Challenger Cities

Iain Montgomery
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Iain Montgomery of Now or Never Ventures interviews urbanists, creatives, transit and development types to explore how cities can punch above their weight and create distinctive new futures outside of the tired playbooks.

  1. Challenger Cities EP79: The Best Practice Industrial Complex with Gerald Babel-Sutter

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    Challenger Cities EP79: The Best Practice Industrial Complex with Gerald Babel-Sutter

    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/

    54 min
  2. Challenger Cities EP78: Saying Yes More with Jen Angel

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    Challenger Cities EP78: Saying Yes More with Jen Angel

    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

    44 min
  3. Challenger Cities EP77: The Will To Build with Alex Bozikovic

    28 ABR

    Challenger Cities EP77: The Will To Build with Alex Bozikovic

    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.

    1 h 8 min
  4. Challenger Cities EP76: Urban Troubleshooting with Heath Gledhill & Tom Shield

    23 ABR

    Challenger Cities EP76: Urban Troubleshooting with Heath Gledhill & Tom Shield

    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 solutionsHow constraints foster innovative and effective urban designThe role of the business case in guiding project decisions and maintaining focusChallenges with briefs, approvals and stakeholder engagement in infrastructure projectsThe power of compromise and trade-offs in city developmentEmbedding aspiration and community impact through creative public programsCross-disciplinary integration as a necessity for successful urban projectsThe influence of cultural attitudes—Australia, Canada, the UK—on project deliveryThe potential of digital tools and visual artifacts to ground project visionBuilding trust and social license through transparency and stakeholder inclusionThe value of humility, purpose and intentionality in urban planning

    1 h 1 min
  5. Challenger Cities EP75: What a Rock Off a Rock Can Teach the Rest of Us with Tasha Freidus

    21 ABR

    Challenger Cities EP75: What a Rock Off a Rock Can Teach the Rest of Us with Tasha Freidus

    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 transformationThe role of Shorefast and Zeta Cobb in community developmentAsset-based community development principlesStorytelling and social media in community buildingEconomic nutrition labels and local spendingScaling community models to larger citiesChallenges in local economic stewardshipThe importance of local banking and finance

    46 min
  6. Challenger Cities EP74: Embrace the Chaos with Bronwyn Williams

    17 ABR

    Challenger Cities EP74: Embrace the Chaos with Bronwyn Williams

    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.

    45 min
  7. Challenger Cities EP73: Showing a City to Itself with Phil Tabah

    14 ABR

    Challenger Cities EP73: Showing a City to Itself with Phil Tabah

    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.

    44 min
  8. Challenger Cities EP72: The Case for Civic Joy with Ilana Altman

    7 ABR

    Challenger Cities EP72: The Case for Civic Joy with Ilana Altman

    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 yearsWhat makes it genuinely different from the High Line and other post-industrial urban renewal projectsThe conservancy model and why it's still novel in CanadaShade as a climate virtue — and how the Bentway reframed itThe Boom Buddies: turning maintenance constraints into public educationWhy volunteerism in Toronto is down 30% and what Dominoes did about itThe urgency of the eastern Gardiner corridor and the window that's closingToronto's self-confidence problem — and what it would take to fall back in love with the city

    1 h 3 min
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Información

Iain Montgomery of Now or Never Ventures interviews urbanists, creatives, transit and development types to explore how cities can punch above their weight and create distinctive new futures outside of the tired playbooks.

Ficha técnica

  • Creado por
    Iain Montgomery
  • Años en activo
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodios
    81
  • Clasificación
    Explícito
  • Derechos de autor
    © Challenger Cities 2024
  • Sitio web del podcast
    Challenger Cities

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