Q It’s almost five years since your book, Aerotropolis, was published. Does its forecast of a world of urbanisation built around airports as central transportation hubs still hold true?
A I think air travel matters more than ever. When the latest rankings for airports came out last year we saw six or seven per cent growth rates in Asia-Pacific and around the world. The notion of air travel connecting the world and the notion that the world is speeding up rather than slowing down is still valid. I think people are reaching out and reaching further than they have before.

Q With more than half the world’s population living in cities, urbanisation is the future. In your opinion what are the main transportation issues this raises?
A The first question is what is a city for? Cities are not the sum of their roads
or infrastructure. The most interesting thinking I’ve seen recently comes from some physicists, who are positing
the idea that cities are essentially stars and instead of the sun, where you’re compressing hydrogen into helium, you are taking social networks of people, compressing them in time and space and what comes out is ideas, quality of life, productivity, everything we need to advance human civilisation.

Q So the question is what infrastructure do we need to compress those people in space and time?
That’s the trouble we’re having now with the automobile paradigm. We are reaching physical limits on how dense we can make the cores. I think when it comes to cities we need to upgrade transit, make them more walkable. I think we need to change the way we live and work. Buildings need to become more multi-use; the typical office building is 40 per cent empty at any given moment. That’s crazy.

Q All the indicators point towards the coming decades being a period of enormous transition in the world of the automobile. Are we heading towards cities predicated on on-demand transportation?
A Totally. That’s the great revolution with the smart phone. We now have the ability to not only summon mobility on-demand but the data that comes off the back end of that allows us to coordinate formerly individually private vehicles on scales we could never previously imagine. We already know, for example, that with Uber and Lyft, a quarter of their journeys in the San Francisco peninsula or Los Angeles are to metro or train stations. We’re seeing the extension of transit that way. It will be interesting to see how people choose to enrol their cars in car-sharing programmes, how they make them available to others, how they choose to use mobility services such as Uber. I think we’re going to start to see a revolution in the car not just being a private vehicle but a service I call when I need it. That’s quite the cultural shift.

Q Is there an element of wishful thinking in the world of autonomous vehicles when you consider the possible infrastructural changes that may need to be made and the possible difficulties in implementing operational standards?
A The automobile as we know it is highly standardised by all sorts of international agencies. Computing operates on a completely different paradigm, where you fight over standards, where companies clash until one can muscle the other
into finally submitting. Imagine your car doing that at 90km/h, where your car is trying negotiate with another car over a protocol that only half works.
There is a lot of work that needs to be done on how cars are going to talk to each other. All the competing vehicle manufacturers are going to want their own versions, with their own safety tolerances and government is way behind on negotiating open standards for this. Really we should have one standard and it should be the equivalent of TCP/IP for autonomous cars, but no, I think we’re going to thrash it out for a while first.