Explore every episode of the podcast Challenger Cities

Challenger Cities EP105: Coming to Play with the Downtown Denver Partnership

Kourtny Garrett, Gretchen Hollrah and Aisha Ahmad-Post were among 71 Denver leaders who spent 48 hours in Montréal this year, studying how a city makes vibrant neighbourhoods through play. On their last morning, while I ran a workshop with the group, Greg Lindsay borrowed the microphone and pulled the three of them aside.

Kourtny, CEO of the Downtown Denver Partnership, explains why play became the headline of Denver's new downtown plan, and why her truest measure of success, after all the foot traffic data, is watching people's faces. "It's simply a feeling." Gretchen, executive director of Denver Arts & Venues, runs a city department that pays its own way through Red Rocks concerts and touring Broadway, which is how Greg came to call her the Robert Moses of the arts. "I would prefer to be from Toronto and the Jane Jacobs, but I am an American, so I guess I'm stuck with Robert Moses." Aisha, executive director of the Newman Center for the Performing Arts, talks about why cities default to public art, and what it takes to make performance happen again and again.

In between, Greg and I compare notes on the workshop, honest pilots, and a 32-foot glowing-eyed blue horse called Blucifer.

In this episode:

• Downtown as a venue, and where a city can start to bend the rules
• What Montréal puts in the ground so organisers pay for the programme instead of the plumbing
• "Play is a tool, but the outcome is connection."
• Why public art gets a 1% budget and repeat performance gets nothing
• Would a forty-year-old do this without feeling stupid?
• How a once-creepy airport sculpture became a festival name nobody commissioned
• Aisha's smallest thing: "Once you finally get through that first chance, the next time it's gonna be easier and easier until it becomes tradition and ritual."

Greg, Lev Kushner, Jasmine Palardy and I will be in Denver on 5 and 6 November to turn all of this into something the city can go and do. If you're in Denver, we'd like to see you there.

Challenger Cities EP104: Just Doing Our Thing with @JamesinSerbia

James, the Brit behind the Instagram account jamesinserbia, thinks of the UK as a cul-de-sac. "You kind of don't really notice that there's anything going on at the end of the road." After five years in Italy, ski seasons across the Alps and one brutal winter in Andorra, he flew to Serbia with one suitcase, a ski bag and his laptop. Within eight days he had an apartment in Novi Sad, a lawyer and the internet installed.

We talk about what he found there: a country that doesn't pretend to be anywhere else. James explains inat, the Serbian word for "the more you tell me not to do something, the more I'm gonna do it", and why it might be the closest thing to a national Challenger mindset. We get into Serbia's marketing problem, Europe's borrowed identities, a map trick best done over rakija, and why so many Britons are sliding into his DMs asking whether Serbia really works.

And there's Koptr, a coffee shop built around a seventies Soviet troop helicopter in a Novi Sad warehouse. "If it was anywhere else in the world, it wouldn't be allowed." The same permissive culture that let it happen may now let it vanish for a property deal, which led James to the smallest possible thing he could do about it.

In this episode:

• Why Britain can feel like a cul-de-sac once you've left it
• Inat, and confidence in who you are, flaws included
• Places cosplaying as western Europe, and one that won't
• Permission, and why an owner's judgement should count for something
• Being a guest, and joining in instead of trying to change things
• James's advice if you're curious: "Go to Belgrade, join in for a few days, and just see if you like it because you'll know very quickly."

Find James on Instagram at @jamesinserbia.

Airports can anxiety machines dressed up in statement architecture. So how do you design for delight in the different modes people turn up in, while building something designed to last decades?

Chris Belisle cut his teeth on airports in Asia in the mid-2000s, when the growth was so relentless that a firm would hand an entire airport to a designer barely out of school and tell him to get on with it. Think Hong Kong, India, the Philippines etc. I assume most architects spend their twenties detailing stairwells, so that’s quite the apprenticeship, and it shows in how he talks about terminals through the course of this conversation as much more than big buildings.

Philip Galway-Witham is, in his own words, a fellow geographically confused Brit, which makes two of us in this chat. He’s a Resilience Leader for Gensler’s Northeast region, which I find a rather interesting title, because Gensler use that term ‘resilience’ where most firms probably still say ‘sustainability’. Capital-S Sustainability is a badge that doesn’t really say what it was a few years ago. You can’t just bolt some kind of green façade onto a building and lay claim to your sustainability creds in a press release.

Obviously, that is a good thing, we have matured.

Together, Phil and Chris co-lead Gensler’s aviation practice in Canada from Toronto. Gensler being the largest architecture firm on the planet, which means if you’ve flown anywhere lately there’s a fair chance you’ve sat, queued or watched the world go by in something they designed. I’ve spent a decent chunk of my recent working life on the future of stations and airports, so I’m rather pleased we’re doing a proper episode on airports in relation to cities.

Challenger Cities started as an attempt to shake things up in Toronto. So when a municipal lawyer left her partnership to run for mayor, I wanted to hear why.

Laura Dean isn't a politician. She spent her career working out why the city says no, and how to get it to yes. We talk about why Toronto has so many ways to block things and so few to let them happen. We also cover the plans the city still doesn't have, and her positive pitch for a city that's "better, easier and more beautiful". And she has a case for seeing the race as more than a two-horse contest.

https://lauradeanformayor.ca/

A restaurant learns something every night. They hear what people say about a dish, see what comes back on the plate and see the financial impact it has on the books. It's a pretty awesome feedback loop.

But the urban realm doesn't work like that. There is a much longer and less responsive chain at play where the planners, developers, architects, engineers, construction firms, designers, financiers and clients do not have such rapid or sophisticated mechanisms of connection and communication.

An architect can finish their work on a building before moving onto the next project. They don't have the right of return, access to the energy data of the finished project, may well have had the work adjusted in the process and aren't the ones experiencing what it's like to use it.

It's what Bryan Boyer from Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning, University of Michigan and Greg Lindsay, newly installed Urbanist-in-Residence at School of Cities, University of Toronto call 'Chain Drain'.

Think of the handoffs, where an architect might place a window, but a structural engineer needs a column exactly there, and the mechanical engineer needs a drain. One of them will likely win an argument, and the others will adapt. Multiply that by every handoff on every project and you get an industry where each job starts roughly where the last one started, and where value leaks out at every transition.

That matters as US construction productivity has fallen something like ~30% since 1970, while productivity in the wider economy more than doubled. We are asking this sector to deliver housing, climate adaptation and the retrofit of trillions in stranded assets. That's a big ask when over the last half century, it's in some ways getting worse at building things in the first place.

It's a properly good paper that I hope will bring the Challenger mindset to the people tasked with designing, planning, making, building and operating Cities and Place.

