This episode is the sort of argument that can be tough to have with very logical, rational and ‘serious’ types that you will find in the realm of engineering, economics and urbanism.

It is also not my typical domain. But it is something I have been converted to embrace. Even better, the two people involved are not found in the traditional urbanism circles.

Florence Okin and Sam Cohen run a workshop called Know Thyself as part of their business, The Twenty Six Collective. Flo spent fifteen-odd years on the talent side of venture-backed startups and qualified as a coach along the way, mostly because she was always the person friends came to when things fell apart. Sam did the other half of that world … a couple of COO roles, the full entrepreneurial tour, “got the t-shirt” … then went off and apprenticed himself to a pair of Dutch master coaches to learn how to properly hold a person without flinching. They met when Flo interviewed Sam for a job, though, Sam maintains it was a coffee, only Flo points out he turned up with a CV.

In many ways, this is a lovely companion episode to the one we did with Matt Ballantine … the serendipity, the loose fit, the stuff you can’t design in on purpose. Not the city as a machine for lucky encounters, but the people making the city, and whether they’re even the kind of people who could build such a thing. There is a gap between the psychological version of the worlds we’re building by accident, and the psychology of what people actually want. We pour hundreds of billions into the likes of public transport or regeneration proiects designed by brilliant people who’ve been trained, over long careers, out of curiosity and vulnerability and any comfort with a thing they can’t yet measure … and then act faintly surprised when what arrives is efficient and cold.

Cold teams build cold places.

Sam and Flo might not put in those terms, mind … they didn’t come at any of this with the mindset of cities. But their experiences from startup culture are very relevant, because, well, people.

They came at it through a survey … anonymous, deliberately nosy, fired out across their networks before they built anything. A few hundred replies came back, and the pattern in them is the reason the business exists. People reported very high success and markedly lower fulfilment. One line Flo still quotes:

“I’m earning seven figures. I’ve hit every marker I could possibly have wanted. And I’m not happy. I’m miserable.”

Dark. And I suspect not very unusual.

When they asked people to name the course that might sort them out, roughly one in five, unprompted, described the same thing … they wanted to understand themselves. Which is a strange gap in the market, and Sam has a clean read on why nobody’s filled it:

“No one’s cracked it. We’re all imperfect, we’re all juggling stuff, and even with all these external markers of success, the inner world is so often just left underdeveloped.”

That’s the bit I’d like the citymaking professions to sit with, because it isn’t a wellness point. The people commissioning and designing our biggest public things are drawn straight from that pool … externally successful, internally under-examined … and we hand them ten-billion-dollar decisions about how millions of people will feel moving through a place, having never once asked whether they know how they feel moving through anything.

The workshop itself is a brilliant double act … Flo, I hope won’t mind me calling her motherly, makes the room safe; Sam more direct, happy to challenge and be the one that breaks a seemingly awkward silence … and it’s disarmingly good at getting reticent people talking. Flo has a story about a hostile corporate session and one bloke who declared the whole thing had “gone from bad to appalling,” then spoke more than anyone and called it his best day in years.

Share

Even though I arrived at this having half-organised the session myself, must admit to being a bit skeptical. Early on I nipped out to let a latecomer in and came back to a room that had changed temperature in the space of ten minutes as an exercise progressed. Previously near-strangers had gone from small talk intros to rich conversations sometimes about the things don’t mention at work. An important detail here is also who was participating … this wasn’t fluffy wellness people, but a bias towards some fairly nerdy transport, infrastructure and urbanist types. They took to it completely, and one’s now working it into an accelerator programme he runs. The people most conditioned out of this were the quickest to want it back.

Which rather begs the question of what they’re doing to people to get there. And here I have to talk about the woo. Say “spirituality” in a professional meeting and you’ll get looked at like you’re a bit doolally. But we need to remember we are designing things for people that will have some unconventional and somewhat irrational beliefs. It’s part of being human. The useful core to this has nothing to do with incense though. Sam frames it rather nicely.

“Spirituality is an antidote to control … and vice versa. Some people want an ironclad grip on every part of their life because it feels safe. The work is asking them to loosen that grip a little … to make space for not knowing everything.”

Read that as an infrastructure professional and it stops being fluffy. We’ve built a whole profession on control … the business case, the risk register, the quantified everything … and the one thing nobody’s trained to do is hold value they can’t yet measure. Which, in language a planner respects, is a spiritual skill. It’s the same seam I keep working from the outside in Cities Without a Proposition … that we run cities on pure supply-side logic, building and zoning without asking who it’s for or why anyone would choose it … only Flo and Sam are working it from inside the human being. It’s why I keep banging on about the infrapreneur, the person sitting between the economists clearing the business case and the engineers chasing the speed, asking the question neither discipline owns … who is this for, and why will they love it. You can’t be that person if you don’t know yourself, because the whole job is holding an ambiguity the spreadsheet is desperate to resolve.

That is probably modest version of the argument. The most ambitious thing Sam said as companies assemble perfectly sensible boards, he points out … the chair who’s done it before, the finance brain who sees the realm through their economic model, the marketer that needs to feel like they can justify their actions … but:

“We’re heading into a time so messy and complex that you actually want a spiritual board of directors too. Someone with a firm hand on the moral tiller. Capitalism’s got so top-heavy and economic that it’s thrown off all these externalities. There just needs to be more balance in the room.”

Hold that against the room hosting any megaproject you like. Economists, engineers, increasingly the right consultees … and conspicuously nobody whose whole job is the human proposition, the reason the thing will be loved rather than merely used. Flo comes at the same wound from the talent side, and it’s the part that visibly bothers her … the waste of human potential she watched inside successful companies, brilliant people ground down into something far smaller than what they’ve got. And under all of it sits the short-termism that keeps it spinning … a large majority of managers, asked whether they’d back something that pays off in three or four years but dents this quarter, will kill the bigger future. Not so much out of stupidity, but conditioning by a system everyone privately admits doesn’t work. The way out isn’t another framework. It starts with one person, confident enough in themselves, to defend a decision the spreadsheet can’t yet justify … which, traced right back, is exactly what knowing yourself buys you.

It’s the same drum a lot of my guests end up beating from different angles. Richard Fisher called it monodisciplinary confidence … everyone doing their own job impeccably while the passenger gets a station identical to the one they left. Flo and Sam are working one layer beneath that. Before you can build the environment that gets the best out of people, the people have to have met themselves.

The double act episodes we’ve done lately set up the biggest possible future we can imagine, and the smallest possible thing we can start doing right now. Flo takes on the biggest:

“Ultimately it’s about helping people raise their consciousness … getting them to look inwards. So many of us are brought up to outsource it … go and see someone for this, someone for that … when a big part of it is being able to tap into what already lives inside.”

If we translate that into citymaking, it’s a lovely takeaway from the episode, of a built environment made by people who’ve done the inner work, so the question of who a place is for is in the room on day one rather than retrofitted at the end as a marketing and comms challenge.

Meanwhile, the smallest action comes from Sam, and it’s a habit most of us don’t notice we have … the little bargains that keep life on hold:

“Stop making if-then statements. Everyone’s got life on hold until it’s perfect, and perfect never turns up. Kill the if-thens, step forward, be a bit brave. Anyone can do that, any time.”

An if-then is one of those private deals we strike to defer the good stuff … when I get the promotion, then I’ll feel secure; once the project ships, then I’ll actually enjoy the work; when things settle down, then I’ll start the thing I care about … and the trouble is the ‘then’ never arrives, because the ‘if’ just keeps moving. So kill one if-then this week.

You can set up a Know Thyself session with Flo and Sam at The Twenty Six Collective. Yes, I’m plugging it, because the whole argument here is that the inner life of the people building the city is upstream of everything we obsess over downstream … and these two are damn good at getting to it. The bloke who walked in saying “bad to appalling” walked out having had the best day in the room. As testimonials go, I’d take that bet for your team.

If any of this sounds like you, talk to them … and me.

To being Challengers.

The digital and social side of the Milan Expo in 2015 which he describes as building a temporary city of millions from scratch, running it as a living environment for six months, and then switching it off. Going on to co-founding Stratosferica in Turin, the urban intelligence agency behind the Utopian Hours festival and an annual research mission that has been fieldworking three cities a year since 2014.

He is a man who has built his whole life around cities. So when told me about how he stays ahead of the curve made me laugh … as he avoids architects.

“The secret is going out of the bubble. I try to talk as less as possible with architects, even if I do respect them. I try to go and see mostly the innovation realm — the tech industry, the venture capitalists, those new hubs of ideas.”

His map of where the future of cities is actually being decided isn’t all that traditional urbanist either. He reels of Zurich for humanoid robotics, Munich for nuclear technology, Stockholm for fintech. There’s the usual tech supercluster suspects in the Bay Area, Shenzhen and South Korea. His argument is that the people thinking hardest about autonomous mobility, about how we house an ageing population, about the coming robot era and what it does to the shape of a building or a street - “today it’s where they are thinking about the future of our cities” - mostly don’t have the word “city” anywhere in their job title. If you only ever talk to people who already agree that cities matter, you will be the last to know what’s about to hit them.

This is very much getting out of the bubble, and it’s the Challenger thing a more people really should be doing. As you can imagine, I want more of this, it’s part of the Challenger City schtick. There is a sense the demand side of the built environment keeps getting shaped by people the field doesn’t recognise as its own.

The second half of his answer is also one that will make many of the conference-circuit urbanist set a bit uncomfortable. After roughly fifteen years of research and somewhere north of two thousand interviews across Europe and the US, Giacomo has reached a conclusion about the thing we all hold most dear … the idea that there is a distinctive, European or Euro-American way of making a city.

He makes the case that the divide doesn’t exist.

“We love to think about our piazzas, our old fabric cities, as a standard and as something unique. But in reality, what is leading our city today is a sort of global standard, which is basically real-estate driven.”

He’s not being nihilistic about it. It’s sort of more optimistic but pragmatic, and a bit cynical. “We should be a bit cynical about what we are seeing,” he says, “not being naive on those green and healthy and peaceful paradigms, which are not happening.” It’s a useful corrective to a field that runs on glossy renderings of a future that the capital stack overwrites. Walk past the piazza romance and the actual operating system of the modern city is a spreadsheet, and far less romantic architecturally too.

I find this bracing rather than bleak as you can’t fix a thing you refuse to see clearly.

Giacomo earns the cynicism too, because he turns it on his own country first. We all do the same thing when we go to Italy, well if we don’t live there, as we cosplay as James Richardson sitting in the piazza, take the train, enjoy the weather and romanticise it into a postcard or Instagram story. Then you travel between the cities and remember that Italy is one of the most resilient industrial economies in the Western world, a manufacturing giant hiding behind the heritage. So I put it to him that the secondary cities like Bologna, Brescia (where Giacomo was as we recorded), Udine etc. — feel like the real Challengers, because they love their past and still build their futures.

He agreed, and then went further than I expected. The thing the world should actually be hiring Italians for, he says, isn’t the piazza. It’s the sprawl.

“We are, in a way, the master of sprawl, which is funny — because in the US or Australia or London, you hire an Italian architect to do a piazza. But at the end you should hire us in setting up your sprawl, because we did it very well.”

It’s a deliberately provocative inversion, and it holds up, because he can name the mechanisms. There are three of them.

The first is the railway. Italy built high-speed rail with a density of stations that France would consider a mistake, “a sort of high-speed slash metro,” he calls it. Brescia, where he was calling from, sits a little over half an hour from Milan on a fast train. That’s not the Paris–Lyon model of firing four hundred kilometres between two big dots; it’s a network that treats a whole region as one commutable organism while leaving the small places intact.

The second is those small places themselves. “We preserved these eight-thousand-plus little autonomous towns in our country, which is more than double than France or Spain” as micro administrative boundaries that, almost by accident, kept town centres alive, slowed the spread of the retail chain, and protected local identity. The thing that looks like bureaucratic over-fragmentation turned out to be a moat around the things people love.

The third is culture. Italy is wall-to-wall with theatres, galleries, cafes, hard to categorise institutions and “little third places, before they even were called like this by some UK practitioner.” Ray Oldenburg coined the term, but Italy already had ten thousand of the things.

So his summary genuinely reframes the whole conversation: “You should ask us more, as Italians or Europeans, how to manage your sprawl, than how to create a little romanticised Roman-style antique plaza.”

There’s an urban legend I’ve always loved about Italian high-speed rail; that someone justified the whole network by joking that it would be nice to wake up in one city, work in another, lunch in a third, see your mistress in a fourth, and still be home for dinner. I’m almost certain it’s not really true, though I’m really not convinced it’s complete nonsense either. But it captures a culture where the default answer to a good idea is - “yes, let’s try it” - which is the opposite of the North American and British reflex, where the default is no, and the burden is on you must persuade me.

So is it just easier to do things in Italy?

Giacomo’s answer was a properly honest ‘yes and no’. Yes, informality leaves room for creativity, though he’s quick to note that same looseness is how a country can wreck its own heritage and eat its greenfield. But the bureaucracy doesn’t actually live where you’d expect. It’s not hard to start something in Italy. It’s hard to make it permanent.

“When something wants to be persistent in time, and economically feasible — if you want to make it more institutional — then it’s more difficult, because of all the rules that are put in order to counteract the vivacity and the spontaneous development.”

It’s not just an Italian problem. The permission to experiment and the permission to endure are two completely different economies, and cities can be generous with the first and consistently miserly with the second.

A lot of Giacomo’s radar points at the private sector, so I raised something I want to believe, and I think it becoming true too … that companies are starting to care about the physical world again. After a decade of believing innovation happened entirely on a screen, firms are waking up to place as the thing that attracts and keeps talent. They’re starting, to borrow a phrase, to “give a shit”. Giacomo immediately credited it to the right source as Richard Upton’s talk in Rotterdam, which he rated highly, and then proved the point with where he’d just been.

Dublin’s Silicon Docks, where two decades of building have produced something he insists on calling a city rather than an office park. “I would call it city more than offices,” he says of dozens of connected buildings, welfare, healthcare, leisure, education, green space, terraces, theatres, all inside the boundary of a single private entity, accessible by badge. He sees Milan’s MIND district, on the bones of the Expo site he once ran, heading the same way: a million-plus square metres, tens of thousands of residents, “a sort of private-owned, open-to-public neighbourhood, with their own police, with their own rules.” He even floats the endgame of “a sort of archipelago of those city campuses.”

Which is where the dream curdles really. The magic of a city is its openness to the things you cannot control such as who moves in next door, who you collide with on the street. Companies hate that level of uncertainty. They want to process-map your day and theirs. The moment you can map that sort of thing, you’ve probably killed the thing that made it a city and built a very effective resort instead. What you actually want is the petri dish, not the org chart.

To his enormous credit, Giacomo, who studied in the long shadow of Richard Sennett, didn’t defend the corporate version. “Disorder, permeability, are key factors to enhance this magic,” he said. Private ownership isn’t automatically the red flag; the red flag is sterility. A city has to stay contemporary, or it dies. And you cannot stay contemporary if you’ve badge-credentialled all the accidents out.

Share

Giacomo’s research method is gloriously low-tech, and will be reminiscent of Gil Penalosa a few episodes back. He walks. “The old rule, from Benjamin to Baudelaire, from Jane Jacobs to Sennett.” And walking the same cities for thirty years has surfaced three … (I think Giacomo thinks in threes) … patterns he thinks are coming for all of us.

The first he calls the ‘all in disguise’ as the dissolving border between public and private. In Bangkok the shopping mall now wears the city’s clothes of the same sidewalk, same lighting, same bins, “no door to signal the border between the so-called public city and the shopping mall.” You’re being privatised and you can’t feel the threshold. He thinks it’s already on its way to Europe.

The second is that the clean-it-up era is over. The instinct of the early 2000s to scrub the city, react against messy 1980s New York, make everything proper, is in his view, dead. The intermediate authorities, the business districts and neighbourhood bodies, now deliberately “make a bit of a mess, closing streets randomly, putting urban furniture in a not-so-perfect or permanent way.” Janette Sadik-Khan’s Times Square, Barcelona’s superblocks are engineered imperfection as feature.

The third is verticality with the city on multiple levels. The City of London’s 1960s skywalks near the Barbican, Las Vegas, Bangkok offering bridges, decks and undergrounds. “This elevated city is another thing I discovered walking.”

I threw in my own favourite version of the “what did we get wrong, and how might we try it again” question, Sheffield’s Park Hill, a brutalist failure that the developer Urban Splash turned around by injecting love and design until people wanted to live there. Same bones, different outcome. The lesson isn’t to demolish, but to remix. Especially where space is scarce, and there is a structure with heritage to breathe new life in.

All of which is throat-clearing for the idea that actually animates Stratosferica’s work, and gives this piece its title. Their book gathers fifty-odd people each writing on a single word or phrase, and the phrase that detonates is this: cities are mental weapons. The sort of provocative statement I want to see more of in this realm.

It’s not placemaking, which, as I said to Giacomo, too often comes across as something a bit bland such as “some chairs and some paint”, but something far more ambitious. The notion that everything in a city shapes how you think, behave, eat and show up to work. The city is still the ultimate form of technology and one we still barely understand.

Giacomo took it somewhere I didn’t see coming.

“What we mean when we say cities are a mental weapon is that the urban form per se is not what matters. You can be a citizen in your spirit. So you need to decouple the urban spirit from the urban form, and focus more on citizen-making rather than just city-making.”

The urban spirit, for him, is a posture of open, intercultural, literate. And his claim of: “It’s not the urban form. It’s not a bunch of skyscrapers or sidewalks, or well-developed transit, that magically makes a city. What makes a city is a spirit, and that’s why it’s rather mental than physical at its core.”

It’s a genuinely lovely idea, and the thing from our chat that stuck with me most. Maybe because it sort of came up in the recent salons.

In Montreal, one of my speakers lives here but says himself that while it’s home, he sort of holds the place at arm’s length, and we ended up in an agreeable disagreement about whether you can call yourself a citizen of a city you never fully show up for. In Toronto, the loudest reflex in the room was a cousin of the same thing: who do I complain to about the stuff that isn’t working? It’s a fair question, but it’s also a tell. If your only move when something annoys you is to find someone to complain to, are you behaving like a citizen, or like a customer of a city?

I think that’s where Giacomo’s framing earns its keep. Citizenship was never the passport you hold for a country; it’s whether you play the part of a good citizen in the place you actually live. And a huge number of people, especially across North America, are frustrated with where they are without ever really participating in it. The casual gift in citizen-making is that it hands those people something to do. Not necessarily a political campaign or a career in planning, just a small, real thing that makes their patch of the world a little better.

“You don’t need to be an engineer in a big construction company with an important role and a lot of budget to make the difference. You can be a creative, good citizen, and change everything for good.”

We rounded out our chat amongst the noise of the city with the questions asking for the biggest idea in his head and the smallest possible thing to try next.

His biggest is unapologetically grand of an international league of city enthusiasts, “the big thing I’m devoted to”, a standing network of the independent thinker-doers he’s spent a decade gathering on research missions. His smallest is almost defiantly humble: “I try to involve other people in my neighbourhood, trying to change little things.” Take care of the city on a daily basis. Get your neighbours into it.

Mine, when he turned it back on me, was adopting the tree square outside my own front door. Half an hour of effort, and a tiny piece of the world gets nicer. It’s kind of the whole theory of change where we consider the biggest possible imagination about what a place could be, paired with the smallest possible thing you can actually do on a Tuesday morning or Sunday afternoon.

Perhaps that smallest possible thing can also be Giacomo’s invitation, and mine, to come and explore for a couple of days as Utopian Hours is in Turin in the middle of October, and Stratosferica’s whole curatorial instinct is to fill the room with “independent entrepreneurs, independent thinker-doers, rather than just speakers.” If you want to find the future of cities, his entire career is an argument for going somewhere the urbanists aren’t, and listening to people who’d never call themselves urbanists at all.

I’ll be there. We can share a few spritzes together while dreaming of owning a little vintage Fiat.

To being Challengers.

Random the Book by Matt Ballantine and Nick Drage, if you get it as a physical copy, will turn up as a weighty package of 120 short stories, printed on card stock, unbound, supplied in a box and shuffleable into more orders than there are atoms in the universe. Matt is a sociologist by training and a technologist by trade who happily admits he has “really got nothing to do with the world of cities and urban planning”; he’s just “endlessly curious about stuff.” This is his first book, and it’s not a manifesto from the authors; “We wanted it to be a tool for thinking rather than a book with a message.” If anything, he says, “I wanted a book that enabled other people to create their own theses that can do what they want with it.”

I love that, and I think more people into citymaking should do too.

Two of the cards make the case almost on their own. One sets Manhattan’s efficient grid against medieval London’s “chaotic tangle of alleys” and argues that the messy quarter is the one that throws people together and makes a place worth being in … what urbanists call ‘loose fit’, with the old warehouse that becomes studios, the ground floor of the merchant’s house that becomes a restaurant, and new uses for spaces that don’t match their original intention. Another retells the High Line of an abandoned railway marked for demolition, rescued by two residents who happened to walk past it, now inspiring people from Paris to Detroit trying to work out what their equivalent could be.

The core bit of the book that I think should carry to the urban planning profession at least, and make them a bit uncomfortable is that genuine urban randomness cannot be manufactured. You can zone and plan things like infrastructure. You cannot plan the serendipity of what you might want to engineer. But you might be able to expand your opportunities exposed to you by embracing the thinking.

Matt warns about how we keep trying to design the luck in, he warns, and the designing is what kills it: “we talk about designing for serendipity, but if by designing something for serendipity, you are not making it serendipitous, therefore that is doomed to failure.” So when I reached for the obvious fix and asked whether the smart move is simply to engineer serendipity into what we build, he wouldn’t take the verb. “Not necessarily engineer,” he said. The point isn’t to manufacture luck; it’s to be able to react to it when it turns up. This is an important distinction!

Start with the word ‘Random’, because people can’t even agree on it. Matt and Nick found “five separate definitions of how the word is used and some of them are contradictory” … random as near-certain, random as near-impossible, random as eclectic, “rando as a term of abuse for somebody who is nonconformist” and random as sudden violence.

“the fact that we don’t even have the ability to have conformity about how we use the term and it’s used interchangeably for all those different things shows you how confused we are around it.”

We get frightened of things we struggle to define, it’s why much professional work exists in trying to stamp out uncertainty, or randomness. In urbanism that means things like zoning, planning and creates rules for order. The irony is that such activities, while not malicious, can kill some of the good stuff!

Think about when you see the muddy shortcut worn across the manicured landscape, aka, the ‘desire path’ … something the internet loves to caption as the failure of a designer. Matt challenges this. “It’s not the designer got it wrong.” The failure is downstream as “the whole system isn’t able to adapt to the actual ways in which people use things.” The plan might have been sensible, fine even. It’s actually the inability to change the plan once reality surfaced that is the problem. It’s the same with the most over-cited office in the world as everyone credits the placement of the loos in Pixar's atrium for the chance collisions between staff. Matt actually credits the recruitment. The business and creative successes occurred perhaps “because of the people that Pixar employed and nothing to do with the way in which the building was laid out.”

The book is not primarily about examples from the built environment. There are everyday consumer product examples. Like when Spotify first shipped a genuinely random shuffle, users revolted and swore it was broken, so the engineers made it less random to make it feel more random. People don’t actually want chaos in their lives, a bit like we don’t want everything to be perfectly planned out. We don’t want to be stressed, and we don’t want to be bored … we actually rather like being pleasantly surprised!

So it you can’t engineer serendipity, only stay ready for it, then readiness is the thing that is worth designing. Matt reached for a metaphor he was still working out, letting the podcast be a bit of a proving ground, as he said he’d only been handed the word for its crucial second half, “optionality”, that very morning with previous guest, Charlie Rowat. Picture a butterfly net.

“the opening of the net is your luck surface areas, the ability that you have to be able to create lucky events to happen. And then the net is your ability to be able to react on your optionality.”

It’s really two different things, and you need both. The mouth is your exposure to good accidents, and the depth is your capacity to actually catch them when they land. If your net is too shallow, the butterfly bounces straight off, but too deep and you shred the net dragging it back out. There’s an optimum to be had in there.

Share

The pandemic is a good example. It handed every organisation unlimited meeting rooms - “we now have unlimited meeting rooms because we have virtual rooms” - only it removed the natural cap on how much we’d schedule. So diaries went back-to-back, and the slack for what doesn’t get scheduled was lost in the process: “we’ve stripped out all of the buffer that used to exist where the interesting stuff happened.”

“We’ve optimized it now so that it’s a very small net with an incredibly tight surface that everybody bounces off all the time.”

The analogy applies to lots of our current ways of working, from back-to-back calendar to things like thirty year masterplanning documents. And it’s enforced by a culture in which, Matt articulates as, “everything is accountable to some sort of deliverable that is yada yada yada yada.” So we don’t have the slack in the system to scoop up the attractive, rare, colourful, delicate butterflies.

