project, a network of Latin American architects and academics who hope to prevent the spread of gated company towns and slash-and-burn sprawl in IIRSA’s wake. The SAP kicked off last month with a symposium at Harvard organized by founders Felipe Correa, an assistant professor of urban design at the university, and Ecuadorean architect Ana Maria Durán Calisto.

“Throughout its history, South America has had a resource extraction economy,” says Correa. “If you go back to the first Jesuit outposts, they represent a form of company town.” Fast-forward to the 17th-century silver mines at Potosí, the commodity-based booms and busts of Argentina and Paraguay in the 1940s and ‘50s, and Brazil’s oil and soybean boom today. “The question is: What stays in South America, and how do you direct the capital for these projects toward social investments that go beyond pure resource extraction?” says Correa.

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(Originally published at FastCoExist.com on November 11, 2011.)

The city of Bangkok is underwater and it’s likely to stay that way for weeks. Besides the myriad Thai people displaced, there are other concerns: hard drive manufacturers are swamped. Western Digital is the world’s largest maker of disk drives, and it’s Thai factories account for 60% of its total production. They’ve been closed now for nearly a month. Global shipments are expected to fall by nearly 50 million units in the fourth quarter, according to IHS iSuppli, a drop of 30%.

Analysts at iSuppli and Gartner have repeatedly warned of higher disk prices in the new year (when the shock will have rippled through the entire supply chain), lower prices (and profits) for other component manufacturers squeezed by the likes of HP and Dell, and even a race to lock up high-capacity storage for the brewing arms race in the cloud between Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple.

“Surely one of the inevitable impacts of this is that never again will so much be concentrated in so few places,” Gartner’s John Monroe told The New York Times this week. But that only raises the question of how Thailand became the weakest link in the first place—and whether the computing industry (or, really, any industry) can still afford to situate itself entirely in the path of climate-related disasters.

“It’s just by chance that Western Digital has the majority of its production there,” says Fang Zhang, an analyst for iSuppli. She adds that hard drives have been a mainstay of Thailand’s technology industry for decades. “It wasn’t planned.”

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(Originally published at Fast Co.Exist on November 4, 2011.)

The seasteader-in-chief is headed ashore. Patri Friedman (that’s Milton Friedman’s grandson to you), who stepped down as the chief executive of the Peter Thiel-backed Seasteading Institute in August, has resurfaced as the CEO of a new for-profit enterprise named Future Cities Development Inc., which aims to create new cities from scratch (on land this time) governed by “cutting-edge legal systems.” The startup may have found its first taker in Honduras, whose government amended its constitution in January to permit the creation of special autonomous zones exempt from local and federal laws. Future Cities has signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding to build a city in one such zone starting next year.

Seasteading, i.e. the creation of sovereign nations floating offshore, is enshrined in libertarian thought as an end-run around the constraints of stodgy nation-states. The idea has received plenty of (mocking) mainstream coverage, most recently in a Details profile of Thiel, in which Friedman outlined the new startup he had in mind:

One potential model is something Friedman calls Appletopia: A corporation, such as Apple, “starts a country as a business. The more desirable the country, the more valuable the real estate,” Friedman says.

Future Cities follows this approach, describing its mission as bringing “Silicon Valley’s spirit of innovation to the implementation of cutting-edge legal systems in new cities,” most likely in the role of the cities’ master developer. Citing laissez-faire entrepots such as Hong Kong and Singapore as examples, the company’s founders believe that strong property rights and business-friendly regulation are key to creating jobs, stimulating investment, and lifting millions out of poverty, a la China’s special economic zones. “The evidence is much stronger,” Friedman replies when asked if he’s building another libertarian utopia, “that rule of law, fairness, and a lack of corruption leads to more economic growth than low taxes.” (Not that they’re mutually exclusive, as Singapore demonstrates.)

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My talk from last month’s TEDxUIllinois.

