Challenger Cities

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 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/

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

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?
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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!

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