If you commission masterplans or buy consulting decks, Matt suggests you may be falling victim to what he calls the ‘actionable insight fallacy’:

“we then remove all of the stuff that isn’t actionable. And then we just present the things that are repeatable and actionable as the method to be able to achieve success, and that is a nonsense”

The luck, the timing, the cheap rent, the one stubborn local all get deleted in the telling, because none of it converts into a clean recommendation. So the case study becomes a method that omits the actual cause, and then “people get disappointed when they try to implement good or best practice and it doesn’t work for them. It’s because they’ve missed the other stuff.” Best practice isn’t wrong so much as it is sanitised. It’s a bit like an autopsy with the cause of death annotated out.

The antidote, happily, is cheap and slightly disreputable. Matt’s method for making something that doesn’t look like everyone else’s is to “try to copy other people and do it badly.” He’s got a fun example for it too, with the story about how Smells Like Teen Spirit was actually Kurt Cobain failing to sound like the Pixies, where in doing so “he created one of the most important songs of the 1990s through badly copying.”

Matt goes on to trace some of this to a Protestant hangover. “We have some very set ideas in our culture about what is proper work and what isn’t,” he says, and “anything that diverts from proper work will not get you to heaven. Therefore, it is bad.”

A little while ago, Matt did an experiment called ‘100 Coffees’, and it’s kinda revealing in its own way as the hard part wasn’t the strangers, it was giving himself permission to have “conversations where there wasn’t an agenda and there wasn’t a defined outcome.” He pinches his threshold from Adam Grant where “if somebody asks you for something, it will take you five minutes to say yes to it”, and runs his life by a one-line rule that cuts straight through the guilt: “unless I think it’s going to endanger me physically or spiritually. I will just give it a go, mostly.”

Then there’s the move we’re most squeamish about which is reaching for randomness on purpose. Matt’s case is that for a huge class of decisions, agonising is simply wasted effort, because “there is no right answer.” So could we start to use randomness to work out which option we should go with or decision we need to make? Interestingly, societies have before, in ancient and very modern history. The ancient Greeks ran civic duty by lottery for example. Modern-day Ireland, in some senses shaking off some very repressive Catholic guilt, resolved issues like same-sex marriage and abortion through citizens’ assemblies and reached, in his words, “positions that are sensible, that they never would have done if they’d left it to politicians.”

To bring this back to cities, you could ask Matt whether you could run a brownfield site regeneration that way and he’s not exactly over or under selling the concept as he says “it will be no better, no worse” than the professionals, but “if there isn’t a right answer, it’s a much faster and often fairer less biased route to achieve it.” No better, no worse, yet quicker and far harder to capture. Surely that’s something that might actually be worth experimenting with?

We resist, Matt argues, because we cling to the fiction that someone is in charge. We “live in a world where the expectation is we have leaders who are omnipotent and can predict the future, which of course is the fundamental problem. We put so much pressure onto roles of leadership.” He learned it years ago from a training game with dice and pennies, where players who rolled high got applauded as gifted and players who rolled low got “castigated for their appalling ability.” That pattern of us taking credit or assigning blame for random acts might actually be getting in the way of us being lucky in the first place.

Which brings me, as ever, to the biggest possible future and the smallest possible thing. The biggest future is a built environment, and a working culture, that stops trying to design the surprise in and instead defends the slack for surprise to find us — and keeps the net deep enough to act when it does. The smallest thing is Matt simply living it, using an example of being on holiday in Lisbon, he and his family “found two wonderful restaurants by finding a restaurant to go to, heading there and seeing something more interesting on the way.” This idea of having a direction, rather than a specific destination is in many ways akin to having a good net, rather than a detailed plan.

And the actual homework, courtesy of his co-author, Nick. In your next meeting, get some dice and throw them to work out the order of who speaks when. I’m going to try it on a future digital salon coming soon, and see what the net catches. You can sign up for that here:

To being Challengers.

Brutal.

So Shiv Malik rang her up.

He didn’t try to win the argument, and instead asked her a different question along the lines of what would have to be true for you to come on board? She told him, “If you can get a landowner on board, then I’ll come on board”. Well he did. Shiv had two weeks to do it and got her from outside the tent pissing in, to inside the tent pissing out. Sadek, known in the development world as a bit of a ‘disruptor at large’, the woman who helped drag Old Oak Common into being is now on his board. She started as the loudest sceptic in the room. She converted because he refused to treat her objection as a wall and treated it as a fair challenge instead.

I’ve spent a chunk of my career borrowing Roger Martin’s line for this move of “what would have to be true?”, and watching very few people actually have the nerve to use it on a hostile crowd. Shiv is using it as a recruitment strategy! “Give me an impossible challenge,” he says. “Go on, give me whatever you think is impossible to do.” The developer’s challenge is the current one of being able to build a four-bedroom terraced house, 160 square metres, faced in stone, sold for £350,000 against a build cost of £250,000. “Go ahead, go and do it,” the developer told him. “If you can do it, then maybe we’ll be convinced.” So that’s the next thing Shiv is going to do … build one house, to prove a city.

This is, at least in my opinion, probably the most interesting thing happening in citymaking right now. Which makes it more impressive this guy has a career as a journalist, rather than veteran property mogul eyeing up a bigger prize.

Shiv co-wrote a book in 2010 called Jilted Generation. The argument was pretty simple, but maybe a little unwelcome at the time too. The gist was if Britain doesn’t fix housing for the young, the social contract breaks. These will be the people who can’t raise families, can’t take entrepreneurial risks and ultimately can’t stay in their city or even the country. I read it in 2014 and it ended up pinned to a wall of an office near Waterloo as part of a wall of research on a project I was running about tenants for an energy supplier. The problems on that wall are, depressingly, very much the same now as they were then, just more acute, for Gen Z as well as aging millennials.

Shiv spent years touring the diagnosis, and watched people move through the predictable stages of first “this is nonsense”, then something worse. “Fine, it’s just the way that it is,” he says they’d tell him, and that resignation frightened him more than the initial disagreement. “No, it doesn’t have to be like this. Please God, let it not be the case — in a hundred and fifty years of economic history, that we’re the first generation to be worse off than our parents in Britain.”

Then a woman called Claire Fox, now Baroness Fox, said the thing that lived rent free in his head for six years. “Isn’t this just a giant whinge? What are you actually doing to put it right?” It annoyed him precisely because it was fair. “I thought I’d done the right thing,” he says. “But she was right. That’s why it was so annoying.” You can write the careful analysis, get all the numbers down, and still have done nothing to really change the situation.

The line that finally tipped him over came from his co-founder Joe Reeve, on a stage, to a room of people. “The cavalry isn’t coming. We are the cavalry.” That’s the whole story, really. “I can’t write another book about how to do things,” Shiv decided. “I should just do it.” Forest City 1 is what happens when someone stops waiting to be rescued and faces the uncomfortable truth that the rescuers were always going to be amateurs like him, because the professionals are busy doing the things they’ve always been doing and the institutions are dormant.

I’m on the other side this conversation sitting in Montreal by way of New York, Toronto, Kelowna and Toronto again. I am one of the people Shiv is talking about, one of the ones who left and haven’t yet found a good enough reason to go back. I miss lots of things about the UK, and get frustrated as a new Canadian frequently, but Britain hasn’t been the siren to say “Iain, come home, it’s worth it now.” Shiv has a phrase for what people like me did, saying, “They’re quiet quitting the country.” And the maddening part is that the national conversation is entirely about immigrants arriving and almost never about the doctors and lawyers and consultants and entrepreneurs and graduates packing up because they can’t afford the life they want. His test for whether a country is functioning is brutally simple.

“Can you work hard and afford a home, to buy or to rent, and raise a family? If you can’t do that, your country’s basically broken, because you’re not giving anyone any prospect.”

He’s trying to build the reason to stay. Given Shiv himself could just take his US passport and sod off too, we can’t fault him for giving it a go.

The instinct, when you say “affordable housing,” is to think small. Build a modest thing, cheaply, on the edge of somewhere. My late mother would have called these sorts of things “Barratt Boxes” … and she never wanted to live in one.

Shiv’s argument is a bit of a counterintuitive inversion of the current developer mindset sticking estates by a ring road … you have to go bigger to make it cheaper.

Let’s follow the money shall we?

Agricultural land runs about £9,000 an acre. “As soon as you give it planning permission, it’s £400,000 an acre,” Shiv says. “Same place. Exactly the same place.” So the land isn’t really the cost, but more so the permission, and the years of risk it drags behind it. “It’s actually not planning, it’s planning permission,” he says. “It’s the permission part that takes us ages.” The infrastructure is the other cost as in putting in the likes of water, rail, power, doctors, teachers etc. … none of which spare capacity exists for in the South of England.

Now if you build an extension to a town and there’s no valuable commercial land in it, so you end up begging Tesco to show up and giving land away to utilities. Build a city though, and employers will pay real money to locate there, because that’s where the talent is, and that commercial land value is what pays for the infrastructure that makes the housing cheap. Shiv is knowing here as, “You have to create that economic value. You have to build a city to make the houses cheap. That’s it.” Scale is more mechanism, than ego. A million people isn’t a fantasy number, it’s a number that makes the maths work.

And the location isn’t arbitrary either. Next to Cambridge which has “more Nobel Prizes than the whole of France put together,” as Shiv likes to point out, and where the current price-to-earnings ratio on a home runs to eleven, you are at the more acute part of the challenge. “There are houses built in Cambridge right now, and you could live in them, but for the fact you turn the tap on and there’s no water, because they’ve run out of water.” We end up discussing Cambridge like a starter batch of sourdough … “It’s one of the best starter batches in the world.” You’re not persuading a million people to move to Northumberland. You’re putting that starter next to the most concentrated bowl of unmet demand in the country.

Storied university, close to the capital city, not enough houses, existing economies, new economies emerging. There’s a good case there. And we’ve not got to the forest bit yet.

Forest City 1 Plan

22.6MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Britain stopped believing the future could be better than the past. We're here to prove that wrong. This isn't another housing development. It's a complete reimagining of how we can live, work, and thrive in the 21st century. We're proposing Britain's first new city in half a century—a forest city of nearly 1 million people, built on 45,000 acres east of Cambridge, surrounded by 12,000 acres of deciduous woodland roughly the size of York.

Download

There are a few issues mind … and I suspect as a reader that you’ll be thinking it too. We have a journalist, with a feasibility study built on a few thousand pounds and forty-odd people working effectively pro bono, with no land secured, no money raised yet, no permission granted, proposing a city for a million people next to a town that can’t fill a kettle. Of course it sounds delusional, and Shiv knows exactly how it sounds.

Near the end of our conversation he preempted his own critics, doing the voice they’ll use on him: “Hold me to account. Like, that was all bullshit, Shiv. This is just some Overton window exercise.” He’s not naive about the odds, and refuses to let the odds be the reason not to try. Do you really think we can keep up doing what we’ve been doing and expect the UK to suddenly meet its housing targets? Yeah … me neither.

Britain invented this new city lark though. Remember Letchworth and the garden cities movement, Bournville and the Cadbury factory, or Robert Owen at New Lanark. There’s also a tidy reminder that the park that went on to inspire Central Park was in Birkenhead. “Britain has traditionally been a leader for all these things … we have been an inspiration for placemaking, for people around the world, for a century at least. We can do it again.” Ebenezer Howard, the man behind the garden cities was, and Shiv enjoys this, also a journalist. Ironically, Jane Jacobs hated this shit … which I find quite funny.

Forest City doesn’t sound outlandish to me because it’s too ambitious. It sounds outlandish to people because we’ve conditioned people for thirty years to think small. We’ve normalised a country that builds what Shiv calls bad places … I’m glad he said it, because I think I softened it too much in our chat.

“So low ambition, so aesthetically ugly, and they leave people with almost no dignity … sometimes we’re too polite. Sometimes we need to just call a spade a spade.”

We should want to watch him try, and at least be what I’d love to call ‘more interestingly less wrong’ than watch the whole country succeed at thinking small without making a dent in the bigger problem.

Shiv knows the hardest part isn’t the water treatment, or the small modular reactor, or the massive amount of financing needed. Which is more honest as he says “You can always fix a physical thing. But the culture of the place, will we get that right? Because it can go horribly wrong.”

This is where many plans of twentieth century failed. Le Corbusier’s palaces in the sky, the streets in the air, citizens who were meant to be kings of their own decks, and which became some of the most frightening places anyone has had to live. The built environment manufactures disasters as easily as it manufactures dignity, and you usually can’t tell which one you’ve made until people are living in it. Shiv’s real test for Forest City is the experience he ends up creating of “Is it going to feel like the future? Is it going to feel like life is better than the past? Because if it doesn’t, that’s where we failed.”

It’s not the same, but I think we should look to some of those noble ambitions of the 1960s. One of my favourite projects, and something that stirred an interest in place for me is Park Hill Flats in Sheffield. It was the great brutalist promise that curdled into slums in the sky, looming over a declining industrial city. Everyone’s instinct was to flatten it as the thing sunk into more and more decay. Instead, the developer Urban Splash kept the bones, learned from what had failed, and turned it into somewhere people now actively want to live. The lesson shows us that brutalism perhaps wasn’t a crime against our urban environments, and that perhaps the bigger issue is our inability to iterate on ideas and projects once they’re constructed.

So for Forest City 1, I think we should consider what the proposition of this place will be. I have written a lot about how this is the thing many projects simply omit and then colour in at the end. So Shiv will tells me about about the lake you can swim in, the forest that runs through the place in tendrils rather than sitting over in one corner of the map, the eighty percent of journeys that aren’t in a car.

But the detail that strikes home is more personal to him. When his daughter was small and they lived on a London terrace, he was permanently tense because at that age, kids run, and they sometimes run toward roads. Then they moved near the Olympic Park where “suddenly all my anxiety was lifted completely,” he says. “She could run for fifteen minutes straight, in any direction, and never hit a road.” That’s the pitch. Not the renderings of wooden apartment blocks or stone faced nouveau terraced family homes, but the unclenching of not worrying. He’s visioning and building a place designed so that the low, grinding hum of uncertainty … about your mortgage, your children or the creative risk you’d love to take but can’t afford to isn’t pressing into your psychology day to day.

Share

Everything we bang on about on this platform is sitting in this story. It’s the biggest possible future and the smallest possible thing … the city for a million people, needing to prove it can make the houses that will make it up commercially viable. It’s next practice over best practice really. Shiv couldn’t quietly buy up land in secret like the California Forever crowd, so he walked onto a stage in front of ~1200 people at the O2 and announced it, because the real bottleneck was never land, it was permission, and permission is politics, and politics you win in the open. An outsider doing the thing the insiders said couldn’t be done, and converting the insiders one impossible challenge at a time.

It will be very hard, and it may very well not happen. But the failure I actually worry about isn’t Forest City falling over, but the country so practiced at not imagining for fear of ridicule that it never tries at all. Shiv’s own defence of the people who came before - the modernists who got so much so wrong - ia good one to work us towards a close here.

“They made mistakes, but they tried. And that is the one lesson we can take from them. How do we think big? Yeah, we might fail, but at least we try.”

“We called it Forest City One,” he reminds me at one point, “So presumably there’s a two and a three.” He won’t build those as he says he’ll retire and die in the first one. But somebody in Oxford is going to look at this and ask why not us. That permission to want something better, spreading from one stubborn outsider outward is the most valuable contribution he can make, long before the first shovels hit the ground.

The cavalry might not be coming, but that doesn’t mean you can’t raise your own force for positive change in this world.

To being Challengers.

You can find out more about Forest City 1, including plans, updates and sign the pledge here.

Not too many people can lay claim to have worked with as many cities as Gil either, and those that do, will normally hand you some sort of framework that looks very sensible on a PowerPoint slide. I’m sure Gil has them, but my experience with the man has been to say what he thinks. I like opinions and ideas over frameworks.

Gil ran for Mayor of Toronto in 2022 and took 100,000 votes in 100 days. We do lament a little in here about what might have been. What I admire is in our conversation, he will occasionally contradict himself within a breath, but it’s him speaking in the form of ideas to do things, rather than reasons to play it safe and hand decisions over the processes that water them down.

When we did the Toronto edition of the Challenger Cities salon, it was Alex Bozikovic who said “say the thing” in relation to how we need to speak our minds and call things out more as they related to cities. I think this conversation with Gil lives that. So here are fourteen of them, verbatim, with my two cents attached.

1. Power is a costume

“There are two kinds of people regarding mayors. Some who want to be mayor, and very few who want to do as mayor. They see being mayor as a means to do something else.”

“One of the myths in Canada is that mayors are not powerful. I remember at a debate with John Tory, he said, ‘I’m only one vote.’ I said: tell me — you’ve been mayor now for eight years. Tell me one significant issue that you lost in a vote. Nothing. Nothing. The mayors are very, very powerful. And now with the new strong-mayor powers, even more. They used to need fifty percent; now they need about a third.”

The weakness mayors plead — I’m only one vote — is a costume. The power is already there, and strong-mayor rules have only made it heavier. What’s missing isn’t authority, but the appetite to spend it. Lots of political people want to be the mayor, but few of them seemingly wants to do the job. The office as a destination versus the office as a tool. Much of what you’ll see from Gil comes from this desire to do rather than be.

2. The same street, sold three ways

“In Paris, children were scared to walk to school because people drive like crazy. So the mayor said: what if we close the streets in front of the schools? Two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. A couple of days later — what if we do it all day? A week later — why don’t we do it permanent, twenty-four seven? In three and a half years she’s done over three hundred schools. The pilot wasn’t one day or one week — it was one year. We bring the doors, no cars for one year. If it’s the end of the world, at the end of the year we open the doors. If it’s not, we plant trees and gardens. She called it greening — greening Paris. Then the mayor of London went, loved it, but in London they don’t care so much about greening — they care about clean air. So he said: the drop-off is poisoning the kids; close the street and we save their lungs. Now London has 250 schools — but there it’s a clean-air program. Tirana, in Albania, I told the mayor: think about children. He said, I want a Tirana that’s good for children. Same program. Somewhere else, they do it about something else.”

This is a masterclass in proposition design without the vocabulary as the intervention is identical in all three cities. The action might be to close the road outside the school, but the proposition is tuned to whatever that city already loves. Greening for green-minded Paris, clean air for asthmatic London, spaces for children for Tirana. The thing you build and the story you sell it with are two different jobs, and most cities only ever do the first.

It’s also the best argument against the copy-paste reflex. He isn’t telling Toronto to import Paris. He’s telling Toronto to find the thing Toronto already cares about, and pour the same intervention into that mould.

3. You’re not building an arena

“Let’s do it two months — July and August — for one year. If it doesn’t work, you don’t do it again. If it’s fantastic, next year you add June. You are not building an arena, you are not building a gymnasium — it’s just some streets where you put some barriers so people will use them. Try it. The risk is very low, the cost is very low, and the potential benefit is gigantic.”

We’re talking about the reversible experiment, or as Jeff Bezos would put it “the two way door”. Half the reason why cities freeze is they treat every change as permanent, and permanence is terrifying. Make it reversible and the fear doesn’t take over the room. You can’t really lose an argument about a thing you’re only trying out. The asymmetry he keeps pointing at is the capped downside and potentially enormous upside. Nobody got fired for some barriers on a road for a few Sundays to see if people like using a public space differently. Rather than having a hypothetical debate over something, we’ll get luckier if we just try a lot more stuff.

4. The missing half of every pilot

“It’s not just doing pilots — it’s doing things citywide. We’re scared of that. Sometimes we do a pilot and then we do nothing with the pilot. No. Do the pilot. If it doesn’t work, get rid of it. But if it works, fix it, adjust, and multiply it citywide.”

This is the critical second half of number three, and the bit cities (Toronto in particular) often skip. Institutions can get addicted to pilots, often “piloting” things that are proven elsewhere. Which can be fine for the permission thing, or to make sure the way an idea gets applied is right. But all too often, the nerve to make a pilot permanent goes missing. This ia actually Gil’s post-mortem on his own biggest Toronto failure where he sold Olivia Chow on summer streets, she loved it, funded it, ran the trials … and then let it die rather than scale it. The trying was never the problem, for the trying is easy and safe and gets you a nice photo op. The scaling is where the actual political courage lives, and it’s the courage Toronto keeps running out of at exactly the wrong moment.

See also the zombie nature of the King Streetcar Pilot.

5. The positive virus

“When I helped Guadalajara do their open streets, they’d never had it — there were one or two NGOs in the whole city. Within three years, about twenty-five. They did a study on why they’d all formed. Because they felt they could get things done. They said: in our wildest dreams we never thought you could get the cars off the street on a Sunday — and now that it’s done, people feel they can do more. It becomes like a virus. A positive virus.”

A visible, reversible win doesn’t just deliver the win … it rewires what people believe is possible, and they go off and start things. This is an answer to everyone who says you have to wait for public demand before you do something. But you don’t have to wait for demand, you can manufacture it, one Sunday at a time. It’s also where his bold-mayor-from-the-top and his scrappy-experiment-from-the-bottom stop looking like two different theories and start working as one loop, as the nerve up top creates the permission down below that makes the next bold thing safe.

6. The magic pill

“Walking is the magic pill. It’s good almost for everything — for the environment, for mobility, for economic development, for health. There’s nothing as good for health as walking. We keep saying everyone needs to be active thirty minutes a day, five days a week. Well, there’s no other way large groups of people stay active other than walking as a normal part of everyday life. So it’s good for depression, for anxiety, for heart attacks, for strokes, for diabetes — almost for everything. We invest billions in health care but almost nothing in health promotion. And walking is the great equalizer — it’s for all ages, all abilities, all backgrounds. The sidewalk is the life of the city. The street moves you from A to B; the sidewalk is where you meet boyfriends and girlfriends and neighbours and the person selling coffee and fruit and flowers. It’s where you develop a sense of belonging. Having walked in over 350 cities, I think walkability is almost proportional to the civility of a city. And in Toronto, one out of four streets has no sidewalk. One out of four.”

If there’s a single idea Gil would burn the rest for, it’s probably this one. What makes it more than a wellness slogan is the fact that walking starts as the cheapest public-health intervention ever invented. We spend billions treating sickness and almost nothing helping people not get sick. Pavements and sidewalks are not just functional infrastructure, but where a city’s social life actually happens, and the places that let a quarter of its streets go without one is telling you exactly how much it values that life. “Walkability is almost proportional to civility” is the kind of line that sounds soft until you test it against every city you’ve been to and find that it actually matters.

It’s also the most unglamorous radicalism going. Nobody builds a political vision around a footpath, but maybe they should?

7. Cave people

“The NIMBYs — I call them cave people, because they’re Citizens Against Virtually Everything. They’re nothing. They’re nobodies. I don’t understand why politicians are afraid of these guys. They’re powerful only because the councillors and the mayor give in to whatever they want. Here we blame the NIMBYs, we blame the developers. No. It’s the elected officials. A developer, if it’s zoned for ten and he can get thirty, he’ll do thirty — his job is to make money. The job of the elected official is to create a city that is equitable, sustainable, playful.”

Share

This is probably my favourite. We hear a lot about NIMBYs but CAVE people is a gem. Opposition’s power is frequently on loan as it exists only because someone keeps folding to it. But I like how he sends the blame not in the direction of the cranks at the microphone, or the developers doing what developers do, but the officials whose actual job description he nails in three words of being equitable, sustainable, playful. Too many elected official seem to forget the playful and sustainable bit, with a warped description of equitable that can be able meaning nobody gets anything so nobody is upset by something happening. That’s not equity.

8. Slow cars for the rich

“This is also an issue of equity. In Toronto, all the high-income neighbourhoods have low speed — 30 km/h — and all of them have humps, every fifty metres, so the cars can’t go fast. Why don’t we do the same in the rest of the city? Is it that we only want slow cars in the upper-income neighbourhoods? Same with tree canopy — Toronto’s about 28%, but the rich neighbourhoods are over 45, 50%, and the poor ones are 5, 6, 7%. Why don’t we say: for the next ten years, all the forestry and sidewalk budget goes to the neighbourhoods that have none?”

Equity shows up here in a different way. You can read a city’s class map straight off its infrastructure diffusion, in terms of where the speed humps are, where the tree canopy is, where the sidewalks simply stop. The genius of his fix is that it isn’t a slogan, it’s a budget rule that is hard to argue with, hard to dilute and easy to audit.

9. Eighty people, eighty cars

“We have streetcars stuck in the middle of the cars. That’s not even democratic. The constitution says all people are equal. Well — if all people are equal, then eighty people on a streetcar should have the space of eighty cars with one person each. At least in peak hours, give the streetcars dedicated space. They’d go thirty percent faster. It’s like buying thirty percent more streetcars without spending a cent.”

This is the one I’ve been going on about for a while. It’s there way back in the early Toronto conversations we did. Here though, Gil takes a transit-priority argument that usually gets lost in in engineering and reframes it as a ethical one. If we’re equal, why does my eightieth of a streetcar get less road than your entire car?

This is also one of the most frustrating aspects about Toronto, for the noisiest group of people complaining about traffic, will do anything to prevent operating existing streetcars like proper trams. But if the Toronto streetcar system was reframed like a French tram system, those people driving still would be in much better flowing traffic. The spirit of entitlement is actually something that harms everyone because we see vehicles as equal, not the actual people using them. A car is not a streetcar, just like a bicycle is not a car.