Find the paper in full here: https://www.bryanboyer.com/chaindrain/

Challenger Cities Summary: https://challengercities.substack.com/p/challenger-cities-ep101-chain-drain

This is the 100th episode of Challenger Cities. A bit of a milestone right? This thing started as an attempt to explore and make a difference specifically in Toronto, but early on took a bit of a turn to have conversations about cities and infrastructure that didn't seem to be happening anywhere else …

… the ones that fall between planners, architects, engineers, economists and what ‘regular’ people want in cities. I didn't expect to still be at it, let alone to have talked my way through 100 guests to get here.

I think Bent Flyvbjerg makes a fitting person to mark the occasion, having spent a career exploring perhaps one of the most consequential questions in the business of cities. How big things actually get done? And so often they aren't?

---

At a time when so many cities and nations are discussing their need for new infrastructure, they are also often arguing over the cost and time required to build it. Bent, with Dan Gardner, pretty much wrote the book on why so many big infrastructure projects end up being so much more expensive than they should have been.

We get into some of the principles in the book, along with some of what's missing when these big projects start out.

His blunt takeaway after the data is that the biggest risk is ourselves as we systematically underestimate risk and assume our project is the exception. The remedy is to be a “realistic optimist,” keep a learning mindset and treat innovation as coming from learning. The episode frames this as fitting the podcast’s broader mission of examining how cities and infrastructure actually get built.

Here's to the next 100 episodes!

What does a city need in order for culture to happen? Venues are the easy answer, and the least complete one.

Jacquelyn West is a cultural industries strategist based in Montréal, by way of Toronto, where she spent much of her career working with artists, festivals and creative organisations. She watched the same cycle run several times over: artists move into a cheap neighbourhood, the neighbourhood becomes desirable, and the people who made it desirable can no longer afford to be there.

In this episode she and Iain Montgomery get into the parts of cultural infrastructure that rarely make a capital plan. Affordable creative workspace and production capacity. Third spaces where nobody has to buy anything. And governance, which decides whether any of the rest of it works.

They also get into the money. Jacquelyn explains why the financing system produces the same four ground-floor tenants in every new podium, and what Toronto learned when it compelled developers to fund public art without building any stewardship around the requirement.

Topics include the professionalisation of placemaking, where bottom up meets top down, Esplanade Tranquille as a third space that works, Montréal's idea of cohabitation in public space, why "play" is a hard word to fund, and how cycling infrastructure expands the cultural catchment of a city.

05:20 — What cultural infrastructure actually includes

07:52 — Culture needs places to be made, seen and belong

10:07 — Why the building is rarely the whole answer

14:26 — Placemaking, professionalised

18:06 — Where bottom up meets top down

22:41 — Empty community centres and overwhelmed small ones

36:07 — Culture as an infrastructure advantage

36:48 — Why the anchor leases decide the ground floor

38:26 — Toronto's public art mandates and what went wrong

43:02 — Programming, stewardship and Esplanade Tranquille

47:23 — Cohabitation, control and care

51:34 — Play, and why it's hard to fund

56:59 — Cycling and the cultural catchment of a city

1:01:34 — The smallest possible thing: count who's leaving

https://challengercities.substack.com/p/challenger-cities-ep99-bottom-up

Most episodes of Challenger Cities are a conversation with a guest. This one isn't. Shortly after publishing our whitepaper The Welcome Mat, a few listeners joined a live session to stress test the thinking and bring their own — which is a rather Challenger way of doing it, and only really possible when you can have Tokyo, Boston, Toronto and London in the same room.

Greg Dyson joins from Thailand, late at night, to explain why most Japanese stations are visually drab and work anyway: wayfinding that never changes, platforms that never move, and amenity provided in inverse proportion to frequency. Three-minute trains, nowhere to sit. Hourly trains, a heated waiting room. Which is roughly the opposite of how we do it.

Seth Hardy on reducing friction and increasing attachment, and the burger place in Copenhagen his family return to on every trip. Why familiarity beats spectacle, and why two of the most profitable Greggs in Britain are where they are.

John Ozimec asks the hard one: Oakville GO, ten thousand people a day, four thousand parking spaces, being redesigned right now by people who've already decided nobody wants to be there. Charles Finley on why that persists — engineers doing engineering, architects doing architects, and nobody talking to anybody — and Greg on who actually owns the land around a station and gets to keep the value a good one creates.

Also: what happens when an operator makes its stations too comfortable, why transit-oriented development might be the wrong way round, and Roundtree Post.

The Anxiety Machine: https://challengercities.substack.com/p/the-anxiety-machine

To being Challengers.

I met Stratton Townley at the Waterworks Food Hall in Toronto, a couple of hours before it opens, with ten or twelve people sat about with coffees and nobody hovering to work out whether they intended to spend anything.

Stratton is at Woodcliffe Landmark Properties, a small, private, family-run developer that has been on the same Toronto street for thirty years. His stepfather founded it; his mother runs it. He spent his first decade in brokerage and investment sales avoiding the family business entirely, on the strength of one job interview where he was told not to take the job.

The thirty years is what this episode is really about. Woodcliffe kept Waterworks rather than registering the condos and moving on, which turned a real estate landlord into something closer to a hospitality operator — and gave them a feedback loop most developers never get.

We talk about what that does to the design of the next building, why the city won't let him cut the grass in the park next door, heated pavements in Summerhill, silos in careers and buildings and government, and a Toronto waterfront that nobody will commit to beyond an electoral cycle.

He is born and raised in Toronto, committed to it, and an optimist — which makes him better company on the city's problems than most.

LINKS

Woodcliffe Landmark Properties — https://www.woodcliffe.ca

Waterworks Food Hall — https://waterworksfoodhall.com

Shops of Summerhill — https://www.woodcliffe.ca/portfolio/shops-of-summerhill

Read the write-up: https://challengercities.substack.com/publish/post/211069995

Challenger Cities — https://challengercities.substack.com

Copenhagen is Jan Gehl's city. So it's a bit of a jolt to hear someone who lives and works there admit that nobody has ever really been able to say what a "human-centric city" actually is.

That's Jakob Norman-Hansen. Along with Ann-Britt Elvin Andersen, he's spent about a decade at BLOXHUB explaining Copenhagen to visiting delegations — and watching most of them decide it could never work back home. Neither of them came to urbanism the usual way. Ann-Britt arrived through media and innovation, including a spell as an editor-in-chief in Japan. Jakob thought he'd spend his career in international development and started with two years in Ethiopia. Which might be exactly why they've gone after the one thing the profession has no filing cabinet for. As Ann-Britt puts it, loneliness doesn't normally land on an architect's desk, or an engineer's desk, or even a planner's desk for that matter.

