Challenger Cities

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

Most episodes of Challenger Cities are a conversation with a guest. This one isn't. Shortly after publishing our whitepaper The Welcome Mat, a few listeners joined a live session to stress test the thinking and bring their own — which is a rather Challenger way of doing it, and only really possible when you can have Tokyo, Boston, Toronto and London in the same room.
Greg Dyson joins from Thailand, late at night, to explain why most Japanese stations are visually drab and work anyway: wayfinding that never changes, platforms that never move, and amenity provided in inverse proportion to frequency. Three-minute trains, nowhere to sit. Hourly trains, a heated waiting room. Which is roughly the opposite of how we do it.
Seth Hardy on reducing friction and increasing attachment, and the burger place in Copenhagen his family return to on every trip. Why familiarity beats spectacle, and why two of the most profitable Greggs in Britain are where they are.
John Ozimec asks the hard one: Oakville GO, ten thousand people a day, four thousand parking spaces, being redesigned right now by people who've already decided nobody wants to be there. Charles Finley on why that persists — engineers doing engineering, architects doing architects, and nobody talking to anybody — and Greg on who actually owns the land around a station and gets to keep the value a good one creates.
Also: what happens when an operator makes its stations too comfortable, why transit-oriented development might be the wrong way round, and Roundtree Post.
The Anxiety Machine: https://challengercities.substack.com/p/the-anxiety-machine
To being Challengers.

I met Stratton Townley at the Waterworks Food Hall in Toronto, a couple of hours before it opens, with ten or twelve people sat about with coffees and nobody hovering to work out whether they intended to spend anything.
Stratton is at Woodcliffe Landmark Properties, a small, private, family-run developer that has been on the same Toronto street for thirty years. His stepfather founded it; his mother runs it. He spent his first decade in brokerage and investment sales avoiding the family business entirely, on the strength of one job interview where he was told not to take the job.
The thirty years is what this episode is really about. Woodcliffe kept Waterworks rather than registering the condos and moving on, which turned a real estate landlord into something closer to a hospitality operator — and gave them a feedback loop most developers never get.
We talk about what that does to the design of the next building, why the city won't let him cut the grass in the park next door, heated pavements in Summerhill, silos in careers and buildings and government, and a Toronto waterfront that nobody will commit to beyond an electoral cycle.
He is born and raised in Toronto, committed to it, and an optimist — which makes him better company on the city's problems than most.
LINKS
Woodcliffe Landmark Properties — https://www.woodcliffe.ca
Waterworks Food Hall — https://waterworksfoodhall.com
Shops of Summerhill — https://www.woodcliffe.ca/portfolio/shops-of-summerhill
Read the write-up: https://challengercities.substack.com/publish/post/211069995
Challenger Cities — https://challengercities.substack.com