10. Doing it right, doing the wrong thing

“My main advice would be: do what is right. It’s not just doing things right — it’s doing the right things. If you have a street with no sidewalk and you repave it — maybe on time, on budget — but you still leave it without a sidewalk, you’re doing it right, but you’re not doing the right thing. Focus on doing the right things, not on doing what’s easy.”

Most of what a city gets wrong isn’t incompetence, rather it’s competence pointed at the wrong target. That’s far more expensive and far harder to catch, because everyone in the room gets to feel like a professional while the place gets a little worse. The repaved sidewalk-less street is the perfect image of a job done flawlessly that should never have been the job in the first place. I think this is the conversation that needs to be had around process. It’s one thing following the process, but what is the process for? Very Dan Davies and his Unaccountability Machine.

11. Fifteen years became fifteen days

“The pandemic was horrible, but it was good for a few things. It showed that a lot of things were never technical or financial — they were political. Not party-political. Political. Bike lanes that used to take fifteen, twenty years to build were built in fifteen or twenty days. In London, Paris, Mexico, even Toronto — lanes approved back in 2008, in 2014, suddenly just got built.”

Keep this one in your back pocket for every “we could never do that”. It’s the natural experiment nobody designed, for the moment the will appeared, the impossible took a fortnight. Which means the thing standing between Toronto and a better Toronto was never money or feasibility or engineering, but appetite.

Ironically, when people say “well we could never do that”, always come back to them with the Roger Martin-ism (Canadian btw) … of “ok, but what would have to be true” … normally you realise it’s perfectly feasible to do it with some critical thinking.

12. Taylor Swift already proved it

“Everyone said the World Cup congestion will be terrible. Why? We had six Taylor Swift concerts — more people than the soccer games Toronto will host — and those six were in ten days. And the city didn’t fall apart. It’s the mentality of looking for problems to solutions instead of solutions to problems.”

I have a reputation for being a bit negative on Toronto. I think it’s unfair, as where I’m really getting at is Toronto is ok, but it can be amazing. Big events show off the best and the worst of a city. Toronto might have done better with how it could have more of a World Cup legacy, but as a city that does handle big events rather well, we should really be thinking about how to make them better.

It’s actually in these moments where we should be thinking, “hang on, if we can host this big event, and people take transit to it, what if we make transit the default the rest of the time?”

13. Fun is economics

“A playful city is about economic development. Two centuries ago, powerful cities were the ones with land. Last century, capital. Now it’s people. Every city is fighting for good nurses, good teachers, good doctors — and the good ones can live anywhere. If you’re good at making pizza, if you’re good at being a nurse, you can live anywhere — not anywhere in Ontario, anywhere in the world. So part of competing is being fun. Almost everything that’s free should be amazing, or quasi-free — the sidewalks, the parks, the libraries, the festivals. Playful cities is really an issue of economic competitiveness.”

This is the bit where I think we turn “playful” from a soft, seemingly trivial word into a critical one. Fun isn’t a frill you fund after the serious stuff, it is the city’s retention strategy. We’ve explored this with both Paul Kalbfleisch, and Sofia Song.

Good people are mobile now, and the amazing free things are exactly what keep the talent that everything else in the city depends on. “If you’re good at making pizza, you can live anywhere” is the labour market in nine words, and it should worry every city that thinks charm is optional.

14. The yes city

“It would be amazing if City Hall had a gigantic banner that said THE YES CITY. Because right now it’s so much the no city. Everything people suggest is no. High Park — let’s put some canoes or sailboats on the lake. No, no, no. Everything is no. The city should never say no with the excuse that that’s how we’ve done it for twenty years. Maybe we’ve been doing it wrong for twenty years.”

His closing banner, and his disposition in two words. It’s also where he cheerfully undercuts himself, as the same man who wants YES over the door also wants to ban the sale of Coca-Cola and fried food in the city’s parks. This is actually a good one to call Gil out on, albeit positively. Sometimes contradictions are the texture, not the flaw in a person or a place. He isn’t handing us a consistent rulebook, but a posture he can make the argument for. A city that defaults to yes is worth more than one with perfectly tidy logic. And in this case, if you want a coke and some fries in the park, there are plenty of places to go get it from. The city concessions in their parks should probably be aspiring to a healthier standard though.

15. It’s not left or right. It’s doable.

“Be very clear: this is not a technical issue or a financial one. It’s about policies. And it’s not about left or right — this is about doable. We can make a Toronto that’s more equitable, sustainable, and playful, where everyone lives healthier and happier. This is not dreaming. This is completely doable.”

I like how this is how we close this out. Because the left vs. right politics is broadly false. We can hold quite left views one moment, and be on the right the next. The goal isn’t for one side to win over the other. But every move in this list is relatively cheap, reversible, probably proven somewhere else and within a mayor’s existing power. None of it needs more money Toronto doesn’t have or permission it can’t grant. The only scarce ingredient is the nerve to do rather than be … which is where we kicked off this list piece.

He left me with one more, almost as a throwaway: “The children’s best toy is other children. That’s why they want to go to the park.” And doesn’t that follow up nicely from our last episode with Alicia Pederson? Build the city where that’s true, where kids spill into the street and the street is calm enough to hold them, and most of the rest will take care of itself.

To being Challengers.

“You can experience walkable cities as a tourist, but when you live there, the scales fall from your eyes. It totally changed my mind about what life can be like, how family life can be, what good cities are, what cities do … cities as a technology for meeting basic needs. And there was no looking back.”

She came home, did a doctorate in Renaissance English literature at Northwestern, and was on track to be a Shakespeare professor right up until she met her husband halfway through the dissertation, had three kids in four years, and watched the third arrive just as COVID was turning the world inside out. So she paused the academic career and found herself parenting on the north side of Chicago, paying attention to what was happening to family housing in the city around her. Then she noticed her friends were leaving.

“A lot of our family friends were having to leave the city. As our kids were ageing into elementary school, not because they disliked urban living, or because of crime or education or the reasons the cranks on the internet say, but because they couldn’t afford a house with a yard.”

The only family housing on the nice part of the north side was the detached single-family home, and those start at a million dollars. The city had decided that family meant house with a private yard, and then made it unaffordable to many. Alicia, thinking back to Florence, knew this was a solved problem. Her Florence family had lived in a four-thousand-square-foot apartment on the ground floor of a six-storey building, sharing the footprint with a late-night café and ten or so households stacked above. The apartment had a front door onto the public street, and a back door onto a courtyard.

That’s the whole idea, and it hangs from that one architectural fact. The apartment was lived in like a house. It had a front and a back. But the back wasn’t a fenced rectangle of grass that one family mowed and ignored - it was a green courtyard, shared with the building, invisible from the street. You could walk past it a hundred times and never know it was there. Drop the average North American tourist into Florence or Copenhagen and they’ll do the restaurants and the museums and the sites and never once register the thing that actually makes those cities work, because the best part is deliberately hidden round the back. It’s worth asking the obvious question then.

“Why is all the multifamily we develop here just these huge, hotel-like buildings?”

I love “hotel-like”. Think the double-loaded corridor, or deep, dark floorplate. The unit layouts so meh that the developers bury them three clicks deep on the website and lead with photos of the amenities instead, because they know, and you’d know too, that the homes are not the selling point.

But what if we flip the intuition? Because we assume a backyard is private and an apartment is exposed. But Alicia’s lived experience says the reverse. A North American backyard is yours, sure, but it’s overlooked by every second-floor window on the block. It’s private in the legal sense, but also a fishbowl in reality. The shared courtyard is sort of the inverse as nobody owns it outright, but everybody who belongs there is allowed in, only the public is not.

“It’s private, it’s not open to the public, but you’re all allowed to be there. There’s almost a greater privacy feel to it, somehow.”

Private like a members’ club, not private like a goldfish bowl. Her case for it is aggressively unsentimental as she is not romantic about gardens. She is a mother of three who can actually speak for what her kids want and do.

“My kids have zero interest in our tiny backyard, because there are no friends there. They just want to play with their friends, and it’s not big enough for their friends to play in. I would prefer the shared courtyard over the private yard any day — tear down all the fences, get rid of the garages and the alleys and the garbage, and then they could play with their friends.”

A private yard is a network of one, while a courtyard is a true network of a community. The gardening point is a masterstroke, for in a private yard, the garden is a chore you can’t opt out of. Alicia calls her own yard “this negative asset … something I have to maintain, but it has no usefulness to me.” In a courtyard, the neighbours who actually like gardening do it, everyone else pays their dues, and you get the attractive garden without needing to be the gardener. It turns a private obligation into a shared option, which is a better deal for almost everyone in the block.

Which brings us to the amenity building, which can be a good way of reframing how we think of the proposition of apartment living. The modern North American apartment leans on the things that come with the building, stuff we call ‘amenities’ … think the gym, the dog wash, the rooftop, the barbecue station, some even have stuff like a golf simulator, which are sold as luxuries for the residents. Alicia makes a very good point that every private amenity you stuff into a building does three damaging things at once.

“You’ve got a gym and a dog wash and all this stuff in your building, and you’re paying for that privately, driving up the per-unit cost. And you’re not taking that money to patronize those businesses in your community … it’s making it harder for the brick-and-mortar stores to exist, because they’re being taken care of in private.”

It privatises what the street should provide, then starves the local businesses that would otherwise make the neighbourhood worth living in. Then because amenity buildings are typically enormous and expensive, it hands the whole development game to institutional capital. A hundred years ago, what are typically our favourite neighbourhoods today, were built out by the city laying streets and subdividing parcels, and then multiple enterprising individuals or developers filling them in. Now any decent-sized site goes to one national developer who does the entire block. It why it’s not just age of development that gives texture to a place, but the way it was formed in the first place.

“The neighborhood itself is the amenity.”

Parisian apartments, even the new ones, don’t put a dog wash in your building. But they do enable a bakery on your corner, and a salon for your precious pooch across the street. The pre-war neighbourhood pushes its residents out into itself, while the amenity building compels them to stay in. The former makes a great city, the latter is almost like a resort. Let’s not knock a good resort, but if we’re honest they tend to be good for a chill week, not so much for a full life.

Now, regular readers and listeners know where my head goes with all this. Run it through the proposition lens of is it lovable, doable, commercial and permitted? Courtyard urbanism is wildly lovable; the kids and their friends case closes the sale on its own. It’s plainly doable as Alicia’s team has finalised designs and a template playbook for North America (and it already exists elsewhere). It’s more commercial than the alternative, because it should be cheaper to build, with no bloated parking deck, no insistence that every child’s bedroom be oversized with its own bathroom (“your kids don’t need their own bathroom,” she says; and, later, “I don’t want to clean five bathrooms”). It fails, on one leg though. We don’t permit these places.

This is the same dysfunction I was circling in Cities Without a Proposition as a permissioning economy that moves enormous amounts of paper without anyone asking what the thing is for or why a human would choose it. Roughly seventy percent of the barrier, Alicia reckons, is zoning. The floor-area ratio that quietly caps you at townhouses. The variance you have to beg an alderman for, which then trips the affordability requirement, which then stops the project penciling, i.e. the numbers stop working. Elevators can cost three times what it costs in Europe because of code about how large it needs to be in the worst case scenario. None of it is about whether the building would be good for someone to live in, but it’s about what previous generations with good intentions compounded into a barrier to doing stuff.

There is also a stigma to apartment living for Americans, as many associate apartments with Section 8 (subsidised housing) and crime. This must be framed as a misconception to be overcome, but the way we get over the stigma is improving the reality. Lots of American apartments are actually bad. People who say they won’t live in an apartment are giving you an accurate verdict on the apartment developers keep building, acting as a hotel-like box with bad layout and no outdoor spaces beyond the balcony and maybe a rooftop. Some are better than others, but the vast majority could be much better without costing more money. The answer isn’t to argue with the customer, but to change the product they’re consistently being presented with. And the history backs the product over the prejudice anyway:

“There’s this idea that Americans won’t live in apartments, but … New York City exists. Seventy-five percent of the housing in New York City is apartment housing.”

The American cities that held onto their apartment stock through what Alicia caled “the dark ages for American urbanism” … New York, Boston, Chicago, even some of San Francisco, Washington DC … are the ones that stayed resilient and clawed their way back. New York has blown past its 1950 peak. Detroit, built around the car and the single-family lot, got gutted, and couldn’t afford to maintain the sprawling infrastructure it was left holding. Apartment cities turned out to be resilient cities, when the tide changed, they had something to come back to.

There’s a density (we need a better word) argument here, and it happens to land in my own backyard. The Plateau in Montréal is, by most counts, one of the densest and most desirable neighbourhoods in Canada, and you can barely find a building over four storeys. It does that through households, not towers, with single-stair walk-ups full of apartments singles, couples and families can live in. The tower obsessives have their way of doing density, but it’s not the only way, when some of the densest neighbourhoods on earth are four and six storeys tall.

“A dense Copenhagen neighborhood is numerically much denser than a Chicago one, but you don’t feel the density, because there’s so much greenness. Whereas in Chicago it feels overwhelming, because there’s no green space and the roads are really big. It’s about how you chunk the density into many small buildings.”

Density is typically seen as a number, but it’s also something felt positively and negatively depending on how it’s done. Too often planners are optimising the number and ignoring the feeling. It’s why I like the reframing of abundance as sufficiency. As in enough to support the corner store and the tram and the school, distributed so it behaves as place you want to be rather than a number that makes sense on a spreadsheet. Our conversation about alleys in cities is a good example of this. Chicago’s alleys are paved places for your garbage cans and garages, so they effectively destroy the desire anyone can have for the interior of the block. Toronto’s are nicer. Montréal’s, behind my own house, have been militantly traffic-calmed with planters and greenery, so my downstairs neighbours’ have a space to play with their toddler. The fundamentals of a Chicago and a Montréal alley are effectively equal, but the details are very different. It’s not quite courtyard urbanism, but an analogy.

Share

The magic is the life-cycle mix. A courtyard block is many buildings, so some can be rental, some condo, some owner-occupied, and you end up with households across the whole arc of a life rather than the segregation we currently engineer of twenty-somethings here, families in the burbs, retirees over there.

“When you can get them all in a neighborhood that meets everybody’s needs, the magic happens. You can have this wonderful complete life-cycle neighborhood that is greater than the sum of the parts.”

I’ve felt the opposite of this every time I’ve gone apartment hunting. You look at these homogenised floor plans and you genuinely cannot work out who they were designed for, not quite a couple, not a family, not a downsizing retiree. They’re not spaces designed for people; they’re boxes built to cram people into, and then the amenity-heavy model papers over it. A neighbourhood of hipsters can be achingly cool for four years and then gets commercialised as the next generation of young creative types can’t afford it and don’t want it to make their mark on. A neighbourhood of retirees buries itself. A neighbourhood of just families can alienate the next generation of families. Kind of the entire point of a city is to put together the people who’d otherwise never end up together, and a courtyard block, being many buildings rather than one, can do that on a single block in a way a podium tower never will.

Alicia and I agree that it’s also the unlock for those dead downtowns full of office towers nobody can convert. I had Steven Paynter from Gensler on back in EP24, and his team built the model that scores an office tower on whether it can become housing … think ceiling heights, window placement, the distance from core to perimeter across hundreds or even thousands of buildings in dozens of cities. The punchline is that converting the right tower makes the wrong tower next door a more valuable office, because the residents you add are the demand that pulls the coffee shop, the grocer and the street life back. Drop courtyard blocks onto the dead parking lots around them and you’re doing the same trick at block scale, reviving the value of everything they sit beside.

Now, because you don’t read this newsletter for a sales brochure, here’s where we might have a bit of a challenge.

The first tension is the cold start, and it’s probably the big one. Courtyard urbanism is accretive as each block makes the next one more valuable, which is its real superpower. But it cuts the other way at the beginning. Block one goes up on a parking lot with no corner grocer, no courtyard community and no other kids, and the entire lovable promise, of your child has friends to play with, is a network effect, and network effects are brutal before critical mass.

Helpfully, Alicia’s most promising leads aren’t empty parcels at all. In some cases they are church land with an existing congregation, or the likes of California Forever arriving with industry and jobs attached. Courtyard urbanism needs a demand anchor of a congregation, an employer, a campus that gives a reason for the first hundred people to want to be there before the magic shows up. “Here be housing” has failed before, and it’ll fail again. The smallest possible thing isn’t a block itself, but the block that can be attached to reasons for it to be.

The second is governance, which is the actual product and the part no rendering ever shows. The whole thing runs on nested ownership where each building’s association feeds a master association that runs the shared courtyard commons. In North America the HOA is frequently the most dysfunctional institution a person will ever belong to, captured by its angriest and most conservative members. A gorgeous courtyard with a broken master association is a big risk if the collective doesn’t come together. We saw some of this in the conversation with Simon Kuper where the small Parisian courtyards are no-go zones because one old couple will be against any noise made by children there. In some ways the physical design is the easy part that can be quite logical, where the social technology that keeps the shared space genuinely shared is the bit that requires nurturing.

And third, smaller but worth saying: the parking answer needs to be better than the idea that “the parking is gonna be like stables” once AVs arrive. That’s a bet on an unarrived future doing big assumptive work. The recent conversation with Bern Grush is a reminder of how little work cities have done around the future of autonomous cars. Courtyard blocks reduce car dependency today, because they’re walkable and mixed-use and shaped to tuck a grocer onto every block. Plus where they exist, there tends to be a culture of public transport and the infrastructure to match. This is where the housing theory of everything and the transporation theory of everything come together.

What genuinely persuades me, though, is the implementation model, because it refuses the planner’s instinct to master-plan and hands the city back its oldest, most boring competence.

“Give the city the tools for doing what cities used to do — you lay the streets, you subdivide into the right parcels, and then you create a form-based code … Then give them a library of template buildings. Developers, or homeowner-developers, could browse from the library, customize them, put whatever facade they want, do whatever unit, and plug it into whatever parcel.”

The right parcels, i.e. wide and shallow, sixty feet and up is a bit of a shift, because North America’s narrow, deep lots are half the reason the apartment tradition can be so weak. It requires writing a form-based code instead of a use-based one, to then hand small developers a kit of parts. This is accretive, and it leans in to the MAYA principle of ‘most advanced yet acceptable’. Alicia frequently posts what she cheerfully calls “insane renderings”, Barcelona Americanised, and the replies say “that will never happen”, right up until she breaks it down. “This is how they’re doing stuff like this right now in the Netherlands”, she’ll say, and then:

“This is not rocket science at all. You can totally do this, and it’s gonna be cheaper and it’s gonna be better and your city’s gonna be richer.”

It should not be seen as ‘best’ practice imported from abroad, but ‘next’ practice of the reinterpretation of a thousand-year-old technology we had, lost for a single century of deep dark apartment blocks, and are finally in a position to recover and modernise. The pieces are already moving too, as Albany is running a pilot, HUD (the US federal housing department) is eyeing courtyard blocks as low-cost family housing through its funding stacks, a courtyard-block overlay is in consideration for Bloomington-Normal where Rivian builds its trucks, the Catholic parishes are sitting on land they’d rather see become a neighbourhood than a parking lot and the dead lots of downtown Dallas are an option. California Forever is already building it into a city from scratch.

The biggest possible future here is enormous of a North American city that finally builds homes families want to grow old in, not just start out in. The smallest possible thing is almost embarrassingly modest of finding a single block, with some 60ft parcels, to create a demand anchor so people can tear down the fences.

The thing I’ll close this with is a line Alicia and I settle on on right at the end, because it’s the philosophy in summary. Density done as arithmetic as “how many bodies can we cram into this footprint?” gives you Chicago feeling overwhelming at a number Copenhagen beats while feeling like a garden city. You don’t win at citymaking by maximising the count, and you don’t lose by keeping it modest. You win by making it a place people feel rather than a place planners measure. Top-down gives you the numbers, bottom-up gives you the spaces and places. And the courtyard, it turns out, was never really about housing at all. It was about whether your kid can go out the back door to play with a friend.

To being Challengers.

Listen to the full conversation with Alicia Pederson on the player above, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to go deeper: Alicia and her team are designing courtyard blocks adaptable to any US jurisdiction and will run educational sessions for cities and developers — the quickest route in is your local Strong Towns chapter or a direct line to your planning department.

Courtyard Urbanist

Courtyard Urbanist, founded by Alicia Pederson, PhD, is a research and development brand advancing courtyard block design for North American cities, drawing on Europe’s best neighborhoods to upgrade U.S. cities with family-friendly courtyard blocks.

By Alicia Pederson

And if this got you thinking about downtowns, Steven Paynter’s episode on office-to-residential conversions (EP24) is the natural companion to this one.

That was the provocation which last Monday, drew the best part of seventy people into a hot, sweaty upstairs room at Pub Sainte-Élisabeth in Montréal, and I’ve been pouring over what happened there for the past week.

There is a particular magic to gathering people who’d never otherwise share a table and simply starting a conversation. Andy Nulman, Jacquelyn West, Phil Tabah and Greg Lindsay did exactly that, and again, to my surprise, we disagreed far less than I’d braced for. It stayed warmer - literally, as well as metaphorically - than the Toronto room, and, thankfully nobody really wanted to spend much time talking about potholes.

The provocation we anchored our conversation around is a fascinating one. For just about every other city in North America has sent, or is sending, a delegation to try to steal a little piece of Montréal’s magic. From the (previously?) affordable studios, the street life, the friction, the culture, the festivals, the streetscape or the identity that is hard to really codify. They all see it, and want it.

So what does Montréal do with that enviable position? It seemingly spends its energy trying to become every other city, while simultaneously having a cultural screaming match about language including whether nosh, pasta or falafel are French enough to put on a shop sign. Litigating menus is a massive waste of energy while the actual culture is being starved of life. It’s weird when the answer is itself behaving like the question.

“This is a great country because of this city. Without Montreal, Canada would be hopeless. It’s where the cool kids hang.” - Anthony Bourdain, 2011

The temptation is to read that as decline. Many in this city do, but I think I mostly disagree there. The real danger is the correction and the urge to smooth the texture, think this is just about renovating some of the old infrastructure and becoming Generic North American City #47, with a new and improved waterfront or heritage district.

Montréal hasn’t lost its talent, but it’s probably lost some of its nerve.

Because Montreal did have the crown for this stuff. People still arrive expecting the culture city of up until circa 2017, and for now the brand is generous enough to keep them coming. But a reputation is a bit like a battery, and arguably, Montreal is running its dangerously low. While we’re deliberating on nights like this, the danger is the people, their investments and their patience could decide it’s no longer got the energy for Montreal and perhaps it might be better off elsewhere.

Montreal Challenger Cities Salon Summary

10.8MB ∙ PDF file

Download

A little recap from the Challenger Cities Salon in Montreal

Download

What the room agreed on, more than anything, is that this is not a talent problem. The skills, ideas and passion is all here. There’s something in the water, but we just need to bottle it better. Culture is the city's actual currency. By pouring something like two hundred odd million dollars into the Quartier des Spectacles, as north of six million people a summer come to stand in the street to watch festivals mostly for free. No other city on the continent does that, so it means the raw material has never been the problem.

What Montreal has done, still does, so well, is not giving a shit what others are doing, or thinking, and living with a sense of pride and acceptance in the decisions, good and bad, it has made.

I often joke that Toronto is somewhat ignorant of learning from the rest of the world, which harms the city. Well Montreal is far from ignorant about how elsewhere works, it’s just that historically it has frequently said fuck that and done something its own way. More often than not, I think it’s been right! Though the fuck up list is not a short one.

Each guest leaned on a different edge of that. Andy Nulman, who helped build Just for Laughs, made the case for daring to be different with the swagger that lets a city try, fail and try again instead of consulting itself into caution. He opened us up with a big provocation about turning the French language into a big attraction vs. something people get all awkard about. People come here for French, let’s have some fun with it by making it a show that pays off at home and away.

Phil Tabah, through themain.com, spends his days showing a city to itself; and in an age of algorithmic slop, knowing what’s good and saying so out loud has become a civic act. Greg Lindsay reminded us how the screen killed the city as we’ve handed the serendipity over to doomscrolling, demonstrating that a room full of people actually talking is no small thing. He's also one of the better travelled, more curious as well daring urbanists I know, and he chooses to live here. He also pointed out Montréal has one of the highest shares of women in its workforce anywhere, which is a kind understated structural advantage that other cities would spend huge sums trying to engineer.

And Jacquelyn West focussed on culture as well as permission as the lovable, doable and commercial count for nothing if the city won’t let you try new ideas that add to the culture. She also recognises this sort of thing can be complex, and nuanced, for you can’t just say “we will do culture here”. It has to be nurtured, it won’t often have a direct financial payoff, but a more oblique one. It often arises when times can feel a bit bleak, which means cities get complacent with it when things are going well.

(Jacq’s episode is coming up soon, and it’ll be a banger, I promise!)