Their argument is that proximity was never doing the connecting. What counts is how much time we actually share, and whether we feel accepted and seen.

In this episode: why the convenience economy is also a disconnection economy, and whether we've all been eating fast food for the brain. What happens when you point the attention economy at metro design. Why the benches and the barbecue never reach the people they're meant for, and how chronic loneliness changes the way you read a room. Why "lots of people turned up" is a lousy way to judge a public space. What a bridge built out into the water says about fixing your own mistakes. And why a delegation from Colombia asked the sharpest question anyone has put to them about liveability.

Plus a turn few Copenhagen conversations take — both guests being properly rude about their own city. Too planned. Too alike. And on course to price out their own children.

This is a bumper episode where we bring you 4 guests that share the privilege of working for an awesome agency called Mosaic. And while yes, Mosaic did pay me to speak at their team offsite at a Cineplex earlier in the year, that's not why we're making this podcast.

We're doing it because I loved what they did after I spoke. Several people from the team were invited to share what they do with their passions in their 5-9 hours, i.e. outside of work.

You're going to hear from Mo, who has a much sunnier disposition on Toronto than I. We'll even get into a bit of an agreeable disagreement. Where we do see eye to eye is we need more of a mindset for hospitality in urbanism. Then you're hear from Laura who will share her story of arriving in Canada, finding a great job at Mosaic and the connections required to make it real. She now pays it back too, solving a massive challenge in Canada as many people not from here need better opportunities. And lastly, we'll get into it with Nick who has created one of the coolest independent culture spaces in the city.

As possible the world's most eclectic urbanism podcast, this is a properly eclectic episode!

Check the Substack for various links.

https://challengercities.substack.com/p/challenger-cities-ep95-the-5-to-9

https://www.mosaic.com/

https://threehorses.ca/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/notworking-to-networking/?originalSubdomain=ca

John V Willshire is the third corner of a loose triptych of British innovation-strategy types I can never quite give a single job title. He runs Smithery, carries a little yellow card called an obliquoscope for teaching himself to notice things, and has a gift for the metaphor that reframes everything. In this case, swapping the language of levers and control for gardening where you can't tell a plant what to do, you can only offer it a trellis and see what climbs.

We get from there to Sussex, its improbable 2006-vintage "ancient" charter, and We Wunt Be Druv, a game about refusing the devolution you're handed and designing one that works round here instead. It's really a conversation about agency; why you only notice what you feel you could act on, why organisations don't care about things but people do, and why the smallest possible thing of a homemade game played in Thomas Paine's front room might be how the biggest possible future actually starts.

And this is the piece that kicked off our conversation: https://buttondown.com/artefacts/archive/artefact-263/

You cannot build a humane, serendipitous city with teams who are transactional, risk-averse and don't really know themselves. It's not my usual territory, and it's a tough argument to have with the logical, rational, "serious" types who populate engineering, economics and urbanism — but I've been converted. The unlikely converters are Florence Okin and Sam Cohen, who run a workshop called Know Thyself under their business The Twenty Six Collective, and who arrive at cities from completely outside the usual circles: the talent side of startups and the full entrepreneurial tour, plus an apprenticeship under two Dutch master coaches. Their premise, once you follow it through, is uncomfortable for our industry. Cold teams build cold places.

The conversation runs from a survey that found people drowning in success and starved of fulfilment, through Sam's reframe of spirituality as "an antidote to control" — which stops being woo the moment you notice our whole profession is built on control and nobody's trained to hold value they can't yet measure — to the idea of a "spiritual board of directors" in rooms that currently have economists, engineers and everyone except the person responsible for why a place will be loved rather than merely used. Flo names the wound from the talent side: the waste of human potential she watched inside successful companies, brilliant people ground down into something far smaller than what they've got. It connects, in the end, to a lot of what guests keep circling on this podcast — Richard Fisher's monodisciplinary confidence, the human proposition that goes undesigned — only worked one layer deeper, inside the people doing the building.

The through-line is that the maker is the medium: you can't design warm, human places with people who've been trained out of being warm and human themselves. As ever, we land on the biggest possible future — Flo's vision of helping people look inward rather than outsource the answers — and the smallest possible thing, Sam's deceptively tiny instruction to stop making if-then statements and just step forward. Whether you build railways, run a team, or just recognise yourself in the seven-figure misery, this one's worth your time. Then go and try it on yourself.

https://knowthyself.onrender.com/

Giacomo Biraghi has spent fifteen years and two thousand interviews trying to answer one question: is there really a distinctive European way of making a city? His answer, after all that fieldwork, is a cheerful and slightly heretical no — what actually runs the modern city, he reckons, is a global, real-estate-driven standard, and we should be a little more cynical about the green, healthy, peaceful renderings we keep selling ourselves. This is a man who's built his whole life around cities and stays ahead of the curve by avoiding urbanists — going out of the bubble to talk to the venture capitalists and technologists who are quietly deciding what our streets and buildings become, whether or not the word "city" appears anywhere in their job title.

We get into why Italy is secretly the master of sprawl rather than the piazza (and what the rest of us should be hiring Italians to teach us), why the future of cities is being written in Zurich and Stockholm rather than at the planning conference, and the idea that gives the episode its title: that cities are mental weapons, and the real work is citizen-making, not city-making. You don't need a big budget or an important title to change your patch of the world — you need to actually show up for the place you live. It's one of my favourite conversations of the series so far. Have a listen, and if it lands, come and be utopian with us in Turin this October.

In this spirit of being the world's most eclectic podcast about cities and places, this episode is a bit random. Which is good, because it's with Matt Ballantine and he's written a book, called Random with Nick Drage.

Some might say 120 short stories that can be shuffled into any order isn't actually a book, but I read it as one, and it's excellent. Plus many of the stories are about cities, places and people in them.

In a world where we spend so much time filtering out opportunities for luck, serendipity or just the unplanned ... this is a conversation that is very important for dragging people that feel everything can be perfectly zoned or planned, back into the real world.

This is an episode about a big, ambitious idea. Which is why people are quick to label it as crazy. But Britain, like many developed nations has a housing crisis. The country simply doesn't build enough good homes for the people who want to live there, and incremental approaches are going to solve for it.

So along comes Shiv Malik, a journalist by trade, with an idea for a new city, not too far from Cambridge, becoming a place one million people will call home. Naturally, he's had a lot of scrutiny, but he's steadily winning people over. This conversation explores where the idea came from. why it's needed, the biggest challenges, and the reasons to believe something like this could actually happen.

One of an incoming Prime Minister to consider perhaps!?

This episode is a zinger. Because Gil Penalosa came in ready to talk!