Sunday’s edition of The New York Times includes my op-ed on increasingly ambitious “smart cities” — which I’ve been covering for Fast Company the last two years. The ultimate aim of these efforts is to build an “urban operating system” capable of playing SimCity for real. The op-ed begins below:

The Southwest is famously fertile territory for ghost towns. They didn’t start out depopulated, of course — which is what makes the latest addition to their rolls so strange. Starting next year, Pegasus Holdings, a Washington-based technology company, will build a medium-size town on 20 square miles of New Mexico desert, populated entirely by robots.

Scheduled to open in 2014, the Center for Innovation, Testing and Evaluation, as the town is officially known, will come complete with roads, buildings, water lines and power grids, enough to support 35,000 people — even though no one will ever live there. It will be a life-size laboratory for companies, universities and government agencies to test smart power grids, cyber security and intelligent traffic and surveillance systems — technologies commonly lumped together under the heading of “smart cities.”

The only humans present will be several hundred engineers and programmers huddled underground in a Disneyland-like warren of control rooms. They’ll be playing SimCity for real.

The rest of the op-ed is available here.

Last Saturday was the culmination of nearly five months’ of work by five multidisciplinary teams of architects, planners, artists, landscape urbanists, public housing advocates, economists (and me) on behalf of MoMA for the forthcoming exhibit Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream. The final public presentations of the workshop phase (and the near-final exhibits) were held on September 17th. I had the honor and privilege of being asked by Studio Gang’s Jeanne Gang (a 2011 recipient of the MacArthur “genius” grant) to work on policy and research for her team. Here’s the video of Jeanne’s final presentation; I make a brief cameo at the 19:30 mark. The next time you’ll see us, it’ll be at MoMA from mid-February through the end of July.

Six months on, it may look like the book has come and gone, but it hasn’t. (At least, not yet.) A few quick updates:

1. There are still a pair of public events on the calendar. Next Tuesday in Washington D.C., I’ll be reading from the book and talking about the future of cities at the National Building Museum (6:30 - 8 PM; admission required). Then, on October 20, I’ll be participating in a discussion about sustainable urban transport at the Asia Society in New York.

2. Writing for Fast Company, Michael Valkevich compares the aerotropolis to Lando Calrissian’s Cloud City and asks whether airport cities can ever be real places. Personally, I’m skeptical; but he’s not.

3. And then there’s this.

We had a first, of sorts, at last week’s TEDxUIllinois — the first TED Talk delivered by a fictional Twitter character. The character in question was @Wise_Kaplan, the brainchild of former New York Observer editors Jim Windolf and Peter Stevenson, who modeled him (and his twin @Cranky_Kaplan) on their former boss, legendary newspaper editor Peter Kaplan (who may or may not be tweeting himself under @Real_Kaplan… and @Kaplan_Premium). Confused? Don’t be.

Wise and Cranky were an inside joke for New York media reporters until Slate verified their creators’ idenities in a story last year. What started as a diversion blossomed into a pair of endless picaresques told in 140-character installments: 

Wise and Cranky are the children of a lost New York. From breakfast until deep into the night, they travel back and forth between the city and the bedroom community of Larchmont, N.Y., charting a path among Manhattan’s decaying cultural landmarks and greasy-spoon diners. Their heroes are the ghosts of jazz greats, long-dead stylists, and midcentury entertainers. In another time, Wise Kaplan and his démodé tastes might have found a home in the pages of a dime novel: The character is self-possessed but chronically bemused, the sort of guy who has just re-emerged into the world after decades in his own head. Stevenson and Windolf describe him as “all anxiety.”

Over the summer, an anxious Wise lamented publicly that he had never received a major award or invited to give a TED Talk. So I invited him to speak at TEDxUIllinois, naturally. Windolf and Stevenson were game, and we settled on one of Wise’s recurring motifs — “Lessons in Journalism,” a rapid-fire series of tweets espousing hilariously cynical advice (“An easy way to become an online star is to make like the Internet™ is beneath you”) and non sequiturs (“Hire a guy to slip drugs into your coffee every morning”). We arranged that Wise would address the crowd live, “in-person.” The audience reaction was… puzzled.

(The complete @Wise_Kaplan TED Talk is after the jump.)

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