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 EP92: Cities Are Mental Weapons with Giacomo Biraghi

    -3 дн.

    Challenger Cities EP92: Cities Are Mental Weapons with Giacomo Biraghi

    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.

    44 мин.
  2. Challenger Cities EP91: Expanding Your Luck Surface Area with Matt Ballantine

    2 июл.

    Challenger Cities EP91: Expanding Your Luck Surface Area with Matt Ballantine

    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.

    48 мин.
  3. Challenger Cities EP90: It Only Sounds Mad Because We Think Small with Shiv Malik

    29 июн.

    Challenger Cities EP90: It Only Sounds Mad Because We Think Small with Shiv Malik

    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!?

    1 ч. 4 мин.
  4. Challenger Cities EP89: To Do, Not Just Be with Gil Penalosa

    25 июн.

    Challenger Cities EP89: To Do, Not Just Be with Gil Penalosa

    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.

    1 ч. 35 мин.
  5. Challenger Cities EP88: The Neighbourhood is the Amenity with Alicia Pederson

    21 июн.

    Challenger Cities EP88: The Neighbourhood is the Amenity with Alicia Pederson

    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.

    59 мин.
  6. Challenger Cities EP87: Bringing Sexy Back to Transit with Mark Salsberg and Jonathan English

    15 июн.

    Challenger Cities EP87: Bringing Sexy Back to Transit with Mark Salsberg and Jonathan English

    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 assuranceWhy we "learn bad lessons" and never close the loop on projectsThe one genuinely remarkable thing Toronto did after the war — and still benefits fromInfrastructure 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-eyesThe biggest possible future and the smallest possible thing — including just running the buses more often

    1 ч. 1 мин.
  7. Challenger Cities EP86: How the Robocars Meet the Curb with Bern Grush

    11 июн.

    Challenger Cities EP86: How the Robocars Meet the Curb with Bern Grush

    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.

    59 мин.
  8. Challenger Cities EP85: Canada Needs a Railway Architect with Michael Schabas

    8 июн.

    Challenger Cities EP85: Canada Needs a Railway Architect with Michael Schabas

    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

    1 ч. 9 мин.
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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.

Информация

  • Автор
    Iain Montgomery
  • Годы выхода
    2024 - 2026
  • Выпуски
    94
  • Ограничения
    С ненормативной лексикой
  • Авторские права
    © Challenger Cities 2024
  • Сайт подкаста
    Challenger Cities

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