If there’s one instruction underneath all of it, it’s this … we need to stop acting like there is an accident to be corrected, and start making it easier to have happy accidents on purpose for virtually everything people love about Montreal is actually hard to manufacture. That means we need to curate events and ideas like they matter and open up new permission spaces. We should make French a generous, rewarding spectacle rather than an alienating factor, a bit like the way Copenhagen rewards good behaviour with CopenPay. If we build for rooms, not screens, then when new Québec culture breaks out, it’s a shared and lived experience.

The smallest version of all this is might be on a single corner. Something I’ve been sketching for Challenger Cities in the context of Montreal is a Nouveau Dépanneur so the dep can be reclaimed as the third place it was always meant to be. But that’s something we’ll come back to later for a future piece …

So while everyone else keeps trying to copy Montréal, the task for Montréal is to get two steps ahead, to keep them coming back to try to copy it again. Not by becoming more like everywhere else, but by becoming, deliberately, more like the only Montréal there is.

That’s how Montreal keeps breathing new life into itself, and can keep offering something new for the next generation, while staying true to the heritage nobody else can possibly copy, and importantly, ensures it is something the city can afford to do and its people be rewarded for.

And just to show that it is possible. There is a magic when you get people in a room together, who wouldn’t ordinarily end up in the same room together. So while many came from my not-so-professional LinkedIn network, others discovered the salon through The Main and the event getting featured on Luma. Thanks to that, I met people like Pedro Delfino who has created Le Day Club. Which again, is another way of getting people together, doing something collective, who might not ordinarily end up in the same place. It’s the alchemy made in Montreal that other places struggle to replicate.

Je pense que c’est possible.

To being Challengers.

Share

Now, I don’t know what street Canada is buying its trains on, but it sure isn’t the street that France, China, Spain, Japan or even Poland are buying their trains on.

So we are pouring the GDP of a small nation into building railways, and we are doing it with no shared rulebook, no agreed sense of what good looks like, and … this is the part that should keep planners up at night … no recent memory to draw on. We took something like three decades off building much serious (someone will say the Skytrain or the REM), and then turned the taps on all at once. As Mark put it, “we’ve gone about twenty-some-odd years without building any infrastructure, and now all of a sudden we’re building massive amounts of infrastructure, and we don’t have any precedents to say this was good, this was bad.”

Thing is, even if things do get built is a reasonably timely and cost effective manner, the system that lets us learn from the things we build has never been there. Most transport in Canada is a fragmented set of things that don’t really connect into one another. Everything that follows is a version of that.

TRACCS (Transit Rail Association for Canadian Contractors, Maintainers, Operators and Standards), the non-profit Mark co-founded started, fittingly, as a rant. He and his friend Paul Murphy were a few Guinness deep at the Irish Embassy in Toronto, going round in circles on why Canada keeps repeating the same mistakes, when they landed on the diagnosis: “we don’t have standards, we don’t have training or competency and we also don’t have any procurement assurance.” Those three missing things are not glamorous items, but the unsexy connective tissue that turns a country full of clever individual projects into an industry that can actually learn, then apply that learning systematically.

Over a few more pints they decided someone should do something about it.

Have you noticed that we never close the loop? Most transport infrastructure projects are so long that the people who set the stall out, design the plan, get the buy in for the funding, win the bid etc. aren’t the people who build it, and no real group ever sees how it actually turns out. The bidder’s whole job is to win work, so they repeat whatever won last time, “repeating the same mistakes,” whether or not it built anything good. By the time the ribbon’s cut, the politician who announced it has moved on, in some cases passed on, the planner who scoped it has retired, and nobody who made the early calls is around to be asked ‘why did you do it that way?’ The feedback never reaches anyone who could act on it. We don’t just fail to learn the right lessons, but Jonathan’s goes on to point out that “you can in fact learn bad lessons, where you keep repeating the practice that was unsuccessful.”

It gets worse when you ask who Canada copies. In several recent conversations I’ve had with Canadian transport operators, I keep hearing how they are benchmarking against projects in the US, which Jonathan, who has lived there and written for the American press isn’t shy about calling “the worst in the developed world” at this. Benchmarking against the worst does two things, both bad:, for it makes it very easy to pat yourself on the back in the celebration of mediocrity, AND it means you import their mistakes. “People could come up with the craziest, dumbest idea in New York and people will copy it just because it’s New York.”

This shows up lately as Toronto announces a big expensive project to install static fences in some stations instead of platform screen doors. Again, this is something I’ve personally heard from transit folks in Toronto previously claiming it would be impossible to install platform screen doors, while seemingly not knowing about other cities that have done it retrospectively.

It’s also how Canada has inherited the American habit of forcing passenger rail into a freight mould, as Mark explains how “we’re trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.” Freight and passengers operate differently, maintain differently, want different things. Pretending otherwise is a choice, and it’s an expensive one.

I want to be careful here, because the easy version of this summary is just a kicking, and that’s not terribly helpful as it just makes people go into their shell. Also, quite a lot does actually work in Canada, some of it did used to work better, but still, sometimes remembering what you used to do well is a good encouragement. Look to the past to image the future.

Share

Jonathan’s first book is about the one genuinely remarkable thing Canada did as Toronto was the only city on the continent to grow transit ridership in the decades after the Second World War, while everywhere was buying cars and pouring the concrete for highways. It did it not with one heroic megaproject but by running a basic, universal level of bus service across the whole city when nobody else would. The legacy is still visible in Toronto’s post-war suburbia, people use transit “four or five times, six times, up to twenty times what it is in similar American suburbia.” That’s not an accident of geography, but a service decision from long ago which still bears a bit of a legacy.

It could be done much better, yes. The vehicles could be nicer, the routes could be promoted more clearly, the stops could be more pleasant, the service could be more reliable, there could be dedicated infrastructure like bus lanes etc. But if you run lots of buses down a street, shock horror!, people will actually use them.

And cities like Toronto are, finally, building. Eglinton and Finch LRTs are indeed late, over budget, picked omn by everyone, but done and running. The question Mark is passionate about isn’t ‘should we build?’ but ‘how do we get value from what we’re building?’. There’s a cultural rot he points to as the agencies so battered by bad press that they’re frightened to try anything, because the last time they were proud of something they got attacked for it. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t, and no one wants to be damned anywhere, any time.” So nothing new gets tried, because new needs permission and permission needs someone to carry the blame.

Which is why the Finch West story might be one with a silver lining. Finch opened slowly, not just the project arriving late, but the vehicles themselves ran to tedious speed limits, kept stopping at red lights and inevitably a runner would show they could comfortably beat it. That noise did generate political attention, and out of the attention came action … they speed limits are being questioned, the transit signals are being adjusted and the service is running faster. Ok, not fast enough, but judging by how fast some of the decisions have changed, that’s some progress.

Jonathan has an important reminder here, because for as much as we can make the noise that the projects as they are being delivered are not good enough, the goal is not to make people scared of challenge. “We can improve things, if there’s enough attention.” Ironically, most of the fatalism, he notes, is inside the organisations, not outside them.

There’s a deeper duality running under all of this, and it’s the bit I think Canada is really naive about. Jonathan emphasises this as transit is really two different things, the infrastructure and the service that operates on it, you need both. North America (and, he’s right in saying Britain too) keeps hoping you can tweak the service to rescue inadequate infrastructure. Parts of Europe meanwhile build magnificent infrastructure and then fail to operate the service at its maximum. “We have both problems here.” And the killer is the network point for a line that isn’t embedded in a network is close to useless.

Jonathan’s Toronto example is funny, for York Mills station, surrounded by golf courses and mansions, carries more riders than Bethesda in Washington, which has textbook density around it. Because York Mills connects to a network and Bethesda doesn’t. A perfect station nobody can reach is a monument rather than a transit stop.

Infrastory

Engineering Problems and Phone Call Problems

There is a distinction that the infrastructure planning world doesn’t tend to make explicitly, but that explains an enormous amount of why large projects cost what they cost. It’s the distinction between engineering problems and what I like to call “phone call problems…

Read more

2 months ago · 75 likes · 5 comments · Jonathan English

I should also plug Jonathan’s Infrastory Substack here too, and one of his posts relating to whether is this an engineering problem, or a phone-call problem? Because the default Canadian answer to “this property owner might be upset” is to spend two billion dollars tunnelling under them, when the more effective answer might actually just be asking for a meeting, or a cheque for two million, or simply someone senior enough and brave enough to sit in a room and sort it out. The catch is empowerment as “you have to be senior enough to maybe cut a check.” We don’t give people the holistic view, and then we’re surprised when they reach for the concrete and the diggers.

It took us a little while to get into this in the conversation, but the meat of this thing is one of the most important ones we’ve done as it relates to Canada at least. For Mark’s whole project is to build the thing a nation spending the equivalent of the annual economic output of Greece or New Zealand has skipped. To build coherent and effective transport, you do need some sense of standards, so that each thing isn’t being designed from scratch, and the thing compounds over time. Training and competency follows this because we don’t promote transit as a career, meaning there’s no real trajectory once you’re in, and there isn’t a school in Canada that produces the variety of skills required. If you’re building generations worth of transit infrastructure, producing specialists like signal engineers might be a good idea.

There’s a culture sitting on top of this too, for there’s a whole army of Canadians who know a lot about transport, love this stuff to the point where they spend their spare time on it, and yet they don’t work in it. Jonathan named it as “too much passion for transport is looked at with a little bit of a raised eyebrow in the industry.” Go to any computer science programme and count how many of them (not so) secretly love trains. If you’re Metrolinx, or Alto, or Calgary Transit, or Infrastructure Ontario etc. maybe go and hire them? The autonomy people are chasing in cars, Canadian transit actually had first with the Vancouver SkyTrain ran driverless in the mid-eighties, before a single autonomous car touched a public road. I think Mark may have been a bit uncomfortable saying it, but we need to bring sexy back into transit. He’s not wrong, but it shouldn’t be an awkward thing to say.

TRACCS is trying to do it the only way it actually works, by getting the right people in the room. Rail Days in Mississauga gets international delegations turning up to talk to Metrolinx and the TTC and Calgary Transit etc. to share what already works elsewhere so Canada can stop reinventing it badly, and instead apply what is relevant to the Canadian context. That’s the systems instinct applied to the industry itself to treat the whole thing as one system, “so we identify all the interfaces, all the gaps,” instead of mashing projects together and hoping for the best. It doesn’t have to all happen at once, but we do need to be clear about the biggest possible future being built, and the smallest possible things that can be done right now.

Which is, of course, how we closed the conversation. Mark’s smallest thing was cheeky … come to Rail Days this week … but his biggest was more serious to make Canada the leader and economic driver for transit across North America, the place that finally figures out how to do this well and exports the answer south. I want that to be true. I’ll also say plainly that we haven’t earned it yet, and that measuring ourselves against the worst country in the developed world is precisely the complacency that would stop us earning it.

The prize isn’t being better than America, but being the bridge by borrowing the infrastructure discipline Europe and Asia have, marrying it to a more commercial, service-minded instinct, and getting good enough to be worth copying. Desirable, I’d add, doesn’t mean expensive; the Dutch don’t run great trains by gold-plating them, they run them by being clear about what they want and direct enough to say so. Canadians are the ones who tiptoe around what they truly meant to say, and then make the decision in the last five minutes of the meeting. Meanwhile the Dutch version is to use the first five minutes to say what the meeting is about, and tackle things head on.

Jonathan’s smallest thing was the one to end on, because it costs almost nothing and we refuse to do it … just run the service more often. There are buses and trains sitting in garages for most of the day across this country. Get the frequency to every 30 minutes and ridership jumps, 15, it jumps again; in urban areas 10 minutes we see the same. In Toronto, we really should be seeing things like automatic train control enable some service every two or three minutes.

His biggest thing is ambitious, but doable, for some cities like Montreal and Toronto have rail corridors fanning out from them that we run a dozen trains a day on, sometimes none, these are “insanely valuable assets” that would cost tens of billions to rebuild from scratch. We take them for granted because they’ve always been there, have run them so badly, and assume the demand isn;t there. The whole game might be to stop building new monuments and finally use some of the networks that are right in front of us.

“Being a leader”, Mark said, “means making a decision no one else wants to make.” We have the need, the money, the moment, and just now, attention. What we don’t have is the rulebook, the project pipeline or the political nerve. Those should be the cheap things, and they’re also the only things standing between where Canada is, and its cities being genuine challengers.

To Being Challengers

Share

Bern Grush co-authored a book called The End of Driving. And the first thing he’ll tell you is that the title gets misread too.

“It’s not the end of cars. It’s the end of driving. It’s the end of human driving.”

Cars, he insists, are a magnificent invention and they aren’t going anywhere. He even reckons we’ll travel at least as many passenger miles in a steel box as we do today. “Cars themselves are perfect,” he says. “It’s what we do with them.” Which is to have too many, too big, too fast, everywhere, too loud. The machine was never the problem. What we ask of the space around it is.

Bern arrives at this from a useful angle as he trained in human factors psychology and systems design engineering … half of him thinking about how humans work with machines, half about how machines work with humans … which accidentally made him for this work. He spent a decade on AI image analysis for satellite imagery back when “AI” meant something laughably primitive next to today. He invented and patented an in-vehicle road-pricing device that was all set to go live in the Netherlands until, in a genuinely bizarre piece of geopolitics, Obama’s surge in Afghanistan toppled the Dutch government, took out the transport minister, and took his contract down with it. An international war killed his startup. He was, he says, “down for a couple of hours.”

Then he noticed sidewalk delivery robots, got worried not about the device but about its behaviour in public, and having done standards work since the 1980s, went off and chaired the ISO series for, among other things, robotaxi pickup and drop-off. Across four years of it, what he found is that almost nobody thought the topic mattered as the prevailing belief was that these vehicles are smart, so they’ll figure it out.

Only, they don’t. A Waymo drives down the street better than an Uber driver. But ask it to find a place to let you in or out, Bern points out, and the human wins easily. The intelligence everyone marvels at stops precisely where the trip meets the city.

We spent a few minutes talking about form factors of autonomous vehicles. The Waymo Jaguar I-Pace still devotes a quarter of its interior to a driver who isn’t there. Bern finds the spinning, driverless steering wheel funnier than the empty seat: “Look-Ma, no hands is laughable, but Look-Ma, the wheel spinning around on its own.” It's there, he says, because we slapped a Band-Aid on existing machines just to try them. The mistake is to judge the whole future by these first awkward attempts: "We're at the Model T edition of this."

Zoox, a reimagined box that was never a car in the first place, is more honest about where this goes, as is a little Chinese toaster-on-wheels called Pixmoving already running a fixed micro-route in Riyadh. Why four seats? Why not two? Why not twelve?

It’s good sport, but it might also be beside the point. Teslas, Waymos, Zooxes and Fords will hoover up the attention because they’re the physical things you can see, sit in and touch. Whether any of them work in a city depends on something far less photogenic, relating to the connective tissue to the place. That means the moments you get in and moments you get out, including here you get in, where you get out. Almost none of the care and money being poured into the vehicle is going there.

Share

Here is the reframe the whole episode turns on, and it’s deceptively simple. When you own a car, you are buying the trip including the status, the feel, the reliability, can-I-fit-the-kids-and-the-kayak. When you use a vehicle as a service, your attention moves entirely to the endpoints. Where do I start? When does it come? Where does it drop me?

Bern stopped driving a few years ago, sold the BMW he loved, and felt his own mental model shift. “It changes everything about that experience and about that safety and about that comfort,” he says, “and we don’t think about those things.”

And then he did something I appreciated, because it’s exactly the move that separates a clever observation from a serious one. He widened it past his own comfortable vantage point.

“Try to imagine yourself a woman, and you need to go to a place that’s a little bit dicey, and you need to be let off at the door. You are not willing to walk three blocks through this particular area.”

Suddenly the endpoint isn’t a logistics detail; it’s whether a journey is available to you at all. The same is true for the wheelchair user who needs an accessible spot, or the blind passenger who can’t be made to cross the road to reach one. We obsess over the autonomy of the vehicle and ignore the autonomy it actually grants or denies the person inside. Marketing never helped as nobody has ever sold a car on how lovely it is to be in the car park.

So who is responsible for the endpoints? In transit we have the same blind spot as the train operator’s job ends at the station, never mind the office, museum, hospital or bar the passenger might actually be heading for, and we’ve imported it wholesale into the automotive world.

I told Bern about a scene I watched the other night near Spadina and Bremner, leaving one of our events as the Toronto Blue Jays game had just ended, with Ubers stopping dead on the junction. Police trying to move them on, passengers still clambering in, and a driver, terrified of a ticket, beginning to pull away with the door open. Everybody behaving rationally for their own goal, the sum of it faintly lethal. Bern called it the Keystone Cops. We are all set against each other because the glue is missing.

“The glue is that the city says: here’s the behaviour we want. If you want to operate in our city, here’s the place — and we’ve given you plenty of places to stop.”

We haven’t, of course, because the kerb is already full. We’ve primarily built it all for parking, squeezed in a hydrant and a charging point, and now we want it to absorb bike shares, scooters, cargo bikes, delivery robots and robotaxis too. Maybe the odd planter or pocket park as well. “There’s just not enough space for this,” Bern says, and it lands as a genuinely uncomfortable piece of arithmetic. A thousand robotaxis, doing twenty-five trips a day, with two endpoints per trip, 365 days a year … that’s eighteen million pickup-and-drop-off events a year, each one a candidate for the little clot in the traffic you can literally watch backing up a block. Toronto, he argues, is right to keep its foot on the brake for now, but it is wrong only if it thinks the answer is “never.” British Columbia banned Uber for a decade; that’s not governance, it’s flinching. “It’s not a mistake to say: you cannot do it until the following is in place.”

We should not be copying San Francisco’s surprise by making the same mistakes, but learn from them and thinking what’s our next practice, not assuming somewhere that moved earlier has the best practice.

What makes this more than a planning lament is that Bern has found the lever, and it’s a fiscal one. “I’m trying to convert parking authorities into PUDO authorities,” he says, PUDO being pickup and drop-off. Because a city gets hit twice, maybe three times, by the robotaxi as it loses the parking fee from the car you didn’t drive in, then loses more revenue while that empty vehicle “curb squats,” waiting fifteen minutes for its next fare in a space someone else would have paid to park in, not to mention people using a robotaxi over public transport.

The fix is to stop treating the kerb as free. Take the space from paid parking, map it, size some of it for accessible vehicles, put a spot on each side of every block, and then price it. Stopping on Richmond between York and Yonge should cost more than stopping out past Bathurst, because it’s worth more. As a bit of a marketer, this is simply repackaging a product to reflect its real value. The money that flows back can run better buses, redesign the street, or subsidise the trips for the person who needs the expensive kerb space for their accessibility needs at the expensive hour and can’t pay for it like someone who can be more mobile.

I’m now wrapping these by conversations by asking for people to think to the biggest possible future. Bern’s is wonderfully unglamorous, wanting more space for smaller things. We need to come away from the F-150 world of big fat automobiles in our cities, and reorganise the right-of-way. We can’t widen it, the buildings are where the buildings are, to make room for walking, bikes, scooters, cargo bikes, the lot. He describes an intersection near his home where a metre of pavement is so cluttered with a pole, a planter, a construction sign and a shelterless bus stop that an able-bodied man can barely pass and a wheelchair has no chance.

What if the commercial delivery robot has the same needs as the wheelchair user. So design the kerb for commerce, following the money, and you improve accessibility at the same time. Could it be that by letting the logistics people fund this thing, we get greater dignity for free?

The smallest possible thing here is a managed, priced spot to stop. The biggest possible future is a city reorganised around smaller, gentler, more numerous ways of moving. The distance between them is not technology alone, and it is not money. It’s the willingness to treat the kerb as something worth designing, and then to let someone run the layer that holds it all together.

Which is the part everyone forgets to ask about: who actually runs this? Throughout the conversation Bern kept referring to “the system,” and I kept teasing it as his future lucrative business endeavour, because it is the thing he has gone away and built. It’s worth separating the two halves. The ISO standard he is championing is the plumbing of a common language so a fleet and a kerb can talk to each other. The system layered on top is where the orchestration happens with the network of mapped, sized, both-sides-of-the-street spots and crucially the logic that lets a city price them. The standard doesn’t tell anyone they have to monetise, but the system is built so they can, because Bern’s advice to cities is to do exactly that.

The deeper move is a reversal of who’s in charge. Today the fleet is imposed on the city by the likes of Uber and Waymo arriving with their own operating logic, and the city’s contribution is a set of painted lines and a hope that everyone behaves. Orchestration flips it. “I’m integrating the fleets with the city,” Bern says, so the city declares the behaviour it wants, and access becomes conditional on conforming to it. If Waymo wants to operate? Fine, but use our orchestration system, and by the way, talk to Uber, who’s already running it. It’s the rare arrangement that lines up the interests it usually pits against each other, so we get a smoother trip for the rider, fewer regulatory headaches and a couple of extra fares a day for the operator, revenue and control for the city.

This is the deeply unglamorous middle layer that decides whether any of the shiny boxes actually work, being the connective tissue between institutions that nobody owned, which is precisely why nobody had built it. It took someone who’d spent a working lifetime thinking about how humans and systems fit together to notice that the gap was the whole problem, and then go and fill it. We are right at the beginning of what will be the messy middle, which is, of course, the good news, because messy middles are where the people willing to build the unglamorous layer get to decide how the whole thing works.

Even better, we don’t have to wait for the robotaxis to prove this out. We could start today, with the ride-hail, taxis and delivery vans already presenting the same problem on the same streets. Bern recognises the difference that “the robot will do what it’s told and the Uber driver does what it must”, and a human behind the wheel is harder to orchestrate than a machine that simply obeys. But that’s a reason to start now, not to wait for the machines and the eighteen million events a year that come with them.

To Being Challengers.

Share

He trained as a transport planner anyway, kept architecture in his back pocket as a fallback, and then got spectacularly lucky with his timing. Cities started building new metro systems again. He landed on the team building Vancouver’s first SkyTrain line, the world’s first driverless automated metro, as a twenty-something sitting beside the people deciding where the stations went and how often the trains would run. It opened in four and a half years, worked from the first day and has gone on to be one of, if not the best, North American system today.

What followed is the sort of CV that will suggest he might be a man worth paying attention to, for it includes; Canary Wharf and the Docklands Light Railway, The Jubilee line extension — he designed the route and built the business case that persuaded the British government to pay for it, four years on the team building Britain’s first high-speed line, from London to the Channel Tunnel. Then he went and founded an actual railway company, won a privatised franchise, turned a money-losing London–Norwich service into a profitable one while lowering fares and growing staff, started a freight operator that is now the largest in Britain, and rescued Australia’s long-distance trains by turning them into something that makes money to this day. Back in Canada, he badgered Toronto into electrifying GO (ongoing!), and more or less invented the Ontario Line at his kitchen table over a Christmas holiday.

I think that probably earns him the right to be frustrated with the state of rail in Canada today, and he is frustrated. Because the question everyone keeps asking him of “why is there still no fast train between Montreal and Toronto?”, the biggest two cities in a country separated 500km apart, when Morocco, Uzbekistan and Turkey and soon Vietnam will have exactly that — has an answer that is both simple and maddening.

Today, between those two cities, you get six diesel trains a day, scheduled to take five or six hours, late by an hour about half the time, and somehow also still an expensive way to make the trip. The fares look European on the website but work out the average and they’re about double, and the railway still loses money! Meanwhile, modern European HSR systems actually make money! … not necessarily enough to pay back the tracks, but significant operating surpluses, because, as Michael puts it, every additional passenger is “a hundred dollars to the bottom line.” So why not here?

Well it’s because the thing requires someone who understands the whole of it from what everything costs and what everything’s worth, across the entire spectrum … and there are almost no jobs that produce that person. The rail industry is gloriously over-specialised so the signalling expert doesn’t know how to timetable, the timetabler doesn’t understand fares, the fares person knows how to set a fare but not how you actually sell one to a customer.

His analogy is the one that lodges in your head. Imagine you buy a lakeside plot, see a lovely house in a magazine, and hire a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, a bricklayer, a gardener etc.. They all say yeah, no problem, we do houses like this all the time. And they’re all telling the truth, and you will still end up with a disaster, because “You need an architect. You need someone who knows how to put it all together.” Others might call this person a producer or general contractor.

Canada keeps assembling teams of people acting as specialists and forgetting to hire the generalist that can actually architect or orchestrate the thing. If this sounds familiar, it’s what I’ve recently been calling the ‘infrapreneur’. Michael describes himself as “a railway architect. I don’t design stations, I design railway systems.” Or, when he’s feeling less grand, “a truffle pig”, as the one who can go and find the buried treasure.

So where’s the treasure? It starts with two of what he calls his laws of railways. The first: “if you’ve seen one railway, you’ve seen one railway. They are all different.” Power stations might be relatively interchangeable, or perhaps better, McDonald’s franchises are interchangeable, but railways are not, because each one has to serve a unique geography, population and set of travel patterns. The second, hard-won over decades of his own failed attempts of “railway alignments are found and not made.”

