Challenger Cities

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/

Jen Angel thinks Canada is closer to a moment of triumph in how it builds than it has been in her lifetime. The conditions are there. What's missing is enough people in positions of authority with the permission to say yes.
Jen leads Evergreen, the national organisation behind the Brick Works in Toronto and a portfolio of public space projects across the country — from school grounds transformations in Halton and Winnipeg, to a Mi'kmaq Native Friendship Centre-led project in Halifax, to the Toronto ravines programme. Before Evergreen, she ran a Nova Scotia crown corporation that built the Halifax Waterfront, Peggy's Cove and Lunenburg Waterfront, alongside rural broadband and innovation hubs. She also sits on the Canadian Infrastructure Council, the ministerial-appointed arm's-length body writing Canada's first national infrastructure assessment.
In this episode we get into:
— Why "it's not that much harder to build a good one than a crappy one" might be the most damning line about Canadian infrastructure this year
— The permission problem: why no has become the safe answer across our institutions, and what it costs us
— Multi-benefit projects, and why our funding model is almost institutionally incapable of recognising them as legible
— Why this particular moment — tariffs, geopolitical pressure, a public mood that actually wants things to be tried — might be a generational opportunity
— What the East Coast knows about resilience that the rest of the country keeps forgetting
— The Evergreen Conference at the Brick Works, May 6–7, theme: Cities Bursting with Life

Alex Bozikovic is the architecture critic for the Globe and Mail, which in practice means he writes about everything from housing politics to the public realm to the quiet cultural erosion that happens when a city stops expecting much of itself. In this episode, Iain and Alex dig into why Toronto ... a city with extraordinary people, genuine sophistication and real financial muscle ... keeps failing to act on what it already knows.
We cover the Spadina Expressway and the identity it left behind, the Ontario Science Centre closure and what it reveals about the state of progressive urban politics, the suburbs as the real story of Toronto's diversity, and what a bar in a 1899 attic has to do with the soul of a city. Plus Montreal, Sugar Beach, the Sanaaq Centre, and why the best things in Toronto tend to happen despite the default settings rather than because of them.

Exploring Urban Troubleshooting
In this episode, Heath Gledhill and Tom Shield, founders of GledHill Shield, share their extensive experience navigating complex urban infrastructure projects. They discuss how early decision-making, constraints and collaborative design principles can transform city development. Whether you're an urbanist, engineer, architect, designer or planner, their insights challenge conventional project setups and advocate for more intentional, purposeful city shaping.
Key Topics:
The importance of framing the core problem before designing solutions
How constraints foster innovative and effective urban design
The role of the business case in guiding project decisions and maintaining focus
Challenges with briefs, approvals and stakeholder engagement in infrastructure projects
The power of compromise and trade-offs in city development
Embedding aspiration and community impact through creative public programs
Cross-disciplinary integration as a necessity for successful urban projects
The influence of cultural attitudes—Australia, Canada, the UK—on project delivery
The potential of digital tools and visual artifacts to ground project vision
Building trust and social license through transparency and stakeholder inclusion
The value of humility, purpose and intentionality in urban planning

When the cod fishery collapsed in the nineties, Fogo Island lost its economy almost overnight. What came next — slowly, imperfectly and without a guarantee of success — became one of the most compelling stories in Canadian community development. Shorefast, the charity behind the Fogo Island Inn, wasn't built on the logic of charity. It was built on the logic of place. Every business decision, from the number of rooms in the inn to where every dollar gets spent, runs through a single question: does this strengthen the local economy?
Tasha Freidus, Shorefast's Director of Education and Entrepreneurship, joins Challenger Cities to unpack the model and what it means beyond Fogo. We talk economic nutrition labels, the forgotten community pillar of the economy, why local banking matters more than most people realise, and how a platform launching this spring is attempting to connect communities across Canada who are quietly doing the same thing, whether they know it or not.
Key Topics
Fogo Island's history and economic transformation
The role of Shorefast and Zeta Cobb in community development
Asset-based community development principles
Storytelling and social media in community building
Economic nutrition labels and local spending
Scaling community models to larger cities
Challenges in local economic stewardship
The importance of local banking and finance