He doesn't hold back as he discussed the issues with Toronto municipal projects, where the city could be amazing but is often found lacking in ambition. We explore ideas from the absolute basics of providing space to walk, why we might want to reframe the idea of the NIMBY to the one of the CAVE person - Citizens Against Virtually Everything!, and how rather than debating an idea to death ... maybe we just try it and see what happens.

As Toronto comes up to the mayoral election, Brad Bradford or Olivia Chow might actually want to pay some attention.

Alicia Pederson went from a Renaissance literature PhD and a two-year stint as an au pair in Florence to becoming one of the best voices on a deceptively simple idea: the courtyard in the middle of apartments.

After watching family friends priced out of Chicago one by one - not because they disliked the city, but because the only family housing on offer was a million-dollar house with a private yard - she started asking why North America builds apartments as huge, hotel-like buildings when European cities solved this centuries ago. Her answer is the courtyard block with apartments that live like houses, with a front door onto the street and a back door onto a shared green courtyard. It's a housing idea that's genuinely lovable, demonstrably doable and cheaper to build ... and, as we get into, almost entirely illegal to build in many North American cities.

In this conversation we dig into why a shared courtyard somehow feels more private than a fenced backyard, why your kids don't actually want a yard (they want friends to play with), and why the amenity-stuffed apartment building — gym, dog wash, rooftop — is starving the very neighbourhood that should be the amenity. Alicia and Iain make the case that density is a feeling before it's a number, that the cities which kept their apartments are the ones that proved resilient, and that the fix isn't masterplanning but handing cities back their oldest tool: lay the streets, cut the right parcels, and let a hundred small builders fill them in.

We also push on where it's hardest — the cold-start problem, who governs the shared space, the parking question — but suspect you will come away convinced this is a concept every Challenger City should be looking at as it reimagines the home, the street and the shape of a life.

Canada is about to spend more on transit and rail than the oil sands are worth, and it's doing it without a national rulebook, a training pipeline or much recent memory of how to build well. So is that a crisis, or the best shot a country has ever had at becoming a genuine transit Challenger? This episode is a double act with two people who think about this for a living.

Mark Salsberg is co-founder of TRACCS (the Transit Rail Association for Canadian Contractors, Maintainers, Operators and Standards), and his mission is the unglamorous connective tissue Canada skipped: standards, training, and procurement assurance. Jonathan English leads Infrastory Insights, holds a doctorate in urban planning from Columbia, was previously policy director at the Toronto Region Board of Trade, and the person who reminds us of the "Toronto Model" ... the heretical idea that good service is what actually drives transit demand, not the other way round.

It starts a little dry and then gets properly good. We get into why Canada is one of the most expensive places on earth to build, why benchmarking against the United States ("the worst in the developed world," per Jonathan) imports all the wrong lessons, and why we keep trying to force passenger rail into a freight-shaped hole. But this isn't a kicking. There's a real opportunity buried in here for Canada acting as a bridge between a mature-but-complacent Europe and a car-choked North America that badly needs another way for its cities to grow.

What we get into:

• The three things Canada never built: standards, training, procurement assurance
• Why we "learn bad lessons" and never close the loop on projects
• The one genuinely remarkable thing Toronto did after the war — and still benefits from
• Infrastructure vs service, and why Canada has both problems
• "Is this an engineering problem, or a phone-call problem?"
• Bringing sexy back to transit: careers, signal engineers, and the passion the industry side-eyes
• The biggest possible future and the smallest possible thing — including just running the buses more often

Good new Challenger Cities episode today, all about autonomous vehicles and the bit that our guest, Bern Grush, thinks cities need to be thinking about more now.

Like them or not, robotaxis are coming to cities. And for all the spectacular technology that helps cars drive themselves, the have some meaty challenges ahead.

One of them being what happens when they interact with the curb. We've already seen how fleets of autonomous cars can create new forms of congestion, and we've seen tragic accidents come about as people open doors into the likes of passing cyclists.

A few years ago I was involved in a project for a big tech firm looking at this, but it was rather quickly mothballed as big automotive clients shooed them away from it.

The hardest part though was the orchestration layer between the operators of autonomous vehicles (think the ridehailing firms minus drivers) and deliveries that are seeking to move away from having a human at the wheel too. It effectively means redesigning who can stop where, when, for how long, and normally monetising it in the same way on-street parking is done today.

So if you want to stop on a busy road to pickup/dropoff ... well you're going to pay for that. And you might be incentivised to do so somewhere quieter, or even let that tempt you towards public transport instead.

We have finite space in urban areas, so we're going to need to be clever to make sure autonomous driving doesn't choke the city.

Canada is, well might be, building a high speed train. At long last after 50 odd years of talking about doing so. But concerningly, there is much negative noise around the project as it seems it might not really be learning the lessons for how successful projects have been delivered elsewhere, and where projects for building fast trains have gone wrong.

This podcast is with Michael Schabas, a Canadian, who knows all about how to make these projects successful. It's a really honest and open conversation about how to build HSR, what Canada is missing just now, and how we can hopefully influence Alto to ensure we actually learn from how it's been done elsewhere.

If you like the idea of HSR, or even if you actually think it's a bad idea, well you should probably listen to this episode and get a feel for yourself.

Michael's work is also available to be found here: https://www.highspeedrailcanada.com/p/all-canadian-hsr-studies.html

Two risk-management cultures looking at each other across a table, each waiting for the other to move. That's rail's relationship with venture capital. Iain talks to Richard Fisher, founder of Future Travel Studio, about why nobody would fund his Dream Suite flatbed seat for trains, even after InnovateUK had backed it and operators had tested it.

About rail's proposition gap, the incumbents who monetise complexity rather than solve it, and why every discipline in the chain can be doing its job correctly while the sector as a whole still can't move. Plus what a transatlantic venture studio is trying to build instead.

This is a lovely episode with Thomas Ableman (a returning guest!) that is mostly about an amazing project he and a few volunteers recently secured funding to go and deliver called Mini Switzerland in the Derbyshire hills.

We often hear about how it's not possible to deliver high quality public transport because there simply aren't enough people to make it worthwhile. That makes a lot of people feel quite clever in saying no to it. But then go an explain how Switzerland works then.

If a nation that has some of the most challenging geography, and not particularly huge numbers of people, can deliver frequent, integrated, efficient and enjoyable transport to villages with as little as 300 people half-way up a mountain ... then I don't think we've got much excuse in the UK, US and Canada.

We also talk quite a lot about trams, and how despite me really not being a fan of Andy Burnham, the fact a man that is probably best known for trams and yellow buses actually might make them an important topic for Westminster government to take more interest in.

One of the best people I met last year was Samantha Peart. We were in Copenhagen for a few days and of our fellows group, I have to say she asked the best questions. She’s also exceptionally good at getting you to question your assumptions or reflect on why you might think what you’re thinking.