For fifty years people, Michael included, tried to draw a line that loops Toronto through Ottawa to Montreal. Only recently did he realise the answer of “you actually build a railway from Toronto to Montreal and you put a spur up to Ottawa.” Trains to Montreal go straight through, while trains to Ottawa turn off, then come back. This isn’t heresy for it’s how Frankfurt, Milan, Rome and Manchester are all served. You build less railway, and the people who aren’t going to the intermediate city get bypassed. He points this out using the comparison of the plane, for “when you take a plane from Toronto to Montreal it doesn’t stop in Ottawa on the way, does it?”

The other piece of treasure is the ground itself. VIA has spent half a century trying to upgrade freight tracks and thread trains down old corridors and highways, the way you’d have to in England or Japan where there’s no room. But most of rural Ontario and Quebec is wide-open country, and the last thing you want is to build where things already are. It’s cheaper to lay track across a field. The cost of much of the land is really a rounding error in the grand scheme of things - maybe a million a kilometre - against the $30–50 million a kilometre that good open-country high-speed rail costs. Start following an existing corridor and you might double that. Go into a city, double it again. Into a tunnel, $500 million a kilometre. Nobody takes the time to break it apart like this, so they reach for an average of total cost divided by total length across twenty railways and produce a number that means nothing. Do the work properly and a greenfield line turns out to be quite cheap, in the way that fifty million bucks a kilometre is cheap.

Next comes the fares argument. The objection you hear, quite loudly lately from Pierre Poilievre, is that this will be a train for the rich, Laurentian Elite corporate and political types. The honest answer shouldn’t be a vague promise of “a range of fares”, but that a high-speed electric railway is so productive, and can have such capacity, that Alto could simply commit to average fares lower than VIA charges today.

The French already prove it as their high-speed average fare is about a third below what VIA charges now. Check Paris–Lyon and the gap between the cheapest and dearest ticket is €19 to €190, “a ten to one ratio,” Michael says, “and that’s what it should be.” You charge the business traveller who wants the window seat, the meal, the table space and the last-minute change a few hundred dollars; but you charge the student who books three weeks out, doesn’t care what time of day, and is prepared to be packed in a little tighter, as little as twenty dollars.

You don’t kill the premium product; you stop leaving the entire bottom of the market on the table. This is an issue with the current North American rail product, for VIA and Amtrak are pretty generous with their economy or standard class. It’s much more premium than standard class on LNER or a TGV. So why not create a value class carriage or two, that helps capture a different market segment.

I sat in a conference once watching an Amtrak exec present how they were maximising the price they could charge for a ticket on the Acela in the North East Corridor. He was proud that he’s increased his fares and ended his presentation with muted, polite claps. At the same event, VIA Rail talked about a new website. Meanwhile a man from SNCF’s budget brand Ouigo came up and explained how he runs a profitable railway selling some tickets for as little as nine euros. The North Americans looked at the Europeans like they’d been sniffing glue selling tickets so cheaply, while the Europeans looked at the Americans like they were morons.

But building a new railway goes beyond the fares on the trains, or how you fill those trains to justify the project. We also need to think about stations, and the developments they catalyse, like housing, which is where the politics get interesting. Alto’s instinct, echoed by its CEO, is to minimise intermediate stops to protect the headline city-to-city time. But the maths runs the other way once you stop treating every train as identical. Stopping at Kingston adds about ten minutes, which might cost you 2-3% of your through riders, but also gain you roughly four times that many new ones, because Kingston ridership is high even on today’s terrible service. The trick, which every mature system uses is that not every train stops everywhere. Maybe one an hour straight through without stopping, another one calls at Peterborough and goes via Ottawa, one that calls at Kingston, one stops everywhere.

And the stations themselves go beyond the place you get on or off the train, as they’re about land.

"When people talk about building houses more cheaply — well, we're not going to get the carpenters to work for less, we're not going to make bricks a whole lot cheaper. It's land. When it comes right down to it, it's land. The reason it costs so much to live in Toronto or Montreal, compared to say Edmonton, is the land cost. So we need to build railways where the land is cheap, and then run commuter trains from those places into the big cities."

The reason Toronto and Montreal are unaffordable is land cost, and the way you build housing cheaply (and quickly) is to build where land is cheap and then run fast trains into the big cities. Alto boasts about enabling 60,000 homes as though it’s a big number. In the scheme of Canada’s housing deficit, it’s absolutely trivial. Done properly you could build 60,000 in Peterborough alone, and another 60,000 in Kingston, and again in Brockville. Each intermediate stop could become a city of half a million, as places companies or academic or public sector institutions actually relocate to, so they’re not just bedroom communities, because key staff can commute out to them in forty-five minutes.

It’s the Bologna–Florence story, the Madrid–Zaragoza–Barcelona, Lille-Paris, story where you stitch separate labour markets into one. There is immense value there where the gains of such previously impossible benefits are what really justifies building the project.

That brings us nicely to the line that gets thrown at every megaproject where big numbers are very quickly challenged. So if this thing costs $100 billion to build, while generating maybe $1.5 billion a year in surplus, people will say that’s a terrible return. Michael’s answer is patient, because a billion and a half, growing, pays back maybe fifty billion of capital over time. The remaining gap, set against a million or two million new homes (that likely otherwise couldn’t be built) along the route, works out to around $25,000 a home, which is a pretty small number. Add the agglomeration, the avoided road-widening, the economic relocations, the simple fact that someone in Ottawa could take a job in Montreal (and vice versa), and the case stops being about the operating surplus at all. I keep coming back to the same point: the business case can’t see the behaviours that don’t exist yet. The Elizabeth Line was forecast to fill up gradually but instead it stampeded with over 500 million journeys in three years, a third of them trips nobody would have made at all. The model can often only imagine faster versions of today’s tedium.

On which note, Michael and I are in violent agreement about business cases, namely that most of them are, in my words, completely bullshit. The point is very much more about the thinking exercise of doing a business case, rather than the end artifact itself.

“A business case is an exercise to prove to yourself that the answer you’ve got is a good answer and is better than the alternatives … it’s a way to validate your instincts.”

A business case will not tell you what to do. You can’t business-case your way to a good solution if you’ve started with a bad one. The number is almost a theatrical flourish, because it’s effectively writing as thinking. Which is exactly why his alternative business case, the one with actual spreadsheets, actual cost-per-kilometre rates, several route alignments and an honest “I was wrong, I should have gone through Kingston after all” as he revises it soon, is worth more than the official forecasts. He told me, almost wistfully, that hardly anyone ever asks to see his model or how he worked out the variable cost per train-kilometre. The people whose job it is don’t seem to spend a Sunday afternoon wondering how to make this one in several generation railway project better.

That annoys me because it’s also what frightened me at the official public consultations. Ask about station design and you get we haven’t got around to that yet and ask about the route and you get that’s what the politicians told us, so we’re doing what we’re told. Compare that to a fellow like Thomas Ableman and the volunteers spending their Sundays working out how to bring Swiss railway concepts to Derbyshire. That’s where change actually comes from, and it’s almost entirely absent from the way we’re building a far more expensive project in Canada just now.

There are real risks Michael won’t paper over too. The concession model puts Air Canada inside the consortium that will set the fares, on a railway with no competition. “Will they set the fares to maximize ridership as well as revenues? Or will they just set the fares to maximize profits?” There’s a reason Spain’s Madrid–Barcelona ridership tripled only once liberalisation forced the incumbent off its one-train-an-hour, revenue-maximising perch. There’s the engineering culture’s instinct to keep the railway pure by not wanting commuter trains on our tracks with two signalling systems and the impact on reliability … yet there are literally hundreds of sections across Europe where high-speed and local trains share track perfectly happily.

It’s the same instinct that had Crossrail’s team declare they wouldn’t serve Heathrow because “airport passengers don’t mix well with commuters.” They were right that the two don’t mix; they were wrong that the answer is to wall them off rather than design for it. Optimisation is really a set trade-offs and design challenges. We see that lack of a design culture that gave Toronto a UPExpress with overhead luggage bins on an airport train that Michael states “are never used,” a station too cramped to move through, and a queue to board as though you’re catching a flight.

"I think the opportunity is fantastic. And in a funny way, high-speed rail isn't that complicated — as long as you get the overall vision and technology right, the components can be done separately. That makes it quite different from a metro. An urban metro has to be a single machine; there's no flexibility. So you can build this in stages, you can build Ottawa–Montreal, you can interoperate different kinds of trains on the same tracks, which you can't really do on a metro."

Michael is keen to look seriously at bi-level double-deck trains, because you carry a third more passengers for the same money. (The operators who say passengers don’t like the stairs have clearly never met my wife, who refused to sit on the lower deck in the Netherlands last week.)

And Michael’s imagination keeps going west with Calgary–Edmonton, then a line through the Rockies to Vancouver. “If this was Austria or Switzerland, they would have already built the railway between the two.” We could even see several million people moving to the interior of BC. Something that might even help with the cohesion of a country currently arguing with itself.

We should also think about the smallest thing we can do right now to realise those visions. For Michael that means go and learn properly as Canada keeps looking at three other railways and declaring the lessons don’t apply. Look at thirty instead. The recurring villain in How Big Things Get Done, which Michael had just reread and I’m about to, is the Sydney Opera House, designed by an architect who’d built barely more than a garden shed, twenty years late and ten times over budget. The hero is Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao, on time and on budget, because by then he’d already made every mistake there is to make and “knew all the mistakes not to make.” Canada needs to go and borrow other people’s mistakes instead of paying full price for its own.

This is perhaps the common thread for me. Michael’s “architect” as the joined-up generalist who knows where the value is and how to get it, is the same role I keep banging on about under an uglier name, the infrapreneur. It’s the person who sits between the economists justifying the cost and the engineers chasing the speed, and asks the question neither discipline owns: who is this for, why will they choose it, and what previously impossible thing does it make ordinary? Alto has lots of economist and accounting, it has lots of engineering types, it has many indigenous reconciliation people. But it doesn’t have a proposition design team, or a marketing department, or a customer insights team. It conspicuously lacks the architect of the proposition, and every number in that business case is therefore resting on a proposition nobody has yet considered designing.

Michael’s own document puts the stakes more bluntly than I would dare: better to build nothing than the wrong system. I don’t think we’ll build nothing, and I’m relentlessly pro high-speed rail for Canada, but I’ve just grown louder as the project has drifted, because we are doing it the wrong way, and the wrong way is the most expensive way there is. A train this consequential is on its way to being the most important piece of infrastructure built in this country in several generations. The question of what it’s for - beyond fast, efficient and clean - is the question that decides whether it earns its investment, its political cover, its riders and its place in how Canadians understand themselves.

You can find Michael’s alternative business case here, and he’s about to release a new version with Kingston, Belleville and Brockville added in, because he went back and decided the locals were right. Which is, when you think about it, exactly the posture this whole project needs more of.

To being Challengers.

Share

… only then, when you actually need a cheque to turn that thing into a business, the industry has a bit of a habit of leaving you stranded at the platform. Not because anyone is being deliberately obstructive, but because the system has over many years, arranged itself so lots of people are empowered to say no, while almost nobody is empowered to say yes.

Richard Fisher is the founder of Future Travel Studio, a London & Toronto based venture studio focused on rail and mobility. Yes, London AND Toronto. I know.

He’s also the type of Brit in Canada I like finding myself in conversation with, as a bit of a kindred spirit on rail, cities and the gap between what gets said in industry conferences and what actually changes anything. He grew up in the Midlands, did twelve years inside train operating companies, a stint at the rail regulator, started his own thing in 2014 so he could get out of being an employee, and eventually scratched the itch of going to work overseas by following the breadcrumbs of friends and former colleagues who had ended up in Canada doing High Frequency Rail.

A few years back, Richard and his business partner Nik Lusardi were doing some consultancy work with Caledonian Sleeper franchise. The conversation was about their place in the rail market generally, but, as these things do, it kept circling back to why the Sleeper itself never washed commercially for it always needed a subsidy. You couldn’t add more trains because there wasn’t the budget. The only lever left was adding more passengers per carriage so you’d have to rip out the original sleeper berths, the ones designed back when strangers were expected to share a four-berth compartment (thank God, no longer), and put in something more like a flatbed seat. Like the ones you get on planes.

Which, as it happens, was a thing Nik knew about. He'd developed the flatbed for Virgin's Upper Class … so flatbeds for rail wasn't a wild leap, it was applying the same instinct in a sector that hadn't seen it. Well, not in the UK, Chinese HSR trains do have these type of seats.

The operator had actually already looked at this as they’d specified it when they ordered new trains from CAF, and they couldn’t get it to work with the standards. Specifically … and this is where the Caledonian Sleeper gets brilliantly and frustratingly British … the train splits in two at Carstairs. Rear half to Edinburgh, front half to Glasgow. Which means half the passengers end up sleeping rearward-facing, and the standards approval for rearward-facing sleeping had never been cracked. This is the type of regulatory nitpicking that one must work through when it comes to innovation with trains.

Nik, who Richard describes as “a design thinker in the truest sense … physical products, digital products, services, organisations,” decided to have a crack at the standards problem the operator couldn’t solve.

The result was Dream Suite, the flatbed seat for rail.

They got it through Innovate UK’s First of a Kind programme, which I should declare I’ve been through too with AlightHear and which is, to give it credit, one of the few bits of rail innovation funding that actually works. Just over a quarter of a million pounds. They built the mockup, unveiled it at Alstom’s plant in Derby, tested it with stakeholders, got interest from operators in North America, Europe and the UK.

And then … nothing.

“We thought we’d made it. And, you know what, nobody would invest in it. Nobody would give us the money we need to get it to go to market.”

Richard’s friend Brian, managing partner at one of the bigger Canadian VCs, eventually gave him the diagnosis straight.

“It’s not you guys. It’s the sector you’re in. There’s too much friction. You’ve got public sector procurement … you’re too small to comply with that. You’ve got regulatory hurdles, you’re too small to comply with that. Even if you do break through, there’s incumbents in your industry who can and will squash you.”

The Dream Suite couldn’t fail in the market because it couldn’t get to the market. Which is a fucking awful situation for a sector that talks about innovation as much as rail does. We have institutionally designed a railway that is structurally inhospitable to small, smart, founder-led firms who would actually shake it up.

Why? Two reasons.

I wrote a piece a few weeks ago arguing that cities operate almost entirely on supply-side logic … more units, more capacity, more square footage … without ever asking what the place is for, who it’s for, why anyone would choose it over the alternative. Rail does exactly the same thing. The big rail project arrives in the form of an infrastructure brief, gets handed to the engineers, who do excellent engineering and a railway gets built, eventually, at great expense.

Richard explains what goes wrong.

"I think there's something when we do transport we focus way too early on delivery, and when we talk about design we're talking about infrastructure design and not service design. And I say this repeatedly on LinkedIn — the first step of a new project, given that you've got your sponsor's instructions, go build railway, your first step is what's my coherent passenger proposition for the people who are going to use the thing when it's built and continue to use it long after I'm gone. Then once I've got that, I can say, okay, now I understand what my passengers want — how do I operationalise that, how do I extrapolate from that the operational requirements of the railway, but also the requirements of the enterprise that's going to run this railway into the future. And then from that, I can finally extrapolate requirements for engineering, which can go be delivered … And we don't do that. That's the hard work that we should do first. And we always skip it, because building a solution is sexy.

Take HS2 as the textbook case, as something sold to the public as being about speed.

“They gave it the wrong name, because speed isn’t the thing that we’re buying. It’s capacity.”

The actual argument for HS2 … the one he makes to environmentalist friends who’d otherwise be in a hedge blocking the route … is that taking high-speed services off the conventional network frees up capacity for freight, which means fewer lorries on roads, which means we don’t have to keep doing road capacity enhancement work. That is the real proposition. It’s the kind of thing you can lobby in favour of when the political weather turns. Because a slightly faster train to Birmingham is not enough by itself. Only that’s what we’ll end up with, and that train will actually now have less capacity because the overall HS2 project has been hacked to death as the costs ballooned.

Canada is potentially gearing up to make a similar mistake with High Speed Rail. Richard pressed on the customer analysis where between Toronto and Montreal, flying will in some cases still be faster, and driving may very well still cheaper. So who is HSR actually for? Possibly … and this is where it gets interesting … it’s for the airlines, who would happily release short-haul slots in exchange for more profitable long-haul ones. Possibly it’s for the people who currently make no trip at all, because the cost of a return flight kills the idea of a Tuesday meeting in the other city. With the right route, it could be for a whole catchment area of people that we don’t currently think of beyond downtown Toronto and downtown Montreal.

A frequent, affordable, fast enough train enables travel that doesn’t presently exist today in the form of day trips, or even changing the nature of where and how people live can be a true customer proposition. Just saying it’s faster than the existing service today is not enough.

And then Great British Railways, which on current trajectory is going to be a brand exercise stacked on top of a structure that the public can’t even explain to itself.

“All this design expertise and all this messaging expertise comes from people who are actually within the railway. So it only means something to them.”

You definitely have, as I called it in our conversation, a endemic case of ‘railway brain’. Decades of design and messaging done by people whose entire frame of reference is railway.

“Everybody designing in the railway has prior railway knowledge. So if you’re not careful, you build a railway that designs brilliantly for railway people, because they know how to navigate the stations.”

Innovation funding in rail … First of a Kind, the Catapults, accelerator grants etc. … is usually designed to get a product from concept to a proof of concept. After that, the founder usually needs scale capital and a route to procurement, but both are functionally closed shops. Procurement frameworks favour firms large enough to have already absorbed the compliance burden, which is why the same handful of consultancies and suppliers keep winning the same work. The small firm with the better idea frequently can’t get on the framework. The framework owners don’t have a route to invite them in. Brian’s diagnosis to Richard … too small to comply, too small to break through, will be squashed if you do … is the common reality.

Station retail is a bit of a tell. Walk through any major British or Canadian station and count the independent businesses. You will not run out of fingers. Most independent entrepreneurs would love to, but sadly could not, get a foothold on a station concourse … not because nobody wants to sell good coffee or a proper sandwich on a platform, but because the operational, financial and compliance burden makes it impractical. So the station ends up with the same six brands that every other station has, and the public space gets less interesting as a result. The platform retailer reinvests nothing local, so you get the same tepid Pumpkin latte in Crewe as you do in Peterborough, and the same paperback selection in Kings Cross as you will see in Leeds.

While it might make life a little less complicated in the mind of an operator, it’s sucks the life out of what is delivered for the passenger and entrepreneur alike.

Richard’s diagnosis of why this persists is the line of the conversation. Some incumbents, he said, aren’t in the business of solving the problem at all.

“There are incumbents who, frankly, monetise that. You could come and solve a problem, or you can generate repeatable revenue by guiding people through a problematic landscape. Well, lots of people don’t want to make that change.”

In many ways friction is the business model, because it is essentially the entire reason rail has been so resistant to actual transformation for the last thirty years. The big firms making serious money from the sector are making it by helping to navigate the complexity, not by trying to remove it. To do so would be self-harming.

Meanwhile the sector tells itself that it’s innovating, because it has launched an app, run a pilot project or set up an accelerator cohort. Richard tells a beautiful story from years ago about pitching a workshop on bringing innovation into rail franchise contracts. He suggested enabling alternative financing for local station investment in places where there’s no viable business case, but a clear community need. The response, gently delivered:

“Thanks, Richard, but we’re talking about innovation. You know, things like apps.”

It is the appstoreification of innovation, the very thing I’m keen to get away from having spent much of a career around it, applied to the railway. The idea that the digital rectangle is the thing that we innovate, because innovation means digital, rather than meaning what customers might want or how we do what Rory Sutherland would probably have called “innervation”.

And then there is the venture capital side, which I confess I had not thought about this way before Richard said it.

“I naively assumed that the thing that mattered to them was making money. What I didn’t appreciate was that in venture capital, they’re not employed to make money. They’re employed to de-risk the process of making money.”

He keeps going, and this bit is good for a little glass shattering:

“The job of investors, analysts, everybody inside venture capital, is to shepherd ventures through uncertainty, reduce exposure to risk, maximise upside. And then you think — well, in a roundabout sense, mobility and venture capital actually share quite a similar psychology. Both believe in doing things differently, but both are structurally obsessed with managing risk.”

Two risk-management cultures looking at each other across a table, each waiting for the other to move first. Of course nothing happens.

This is what I have been calling monodisciplinary confidence. Everyone in the chain is doing their job correctly, by the standards of their discipline. The engineers do good engineering, the economists clear the business case, the procurement officers protect the public purse ansd the VCs minimise downside exposure. It means the passenger gets a station that looks identical to the one they left, on a train that runs at roughly the speed it ran in 1995, sold to them at a higher ticket price, through a rebrand they didn’t ask for.

In many ways, you can say everyone did their job. Only people are getting frustrated, and it’s clear the system is not really working to the level it is capable of. Some of the problems are trivial, but painful to many, and others are big and meaty while requiring some confidence to work up to.

Richard and Nik’s response is Future Travel Studio. And I will admit I have a temptation when I hear “venture studio” to roll my eyes because been there, seen that, done that, and most of them are a big rubbish. But I actually care about what they are trying to do with it. Because that’s the good bit.

“You’re not just building products, but actually you’re building companies that are designed to survive that system from the beginning. Instead of stumbling into it and then discovering the friction, we want to help founders navigate that and build businesses so that they’re investable.”

In practice, the studio itself qualifies for the procurement framework. The studio absorbs the compliance burden on behalf of its portfolio, so the studio becomes the entity that is big enough to play the game, and inside it sit the small, sharp, founder-led firms that would never make it through alone. It is, in effect, exactly the same workaround that excludes many entrepreneurs from the platform … applied in reverse, to invite many more Dream Suite or AlightHear ideas back in.

The transatlantic shape matters too. The UK is the stress test, being mature, complex, brutal and full of incumbents who will tell you in detail and at length why your thing won’t work. Canada is a different environment, and Richard is properly bullish on it. In many ways it’s refreshingly, because if you’ve read this Substack for any length of time you’ll know I find the Canadian rhetorical default of “we’re not Amsterdam / we’re not Copenhagen / we couldn’t possibly” exhausting. I’ve banged by head against the TTC / Metrolinx / VIA Rail walls enough to know the default there is also no, but from a different place.

But Richard is emphatic that Canada has, unusually for North America, a real willingness to use policy as an enabler. There is serious infrastructure investment landing in the next decade, and there is an appetite for innovation in mobility beyond cars that the US lacks. Running the ventures through the British meat grinder, and build them out in the Canadian opportunity space might be an interesting play.

Which leads to the Challenger Cities note I want to draw out. Richard is properly impatient with international consultancies dropping foreign solutions into Canadian contexts. German operating models, British franchise structures, American suburban biases. He’s been burned by this directly … there’s a Metrolinx-meets-Deutsche-Bahn story in this episode that you might not want to hear if you work at either. The point is not that foreign expertise is bad, but that importing without translating is the consultancy market’s whole business model, and Canada has got some genuine contextual differences.

That can actually be the weather, it might be distances, it might be how cities developed around car sprawl in the 1970s so it’s not really European. It is also indigenous community engagement obligations that genuinely matter. Those solutions will have to be honed for the reality of Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax etc. Future Travel Studio’s thesis is that you build a transatlantic venture pipeline to ensure they develop what works where in a relevant manner, rather than buying in a direct translation of how they do it in Frankfurt.

That’s next practice over best practice, applied to rail … which I’ve been banging on about for a while.

“Find the people who know how to create an environment that can get the best out of you”

I asked Richard the magic wand question (as we recorded this before Samantha Peart killed it off), which long-time readers will know I used to tend to end these conversations with. His answer came in two parts.

“I want more people to work together. I realised I’m not trying to build a business — I’m trying to build an environment. An environment where people and ideas come together and startups can grow. Where creatives, designers can work with engineers, can work with economists, can work with delivery people, commercial people, to build things. And not one silo is more important than the other. All silos need to be demolished and we need to be flat and everybody just needs to be working together.”

Then this … the line that ended up at the top of his vision board, lifted from a radio show about music producers, which he had to rewind several times to write down. It’s the close, so I’m giving it the space it deserves:

“You want to find the people who know how to create an environment that can get the best out of you. And I think that’s what our projects are missing. You have so many people in these really deep structures and everybody’s concentrating on their own thing, and nobody’s giving their best, because they can’t … they’re boxed off in this role of you’re a commercial manager, you’re a project manager, you’re this, you’re that. And actually if you bring everybody together — these are the problems I have to solve for our programme to work — you’re going to find that the solution might not come from where you think it’s going to come from.”

Pretty much every interesting person I’ve spoken to on this podcast, on the question of how cities and infrastructure and big public projects get unstuck, has eventually said some version of the same thing. Ken Greenberg on the storefront office, or Gerald Babel-Sutter on the fuck-up award in Helsingborg. It’s not that we lack experts, it’s that we lack the room where the experts have to argue with each other in front of the problem.

Rail has it bad because rail is institutionally siloed by design. In many ways, cities have the same set of institutional bureaucracies that struggle to communicate and collaborate with each other. The fix in both cases is the same, where we have to stop with start with how the system is today, and start with the proposition for the people we are trying to solve. To make things work for people, we in many ways need to build the squad, before building the thing.

