What is Challenger Cities?

Challenger Cities is a podcast and publication with unconventional, and sometimes accidental, urbanists looking to make places that are happy, prosperous, productive, purposeful, healthy and hopefully fun too.

There is a lot of academic thinking out there on cities, much of it good, some of it tired, and sometimes just plain wrong for places to adopt.

So many cities today are trying so hard at being somewhere else, a place they have no right trying to be, and probably don’t want to be in the first place. We see this in the tech landscape as all sorts of places want to be like Silicon Valley, when actually it’s kind of a terrible place to play, live or even work.

Challenger Cities is all about creating places people actually want to spend time, to lay down some roots, to work, to hang out with friends, to visit, to shop, to eat, drink, love, or all the other things that make up life.

Few cities are truly alike, and so they should focus on what makes them special, the aspects they have that others can’t copy, the reason for being that will make people choose them over somewhere else.

So what you’ll find here are interviews with interesting people, doing interesting things, with opinions that you might not always agree with, but will hopefully make you think whatever you heard or read was interesting.

Basically we want to be a playlist that stirs a bit of conversation and action, the antithesis to the sterile urban planning report if you will.

Mostly free, but we might charge at some point, or you can hire us through Now or Never Ventures to help create a future together.

Subscribe to get updated for each new podcast or piece, as well as full access to the newsletter and publication archives.