And that really comes through in this conversation, with real examples that have had a massive impact on projects and places.

I’m such a fan of hers, that I even let her destroy the magic wand question. Because she makes an excellent point about it.

So if you’re involved in any sort of urbanism, placemaking or infrastructure project. This really is one you need to have a listen to.

If you liked our episode with Ilana Altman about The Bentway, then you'll like this one with Ken Greenberg, because he's part of that origin story. Ken is a legend in Toronto urbanism circles, as someone who did pioneering work in his early career in the city and then took it to the likes of St. Paul and Boston in the US.

We set up this episode to discuss work he's doing around the newly free'd up airport lands in Pickering, ON and his vision to turn this into a new part of the Rouge National Urban Park.

It's a conversation that we hope can breathe life and optimism into the Toronto urban discourse, as many of the components of what Challenger Cities need is right there. It just needs unleashing.

This is a bit of a different episode because we're talking about what cities are made of, rather than how we make our cities.

I had the pleasure of meeting Saurabh Mangla on a day where I was hot, tired and just wanted a beer. But getting the story of his materials lab and how he's working to explore how cities use their materials more effectively, efficiently and in many ways, delightfully is a good reviver.

We talk about Singapore, India and how material resources can be an excellent way for cities to demonstrate their Challenger mindset.

Gerald Babel-Sutter is the founder of Urban Future, a 14-year-old event that has grown from a workshop for ten city officials in Graz to a gathering of 2,000 people from 290 cities in 48 countries. The premise hasn't changed: get the actual project managers in a room, not the communications directors, and ask them to talk honestly about what went wrong.

In this conversation we cover how a frustrated city official's complaint over a beer became the founding logic of one of Europe's most distinctive urbanism events, why Oslo's deputy mayor told a room full of city planners to never call anything a car-free city centre, what Helsingborg's annual fuck-up of the year award reveals about institutional culture change, and why Istanbul — four religions, sixteen million people, a more open visa regime — is where Urban Future is heading in April 2027.

Gerald also makes a case that the knowledge flows in urbanism run almost entirely in the wrong direction, and that who gets a visa to attend whose conference is one of the most consequential questions in the field that nobody is talking about.

https://urban-future.org/

Jen Angel thinks Canada is closer to a moment of triumph in how it builds than it has been in her lifetime. The conditions are there. What's missing is enough people in positions of authority with the permission to say yes.

Jen leads Evergreen, the national organisation behind the Brick Works in Toronto and a portfolio of public space projects across the country — from school grounds transformations in Halton and Winnipeg, to a Mi'kmaq Native Friendship Centre-led project in Halifax, to the Toronto ravines programme. Before Evergreen, she ran a Nova Scotia crown corporation that built the Halifax Waterfront, Peggy's Cove and Lunenburg Waterfront, alongside rural broadband and innovation hubs. She also sits on the Canadian Infrastructure Council, the ministerial-appointed arm's-length body writing Canada's first national infrastructure assessment.

In this episode we get into:

— Why "it's not that much harder to build a good one than a crappy one" might be the most damning line about Canadian infrastructure this year

— The permission problem: why no has become the safe answer across our institutions, and what it costs us

— Multi-benefit projects, and why our funding model is almost institutionally incapable of recognising them as legible

— Why this particular moment — tariffs, geopolitical pressure, a public mood that actually wants things to be tried — might be a generational opportunity

— What the East Coast knows about resilience that the rest of the country keeps forgetting

— The Evergreen Conference at the Brick Works, May 6–7, theme: Cities Bursting with Life

Alex Bozikovic is the architecture critic for the Globe and Mail, which in practice means he writes about everything from housing politics to the public realm to the quiet cultural erosion that happens when a city stops expecting much of itself. In this episode, Iain and Alex dig into why Toronto ... a city with extraordinary people, genuine sophistication and real financial muscle ... keeps failing to act on what it already knows.

We cover the Spadina Expressway and the identity it left behind, the Ontario Science Centre closure and what it reveals about the state of progressive urban politics, the suburbs as the real story of Toronto's diversity, and what a bar in a 1899 attic has to do with the soul of a city. Plus Montreal, Sugar Beach, the Sanaaq Centre, and why the best things in Toronto tend to happen despite the default settings rather than because of them.

Exploring Urban Troubleshooting

In this episode, Heath Gledhill and Tom Shield, founders of GledHill Shield, share their extensive experience navigating complex urban infrastructure projects. They discuss how early decision-making, constraints and collaborative design principles can transform city development. Whether you're an urbanist, engineer, architect, designer or planner, their insights challenge conventional project setups and advocate for more intentional, purposeful city shaping.

Key Topics:

• The importance of framing the core problem before designing solutions
• How constraints foster innovative and effective urban design
• The role of the business case in guiding project decisions and maintaining focus
• Challenges with briefs, approvals and stakeholder engagement in infrastructure projects
• The power of compromise and trade-offs in city development
• Embedding aspiration and community impact through creative public programs
• Cross-disciplinary integration as a necessity for successful urban projects
• The influence of cultural attitudes—Australia, Canada, the UK—on project delivery
• The potential of digital tools and visual artifacts to ground project vision
• Building trust and social license through transparency and stakeholder inclusion
• The value of humility, purpose and intentionality in urban planning

When the cod fishery collapsed in the nineties, Fogo Island lost its economy almost overnight. What came next — slowly, imperfectly and without a guarantee of success — became one of the most compelling stories in Canadian community development. Shorefast, the charity behind the Fogo Island Inn, wasn't built on the logic of charity. It was built on the logic of place. Every business decision, from the number of rooms in the inn to where every dollar gets spent, runs through a single question: does this strengthen the local economy?

Tasha Freidus, Shorefast's Director of Education and Entrepreneurship, joins Challenger Cities to unpack the model and what it means beyond Fogo. We talk economic nutrition labels, the forgotten community pillar of the economy, why local banking matters more than most people realise, and how a platform launching this spring is attempting to connect communities across Canada who are quietly doing the same thing, whether they know it or not.

Key Topics

• Fogo Island's history and economic transformation
• The role of Shorefast and Zeta Cobb in community development
• Asset-based community development principles
• Storytelling and social media in community building
• Economic nutrition labels and local spending
• Scaling community models to larger cities
• Challenges in local economic stewardship
• The importance of local banking and finance

Bronwyn Williams is a South African futurist and economist, a combination she'll tell you should not be the oxymoron most people assume it is. She's been doing sharp thinking about cities lately, and this conversation is a good example of why.

