Challenger Cities

Cities are usually explained through buildings, infrastructure, policy and planning. Food rarely gets a look-in.
Which is strange, because for most of human history, cities existed in the first place because we learned how to feed ourselves at scale. Farming allowed settlement. Settlement allowed specialisation. Specialisation gave us civilisation. Long before zoning codes or masterplans, food decided where cities formed, how power worked, and why empires survived or collapsed.
In this episode, I’m joined by architect and writer Carolyn Steel, whose books Hungry City and Sitopia have quietly reshaped how many people think about food and place. Carolyn doesn’t approach food as lifestyle or culture. She treats it as infrastructure. A lens that connects geography, logistics, politics, economics, health and social life in ways that most urban conversations completely miss.
We talk about cities as food machines, moving from Rome, Paris and London to Chicago, tracing how grain, rivers, canals, railways and refrigeration shaped very different political and economic outcomes. We explore how technology didn’t just speed food systems up, but fundamentally altered them, separating calories from nutrition and convenience from ritual.
A big part of the conversation centres on Carolyn’s idea of exo-evolution: the moment when humans stopped adapting themselves to their environment and instead began redesigning the environment to suit their desires. Cities, it turns out, adapt very quickly. Human biology does not.
We also dig into what was lost when markets gave way to supermarkets, how food was deliberately redesigned to remove human interaction, and why eating together remains one of our most overlooked forms of civic infrastructure.
This is a conversation about food, but it’s really about cities. About how we live together, what we take for granted, and why so many urban problems make more sense once you stop looking at buildings and start following what’s on the plate.
Don’t expect to walk through a supermarket in quite the same way afterwards.
In this episode, we cover:
• Why food is one of the fastest ways to understand how a city actually works • How Rome, Paris and London evolved very different food systems, and why that mattered politically • The role of grain, rivers and trade in shaping empires and revolutions • How Chicago became a global food hub through geography, railways and refrigeration • What exo-evolution means, and why cities adapt faster than human bodies • How ultra-processed food and constant availability changed our relationship with eating • Why markets were once the social heart of cities, and what happened when supermarkets replaced them • Eating together as low-tech civic infrastructure in an increasingly fragmented world
About Carolyn
Carolyn Steel is an architect and writer best known for Hungry City and Sitopia, two influential books exploring the relationship between food, cities and civilisation. Her work examines how food shapes the physical form of cities, the way societies organise themselves, and how modern food systems affect health, culture and everyday life.

Tourism is big business. Cities spend vast sums attracting visitors, promoting landmarks and polishing their image. What they’re far less good at is thinking through the experience of actually being there. How a place works once you arrive. How you move around it. What makes sense, what doesn’t, and what quietly undermines the affection people might otherwise develop for a city.
In this episode, Iain Montgomery is joined by Maryam Siddiqui, a Toronto-based travel and culture journalist who came to travel writing sideways rather than by design. Starting out in PR before moving into business journalism, then arts and culture, Maryam brings a critical, socially minded lens to how cities are marketed, experienced and lived in.
Our conversation treats tourism not as leisure, but as a stress test for cities. We talk about over-tourism and the post-pandemic reckoning it forced into the open. About why cities are often better at selling themselves than explaining how they work. About transit systems that feel like puzzles, wayfinding that assumes insider knowledge, and why visitors notice problems locals have learned to tolerate.
We dig into regenerative tourism, not as a buzzword but as a philosophy rooted in care, stewardship and Indigenous knowledge. If cities invite people in, what responsibility do they have for how those people move, behave and experience the place? And why are metrics like “heads in beds” still crowding out harder questions about emotion, memory and whether people actually want to come back?
Toronto becomes a case study, from the confusion of its transit system to the disconnect between what’s officially promoted and what people actually love. Small theatres. Independent restaurants. Neighbourhood scenes that don’t lend themselves to brochures. As Maryam puts it, “The places that don’t need publicising are the ones with the money to do publicising.”
We also talk about how people really plan trips today, bypassing official channels in favour of TikTok, Instagram, Reddit and word-of-mouth, and what that means for tourism organisations still behaving like broadcasters rather than curators.
We close with Maryam’s magic wand: making it genuinely safe and easy to bike around cities, and pushing tourism organisations to show up for locals, not just visitors. Sponsoring neighbourhood festivals. Supporting cultural life. Making it obvious how tourism contributes to the everyday city.
Because at its best, tourism doesn’t invent affection. It amplifies what’s already there.
Topics covered:
Tourism as a stress test for cities
Over-tourism and the post-pandemic shift
Why cities sell highlights but neglect experience
Transit, wayfinding and everyday friction
Regenerative tourism and care for place
TikTok, trust and the collapse of official travel comms
Toronto as a case study
The gap between what cities promote and what people love
Why tourism organisations need to show up for locals