The Dream Suite is still sitting in a workshop somewhere. Maybe it gets built for the Caledonian Sleeper, or VIA Rail, or even ALTO, or maybe it doesn’t. The more interesting question is how many Dream Suite stage ideas are sitting in how many workshops, attached to how many founders who eventually concluded the sector wasn’t worth the fight. We don’t measure that just now, but Richard is trying to build the environment that would have caught his own product, and the people coming after him.

I think that work is worth doing.

If you’re in rail, mobility, or anywhere adjacent and any of this sounds like you, talk to him, and me.

To being Challengers.

Share

Most of them are tremendously dull, formulaic and designed to fill an agenda rather than do something somewhat magic by getting a diverse collection of people who care in the same place for a short period of time.

But last week I was at a conference that would rather call itself a festival. I’m not sure that the Rotterdam edition of Utopian Hours can quite claim to be what I’d consider a festival, but my word it was a refreshing production. My notebook is overflowing with notes from a range of speakers who all do something rather special.

They make you give a shit. And they do it while showing you what’s possible, leaving you with reasons to be optimistic. We need more of this, much more of it! … All the more impressive as it took place in an exceptionally hot room at the top of The Groot Handelsgebouw in the midst of a May heatwave.

If you don’t know about Utopian Hours, go listen to this previous episode we did last year before the annual Turin edition, with Luca Ballarini.

That title of the festival of what is possible is what should ring through too. Because in a couple of afternoons we covered the likes of mega urban rewilding projects of gigantic garbage dumps and industrial heritage turned iconic tourist destinations done by one of the world’s famed studios, to transformational projects done with 0.1% of the budget at a get it done attitude.

We heard about global megacities, as well as provincial British seaside towns. We had the anglosphere, Europe, India, China and the Middle East all used of examples of what can be done. That included Finnish libraries, English and American community centres, unrealised century old urban plans reimagined in features of a single house, making active mobility work in scorching hot climates, fantastic urban visions through to the seemingly more mundane matter of innovating the administration.

Because cities are indeed imagined, designed, build, experienced and told.

And I worry we don’t do enough to do that telling bit. Because when we don’t do the telling bit, we don’t loop back to imagine again, or encourage new people to imagine what they can design and build, for people to experience and tell the story about.

And that’s why I want to highlight Richard Upton for his talk about hope, and how the built environment is really the platform for that. As someone working to reapply a career of working in ‘innovation’ that traditionally gravitated to what took place on the screen, hearing from a developer that actually talks about the built environment as a place for purpose over profit (because the profit will come), for the external rate of return, not just the internal one, for what will be immediately worthwhile over what takes place in the meanwhile.

Because when we design with the ambition of being simply ‘efficient’, it closes our mind off to all the other possibilities that could have been there. And in a world where we are at least acknowledging chronic levels of loneliness, becoming more lost into the world of screens … then we should at least try and make the built environment interesting.

Even if it’s subjective like a bronze elephant riding a tricycle out the front of a Premier Inn. People will at least remember it. They might even tell someone about it. That is the antidote to the realm of blandism believing the world can be explained simply by what someone last clicked on.

You can come across as a bit of a curmudgeon on the internet when you look at things with a sense of curiosity, and a bit of a reference library for how things have been done elsewhere. And I think that’s especially true for me when I look at Canada and the UK as the places where I can consider home. We all too often cut a corner, or don’t push an idea as far as we can, so you get something alright, but not quite right.

Instead, let’s perhaps ask if we took the exit for That’ll Do, rather than having pushed on for what can be Wonderful.

It’s a catchy call to action, of taking a care in the heritage of a place, making space for art, and then making an immediate start. Well Richard called for people to be doing just that come Monday, so here we are.

We need more people from more places in the rooms for these conversations though. I’m not remotely convinced that your typical corporate executive or even most marketers understand cities, what makes them work, what holds them back, why few works the same as one another. And all too often, the public sector institutions lack the capacity, get lost in the short termism of the politician and then lose themselves in policy and process that hasn’t really been designed with outcomes in mind.

Because civic competence isn’t something that should get left to City Hall. We could have had a full day with Philipp Rode from LSE talking about how we create, and measure, urban value. Lord knows North American cities need more of this thinking, for both the professional class, and the person who simply calls somewhere home. We have the evidence that shows people tend to be happier, healthier and wealthier when cities are not allowed to sprawl, but then we struggle to apply the learning in a boardroom or even a polling booth.

A year and a bit on from the Abundancy term blowing up, it’s rather nice to see us talking more about not so much that, or efficiency, but sufficiency. We don’t need to do it the faster, cheapest or some quantifiable definition of best either. For cities are messy, we don’t and won’t fully understand them, but if you have a promiscuous or polyamorous relationship to cities, then you will have felt and understand how there are spacial and psychological solutions in this build world that go a long way to helping with societal problems.

A rather nice part of Utopian Hours too, is that it’s not dominated by any one facet of the groups and skills that make a city. It could do with more corporate executives attending because if you run a big company, you should give a shit about cities. It would benefit if the transport types didn’t just attend the transport and mobility events. Because the planner and architecture types that I met had come to this world by not necessarily following the linear path.

And as I had the pleasure of introducing Majora Carter to speak about her work in the South Bronx, she proved to be a real life incarnation of that ‘Infrapreneur’ character that I started off the month of May talking about. A project where the irony of it being a former rail station is not lost on me.

As Andrea D'Antrassi from MAD Architects talked about the need for generosity when it comes to design for cities and Robert Stephens told one of the best stories on a stage about being inspired by a world of unused plans, my hope is that we can see the talent, skill, curiosity and capability can be there … but now the need is to tell the story of how we can do these things, so we imagine more to be designed, built, experienced and told about again.

Big thanks to Luca, Giacomo, Daniele and the Stratosferica team for the invite, and hopefully see you for more in Turin. Maybe we can even bring a Challenger Cities Salon to Italy :)

To Being Challengers.

Share

The draw was six Torontonians on a low stage talking about the city with Alex Bozikovic, the Globe & Mail’s architecture critic; Ilana Altman, who runs The Bentway; Jen Angel, who runs Evergreen; travel and urban culture journalist Maryam Siddiqi; Gensler architect Steven Paynter; and Gil Penalosa, who has more fire about Toronto than almost anyone.

Calling it a salon might have been a bit pretentious, and the teenage me growing up in the North of England would have given me hell for it. But it worked. Partly because people want to argue about Toronto and they’ve stopped believing the internet is the place for it.

I don’t even live in Toronto anymore. Montreal is home now, but Challenger Cities, the podcast and now this travelling argument I’ve started staging still has a thread that frequently returns to Toronto. A good chunk of my adult life has been in that city and I’m not sure I’m done with it, even though it frustrates me in the specific way that places frustrate you when they have all the ingredients and somehow play to less than the sum of their parts.

That frustration was in the room the other week, but so was a sense of affection. People don’t pay to attend a back-room evening partially about municipal dysfunction if they’ve given up. They have turned cranky on the internet, sure, but it’s really a form of caring. This meant the conversation ranged across the things you’d expect, including transit, the challenge and cost of building anything, the strange Canadian habit of treating ambition as a personality flaw, in a city that really has lost its mojo.

From the floor, one gentleman made the case that Toronto has no unifying myth, no story it tells itself about itself and that visitors and residents alike pay the price for there being no there, there. Jen Angel argued persuasively that the Canadian fear of risk is itself the biggest risk currently being taken. Steven Paynter, who consults on projects across the United States, described decisions being made elsewhere in months that take years or never get made at all in the city he chose to call home.

We absolutely didn’t agree on everything, the audience didn’t agree with some of it. We contradicted ourselves at times, but it was mercifully polite, because this is still Canada.

One question kept coming back, in different forms, from different people was “who do we actually go to with this?” Not necessarily to just complain, but to propose, perhaps to build something, or to at least get a serious idea taken seriously. Elected officials feel inaccessible, or at best when they do show up, frustratingly timid.

There is a mayoral election this year and I’ll spare you my views on the candidates except to say that the structural problem I am describing predates them and will outlast them. The institutions that should be doing this work are thin, as the civic sector and the private sector spend a lot of energy blaming each other for things neither of them is positioned to solve alone.

So what fills the gap? On Tuesday night, the gap was filled by a person from out of town with a Substack and a music venue better known for indie, folk or country music than for civic discourse.

That should embarrass somebody. It doesn’t embarrass me - I had a great time - but it should tell you something about what isn’t happening in the places it ought to be happening.

I started Challenger Cities two years ago because moaning was making me miserable and making nothing better. It was the smallest possible thing I could do that felt like the opposite of moaning. The way I think change actually happens is you imagine the biggest possible future you can get excited by, and then you do the smallest possible thing right now that points toward it.

In Montreal, where I live now, there's a rather cute municipal program where you can adopt the plot of soil around a street tree. That’s my smallest possible thing there, but in Toronto, today, my smallest possible thing is this. It was originally meant to be an op-ed in the Globe & Mail, or the Toronto Star, but they said no … hey-ho … so here it is.

There is no shortage of writing about what’s wrong with Toronto. Heck, I’ve done enough of it. Most of it is engineered to be shared by people who already agree, which is to say it is a complaint dressed up as analysis.

Steven Paynter made a point on the night that deserves more attention than it’s getting. The pandemic, for all its damage, made a lot of our neighbourhoods better. People rediscovered the streets they lived on so the places near home became the places they actually used. Toronto trades on being a city of neighbourhoods, a cliché (for that is kind of what a city is, and Toronto might not be that special at it imo), but the gains during those years are real. Now, Toronto has a downtown that hasn’t recovered its purpose, with offices that don’t fit the way people now work and a transit experience that punishes the people grinding back into it.

The instinct now has been to drag everyone back, fill the towers, restore the old pattern and prop up the legacy economic model. That instinct will undo the neighbourhood gains without fixing what is broken in the core, and it will do real damage to the city and the economy underneath it. This is not a problem a mayor solves. It needs companies and executives that care about more than their lease, banks that recognise they are civic actors whether they like it or not, and the professionals across this city to stop running pilots when they should just be doing the thing.

The temptation, in an election year, is to pin all of this on whoever holds the chair at City Hall. Change the name, change the face and feel better for about six weeks. But if the only thing that changes is the politicians, the only thing that changes is who we complain about.

So we all need to do our bit. With our ideas, on our streets, in our buildings, with our colleagues and neighbours, on our little slices of social media as well as in back rooms of bars. We’ll fix this by behaving like challengers, in public, in small ways, and not just on Tuesdays.

(because the next one of these is on a Monday, in Montreal, on June 8th … tickets here)

To being Challengers.

Share

"It breathes out and all the trains go out from cities to the towns, the towns to the villages every hour, and then it breathes in and all the buses come back in from the villages to the towns to the cities."

It works because Switzerland decided, decades ago, that a transport system exists to move people rather than vehicles. So the timetable is built around the journey a person is trying to make, not around the operational convenience of any one operator. Trains meet buses, buses are timed for trains, and the whole thing effectively breathes in and out, across the country. It works precisely because some Swiss people decided it should work, and then they did the unglamorous task of planning across multiple decades to make sure the thing does work.

The principle underneath is that "they create their services based around a timetable optimised for people making connections through the system, as opposed to for individual vehicles." The vast majority of the rest of us … Britain, Canada, most of the world … do it the other way around.

When Thomas Ableman came on Challenger Cities at the back end of 2024, he made the case that we could do this elsewhere too, for the Swiss are not a different species, that the problem is not topography or even money or culture … but design, and that the things which make Swiss public transport feel almost obscenely civilised are mostly small, repeatable choices that other countries have simply decided to not make. His magic-wand answer at the end of that episode was a beautifully simple one: “Make public transport so good, so intuitive, that driving feels like the irrational choice.”

So a year and a bit on, Thomas is doing the small, repeatable, decidedly British version of that argument. And it seems to be working as the Department for Transport has put 6 million quid behind a project called Mini Switzerland as a working demonstration of integrated rural transport in the Hope Valley in Derbyshire. And Thomas, with a charity called Hope Valley Climate Action and a small group of volunteers, made it happen. Well, the money bit, the making it work will hopefully come with what they do with that cash.

Brilliantly though, there was no bid, there was no consultancy, because they wrote a report that made the case, sent it to the right people and the right people actually said “yes!”. I want to come back to how that happened, because it’s probably the most important part of the story.

But first, what actually is Mini Switzerland?

"Mini Switzerland isn't just a bus timetabling project.”

The idea, in a phrase, is to do for rural public transport what Mini Holland did for urban cycling. In 2014, in one of the few decisions of his career that has aged well, Boris Johnson funded a small experiment in Walthamstow (where Thomas lives, and acts as an unofficial tour guide of) with the idea of pick somewhere, do cycling infrastructure to Dutch standards and see what happens. A decade later, probably every council in the country has been to have a look. "None of it is amazing, it's not special … if you were Dutch you wouldn't even notice it," Thomas says of Walthamstow now. "But the point is, it works." It’s still a rather remarkable example of what so many places could do if you’re British.

Mini Switzerland is borrowing a little bit of that playbook, but applied to the integration of public transport. The Hope Valley already has an hourly train through five rural stations. So if two of those stations can become hubs … and the buses can be timed to meet every train …. with tickets that work across operators …and signage tells you when you step off the train where your bus is and when it leaves … with the road outside the station given a proper pedestrian crossing, then there might be a little bit of Switzerland in the Derbyshire hills. It’s not really glamorous, and it’s not of the scale of HS2, though it’s not of the price tag either. But it is the conscious decision to treat a bus and a train as one product rather than two separate services, run by different companies, with different incentives, that happen to overlap on a map.

Freewheeling Bitesize for Transport Change-makers

Mini Switzerland shows the importance of focusing on outcomes not processe

Since my last Freewheeling Bitesize, I’m thrilled to confirm that DfT have announced they are funding Mini Switzerland in the Hope Valley…

Read more

3 months ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Thomas Ableman

The reason it doesn’t already happen everywhere is more structural, that it is technical. Everyone, when you describe the idea, intuitively gets it. No bus company really opposes it, and no councillor will argue against it. (though they might not champion it either). Ask any passenger whether they would like the bus to be timed for the train and they will wonder why someone might suggest it shouldn’t. It doesn’t happen because nobody is really paid or incentivised to make it happen, or rewarded when it does.

A bus company contracted to run a ‘socially necessary’ rural service is paid to run the cheapest possible timetable that suits operationally, which quite likely won't be one that connects up to the timetable being set by the railway. "If you're a bus company operating a commercial service," Thomas says, "you probably don't want people to change onto the train. You probably want people to go all the way to Sheffield on your bus, even though it might take longer, because you get to keep more of the revenue." A bus driver at a rural stop has no way of knowing the train is three minutes late, and even if they did, they aren't allowed to wait, and even if they were, hanging around might come back to bite them for running the service behind schedule.

These are problems of design, accountability and what we choose to measure. They are problems of who decided what the bits of system were for, and when. The Swiss decided decades ago that the answer was the person’s journey, and built the institutions, the legal duties, the ticketing frameworks even the clocks, around that decision. Britain, and Canada, decided the answer was the efficiency of the vehicle, and we have been paying for it ever since. Mini Switzerland is in some ways a bit of a forensic experiment, as the plan is to solve these problems in one valley, learn the lessons of doing so, and then share them so that the next place to try doesn’t have to start from scratch. It should be a good proof point of what can be true.

"All of these are problems that bus companies would love to be able to overcome," Thomas says, "but there are no solutions to. So that's what we need to do through this project. We need to solve these things, and then publish how we solved them." The deliverable is the learning, not the buses.

Which brings me to the part of the story that might not get the attention that it probably ought to. Mini Switzerland exists because a small group of volunteers decided it should exist, gave up some of their evenings and Sundays for a year, wrote the report that made the case and a government department read it and funded it. There was no initial pot of funding put up for grabs, and there wasn’t an application form. The Foundation for Integrated Transport made a grant for the transport plan itself. Everything else was done for free. Thomas is direct about why this worked. “If you are a team of volunteers, you use your time effectively, because you’re not being paid for it. We meet when we need to meet. We make very good use of the time when we’re together. We give everyone on the team a lot of individual accountability and empowerment to go away and do the things that need to be done. We’re not marking each other’s homework. We’re not reporting in to anyone.” They produced, in a few months, the kind of document that a funded committee would have spent two years drafting and three more revising.

Which raises an uncomfortable question for everyone who works inside the bureaucratic model, which is most. If the most consequential rural transport experiment of the decade was built by a handful of people doing it after work because they cared, what is the formal infrastructure of grants and frameworks and process actually optimising for? It is not optimising for change, but for the appearance of fairness. Thomas is generous about this as he doesn’t think the government should just hand money to people it likes. “Sometimes these funding pots emerge through a misguided idea around fairness,” he says. “You shouldn’t just give money to your mates, that’s a really bad idea. And you shouldn’t just hand out money to things that don’t make sense. But if people can make the effort to spend time creating something that has a rational basis to it, and you could read that and say ‘I’m funding that report there because it makes sense’ … just do that. Be willing to take more risks on things like that.”

The way Mini Switzerland actually got funded - because someone made an argument, someone read it, someone said yes - is the way most useful things in the world get funded. We have just decided, in the likes of Britain and Canada, that this is somehow improper. That should be an aberration.

About halfway through our conversation, Thomas brought up a post from Rachel Cunliffe, the political journalist at the New Statesman, about something sharp-tongued about Andy Burnham … that you cannot credibly be Prime Minister when the biggest issue crossing your desk has been trams. A swipe, fairly, at the Mayor of Greater Manchester as the talk of a Labour leadership contest gathers. Thomas’s response is the bit I keep thinking about. “Trams may or may not be the most important issue crossing the prime minister’s desk,” he says, “but to an extent they should be.” Because Britain’s central problem is that it cannot afford the things voters want, and it cannot afford them because it hasn’t had meaningful productivity growth in fifteen years. And it hasn’t had productivity growth, in his words, because “our cities literally don’t work as cities because the connectivity isn’t in place to create the purpose of a city, and we’re not connecting people to opportunity.”

The Centre for Cities work on this is becoming hard to argue with. Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield, Nottingham, Bristol, Cardiff have the populations of mid-sized European cities and the connective infrastructure of large towns. “They’re actually large towns in terms of who can access jobs and opportunity,” Thomas says. The workforce can’t reach the jobs that should be within reach, and the employers therefore have less access to the workforce. It means productivity drops as the economic opportunity to them is restricted by poor public transport links, and the costs of owning a car. London works because London has a transport system that lets a city behave like a city. Manchester works a bit better because of it’s tram system, but it should really have a proper Metro at this point. The fragmented tram network of Sheffield or Nottingham or Edinburgh should be bigger. Leeds should have had a tram decades ago.

And the argument that we cannot afford to fix this is, on closer inspection, an argument about who is supposed to pay. “96% of taxes are raised centrally in the UK,” Thomas says, “which is a massive outlier compared to every other OECD country. There’s no other OECD country where it’s more than 70%, other than those that have populations of less than 10 million people.” The original Victorian tram networks in these same cities were not built by central government as “they were built by the cities themselves, funded by the cities themselves, borrowed, paid back through the proceeds that they generate.” France still does it that way, so does most of Europe. Britain has made the choice that it cannot.

His sharpest line in the whole conversation is about the current chancellor. “Rachel Reeves should be doing the opposite. Rachel Reeves should be saying: you Leeds, Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield … I am going to give you even more fundraising powers. You are going to use it, you are going to build and you are going to transform your cities. And I’m not going to be involved. It’s all on you. If you can’t turn your cities around with all of the powers I’m going to give you, then you’ve got your voters to answer to.” He’s right. If it goes well the chancellor takes credit for devolving. If it goes badly, the cities have nobody to blame but themselves. There is no version of this that doesn’t work for her, and she isn’t doing it.

Leeds got parliamentary approval for a tram in 1993 and might open one in the late 2030s. Forty-five years to deliver a piece of infrastructure that will be inadequate to the city it serves by the time it arrives. Thomas, who openly hates DIY, has a perfect analogy for it. “I make such an enormous fuss about having to do any kind of DIY,” he says, “I build up to it for months, I finally do it — and then no one’s going to ask me to do the amount that’s actually needed. The result is that everything in our house falls apart. It’s kind of like that with the Leeds tram. It’s so hard to get something inadequate done that no one’s even talking about the jobs that actually have to be achieved.”

Edinburgh is the other end of the same wire. The inquiry into the first phase of the Edinburgh tram, when it finally reported, ran to 957 pages, and longer in elapsed time than the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War. The conventional view at the time was that the tram had been a costly mistake. Then they finally finished it down to Leith, and the city fell in love with it. “People react to transport once it exists in a way that’s often very hard to predict beforehand,” as Thomas puts it. Something happens when there is a track in the ground that does not happen when there is a timetabled vehicle on a road. (Jarrett Walker will be furious if he listens to or reads this, but buses, unless you do them spectacularly well, are not the thing that changes minds.)

This is, in the end, the same argument as Mini Switzerland, but applied to cities. The rural version is the bus and the train don’t meet, and nobody has decided whose job it is to make them meet. The urban version is the city is too big for its transport network and too small for its ambitions, and nobody has decided whose job it is to fix that either. Both are failures of design responsibility, both are paid for in lost growth and lost productivity, and both are paid for more corrosively, in the sense that the person who chose the public option is the sucker.

Thomas’s line on this is the most honest sentence in the conversation. He doesn’t drive. He uses public transport for every journey he makes. “The purpose of my career is to not be the sucker,” he says. “I want to be the person who thinks the choices I’ve made make sense. And if you’re driving, you’ve got it wrong.” And then the confession: “For an awful lot of journeys I make, that is simply not the case. I feel like I’m the sucker and they’re doing the sensible thing. And if you’re waiting at a bus stop in a hedge, you can’t really justify the idea that you’ve made the sensible choice.”

That is what British transport policy ought to be solving for. Not making things more efficient for the Treasury, not in the pursuit of a decarbonisation strategy. Just make the damn public transport option the obviously rational choice for a normal person making a normal journey, and the benefits of less public subsidy thanks to greater revenue, or less traffic congestion, will follow.

I closed our conversation by asking Thomas a new version of the closing question I’ve been testing as the biggest possible thing you’d want for public transport in Britain, and the smallest possible thing that could be done now to move in that direction. He chose, characteristically, to fold them into one answer. “We already have one of the densest railway networks in the world. We have bus networks in every village, town and city. We just don’t make the most of them. Being able to connect up the timetables, connect up the fares, connect up the experience, so that humans can make journeys … It just requires thinking about transport from the perspective of the human journey, not the vehicle journey. Which is a relatively simple change, albeit one that is culturally very hard for us to make.”

Which, in the end, is the line under all of this. Mini Switzerland is one small bet on building a system in one valley. The British urban argument of Leeds, Sheffield, Bristol can be the same bet at a different scale. The Toronto question is what happens when you have the bits but never quite committed to the whole. Each is a story about deciding, finally, that the thing is worth designing properly. The Swiss decided to do that in their cities all the way through to their villages. The volunteers for the Hope Valley have made a statement, and hopefully others can be inspired by that too.

To being Challengers.

“What’s the purpose of this project?”

“Oh, it’s to deliver a 40-storey office tower.”

“That’s not the purpose. That’s the function.”

The team, she says, will then go quiet, and eventually someone will offer the real answer … to make the developer a certain amount of money. They’ll feel slightly embarrassed about having said it out loud, but Sam’s response is that there’s nothing to be embarrassed about. The point of naming the purpose honestly is not to indict the developer. The point is that once you’ve named it, you can use it.

“What if we could still make the developer that much money but deliver it in 30 storeys, and save this much material and this much carbon? We build a better relationship with the city. There’s less overshadowing. We can actually offer some space back to the city for public amenity.”

This is a move I want to talk about, because I think it’s the most underused move in city-making, and often in the entire professional services industry.

Most of what gets called sustainability, regenerative design, place-based thinking, social value … pick your label … is bolted onto a function that was set somewhere earlier in the room, by someone who has already left. Brief arrive pre-decided, so the number of storeys, or a certain criteria, is the brief. It means by the time anyone with a holistic instinct gets near it, the only remaining variables can be peripheral. You can make the tower greener, but can ask whether it should be a tower in the first place?

Sam’s move is to refuse this framing without antagonising it. She doesn’t tell the developer their function is wrong. She accepts the purpose of “make this financial return” and uses it as the lever to renegotiate the function. The developer’s incentive is fully respected, but what gets challenged is the assumption that there’s only one shape of building that delivers on it.

This is, I think, a real world move of something I was recently circling around in Cities Without a Proposition, just made from the inside of a design practice rather than from the outside of a city. The argument there was that cities operate on supply-side logic … as in they build, they zone, they consent, they permit … without really asking what they’re for, who they’re for and why anyone would choose to be there. The permissioning economy moves a lot of paper without ever interrogating the proposition. I think Sam is describing a similar dysfunction at the building scale where the people who can ask the better question are typically downstream of the people who shy away from it.

So why doesn’t it happen more?