We get into South African cities as a lens for the future with Johannesburg and Cape Town as two very different experiments in what happens when you try to impose order on a place that has other ideas. We talk about why the cities that look like they're working are often the most troubling ones of all, and what Dubai, Brazil and China tell us about the limits of control as a city-building strategy.

We also get into AI and the data confidence problem including why shinier models don't mean better assumptions, just more expensive mistakes at greater scale. And we end up at the one question I always ask urban planners that they never quite know how to answer.

Bronwyn is a futurist-economist based in Johannesburg. She works at the intersection of foresight and economic analysis, and has done work with Metropolis and UN-Habitat among others.

Phil Tabah is the co-founder of The Main, Montreal's city magazine, and one of the most thoughtful people working on the question of how cities see themselves and tell their own story.

In this conversation we get into why Phil started The Main at 21 as a Twitter account and what it's become, the publications that used to do this job well and what happened to them, why Montreal is a city that has cracked culture but not confidence, the economics of being a springboard city, and what it would actually take for Montreal to claim what it's already built.

We also get into why the stories worth telling about a city are exactly the ones AI can't tell, and what a refined bullshit meter has to do with good editorial judgment.

The Main is at themain.com. Go subscribe.

Most cities debate their troubled infrastructure to a standstill. Toronto has been arguing about the Gardiner Expressway for decades. Ilana Altman didn't wait for that debate to resolve. As CEO of The Bentway — a public space and cultural platform built underneath Toronto's elevated waterfront highway — she's been proving that you don't have to tear something down, or wait for it to die, to embed new values in it.

In this conversation, Ilana and Iain cover the full arc: how the Bentway went from idea to open in under three years, what it actually takes to run a 24/7 public space underneath a working highway, and why the conservancy model it pioneered is still largely foreign to Canadian cities. They get into the practical constraints — maintenance access, lighting limits, the challenge of food and beverage on a linear site — and what those constraints have forced the team to do creatively. Including turning highway maintenance equipment into community mascots.

But the deeper conversation is about civic joy as a strategy. The Bentway's Dominoes project — 2.7 kilometres of oversized dominoes run through Toronto streets by 300 volunteers — became one of the city's most shared moments in recent memory. Ilana traces what that kind of project actually does: not just entertain, but rebuild the connective tissue of a city that's been losing its volunteers, its optimism, and its willingness to celebrate what it's accomplished.

With FIFA FanFest coming to the Bentway this summer and the full seven-kilometre Under Gardiner Public Realm Plan now approved by council, the window to get the rest of the corridor right is open. Ilana is clear-eyed about how short that window is.

In this episode:

• How the Bentway went from philanthropic idea to open public space in under three years
• What makes it genuinely different from the High Line and other post-industrial urban renewal projects
• The conservancy model and why it's still novel in Canada
• Shade as a climate virtue — and how the Bentway reframed it
• The Boom Buddies: turning maintenance constraints into public education
• Why volunteerism in Toronto is down 30% and what Dominoes did about it
• The urgency of the eastern Gardiner corridor and the window that's closing
• Toronto's self-confidence problem — and what it would take to fall back in love with the city

We have spent a lot of time on the podcast talking about physical cities as streets, buildings and the spaces between them. What we perhaps don't talk about enough is the digital layer underneath all of it, and how badly most cities are fumbling it. This week's guest has spent the last decade thinking about almost nothing else.

Alistair Croll runs FWD50, perhaps the biggest gathering of digital first public servants in the world. He also wrote the book on lean analytics, literally, with Ben Yoskovitz. And last year he published Just Evil Enough with Emily Ross, which is about recognising the systems you're inside and getting them to behave in ways their creators didn't intend. As it turns out, that's a pretty useful instinct when you're trying to drag government into the 21st century.

We talked about why digital government is slow ... and it's not the reason most people think, about what AI is about to do to the relationship between citizens and the state and why cities need to start thinking a lot weirder than they currently do.

Basically if you're into cities as one of the original forms of artificial intelligence more than you are the built environment, this is the conversation for you.

Anson Kwok has spent fourteen years building Canada's tallest tower at the foot of Yonge Street. As VP of Sales and Marketing at Pinnacle International, he's had a front row seat to how Toronto has transformed from a city of downtown parking lots to one of the most dense urban skylines in North America. We talk about what it actually takes to build a vertical city inside a city that wasn't designed for one, why the rules written for 20-storey buildings don't survive contact with a 106-storey one, and what patience has to do with getting any of it right.

At first glance, SPNKD might look like a BDSM venue. But Paul Meyers real focus is something deeper ... finding connection and creating intimacy.

We explore how intimacy is designed, why many people use kink to avoid connection rather than deepen it, and what the concept of creating an arena in BDSM can teach us about relationships, work and even how cities function.

Along the way we discuss:

• Why Paul created SPNKD after finding most kink venues “tacky dungeons”

• How BDSM spaces deliberately design trust, consent, and emotional safety

• Why many couples visit not because something is broken, but because they want to invest in their relationship

• The idea of the “arena” and what workplaces could learn from it

• Why four hours together changes how people interact

• How cities succeed or fail based on how they enable human interaction

• The difference between technical performance and real connection

This is a conversation about intimacy, but also about architecture, culture and subtle infrastructures that shape how we relate to each other.

In other words: what happens when you design spaces for connection rather than efficiency.

What if the problem with buses isn’t frequency, funding or technology ... but attitude?

In this episode, we're in person with Ray Stenning, founder of Best Impressions and arguably the most prolific bus livery designer in the world. For more than 40 years, Ray has been quietly reshaping how buses look, feel and function across the UK — from iconic interurban routes like the X43 and the 36 to countless urban fleets most people ride without ever knowing who shaped them.

But this isn’t a conversation about paint schemes.

It’s a conversation about dignity.

Ray argues that every rattling panel, every hard plastic bench, every grey-on-grey interior sends a message about who the passenger is assumed to be. When we design buses like cattle trucks, people behave accordingly. When we design them like shared public rooms, behaviour shifts.

We explore:

• Why anxiety — not speed — is the real barrier to bus use
• The psychology of reassurance in public transport
• How small design details change passenger behaviour
• Why manufacturers optimise spreadsheets instead of humans
• The hidden importance of noise, seat spacing and eye-lines
• Why drivers are always “on stage”
• The missed opportunity of electric buses that still feel like diesel punishment
• And why a bus is closer to a café than a car

Ray makes a simple but uncomfortable point: buses have been treated as the lowest common denominator because the people who use them are assumed to be the lowest common denominator.

If we want more people on public transport, we don’t just need better timetables. We need better environments. Better hospitality. Better ambition.

Because public transport isn’t just about moving bodies. It’s about how we choose to treat one another in shared space.

Füsun Aydın has spent twelve years reading people from a window in Amsterdam. Cities would be better places if the people planning them had half her instinct.