In this episode of Challenger Cities, we've got Pete Brown, one of the UK’s most thoughtful writers on beer, pubs, and drinking culture.
Pete has spent decades writing about pubs not as lifestyle accessories or nostalgic backdrops, but as places where history, behaviour, economics and everyday social life collide.
We talk about why pubs weren’t designed, branded or planned into existence, but evolved slowly through circumstance, need, and habit. Why that matters for cities obsessed with masterplans and placemaking. And why attempts to “recreate” pub culture so often feel hollow.
Pete offers a compelling reframing of alcohol as a form of social technology. Dangerous if mishandled, but deeply valuable when surrounded by the right rituals, spaces, and social rules. We explore how pubs moderate behaviour, teach people how to drink, and create a crucial middle ground between sobriety and excess that many cultures understand instinctively.
We also get into the overlooked design intelligence of pubs. The bar as a place for accidental conversation. The invisible queue. The unspoken rules about who you talk to, where, and for how long. How pubs create weak ties between people who would never otherwise meet, without forcing intimacy or participation.
From there, the conversation widens out to loneliness, screens, and a world increasingly engineered to keep people at home. Pete makes the case that pubs sit in direct opposition to frictionless, algorithmic life, and that this discomfort is precisely what makes them socially valuable.
We talk about flat-roof pubs, post-war housing estates, and why the loss of informal gathering places has left many newer neighbourhoods socially hollow. We look at how pubs are being squeezed from all sides: cheaper beer in supermarkets, rising costs, higher taxes, and policy frameworks that treat them like any other retail unit while ignoring the social work they do for free.
This is a conversation about pubs, but it’s really a conversation about cities. About what we value, what we price, and what we quietly allow to disappear while wondering why public life feels thinner than it used to.

Most cities are designed around a surprisingly narrow idea of who gets to feel comfortable in public.
In this episode of Challenger Cities, Iain Montgomery chats with Patti Baston, who runs a feminisation makeover service in Manchester. On the surface, her work might sound niche. In practice, it turns out to be a sharp and unexpected lens on how cities really work, who they quietly exclude, and how play, permission, and experimentation get designed out of adult life.
We talk about growing up without space to express yourself, getting ready in café toilets, the freedom cities can offer through anonymity and density, and why permission might be one of the most overlooked forms of urban infrastructure. Along the way, the conversation touches on femininity, masculinity, power, vulnerability, internet culture, gentrification, and what happens when cities mistake control for care.
This isn’t a culture-war conversation. It’s a human one. About joy, play, and what it means to feel at ease in public.
Expect some swearing.

Iain Montgomery talks with Glenn Auerbach about why sauna, bathing and cold-water culture has suddenly gone mainstream in cities around the world, and why the reasons go far beyond health trends or wellness hype.
From floating saunas and mobile heat rooms to dawn swims in urban rivers and harbours, we explore how shared rituals of heat, cold and recovery are reintroducing forms of social connection that cities have quietly lost.
Glenn traces sauna’s roots as everyday civic infrastructure rather than luxury amenity, reflects on the risks of gatekeeping and elitism as the scene grows, and explains why inclusive, well-held sauna culture can strengthen community, public trust and even environmental stewardship.
The conversation reframes sauna not as a fad, but as a clue to how cities might better balance pressure, release, togetherness and solitude.