Challenger Cities

Copenhagen is Jan Gehl's city. So it's a bit of a jolt to hear someone who lives and works there admit that nobody has ever really been able to say what a "human-centric city" actually is.
That's Jakob Norman-Hansen. Along with Ann-Britt Elvin Andersen, he's spent about a decade at BLOXHUB explaining Copenhagen to visiting delegations — and watching most of them decide it could never work back home. Neither of them came to urbanism the usual way. Ann-Britt arrived through media and innovation, including a spell as an editor-in-chief in Japan. Jakob thought he'd spend his career in international development and started with two years in Ethiopia. Which might be exactly why they've gone after the one thing the profession has no filing cabinet for. As Ann-Britt puts it, loneliness doesn't normally land on an architect's desk, or an engineer's desk, or even a planner's desk for that matter.
Their argument is that proximity was never doing the connecting. What counts is how much time we actually share, and whether we feel accepted and seen.
In this episode: why the convenience economy is also a disconnection economy, and whether we've all been eating fast food for the brain. What happens when you point the attention economy at metro design. Why the benches and the barbecue never reach the people they're meant for, and how chronic loneliness changes the way you read a room. Why "lots of people turned up" is a lousy way to judge a public space. What a bridge built out into the water says about fixing your own mistakes. And why a delegation from Colombia asked the sharpest question anyone has put to them about liveability.
Plus a turn few Copenhagen conversations take — both guests being properly rude about their own city. Too planned. Too alike. And on course to price out their own children.

This is a bumper episode where we bring you 4 guests that share the privilege of working for an awesome agency called Mosaic. And while yes, Mosaic did pay me to speak at their team offsite at a Cineplex earlier in the year, that's not why we're making this podcast.
We're doing it because I loved what they did after I spoke. Several people from the team were invited to share what they do with their passions in their 5-9 hours, i.e. outside of work.
You're going to hear from Mo, who has a much sunnier disposition on Toronto than I. We'll even get into a bit of an agreeable disagreement. Where we do see eye to eye is we need more of a mindset for hospitality in urbanism. Then you're hear from Laura who will share her story of arriving in Canada, finding a great job at Mosaic and the connections required to make it real. She now pays it back too, solving a massive challenge in Canada as many people not from here need better opportunities. And lastly, we'll get into it with Nick who has created one of the coolest independent culture spaces in the city.
As possible the world's most eclectic urbanism podcast, this is a properly eclectic episode!
Check the Substack for various links.
https://challengercities.substack.com/p/challenger-cities-ep95-the-5-to-9
https://www.mosaic.com/
https://threehorses.ca/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/notworking-to-networking/?originalSubdomain=ca

John V Willshire is the third corner of a loose triptych of British innovation-strategy types I can never quite give a single job title. He runs Smithery, carries a little yellow card called an obliquoscope for teaching himself to notice things, and has a gift for the metaphor that reframes everything. In this case, swapping the language of levers and control for gardening where you can't tell a plant what to do, you can only offer it a trellis and see what climbs.
We get from there to Sussex, its improbable 2006-vintage "ancient" charter, and We Wunt Be Druv, a game about refusing the devolution you're handed and designing one that works round here instead. It's really a conversation about agency; why you only notice what you feel you could act on, why organisations don't care about things but people do, and why the smallest possible thing of a homemade game played in Thomas Paine's front room might be how the biggest possible future actually starts.
And this is the piece that kicked off our conversation: https://buttondown.com/artefacts/archive/artefact-263/

You cannot build a humane, serendipitous city with teams who are transactional, risk-averse and don't really know themselves. It's not my usual territory, and it's a tough argument to have with the logical, rational, "serious" types who populate engineering, economics and urbanism — but I've been converted. The unlikely converters are Florence Okin and Sam Cohen, who run a workshop called Know Thyself under their business The Twenty Six Collective, and who arrive at cities from completely outside the usual circles: the talent side of startups and the full entrepreneurial tour, plus an apprenticeship under two Dutch master coaches. Their premise, once you follow it through, is uncomfortable for our industry. Cold teams build cold places.
The conversation runs from a survey that found people drowning in success and starved of fulfilment, through Sam's reframe of spirituality as "an antidote to control" — which stops being woo the moment you notice our whole profession is built on control and nobody's trained to hold value they can't yet measure — to the idea of a "spiritual board of directors" in rooms that currently have economists, engineers and everyone except the person responsible for why a place will be loved rather than merely used. Flo names the wound from the talent side: the waste of human potential she watched inside successful companies, brilliant people ground down into something far smaller than what they've got. It connects, in the end, to a lot of what guests keep circling on this podcast — Richard Fisher's monodisciplinary confidence, the human proposition that goes undesigned — only worked one layer deeper, inside the people doing the building.
The through-line is that the maker is the medium: you can't design warm, human places with people who've been trained out of being warm and human themselves. As ever, we land on the biggest possible future — Flo's vision of helping people look inward rather than outsource the answers — and the smallest possible thing, Sam's deceptively tiny instruction to stop making if-then statements and just step forward. Whether you build railways, run a team, or just recognise yourself in the seven-figure misery, this one's worth your time. Then go and try it on yourself.
https://knowthyself.onrender.com/

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.