Füsun is Turkish-born, a trans woman, a former sex worker, and now the madam of a bordello in Amsterdam's red light district. She came to the Netherlands as an asylum seeker at nineteen, having grown up in Istanbul where trans women have no legal discrimination protections and sex work on the street is both common and dangerous. The move wasn't idealism — it was survival arithmetic. In four years in Istanbul she knew fifteen women who were killed. In twelve years in Amsterdam, one. That is what regulation does.

In this conversation we get into what it actually means to work behind a window in a residential neighbourhood — who walks past, how you read them, what the difference is between a local and a tourist, and what the red light district looks like from the inside at ten on a Monday morning versus nine on a Friday night. We talk about sex work as informal social infrastructure, the overlap between care work and sex work, and why the women Füsun has worked with who came from healthcare backgrounds didn't leave because the instinct to care disappeared — they left because the pay wasn't enough. And we get into the fight that matters most to her right now: Amsterdam's proposal to relocate the red light district, what it would actually mean for safety, and what it reveals about who gets listened to when cities make decisions about the places that matter most to the people who live in them.

Füsun also writes about her life and work on Substack - https://substack.com/@fusunaydin, where she brings the same directness and warmth to the page that she brings to this conversation.

In this episode of Challenger Cities, Iain Montgomery is joined by urban designer, filmmaker, and author Mikael Colville-Andersen for a wide-ranging conversation about why cities so often know what works, yet struggle to act on it.

We start with train stations and the importance of arrival, before moving through cycling, design, experimentation, Nordic urbanism, and finally Mikael’s recent work in Ukraine, where urbanism takes on a very different meaning.

We cover:

• Why train stations are still one of the clearest signals of a city’s confidence and priorities
• What cities lose when arrival becomes a throughput problem rather than a civic moment
• Why Copenhagen doesn’t have “cyclists,” only people on bikes
• How removing friction works better than persuading or moralising
• Why design creates behaviour, and why blaming people misses the point
• Paris as an example of what happens when infrastructure forces constant negotiation
• The limits of theory, optimisation, and data-heavy urbanism
• Why pilot projects shouldn’t be scary, and how fear quietly paralyses cities
• How Copenhagen built momentum by testing ideas quickly and publicly
• What the Nordics get right, not as a model to copy, but as a cultural operating system
• Democratic urbanism and designing cities for the five-year-old and the ninety-year-old
• Trust as an overlooked form of infrastructure
• Mikael’s work in Ukraine, where benches, trees, and shade become “urbanism as medicine”
• What peacetime cities should learn from urban interventions built under air-raid sirens
• A provocation: what would happen if one city simply did everything it already knows to be right?

Cities are usually explained through buildings, infrastructure, policy and planning. Food rarely gets a look-in.

Which is strange, because for most of human history, cities existed in the first place because we learned how to feed ourselves at scale. Farming allowed settlement. Settlement allowed specialisation. Specialisation gave us civilisation. Long before zoning codes or masterplans, food decided where cities formed, how power worked, and why empires survived or collapsed.

In this episode, I’m joined by architect and writer Carolyn Steel, whose books Hungry City and Sitopia have quietly reshaped how many people think about food and place. Carolyn doesn’t approach food as lifestyle or culture. She treats it as infrastructure. A lens that connects geography, logistics, politics, economics, health and social life in ways that most urban conversations completely miss.

We talk about cities as food machines, moving from Rome, Paris and London to Chicago, tracing how grain, rivers, canals, railways and refrigeration shaped very different political and economic outcomes. We explore how technology didn’t just speed food systems up, but fundamentally altered them, separating calories from nutrition and convenience from ritual.

A big part of the conversation centres on Carolyn’s idea of exo-evolution: the moment when humans stopped adapting themselves to their environment and instead began redesigning the environment to suit their desires. Cities, it turns out, adapt very quickly. Human biology does not.

We also dig into what was lost when markets gave way to supermarkets, how food was deliberately redesigned to remove human interaction, and why eating together remains one of our most overlooked forms of civic infrastructure.

This is a conversation about food, but it’s really about cities. About how we live together, what we take for granted, and why so many urban problems make more sense once you stop looking at buildings and start following what’s on the plate.

Don’t expect to walk through a supermarket in quite the same way afterwards.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why food is one of the fastest ways to understand how a city actually works • How Rome, Paris and London evolved very different food systems, and why that mattered politically • The role of grain, rivers and trade in shaping empires and revolutions • How Chicago became a global food hub through geography, railways and refrigeration • What exo-evolution means, and why cities adapt faster than human bodies • How ultra-processed food and constant availability changed our relationship with eating • Why markets were once the social heart of cities, and what happened when supermarkets replaced them • Eating together as low-tech civic infrastructure in an increasingly fragmented world

About Carolyn

Carolyn Steel is an architect and writer best known for Hungry City and Sitopia, two influential books exploring the relationship between food, cities and civilisation. Her work examines how food shapes the physical form of cities, the way societies organise themselves, and how modern food systems affect health, culture and everyday life.

Tourism is big business. Cities spend vast sums attracting visitors, promoting landmarks and polishing their image. What they’re far less good at is thinking through the experience of actually being there. How a place works once you arrive. How you move around it. What makes sense, what doesn’t, and what quietly undermines the affection people might otherwise develop for a city.

In this episode, Iain Montgomery is joined by Maryam Siddiqui, a Toronto-based travel and culture journalist who came to travel writing sideways rather than by design. Starting out in PR before moving into business journalism, then arts and culture, Maryam brings a critical, socially minded lens to how cities are marketed, experienced and lived in.

Our conversation treats tourism not as leisure, but as a stress test for cities. We talk about over-tourism and the post-pandemic reckoning it forced into the open. About why cities are often better at selling themselves than explaining how they work. About transit systems that feel like puzzles, wayfinding that assumes insider knowledge, and why visitors notice problems locals have learned to tolerate.

We dig into regenerative tourism, not as a buzzword but as a philosophy rooted in care, stewardship and Indigenous knowledge. If cities invite people in, what responsibility do they have for how those people move, behave and experience the place? And why are metrics like “heads in beds” still crowding out harder questions about emotion, memory and whether people actually want to come back?

Toronto becomes a case study, from the confusion of its transit system to the disconnect between what’s officially promoted and what people actually love. Small theatres. Independent restaurants. Neighbourhood scenes that don’t lend themselves to brochures. As Maryam puts it, “The places that don’t need publicising are the ones with the money to do publicising.”

We also talk about how people really plan trips today, bypassing official channels in favour of TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and word-of-mouth, and what that means for tourism organisations still behaving like broadcasters rather than curators.