“Curiosity is not a KPI. It’s not incentivised. What’s incentivised is return on investment and delivery on time. And the way we’ve been taught to do that is, copy the last thing you did. Copy, paste, repeat.”

She’s careful, throughout the conversation, to frame this fairly. The people inside these processes are not lazy or unimaginative. They are under enormous pressure, working with constrained margins, in a context that is changing faster than their reference data, on briefs that arrive partly cooked and need to be in the ground inside a delivery window that may well have been optimistic when it was set. The pressure produces a rational behaviour of minimising variance. So don’t ask new questions, and reach for the last project that looked like this one and adapt the spreadsheet.

This is why the volume builder story she tells partway through the episode is brilliant in illustrating the opportunity. Working inside Development Victoria, Sam asked four volume housebuilders what it would cost to lift their product above code on a set of performance dimensions. The development managers had told her it was prohibitively expensive for that if it had been easy, the volume builders would have offered it already.

So Sam went and asked the volume builders directly. The exercise came back with a range of $10,000 to $30,000 per home, on homes worth between $500,000 and $700,000. But the more telling finding was inside that range. To take one variable, changing the colour of the roof, one builder said it would cost $5,000. Another said they’d give a $600 refund for the same change. The variance had nothing to do with design effort and everything to do with how each builder had configured their supply chain. Across three subsequent projects over eighteen months, the cost of the full upgrade went from $30,000 a home, to $10,000, to cost-neutral, not because anything got cheaper, but because Sam kept asking, and the supply chains kept rearranging themselves around the question.

The thing the development managers had told her was true, in the sense that they sincerely believed it. It just wasn’t stress-tested, because noobody was incentivised to test it, or felt they had the time to test it and copy-paste is quite defensible. The $30,000 per unit was an artefact of the question never being put because a two-week pause and some curiosity wasn’t seen as investable.

This is what Sam means, I think, when she says we are “wasting a lot of money on risk where we could turn that into profit and impact.” The industry has built a sophisticated apparatus for identifying and managing risks it can see, and almost no apparatus for noticing opportunities it has assumed away in the name of risk. The two functions sit in different rooms in most organisations. In the mature ones, she says, they sit closer together. In the best, she says, they're "almost one and the same." Elsewhere, the disconnect between them is something we should be paying much more attention to!

“Risk has become way bigger, way more complex and way scarier. And if you start to change things, that feels like risk. So when you're up front trying to get through this thing to get the thing built really quickly to minimise risk, you lose curiosity."

When you do the arithmetic, it's almost embarrassing.

“Asking questions up front, and spending — real examples — ten to twenty thousand dollars on getting the right people around a table on an eighty million dollar project can change the value that is delivered within the constraints of cost pressures and delivery pressures.”

That’s between 0.0125-0.025% of a common project value. It’s the kind of money that gets approved in a single line of an expense report. No industry decides it structurally cannot find a number that small. It just often chooses not to.

Share

What Hassell has been building over the last few years, and what makes this episode perhaps one of the most useful to people with day jobs in the public sector, is a process for embedding exactly this discipline. Twelve sustainability principles, applied to site analysis at three orders of magnitude. A stakeholder map that names not the developer but Sarah-who-works-for-the-developer, and Sarah’s boss Mary, and what each of them actually cares about. A separation, in the language of the team, between the function the brief states and the purpose the brief is serving.

Done at the start of a project, in a 90-minute session, before anyone picks up a pen. Across nine studios, they did over 160 of these sessions in 18 months. When the team eased off the formal tracking, participation dropped a bit, not back to where they were before. The behaviour had partly become the culture, where some teams will have found their own new iterations on how to adjust the process, improve it or make it work better for them.

There’s a question that follows naturally from all this, and I put it to Sam late in the conversation. She’d been describing the spectrum of projects she sees land at Hassell. At the top, the lighthouse briefs — the dream projects where, as she puts it, the job is mostly “don’t f*** it up.” At the bottom, the 5% the firm declines because they’re not aligned with what it’s there to do. And then, in the middle, the 90% that she calls her jam — the ordinary projects, the ones that won’t win awards, the briefs that arrive with constraints already baked in. That’s where she thinks the real work is.

The thing I’ve watched happen to projects in that middle tier, over and over, is that they get defensive about not being poster children. The team concedes early that this one won’t be the iconic plaza, the breakthrough building, the case study other cities will fly in to visit. And once they’ve conceded that, they often stop trying to be magical at all. The aspiration collapses to compliance. Which is a strange outcome, because most of the places people actually love living in or going to work in are not poster children. They’re ordinary places that did one or two things with real care.

"There are lots of great examples of where curiosity, upfront thinking, has delivered much better outcomes. But it's a culture and a psychology of the built environment that I think is a really exciting opportunity."

So I asked Sam whether, alongside the systemic work she’d been describing — the curiosity, the upstream questions, the supply-chain re-asks — there was still room for the one piece of delight on top. I reached for the example I keep coming back to: the Magic Castle Hotel in Los Angeles. A fairly ordinary motel that became one of the highest-rated hotels in the world on TripAdvisor, partly on the strength of a red phone by the pool that you can pick up to have an iced lolly delivered to you. The signature move. The thing that makes people smile when they walk past it. The reason they tell their friends.

Sam’s answer surprised me, because most people in her field would treat the question as a distraction from the serious work. She didn’t.

“You’ve nailed it. There’s a question I get asked that is one of my pet peeves. It sends me into an internal rage. If we could just pick one thing to do, what would it be? We’re not nodes floating in space. What are the things we can do to reduce our impact, do what we need to do functionally — and then what is the one thing we can add to give back? Not what is the one thing we can do, period. You’ve got to do both.”

I think this is the most underrated thing Sam said in the whole hour, and it dissolves a false dichotomy the industry keeps falling into. The standard sustainability voice treats the popsicle hotline as frivolous and the systems work as serious, and asks you to choose. Sam’s position is that the question is wrongly framed. The discipline is the floor; the signature move is what people remember. Ordinary projects don’t have to choose between being efficient and being lovable. They have to refuse the framing that pretends they’re alternatives.

The thing I keep coming back to, listening again, is how unremarkable the actual technique is. Ask what the project is for. Separate that from what the project is just now. Spend ten conversations finding out whether your assumptions are real. Then, having done the discipline, ask what one delightful thing you can add on top. None of this requires new tools. It does require just a little permission to slow down for two weeks on an eighty-million-dollar project, which the industry has decided it cannot afford, and which Sam keeps demonstrating it cannot afford not to.

I’ve been ending these conversations for a while now with what I call the magic wand question … of forgetting about rules, restrictions and requirements, what would you change about cities? Sam took the question apart the first time I asked it, at a salon in Singapore, and she took it apart again on this episode. She’s right both times, and I think I’m actually going to retire it. Going back through the answers I’ve collected, the uncomfortable thing is that most of them never really needed a magic wand. They needed a a tiny bit of budget allocation, a willing client, a planning officer who’d return a call, a project director prepared to carve out a day to think differently.

The question was inviting people to dream sideways into fantasy when the more useful provocation is to look at what’s already within reach and ask why we keep behaving as if it isn’t. Asking for magic gives everyone permission to imagine a world in which the constraints don’t apply. Sam’s whole argument is that the constraints are mostly real, but the assumptions stacked on top of them mostly aren’t, and the latter is where the actual room to manoeuvre lives.

"Perpetuating the idea that one wish, a silver bullet, one move, can change everything and that change isn't hard work … I think is a real cultural problem. It allows people to go 'what if', or 'I don't', or 'I just'. With all due respect, that question removes accessibility. Everyone has got their own magic wand, and it's just about finding the confidence to use it in a small way every day."

The 40-storey building isn’t the purpose. It’s the answer the system gave the last time it was asked a question. Most of city-making is operating on answers, not questions. Sam Peart is one of the people asking the questions back, and then, when the discipline is done, not letting that be an excuse to not find the cherry on top.

To being Challengers

Specifically, it is a series of rooms, in three different cities, over decades. They might have had a model in the middle, drawings on the walls and a deliberate, slightly subversive seating plan so the people who would normally argue with each other across departmental memos sitting next to each other instead. Toronto in the late 1970s. St. Paul, Minnesota in the 1990s. Boston after that. The same idea, applied three times, with the same result.

We set up this conversation primarily to talk about the Pickering Lands, and we will come to that, promise. But when I listened back to this one, the Pickering project is really just the latest application of something Ken has been proving since David Crombie hired him in 1977 after a short stint in Prince Albert, SK … that the room where the decision gets made can matter more than the discipline of the person making it.

Ken’s first (big) city job was creating an urban design group from scratch in Toronto, where there wasn’t template or much precedent. There was “a chair in the city” and a brief.

He went and met the counterparts to the people he had worked with in Prince Albert … the commissioner of public works, the head of parks, hydro, the TTC, the city architect. Not for just for stakeholder consultation, but to work out with each of them how to piggyback urban design onto their capital budgets. The commissioner of public works would bring an 85% budget for rebuilding streets and the infrastructure underneath them. Ken would bring a 15% budget. They would go to budget committee together, and the streets would not get put back the way they were, but in a better state.

That, by itself, is a good story. The better story is what he did with the office.

“I convinced the city to let me create a storefront office on Elizabeth Street behind city hall and I sat in the window and invited people to drop in and we did a plan for our studio.”

In the middle of the studio, they built a model that started with what was there. Then they got everybody who was adding to it … i.e. developers and departments … to bring their scale model and fit it into the city’s. Drawings became the service the office offered to other departments, to councillors, to the newly emerging BIAs. By the time Ken left, the group had thirty-five designers and a working alliance with every department in city government that touched the public realm.

“It became a completely opportunistic exercise just seizing on opportunities.”

Often we use “opportunistic” has a negative connotation. It shouldn’t.

When he describes the work this way, you can hear Ken arguing against the version of planning that delivers a fixed end-state, on a fixed timeline, agreed by people who never sit in the same room. He took the storefront model to St. Paul next, where the mayor had a vision of reconnecting the city to the Mississippi and no idea how to deliver it. Ken set up a storefront office outside city hall called the Design Center for St. Paul on the Mississippi. He seconded the heads of every infrastructure-related department and gave them what he calls “two passports”, one reporting through their vertical hierarchy, one to the design centre. They met once a week around a table with models and drawings of every project in flight, and invited the developers in.

It worked for ten years. Then he did it in Boston with the same model and similar results. The methodology here is something we likely need to revisit in terms of how institutions operate today.

Share

Now let’s get to something Ken is doing now.

For fifty years, the federal government held 9,300 acres east of Toronto for an airport that has never been built, and now won’t be built. The land had been identified to be expropriated, but people who lived on it were not incentivised to invest in it. Farms had short-term horizons, which meant cash crops, which meant a slow agricultural decline on what is some of the best farmland in Canada. There’s the headwaters of Duffins Creek, heritage hamlets, albeit with some ‘missing teeth’ in the streetscape and a direct boundary with the Rouge National Urban Park.

(I spoke to Janet Sumner from the Canada Wildlands League about the Rouge National Park for more on the area.)

In 2024, it became clear the federal government was about to release the land, which is the moment where most campaigns that had existed to oppose the airport might see some strain at their coalition as what they want next might not be so clearly aligned.

“We had advocacy groups who had been advocating essentially for one thing and they all agreed on stopping the airport, but that’s kind of where the agreement stopped.”

The three groups of Environmentalists who wanted nature preserved, Land Over Landings and the farm coalition, who had done the foundational work on agricultural protection and were focused there, and people who mourned the loss of community … the hamlets, the heritage buildings, the families that used to live there. Each in some way correct in its own discipline, but not necessarily coordinated about how to work together for what comes next.

What Ken did, working with SLA from Copenhagen and a small Toronto team, was build the synthesis the campaign hadn’t yet built for itself. He uses the analogy of the three-legged stool, with nature as the foundational layer, agriculture as the second and community as the third. The seat of the stool is the vision of a working agricultural landscape inside a national urban park, with restored hamlets housing the people who farm it, sharing a boundary with the Rouge.

If that sounds like the storefront office argument applied to a 9,300-acre site, that might be because it kinda is. The same instinct of put the disciplines in the room together, draw the thing that includes all of them, and the answer that emerges is one nobody could have produced on their own.

The campaign - thenewrouge.ca - is now in a fight against a different version of the ‘now what’. The City of Pickering has proposed a compromise that would carve off three slices of the pie for the Rouge expansion and let the rest go to conventional industrial and commercial sprawl. Ken’s argument against this is partly aesthetic, partly economic and entirely on-pattern for once it is gone, it is gone. A short-term sell-off is a sugar rush, but the legacy can be the synthesis of the other groups coming together to create something of greater economic, cultural and environmental value.

We went on to talk about a couple of other big projects in Toronto that might show some of this big ambition creeping back in to the city too. For the two biggest pieces of land Toronto is currently redeveloping - Downsview and the Port Lands - can be the inheritors to this idea of designing and building in public.

Downsview will be a 40-year project, while the Port Lands becoming Ookwemin Minising is the conversion of an old industrial waterfront into something the city has been trying to ponder for a couple of generations. Both, unusually for North America, have landed on the same design move of a pedestrian spine as the organising element of the entire site.

At Downsview, the spine is the runway itself. 2.1 kilometres of it, kept and re-purposed, with many new neighbourhoods threaded along its length. Ken is working on it with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. At the Port Lands, his colleagues at SLA have just received approval from Waterfront Toronto for a pedestrian spine through Ookwemin Minising anchoring a community of around twenty thousand people to come.

The interesting thing is not that two large redevelopments have a pedestrian spine. The interesting thing is what the spine does to the planning logic.

“It’s the heart of the community tying together a community of I think 20,000 people.”

You cannot plan a multi-decade project end-to-end, and you shouldn’t even try. What you can do is establish a piece of public realm so generous, so structurally central, that it forces every subsequent decision to relate to it. The runway, if you keep it, becomes the thing that all seven or eight new neighbourhoods have to address. The spine at Ookwemin Minising becomes the front door for everyone who lives there. It’s what Ken calls a framework, rather than a masterplan. It might be the same logic as the unofficial plans he was drawing in 1979 in the East Downtown, putting the public works and the development plans on the same sheet of paper and looking for opportunities to link them.

It also, importantly, leaves room to be wrong as he says “one of the bug bears of planning is false predictability.”

He says it about Downsview, but he could be saying it about anything he’s worked on. Regent Park, where the master plan he started in 2002 deliberately produced a streets and blocks framework rather than a fixed program. The aquatic centre, the arts spectrum, the MLSE involvement in the cricket pitch … none of them anticipated, all of them possible because the plan was opportunistically (that word again) loose where it needed to be.

If you want to know what monodisciplinary confidence looks like at the scale of a stadium, Ken has the SkyDome story for you. He and his colleagues advocated, successfully, for putting it downtown rather than out by the 401. They drew the public spaces around it, imagined it like Boston or Chicago as a stadium with the city pressed up against it, life on the perimeter, before-and-after experiences spilling into the surrounding streets.

“The people who owned the franchise insisted that there be nothing that could be accessed from the outside.”

They wanted every dollar, i.e. every hot dog, every soft drink or beer, to be spent inside. So the perimeter became, in Ken’s words, “a lesson in sterility.” Each discipline did its job correctly, and the franchise maximised concession revenue. The architects designed a very cool stadium, so cool that I had a poster of it on my bedroom wall as a child in England. The planners delivered the public spaces they had been asked for too. And the result, forty years later, is a building that has had to spend the last three off-seasons fixing its insides while the outside is still essentially dead.

I asked Ken what he would do with a magic wand. I sort of expected a big project idea, but he gave me an organisational chart.

“So, I’m gonna say something unusual. I could mention all sorts of amazing projects, but I’m going to mention administration and getting city hall out of its doldrums.”

The reference is Helsinki. A few years ago, the mayor took the city’s thirty-five departments and collapsed them into four divisions, each under a deputy mayor from a different party in the coalition. Architects, landscape architects, transportation planners, civil engineers … everyone working in the same studios. Ken visited. He came back convinced that what he had been trying to do, project by project, since 1977 was the standing operating model in Helsinki.

He’s right that this is unsexy and he says so himself for it’s not something you can really cut a ribbon on. It is also, if you take his career seriously as evidence, the single highest-leverage thing Toronto could do.

The reason is in his own work. The storefront office only ever worked because Ken, at the start of his career, was building something new and “nobody stopped me from talking to anybody I wanted to.” Every successful project he describes … the 1:200 model on Elizabeth Street, the two-passport secondments in St. Paul, the interdisciplinary team that came up with a river estuary as the answer to a flood-proofing problem in the Lower Don Lands has the same structural feature. The right people, in the same room, with the same drawing in front of them and a remit that crosses department lines.

Toronto, right now, is structurally arranged to make this almost impossible. Ken describes the morning of our recording of emails ricocheting around city hall with one group after another saying “not my responsibility, talk to so and so.” That’s not malice, for it’s the result of an org chart doing exactly what an org chart does. The talented people inside it, and Ken is generous as he correctly points out how many of them there are, are working against the structure rather than with it.

The thing that would change this is not another project. It is the organisational equivalent of the storefront office, applied to the whole of city government. Helsinki has done it, and Ken himself has done it three times at smaller scale. The mayoral election Toronto is about to have is perhaps a big opportunity to do something similar.

I think he’s right.

There is one conversation thread I should have had with Ken that I didn’t, and I’m putting it here so I remember to come back to it. He was in the room for Sidewalk Labs and Quayside, and he has been polite about that experience in public. The questions of what Toronto learned, what it got wrong, and whether the resulting Quayside mk II is the bolder city building the first attempt was supposed to be. Those are questions only a handful of people in this city are positioned to answer honestly. Ken is one of them, so I think we will need to have a next time.

For now, if you live in this region, the most useful thing you can do this week is go to thenewrouge.ca and write to your MP. The federal cabinet is about to make a once-in-a-century decision about 9,300 acres of land that, fifty years ago, somebody decided should be an airport. The disciplines that fought that decision, individually, won. The synthesis they have produced together is genuinely worth defending.

To Being Challengers.

I thought this might make for a slightly different conversation, where we broadly covered four things worth calling out: what circularity actually means, why different places need different answers, how Singapore and India fit together and why we don’t experiment enough.

Saurabh’s path into materials started where most people don’t go; a material recovery facility in Singapore. As he put it, it gave him “a very good insight into how a city consumes and how it wastes... looking at the city from its underbelly as opposed to looking at how it looks from the outside.”

From there he started mapping the largest waste streams and asking what could actually move soil health and air quality. The early work was circular with recycling, upcycling, partnerships with Singapore Airlines on retired planes, 100,000 soda cans collected from preschoolers and turned into medals for the World Aquatic Championships.

But the more he did, the less convinced he was that recycling was the answer. He pointed out that PET production has actually increased since recycled PET became a thing as recycling is doing its job, just the job just isn’t enough. His framing is a good one:

“I almost think of that as a silver standard. I don’t even think of it as gold standard. I think the gold standard really is make home compostable materials.”

So Lumatera now works across three categories: circular materials, bio-based materials that compost in three to six months and advanced materials being developed by researchers and scientists.

Saurabh recognises as simple, but commonly overlooked factor for cities. Because every place has different waste streams, different agricultural by-products, different geography and the answers should follow from this, as he explains; “If you’re an island, look at seaweed. If you’re an agrarian country, look at the agricultural waste.”

He gave the example of agricultural waste in Indonesia and Thailand as two neighbouring countries where the geometry of the waste is different, which means the material IP has to be tweaked to fit each one. Copy-pasting a playbook from one geography to another doesn’t necessarily work, even if the geographies look similar from the outside.

This is why Lumatera licenses IP into different geographies based on what waste feedstock those places actually have. It’s kind of the opposite of the global brand model, and, not coincidentally, exactly what a Challenger City should be doing. Work out what you have that nowhere else has, build from there and stop trying cosplay as Singapore. Be inspired by all means, but don’t forget what makes it special, will not make you special.

Saurabh has lived in India, the UK and Singapore, and this shapes how he frames the different economies and contexts as he explains: “I see Singapore as the systems enabler … the policy, the research, the corporate engagement. The ideas can emerge every day in Singapore. I look at India as the scale engine, because in a country which is actually developing, these IPs can actually be put into action and create real-world impact. So you're not making the same mistakes the other cities have made.”

Singapore has the policy, the research institutions, the corporate engagement and the appetite to think differently. What it doesn’t have is room to test things at the scale that proves them. India has that, plus a development trajectory that hasn’t fully locked in the worst of what came before. He’s blunt about the inheritance:

“The playbook from the 1990s was always about building big factories and big industries and glass and steel buildings. But I think the playbook needs to change.”

The Singapore–India connection isn’t just trade. It’s a deliberate pairing of the Singapore-style system design with India-scale execution that forms the structural logic underneath Lumatera’s model. Ideas can be shaped in one, developed in another, proven in either.

I also rather like how Saurabh deliberately calls Lumatera a combinator rather than an incubator or accelerator. IPs come in at different stages as some need further design stage work, some need to be take to a pilot, some are pilot-complete and need demonstration scale, some are demonstration-ready and need commercial acceleration. He takes them from where they are, rather than filtering them through a single funnel.

That’s more interesting than it sounds as a lot of innovation infrastructure is what you can almost call laccelerator-shaped accelerators, as in programmes designed by looking at other programmes, copying the process and missing the problem the original was solving. Tech-readiness levels become entry criteria so everything that doesn’t fit gets filtered out, regardless of whether it’s interesting.

The deeper point Saurabh kept coming back to is about risk:

“People shouldn’t be afraid to try. I think that’s become a problem, especially in high cost cities where people feel, my God, there’s a stigma around failure, especially in Asia, that I’d rather just take the safe route and not try something new.”

Comfortable places stop experimenting. That’s part of why he sees the India connection as essential. Not just for scale, but for the risk-tolerance that comes from people having less to lose.

He ended on a magic-wand answer about building an innovation district in a rural part of in India that becomes Singapore 2030 … a slightly more master-planned version of the bottom-up argument he’d been making for the previous forty minutes. I don’t think he meant it the way it came out. I think the version he actually wants is closer to something he described earlier of workshops and institutions of learning around waste sites, in the parts of cities nobody goes to, anchoring the rejuvenation of forgotten districts. That version is more interesting, and more honest to the rest of his thinking.

So I kind of came away from our chat with three big things.

The underbelly point. While most place-based work starts at the rendering of shiny new things, interesting stuff happens with the messy stuff. Like what goes to landfill.

The point about ‘feedstock’. Different places have different shapes, and any solution that doesn’t notice that isn’t really a solution. It’s a reminder to ensure we’re designing based on what we have, or don't have, and the context of a place.

And the experiment point. We’ve built an innovation culture, particularly in expensive cities, that punishes the attempt, and often means we’re unable to learn from failure. Saurabh has spent years trying things, getting them wrong, and figuring out how to get them less wrong. That disposition of what he called wanting to “open up the kitchen and get everyone to come and play” is one of the most missing elements in the conversation about cities right now.

To being Challengers.

I’ve been pondering whether there a word for the kind of person who does this kind of bridging work between the natural disciplines and silos of urban, infrastructure or place based practice. Think between ambition and delivery, or between what’s expressly planned and permitted, with what might just be assumed to be forbidden.

It’s interesting as it really does bridge my corporate innovation background, with the work I want to do more of around place-based innovation, ideally off the little rectangles that we’re not very good at keeping in our pockets.

If you want to do innovation, or push an idea through a big, complex, often rather stodgy organisation, we have a term for it … Intrapreneurship.

It’s a concept that goes in an out of fashion relatively frequently.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting the man who coined the term too, Gifford Pinchot, through Hans Baelmaekers’ Intrapreneurship Conferences a while back.

Now I feel for anyone who gets into intraprenership, whether they embrace the term or not. It’s pretty masochistic territory. The term implies that this could be a path to the transformational, fun and potentially lucrative world of entrepreneurship, all without really having the same risk profile because you’ve got the resources of a behemoth behind you. So if you do it right, your impact on the world can be so much bigger, yeah?

As my old boss Dan Taylor liked to say, if you’re a startup and you sell the first 100 units or get the first 100 customers, it’s pop the champagne time. Do that in a corporate and there’s a good chance you’re going to get fired. Not to mention, if you are successful, the bonus likely isn’t anywhere comparable to the potential rewards a founder can attain with a ludicrous valuation on their exit, even if the thing doesn’t make any money.

In the cities realm, I got to know Charles Landry through the WRLDCTY Fellowship last year, and he gave us what is probably the cousin of intrapreneurship with the concept of the ‘creative bureaucracy’. Effectively the argument that public institutions don’t have to be where ambition goes to die, and that some of them even aren’t!

If we’re being honest, neither concept has truly transformed the systems they pointed at. At least not yet. Most large corporations are not riddled with intrapreneurs, hacking at the system and finding new ways to value through the application of innovation or some design process. Though much activity does take place, it can often be performative. Likewise, most bureaucracies are not especially creative. But both ideas have made some institutions more interestingly less wrong for a spell, which is probably the realistic ambition for any concept of this kind. You don’t fix the system by coming up with a new term, but by giving it a word for the thing it could be doing better, a few people will use that as cover to do what they can.

