Adam Greenfield’s life experiences give him a unique perspective on the converging challenges presently confronting humanity, in a situation he refers to as “the Long Emergency.”
Having worked in the technology sector for over two decades — including stints at Nokia and the legendary early Web consultancy Razorfish, as well as his own practice Urbanscale — he has direct insight into what it takes to design, build, deliver and deploy new digital technologies at scale.
He’s leveraged this insight in a series of prescient and groundbreaking books, from 2006’s Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, which offered design guidelines for what later became known as “the internet of things,” to 2017’s Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, which explored the social impact of augmented and virtual reality (the “metaverse”), cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies more broadly, 3D printing and digital fabrication, autonomous vehicles, workplace automation and artificial intelligence.
And for the past ten years, as Senior Urban Fellow at the LSE Cities center of the London School of Economics, instructor in urban design at Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and independent researcher, he’s explored what all of this means for cities, city life and citizens, as a sharp critic of the “smart city” concept and strong advocate for an emerging urban design vocabulary suited for an age of permanent climate chaos.
As ecological disruption, resource wars and mass population movement threaten the ability of our urban environments to support high-complexity human civilization, few thinkers are better placed to help us imagine what it will take to endure — and to thrive — amidst the enduringly difficult circumstances of the mid-21st century.
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