We close with Maryam’s magic wand: making it genuinely safe and easy to bike around cities, and pushing tourism organisations to show up for locals, not just visitors. Sponsoring neighbourhood festivals. Supporting cultural life. Making it obvious how tourism contributes to the everyday city.

Because at its best, tourism doesn’t invent affection. It amplifies what’s already there.

Topics covered:

• Tourism as a stress test for cities
• Over-tourism and the post-pandemic shift
• Why cities sell highlights but neglect experience
• Transit, wayfinding and everyday friction
• Regenerative tourism and care for place
• TikTok, trust and the collapse of official travel comms
• Toronto as a case study
• The gap between what cities promote and what people love
• Why tourism organisations need to show up for locals

In this episode of Challenger Cities, we've got Pete Brown, one of the UK’s most thoughtful writers on beer, pubs, and drinking culture.

Pete has spent decades writing about pubs not as lifestyle accessories or nostalgic backdrops, but as places where history, behaviour, economics and everyday social life collide.

We talk about why pubs weren’t designed, branded or planned into existence, but evolved slowly through circumstance, need, and habit. Why that matters for cities obsessed with masterplans and placemaking. And why attempts to “recreate” pub culture so often feel hollow.

Pete offers a compelling reframing of alcohol as a form of social technology. Dangerous if mishandled, but deeply valuable when surrounded by the right rituals, spaces, and social rules. We explore how pubs moderate behaviour, teach people how to drink, and create a crucial middle ground between sobriety and excess that many cultures understand instinctively.

We also get into the overlooked design intelligence of pubs. The bar as a place for accidental conversation. The invisible queue. The unspoken rules about who you talk to, where, and for how long. How pubs create weak ties between people who would never otherwise meet, without forcing intimacy or participation.

From there, the conversation widens out to loneliness, screens, and a world increasingly engineered to keep people at home. Pete makes the case that pubs sit in direct opposition to frictionless, algorithmic life, and that this discomfort is precisely what makes them socially valuable.

We talk about flat-roof pubs, post-war housing estates, and why the loss of informal gathering places has left many newer neighbourhoods socially hollow. We look at how pubs are being squeezed from all sides: cheaper beer in supermarkets, rising costs, higher taxes, and policy frameworks that treat them like any other retail unit while ignoring the social work they do for free.

This is a conversation about pubs, but it’s really a conversation about cities. About what we value, what we price, and what we quietly allow to disappear while wondering why public life feels thinner than it used to.

Most cities are designed around a surprisingly narrow idea of who gets to feel comfortable in public.

In this episode of Challenger Cities, Iain Montgomery chats with Patti Baston, who runs a feminisation makeover service in Manchester. On the surface, her work might sound niche. In practice, it turns out to be a sharp and unexpected lens on how cities really work, who they quietly exclude, and how play, permission, and experimentation get designed out of adult life.

We talk about growing up without space to express yourself, getting ready in café toilets, the freedom cities can offer through anonymity and density, and why permission might be one of the most overlooked forms of urban infrastructure. Along the way, the conversation touches on femininity, masculinity, power, vulnerability, internet culture, gentrification, and what happens when cities mistake control for care.

This isn’t a culture-war conversation. It’s a human one. About joy, play, and what it means to feel at ease in public.

Expect some swearing.

Iain Montgomery talks with Glenn Auerbach about why sauna, bathing and cold-water culture has suddenly gone mainstream in cities around the world, and why the reasons go far beyond health trends or wellness hype.

From floating saunas and mobile heat rooms to dawn swims in urban rivers and harbours, we explore how shared rituals of heat, cold and recovery are reintroducing forms of social connection that cities have quietly lost.

Glenn traces sauna’s roots as everyday civic infrastructure rather than luxury amenity, reflects on the risks of gatekeeping and elitism as the scene grows, and explains why inclusive, well-held sauna culture can strengthen community, public trust and even environmental stewardship.

The conversation reframes sauna not as a fad, but as a clue to how cities might better balance pressure, release, togetherness and solitude.

We reconnect with Jasmine Palardy almost eighteen months after our very first conversation to reflect on what has changed in how we think and talk about cities, and what hasn’t.

Exploring why real progress in cities comes not from imposing control but from embracing uncertainty, loosening the grip of over-planning and letting “accidental urbanists” and informal city builders shape change on the ground.

Jasmine reframes urbanism as a messy, lived practice rather than a rigid discipline, and highlights how everyday friction and irritation are often the beginning of meaningful change.

This episode reframes control, imagination and experimentation in the design of cities.

Ruchita Bansal discusses what happens when modern infrastructure projects are built at speed but don’t connect with the deep, informal systems that make cities work.

Drawing on her experience across Indian urban planning and large-scale delivery, we explore how cities in India are being transformed rapidly with metros, highways and ambitious timelines, yet often miss the connective tissue of everyday life such as first-mile/last-mile walking, informal transport, street life and safety.

We dig into whether building faster actually deepens resilience or erodes memory, how imported models can misfit local context, and what it means to design infrastructure that truly serves people rather than object-centric headlines.

Chris Fair, CEO of Resonance and publisher of "World's Best Cities" talks about what really separates the world’s cities.

As Chris explains, obsessively measured performance isn’t enough to explain why some cities feel magnetic and others feel interchangeable.

We unpack the World’s Best Cities framework and how liveability, prosperity, and a often-overlooked dimension of lovability shape both the experience of place and its global perception.

We explore the gap between performance and perception, why most cities lack resonance on the world stage, and how the interplay between infrastructure and experience may determine the future of urban success

https://www.worldsbestcities.com/

Researcher and strategist David Akermanis talks about how young people are navigating a world where traditional financial stability has eroded and cities themselves shape economic life.

We explore why the familiar narratives about youth finance, savvy versus reckless, miss the deeper tension underneath. Across stories of early career precarity, the blending of gambling and investing, the limitations of traditional banking advice, and how mobility and access matter as much as income, we dig into how young people are improvising within a system that no longer feels trustworthy.

The conversation reframes stability, money, and the urban experience, and challenges cities and institutions to rethink how they build opportunity and trust for future generations.

https://www.fasterhorses.ca/blog/young-people-amp-money

Evan Snow, co-founder of Zero Empty Spaces talks about why vacancy in cities isn’t a neutral pause but an active force shaping how we feel, move and connect in urban places.

We explore how empty storefronts, abandoned commercial spaces and obsolete interiors drain confidence and disrupt movement, and how creative, low-risk activation can turn them into meaningful places without waiting for the “perfect tenant” or a grant.

Evan’s work reframes empty space as opportunity, showing how activation builds momentum, restores “muscle memory” on streets, and creates social and economic life where there was none. This episode reframes how we think about vacancy, placemaking and the everyday infrastructure of cities.