When you hear the word Google, you first associate it with search. When you disagree with someone over a fact, Google it. You want to know where to go on vacation, Google it. You want to know what a company does, Google it.
To date, the only company to ever come out of X and spun out into a separate entity is Flux. I spoke with Jen Carlile, a co-founder of Flux, who initially joined Google as a software engineer in 2010.
The housing crisis
The Industrial Revolution caused massive migrations from the countryside to cities where factories were located. The result of these massive migrations? By 1900, 14 per cent of the world’s population was living in cities. In 1950, that number went up to 30 per cent. And then in 2008, for the first time in the history of the world, the percentage of people living in cities equalled the percentage of people who lived outside of them.
Here’s where it gets interesting. As of 2016, there are 7.4 billion people on the planet. 2.2 billion people are expected to join us by 2050, and 90 per cent of this growth is expected to take place in cities.
It’s really hard to make sense of what the building challenge will look like to house 2 billion people. Jen delivered a keynote address in 2015 at the Design Modeling Symposium in Copenhagen where she suggested that we visualize this population problem by considering the number of new buildings we need to house them.
This is an excerpt from the article published on Tech in Asia. You can read the full article here