Extending the Challenger Cities mindset beyond Toronto.

This place started out as a mission to turn Toronto into a Challenger City, but the desire seems to create better places to live, work and play exists far beyond a Canada's city with growing pains.

I like Toronto. But I don’t love it.

This place, and series, started out as an effort to try and be constructive in the criticism of Toronto, and turn that negative energy into a force for positive change.

It sort of worked. Lots of people liked, commented, shared, or just sent a nice DM to say they appreciated the effort. Thank you for that.

What was weird was a lot of those people came from places that aren’t Toronto. A lot of you from Kitchener/Waterloo, ON, others from London, the English one, not the fake Ontario version, a few from Ottawa, Calgary, Winnipeg, Manchester, Dallas, New York, Montreal, Victoria, Kelowna, Edinburgh, Amsterdam, Dublin, Minneapolis, Valencia and Frankfurt to name more than a few.

During the course of the series, I ended up doing something kinda big and bought an apartment in Montreal where I’ll be moving later this week. So it’s a sort of goodbye from Toronto, although I’ve done that once already and come back again. We’ll see.

The goal now just gets a bit bigger. For as much as I want to help Toronto become the global city it has all the potential to be, I’m excited to apply my skills to the urban realm in other places, learn from what Montreal has done really well, plus hopefully improve my French a bit too.

This place will get a bit of a glow up too, and I’m happily setting up the next series of interviews. The first of which will be out very soon with the fantastic Paul Kalbfleisch who some might know as the author of The Joy Experiments, an amazing book on how mid-sized cities can punch above their weight.

While the first series focussed on under the radar urbanist types, I’m hoping to mix in a few bigger names as well as people with weird and wonderful experiences across the likes of urban planning, housing, transportation, education, healthcare, culture, the environment etc.

Toronto might still get a disproportionate focus, and while the first series didn’t get the traction I’d hoped for with the local municipal leaders or media, maybe it just required a bit of perseverance and patience.

So here’s to series 2 of Challenger Cities.

And if you’re still into it, please do like, share, comment, drop me a note, be an interviewee and together we’ll make a little dent in the universe and our local communities.

Cheers

Iain