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.