I’d like to build on these terms though, and I do this with apologies, because I’m going to use a bit of a clunky word. I’m almost a bit embarrassed to be offering it, but I think the word infrapreneur might be interesting to explore.

It is not virgin territory. Laura Tomasko coined social infrapreneur in 2013 for people who build the plumbing of social change. The Brickstone group in West Africa run training programmes for infrapreneurs developing toll roads and power plants. A 2015 TechCrunch piece used it for enterprise-software founders. None of these usages is mine, but none of them quite stuck either. So the word is squatted rather than claimed, which is fine, as it makes this a reclamation rather than a coinage, and reclamation requires less hubris.

There is pretty well worn language around corporate innovation. Anything you build needs to be desirable, feasible and viable, the classic IDEO venn. For places (and products actually), I prefer lovable, doable, commercial. Slightly less corporate jargon, and slightly more honest about what’s at stake. Interestingly though, I rarely see this framework or philosophy applied to places, cities or infrastructure.

The lovable bar matters more than people in the planning, engineering, economics, policy or project realms tend to admit. I also think it’s a better reframe that desirable. We should use an example here, so let’s compare Apple and Lenovo. Both successfully make laptop computers. Both are commercial with Lenovo more so on volume than Apple in some segments. The difference in how the two companies capture value is almost entirely on the lovable axis. People queue overnight for one (well they used to), and more people are issued the other by IT procurement. You don’t see Lenovo win too many design awards, you don’t see Lenovo branching out into all sorts of other tech devices. There is no Lenovo store on Fifth Avenue.

Engineers owns doable and economists, or finance departments, own what is considered commercial. Planners might think they own desirable but on closer inspection they mostly own what is permitted, which is a related but different bar, and we’ll get to it. Lovability as the thing that determines whether a place is celebrated, defended, photographed, shared, missed when it’s gone, has no professional owner.

In the business world, making sure things are designed to be something people want has historically been the realm of a very important group. They were called Marketing, though more frequently these days are often the Product team.

I’ll keep using marketing in the original, classical sense as the discipline of understanding why people choose what they choose rather than the diminished modern sense in which marketing means promotion or advertising. The first sense is what’s missing from urbanism.

You can see this trinity collapse on any large project. Heath Gledhill, who I spoke to recently for the podcast alongside his business partner Tom Shield, calls his own role agitator integrator … being the person who walks into a room full of professional hats and gets looked at as though he’s just opened a window in a meeting room that had been sealed for years.

The designated hats and silos are a big problem. Landscape architects who are excellent at the edge detail of a seat. Engineers who can build a bridge that will be big and strong enough. Planners will adhere to the regulations and policies with rigour. Each will be correct in their own terms. Each, in Heath’s words, “absolutely not responsible for the question of whether the hat was the right one to wear in the first place.” Somewhere upstream, somebody decided what the project was for, and by the time the concrete is being poured, that person could well have left the building, the company, the office, possibly the country.

Tom Shield, coming at it from architecture and urban planning, locates the problem at a particular moment: the business case. “One of the biggest challenges is so many people involved in delivering the project will never have read the business case. And why would you, I mean, they’re enormous, but they won’t even have the four dot points that summarise the business case.” What he wants is what he calls the voice of the business case as someone who shows up at the moments when trade-offs are being made, asking whether the project is still consistent with what it promised. Simple, obvious, and not happening.

Heath sees the gap from the field and in the room where the bad decision is about to be made. Tom sees it from the document, where the aspiration was specified and then not necessarily followed through on. Between them they cover most of the territory where what we might actually consider infrapreneurial work would actually live.

This brings us back to the recent recurring theme. The infrastructure and urbanism world treats permitted as a fence. It can be the planner’s master document, the procurement framework, the political envelope or established process. This leads people and teams to ask whether they are allowed; if yes, proceed; if no, abandon.

The infrapreneur might treat permitted as a permeable perimeter. Sometimes the reason can be real, but sometimes the rationale or perceived rule can be challenged. Sometimes the planner, developer, engineer, politician, client has discretion they don’t usually exercise, and merely asking nicely “what if” turns out to have been an option all along. Sometimes nothing in the existing framework permits or prohibits what is being proposed because the framework doesn’t recognise it. Often the legal permission is fine but the social licence isn’t, and the work of the infrapreneur can be to build the case for that.

This is entrepreneurial behaviour. Entrepreneurs always operate at the edge of what’s permitted; a great deal of value creation lives in the careful expansion of that edge. We accept this in startups, and we actively celebrate it, hero worshipping the successful. But we’ve structurally forgotten it can be allowed in the domains where most of our public value gets built or destroyed. This is where we come back to intrapreneurship and needing people inside the walls who have the purpose of looking at things differently across disciplines, challenging assumptions, testing a few rules and ensuring we are not working within gilded cages of our own making.

Which is part of why we kill so many projects through pre-emptive caution. The dominant Western mode, faced with a piece of infrastructure or a public realm decision, is to almost instruct the economist to find a reason not to do it. The dominant Chinese mode is to instruct the engineer to find a way to build it. Dan Wang has obviously covered so much of this in Breakneck. And both methods can fail in their own ways for China probably builds plenty it shouldn’t, the West almost certainly fails to build plenty it should. That latter failure can be the harder one to see. The unbuilt bridge generates no inquiry, no audit, no parliamentary committee. It is, in cost-accounting terms, almost suspiciously well-behaved.

It’s all a bit trying to justify where to build a bridge based on where people are swimming across the river.

Share

So with this clunky word of infrapreneur, I want to challenge the notion of who in a project … whether it is an airport masterplan, a new railway line, a corporate HQ, a brownfield regeneration project … owns the concept of making the thing lovable? Who is treating permitted as a frontier to be expanded rather than a fence to be kept in? Who is the agitator integrator, the voice of the business case, the person whose job is to keep the whole thing in mind when everyone else is, rationally, focused on their bit?

If the answer is nobody, the project will probably get delivered, but it won’t necessarily be defended because someone loves it. It may very well reflect badly on whoever was standing there when the music stopped, even if they only inherited the thing from someone else’s previous decisions. If there isn’t that person, the project could probably have been done better.

If the answer is somebody … Heath, Tom, you, the person you didn’t know you needed … there’s a chance it ends up being the kind of project people queue for, fight for, miss when if it was no longer there. It’s the kind that compounds over time rather than depreciates, or justifies its own existence in retrospect more thoroughly than any business case could promise in advance.

Whether infrapreneur sticks as a word is a separate question, and probably not the most interesting one. Pinchot’s intrapreneurship word stuck because it gave a few thousand mid-level managers cover to behave in new ways. Infrapreneur might or might not, but what I’m more interested in is whether the question about the behaviour can sticks, because we know the way we’re making our places, projects and cities needs some innovation.

To being Challengers.

The official was exhausted by best practice case studies. Gerald recalls him saying: “I cannot hear best practice cases anymore because they make me feel like the biggest idiot on the planet. Because all the best practice cases, they are always nice, sunny, beautiful, no problems, bad before, good after. And whatever project I do in my city, they never look like that. There are always problems, bumps, challenges along the way. And I never read anything about them.”

That frustration is where Urban Future came from. And as someone who gets triggered by the phrase ‘best practice’, I’m all for it. Two people, having a chat, discussing out loud something that a lot of people apparently felt but hadn’t fully articulated.

The idea that followed was simple to the point of being obvious in hindsight. Find cities that had already done what this team wanted to do. Invite the people doing the actual work, not so much the PR and communications types, not just the mayors, real workers … and ask them to talk about the fuckups. . “We did not want to hear the best practice, the marketing, blah blah. We wanted to get the real story.”

They set it up for tens of people. A month later they had 150 registrations. Six months after that, a thousand people from thirty countries showed up, with one big sponsor, a large European building materials company, whose board member Gerald spotted sitting on the floor because they'd run out of chairs. Gerald was mortified, only to have that board member send a glowing email a week later saying it was the coolest experience he’d ever been part of.

Urban Future has been going fourteen years. It was in Ljubljana a few weeks before we spoke, with 2,000 people from 290 cities in 48 countries. Istanbul is next in April 2027. Might want to start planning for that.

Gerald came into urbanism as a complete outsider, with a corporate background, no strong knowledge of the field, no major relationships in it, no fluency in the jargon even. When he started curating sessions, he couldn’t write the way the existing conferences wrote with dense abstracts, sessions that required, as he puts it, “a degree just to understand the title of the session.” So he didn’t, and he asked people what questions they actually wanted answered, and built the programme around those.

He’s convinced that ignorance was a critical ingredient. The existing scene in 2014 was, in his words, “guys in suits with ties who attended those conferences.” By not knowing what he was supposed to do, he ended up doing something different.

The same instinct runs through how he thinks about keeping the event’s culture intact as it scales. “We recruit for passion and not for skills necessarily. Many things you can learn. But you can’t learn the passion.” It’s a line that sounds like a poster, except he then backs it up with a specific example: we have 200 speakers at each event, he says, and one person on the team whose entire job is to support those speakers. They handle every email, every hotel question, every connection to other speakers. And then they also stand at the check-in desk, so when a speaker arrives, they already knows them … has written their bio, exchanged dozens of emails … and greets them by name. “It’s the kind of welcome and the personal approach that our staff has everywhere throughout the process. And people feel that this is different.”

One of his best stories is from Oslo in 2019, when Urban Future came to the city just as it was launching what was then one of the largest car-free city centres in Europe. They built the whole programme around it, with sessions from every angle and city officials explaining the mechanics.

And then, at the end, the deputy mayor came on stage and said: “If there’s one advice I can give you, when you want to do a car-free city centre in your city — never ever call it a car-free city centre.”

The room didn’t quite know what to do with that, but she went on to explain.

“When you call it a car-free city centre, the discussion is set. It is either for or against cars. But that’s not the point. The point is we want to increase quality of living, livability, health, safety, air quality. And when you look at Paris or London, they’re not talking about getting rid of cars. They’re talking about making the school commute for children safer. How do you really want to argue against making the school trip for kids safer? You’re going to be crucified if you do that.”

Gerald says he watched people in the audience quietly revising their own communication plans as she spoke. He sees the reframe now in how Paris and London talk about the same kinds of projects. You don’t lead with what you’re removing. You lead with what you’re gaining.

Share

The city selection follows the same spirit as Gerald doesn’t want capital city after capital city after capital city. He wants variety of condition of rich cities and poor ones, cities in transformation, big cities and smaller cities, cities staring down a reckoning.

Stuttgart is the European car industry’s home. Helsingborg is a Swedish city of 120,000 that nobody outside Scandinavia tends to cite in urbanism debates. But their leadership came in and did something casually radical as they acknowledged that their administration had been built to administer, and that administering and innovating are not the same thing. So they rebuilt it from the inside with a new leadership structure, new training, a physical incubator where any staff member could bring an idea, provided they brought two people from two other departments with them.

And once a year, at an all-hands event in the hockey stadium, “the highlight of the afternoon, apart from the food and the drinking, is where they give out the fuck-up of the year award. And this person or group of persons is celebrated like rock stars in there, getting on stage, people cheering.”

Within eight years, Helsingborg went from a city nobody wanted to work for to one competing with Google for graduate talent. Gerald tells that story not as a model to copy but as proof that a certain kind of institutional culture change is actually possible. You can decide that failure is information rather than embarrassment. And then you have to mean it, publicly, in the hockey stadium, in front of everyone.

The whole “but we’re not Amsterdam” argument comes up constantly when it comes to making change happen in cities, and not just from North Americans. Gerald hears it in every European city too. His answer is that Urban Future is specifically not about Amsterdam and Copenhagen. When Ken Livingstone came, they didn’t ask him about the congestion charge mechanics, and instead asked him how you personally cope when tabloid media is running photos of your family because they hate your transport policy. “Hearing how a top political leader deals with it, and how he deals personally with it. … because they are also humans … suddenly people could really relate to it.” A mayor in a French city dealing with a tram construction and one local journalist hounding them has something real to learn from that, even if the scale is not exactly the same.

But next time out, Istanbul feels like a different register.

Gerald admits was initially shocked by the idea as it’s not really the same as anything they’ve done before. It’s the biggest city in Europe, roughly double the population of Austria. It’s chaotic in ways that no previous Urban Future city has been. But there’s a specific reason he came around to it.

“Four different religions right next to each other, coexisting for hundreds of years already in that city. And we thought in a time when everything becomes more right wing, where everything becomes more ‘this is mine, this is them and us’ … finding a place where people live together, or have been living together for such a long time, I think this is a strong backdrop for an event where people from all around Europe and beyond are coming together to talk about how to make things better.”

There’s also a practical reason, and it’s one that doesn’t come up often enough. Urban Future has tried repeatedly to bring speakers from African cities into their European events, with cities managing maybe 20 or 25 percent annual informal growth with almost no institutional resources, finding creative solutions to problems that well-funded European administrations simply don’t face. “We tried a lot of things, but they just didn’t get a visa. They just didn’t let them in.” Turkey is more open, so Istanbul gives Urban Future a better chance of finally getting those voices in the room.

The knowledge flows in urbanism run overwhelmingly in one direction, so who gets a visa to attend whose conference is not a trivial question. It will shape whose ideas circulate and whose don’t.

Gerald’s magic wand at the end of our conversation was simple really, and along the lines of something I (reassuringly!) hear a fair bit in these conversations … just let people try things. Stop telling them it can’t be done. He traced it back to high school, to being told something was impossible and deciding to find out whether that was actually true. He still does it as he mentioned trying to get a school street outside his son’s school, being told it was impossible because of some obscure regulation, tracking down the person responsible for that regulation, and discovering they’d never heard of it.

“Asking why, when somebody tells you that something cannot be done, has become my favourite thing. I’m like a pain in the ass and I have been a pain in the ass to my high school teachers, but it’s also been throughout my career. I just love to ask these presumably stupid questions until at one point people couldn’t answer anymore why things had been done that way.”

I love that move. Ask why, then keep asking why. At some point, people stop being able to answer, which is exactly where the fun work begins.

Urban Future is in Istanbul, April 13-16, 2027. If you go, you’ll probably end up sitting on a floor at some point. Consider it a feature, not a bug. And I will see you there too.

To being Challengers.

So this conversation was very much one that took place with a kind of cheerful matter-of-factness that some might even consider quite radical.

Jen is from Halifax, NS, so that should explain a lot for people who’ve spent time in the Canadian Maritimes. And before Evergreen, she ran a Nova Scotia crown corporation that built some of the province’s most visited public places, think the Halifax Waterfront, Peggy’s Cove, Lunenburg Waterfront, alongside rural broadband and standing up innovation hubs. This is combination of responsibilities that already tells us something useful about how she thinks. She is, as she was keen to flag up front, not an engineer and not a planner.

“No one would ever hand me a hammer.”

Her training is philosophy, then an MBA, then governance. Which, if you think about it, is probably a better grounding for getting anything built in this country than most of the disciplines we actually associate with the job.

Evergreen, for those who only know it as the Brick Works, is a national thing. The Brick Works is the demonstration site. The strategy across the country, in Jen’s words, is to build “public land that really outperforms across a number of public policy priorities” … which they do through three parallel strands. Convening practitioners, community, governments and First Nations. A Centre for Better Public Spaces. And actually getting involved in projects. That last bit this year includes three large school grounds transformations (two in Ontario, one in Winnipeg), a Mi’kmaq Native Friendship Centre-led project in Halifax that Evergreen is supporting and a Toronto ravines programme we’ll come back to.

Oh, and in her spare time she’s also on the Canadian Infrastructure Council, the ministerial-appointed arm’s-length body writing Canada’s first national infrastructure assessment. Two roles, two vantage points but with one common diagnosis.

It roughly goes like this. Canada isn’t short of mone, isn’t short of ideas and isn’t short of expertise. It isn’t, for the first time in a generation, short of public appetite either. What it is chronically and structurally short of is people in positions of authority who feel properly allowed to say yes to anything.

“The good news is, once again, it’s the humans that are blocking this stuff. We’ve created this thing. We can untangle it. And I do see, perhaps naively, but I do believe there is a strong willingness to do things differently in this moment.”

She flags her own optimism as potentially naive … but commits to it anyway. I think that’s roughly the psychological profile of everyone I’ve ever met who actually gets things built, in the urban realm or the corporate one.

Toronto should be known for its ravines, but even people in Toronto might not make the best use of them. They manage stormwater, cool neighbourhoods, support biodiversity, sink carbon. And give a family somewhere to take the kids on a Saturday afternoon. 17 of Toronto’s 31 Neighbourhood Improvement Areas sit alongside the ravines. There are serious community organisations already embedded in those places, with ambitions that would make a lot of municipal planners faint. Evergreen’s job is basically to assemble the partners, the designers and the money, get things going and then mostly get out of the way. These natural environments, in many ways, are some of Toronto’s most critical infrastructure.

School grounds are another one Jen’s team is working on, and possibly even less appreciated. Every school in the country sits on a reasonable chunk of land that technically does one job for maybe seven hours a day, forty weeks a year, and often, nothing the rest of the time. It can be a weird way to run public property portfolios when you think about it.

Evergreen did a project a couple of years back with the Halton District School Board in Ontario, and the feedback from the kids was immediate. They couldn’t wait to get outside. They were less anxious and more focused. The teachers, principals and facilities leads were, in Jen’s words, “effusive sort of maybe shocked.” Halton has since led 27 of their own projects off the back of it, and now has 850 acres of school grounds under active management … which is not exactly a small amount of land. There are three more large school ground transformations in progress this year with Evergreen, two in Ontario, one in Winnipeg.

And this is the bit where the ravines and the school grounds start pointing at the same principle, which Jen generalises in the way only a governance-trained philosophy graduate could.

“We need to look at them not as projects and ends in themselves, but as means to get at multiple priorities in climate and health and well-being, and economic development at the same time. And they can, and it’s not that much harder to build a good one than a crappy one.”

That last line is really important. A good piece of public infrastructure costs roughly the same as a rubbish one, but all too often we build the mediocre one anyway, because it was easier or at least less controversial to get through consultations and committee. The good one needs someone to say yes to something they can’t fully model in advance. Which is the permission problem starting to announce itself.

The funding side of the same argument is where it gets pointier still.

“Public space projects like this one, you can do both at exactly the same time. Your dollar can serve multiple, and so I think more of that thinking needs to be embedded in our infrastructure planning, design, financing, and delivery in the country.”

We’ve siloed our money so thoroughly that we can’t pay for the things that do the most work. We can often think about how to fund health. And then separately about how to fund the environment. It gets a bit stuck when something is actually both of those at once, plus climate, plus local economic development, plus community infrastructure. Which, obviously, the good projects always are. But they don’t fit the existing tick boxes neatly enough, so we end up funding the narrow version of whatever the brief was.

Evergreen’s own model for getting around this, incidentally, is worth noting. They bring investment as well as expertise. A little bit of private capital, as Jen describes it, crowding in public budgets, which is the ticket to nudge innovation.

…if we can bring in a little bit of private capital to sort of crowd in public budgets, that's sort of the ticket to nudge innovation. So if they can access some new money, they're willing to try things a little differently. And once they see as happened at the Halton District School Board… at the Irma Colson School. Once they see what it can be, they can never unsee it. And then they're excited to make their work work harder for kids and for climate and for community cohesion, even local economic development."

Which is also, funnily enough, about permission. People need to be shown what “yes” can look like before they can say it themselves.

This is where I went off on one about return-to-office mandates, which have been bugging me for months now. The executive class is bemoaning its missing productivity gains. The employees, when anyone bothers to ask them, have their own views. The commute is miserable, lunch doesn’t get much change from twenty bucks now. The block the office is on has no trees, limited seating options, and nothing to look at that isn’t a parking garage or a bank branch. When it’s February in Canada, few want to go outside for a walk because outside has been actively designed to discourage it. We can blame the weather, but other cold and wet climates don’t make the same excuses.

Now put a good piece of public space next to that office. Not a plaza with a single sad planter and some deterrent seating … an actual piece of civic landscape that does stormwater, tree canopy, somewhere to sit for twenty minutes in the middle of a Tuesday. What have you built? Flood infrastructure, yes. Biodiversity, sure. You’ve also, and this is the bit nobody wants to write down on a business case, built the conditions under which the person in the afternoon meeting has recharged their brain and is perhaps not quite so cranky as had they eaten lunch brought in from home at their desk.

Jen agreed with me.

“You got it.”

The real problem is that the people trained to build infrastructure business cases have been trained to discount exactly this kind of benefit. Anything that can’t be modelled, as in directly quantified, gets treated as imaginary. Anything that can be modelled gets over-indexed on, as if the model were some sort of scientific calculation, when the model is palpably some level of informed guess. This is not so much a technical failure, but a philosophical one, and over time it has crushed more good ideas than we could possibly imaging.

I asked her the magic wand question, as I always do. I like how her answer started with a story … this is one of the traits of Maritimers I like best. A senior colleague of hers in Nova Scotia, a lifer in the provincial public service, told her on retiring that what he’d appreciated most about their time working together was that he’d been allowed to say yes.

‘Allowed.’

Thirty-odd years in government and the bit that stuck with him was the rare experience of being permitted to agree to something.

Then the wand itself.

“If I could wave a magic wand, I would focus on creating the conditions for people with decision authority to say yes, particularly in government, but not only. We need to try new things, and not just small iterations on existing things, but really get at what are we trying to achieve, and if we could start from scratch, how would we build the thing, and invite good ideas from all sorts of different places and say yes to trying some of them.”

‘No’ is seen to be the safe answer. ‘No’ often protects the official who said it. ‘No’ avoids the audit of something imperfect being done. ‘No’ defers the risk to a future quarter, a future administration or a future cohort of taxpayers who’ll pay for the deferral without ever really knowing. Across a system, an accumulation of small individually-reasonable ‘no’s’ produces a country that can’t build, but nobody actually wanted the decision to become that. It happened by aggregation.

Jen’s version is sharper than mine.

“Or we’re just worried we’re stalled or frozen because we’re so worried about making that mistake that we’re making an even bigger mistake, or we’re leaving so much possibility off the table.”

This diagnosis might seem bleak, but Jen’s read on the present is very much not one of doom and gloom,

“The conditions are there maybe in a way I haven’t seen in my lifetime, not all for good reasons. But there’s this exciting moment, could be a moment of triumph of sort of the Canadian approach to building infrastructure.”

Tariffs, Geopolitical noise, an economy being rewired, not because anyone wanted it to be, but because the alternative of not doing so now looks like an extreme risk. In some ways it’s produced a gift that Canada hasn’t had in at least a generation, which is a public mood that genuinely wants things to be tried. The tone of the conversations she’s been having, Jen says, has shifted from passive complaint to active offer.

“There’s a shift from ‘government isn’t doing all the things well’ to ‘what can I do to help? How can I engage? Let me tell you how I could better engage.’”

You get this mood sometimes, but you don’t get it often, and you don’t know how long it will last. If we spend it on process improvements, excessive stakeholder mapping exercises and a national convening on convening, we’ll have wasted something it took decades of discomfort to generate.

We got onto Nova Scotia at some point, partly because I’ve worked out there more than is probably strictly necessary for a British person who lived in New York City, then Toronto and now Montreal, and partly because Jen is from there, and these things come up naturally when two people with Maritime miles under them end up in the same room. There’s a quality to East Coast communities that urbanists from elsewhere in the country consistently fail to see, which is that the economic hardship and the social density can be a powerful combination.

“You learn to lean very close to community and you build this sense of, you build resilience in that way.”

I once ran a futures exercise in the Maritimes where, partly as a provocation, we wrote a bit of an outlandish scenario in which Moncton became the fastest-growing municipality in Canada. Eight years later it actually did, for completely different reasons than the ones we’d invented. The imagination of a scenario can be rather helpful, and the things that make a place work when things are hard are often the same things that make it work even better when things turn. Resilience, reciprocity, knowing your neighbour. None of which, obviously, turns up on any infrastructure business case ever written.

Which brings me, at last, to the conference.

Evergreen Conference is at the Brick Works on May 6 and 7, under the Cities Bursting with Life theme I alluded to earlier … and is exactly why it’s the right theme for this particular moment. Jen’s own framing of what public space actually does is, I’d argue, also the correct theory of what a conference should be for.

“What I love most about public spaces is, it causes people who would not otherwise maybe meet to show up in the same place and connect in some way. And I think those are the building blocks in a very big country. Proximity isn’t our friend in terms of the conditions for collaboration.”

The best conferences aren’t talks. They’re excuses to put somebody next to somebody they’d never otherwise have a reason to meet, and then get out of the way while they figure out what they have in common. This is something that has constantly come up in the Challenger Cities live events I’ve been doing, and the wonderful Ed Bernicki has reinforced this point on me.

Tickets are still available. I’ll be there. You should be too.

I’ll leave you with a line of Jen’s that has stuck with me. It isn’t a framework, but a position.

“You can sit back and say it can never be different, or you can work at making it different. And that’s how I choose to apply my energy.”

Turns out saying yes is a choice, one person at a time.

To Being Challengers.

Share