Challenger Cities

Iain Montgomery
  • 5.0 (3)
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  • Updated Semiweekly

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. 8h ago

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

    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 rulesWhat 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 nothingWould a forty-year-old do this without feeling stupid?How a once-creepy airport sculpture became a festival name nobody commissionedAisha'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 EP105: Coming to Play with the Downtown Denver Partnership

  2. 8h ago

    Challenger Cities EP104: Just Doing Our Thing with @JamesinSerbia

    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 itInat, and confidence in who you are, flaws includedPlaces cosplaying as western Europe, and one that won'tPermission, and why an owner's judgement should count for somethingBeing a guest, and joining in instead of trying to change thingsJames'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.

    Challenger Cities EP104: Just Doing Our Thing with @JamesinSerbia

  3. Sep 24

    Challenger Cities EP103: What Airports Know That Cities Don't with Philip Galway-Witham & Chris Belisle

    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 EP103: What Airports Know That Cities Don't with Philip Galway-Witham & Chris Belisle

  4. Sep 21

    Challenger Cities EP102: Getting to Yes with Laura Dean

    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/

    Challenger Cities EP102: Getting to Yes with Laura Dean

  5. Sep 15

    Challenger Cities EP101: Chain Drain with Bryan Boyer & Greg Lindsay

    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

    Challenger Cities EP101: Chain Drain with Bryan Boyer & Greg Lindsay

  6. Sep 8

    Challenger Cities EP100: How Big Things Get Done with Bent Flyvbjerg

    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!

    Challenger Cities EP100: How Big Things Get Done with Bent Flyvbjerg

  7. Sep 1

    Challenger Cities EP99: Bottom Up & Top Down Cultural Infrastructure with Jacquelyn West

    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

    Challenger Cities EP99: Bottom Up & Top Down Cultural Infrastructure with Jacquelyn West

  8. Aug 27

    Challenger Cities EP98: Stations & Airports of the Future ... a Megacast

    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.

    Challenger Cities EP98: Stations & Airports of the Future ... a Megacast
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

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.

Information

  • Creator
    Iain Montgomery
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    107
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Challenger Cities 2024
  • Show Website
    Challenger Cities

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