Challenger Cities

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/