Challenger Cities

75:53

Challenger Cities EP103: What Airports Know That...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/09/24

Airports can anxiety machines dressed up in statement architecture. So how do you design for delight in the different modes people turn up in, while building something designed to last decades?Chris Belisle cut his teeth on airports in Asia in the mid-2000s, when the growth was so relentless that a firm would hand an entire airport to a designer barely out of school and tell him to get on with it. Think Hong Kong, India, the Philippines etc. I assume most architects spend their twenties detailing

en

61:12

Challenger Cities EP102: Getting to Yes with Laura Dean

Challenger Cities ·

2026/09/21

Challenger Cities started as an attempt to shake things up in Toronto. So when a municipal lawyer left her partnership to run for mayor, I wanted to hear why.Laura Dean isn't a politician. She spent her career working out why the city says no, and how to get it to yes. We talk about why Toronto has so many ways to block things and so few to let them happen. We also cover the plans the city still doesn't have, and her positive pitch for a city that's "better, easier and more beautiful". And she has a

en

62:46

Challenger Cities EP101: Chain Drain with Bryan Boyer...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/09/15

A restaurant learns something every night. They hear what people say about a dish, see what comes back on the plate and see the financial impact it has on the books. It's a pretty awesome feedback loop.But the urban realm doesn't work like that. There is a much longer and less responsive chain at play where the planners, developers, architects, engineers, construction firms, designers, financiers and clients do not have such rapid or sophisticated mechanisms of connection and communication.An

en

61:44

Challenger Cities EP100: How Big Things Get Done with...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/09/08

This is the 100th episode of Challenger Cities. A bit of a milestone right? This thing started as an attempt to explore and make a difference specifically in Toronto, but early on took a bit of a turn to have conversations about cities and infrastructure that didn't seem to be happening anywhere else …… the ones that fall between planners, architects, engineers, economists and what ‘regular’ people want in cities. I didn't expect to still be at it, let alone to have talked my way through 100 guests

en

58:20

Challenger Cities EP99: Bottom Up & Top Down Cultural...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/09/01

What does a city need in order for culture to happen? Venues are the easy answer, and the least complete one.Jacquelyn West is a cultural industries strategist based in Montréal, by way of Toronto, where she spent much of her career working with artists, festivals and creative organisations. She watched the same cycle run several times over: artists move into a cheap neighbourhood, the neighbourhood becomes desirable, and the people who made it desirable can no longer afford to be there.In this

en

76:43

Challenger Cities EP98: Stations & Airports of the...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/08/27

Most episodes of Challenger Cities are a conversation with a guest. This one isn't. Shortly after publishing our whitepaper The Welcome Mat, a few listeners joined a live session to stress test the thinking and bring their own — which is a rather Challenger way of doing it, and only really possible when you can have Tokyo, Boston, Toronto and London in the same room.Greg Dyson joins from Thailand, late at night, to explain why most Japanese stations are visually drab and work anyway: wayfinding that

en

69:05

Challenger Cities EP97: Developers as Citymakers with...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/08/27

I met Stratton Townley at the Waterworks Food Hall in Toronto, a couple of hours before it opens, with ten or twelve people sat about with coffees and nobody hovering to work out whether they intended to spend anything.Stratton is at Woodcliffe Landmark Properties, a small, private, family-run developer that has been on the same Toronto street for thirty years. His stepfather founded it; his mother runs it. He spent his first decade in brokerage and investment sales avoiding the family business

en

62:47

Challenger Cities EP96: The Paradox of Proximity with...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/08/11

Copenhagen is Jan Gehl's city. So it's a bit of a jolt to hear someone who lives and works there admit that nobody has ever really been able to say what a "human-centric city" actually is.That's Jakob Norman-Hansen. Along with Ann-Britt Elvin Andersen, he's spent about a decade at BLOXHUB explaining Copenhagen to visiting delegations — and watching most of them decide it could never work back home. Neither of them came to urbanism the usual way. Ann-Britt arrived through media and innovation,

en

98:31

Challenger Cities EP95: The 5-to-9 Episode with Mo,...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/08/04

This is a bumper episode where we bring you 4 guests that share the privilege of working for an awesome agency called Mosaic. And while yes, Mosaic did pay me to speak at their team offsite at a Cineplex earlier in the year, that's not why we're making this podcast. We're doing it because I loved what they did after I spoke. Several people from the team were invited to share what they do with their passions in their 5-9 hours, i.e. outside of work. You're going to hear from Mo, who has a much

en

60:55

Challenger Cities EP94: We Wunt Be Druv with John V...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/07/29

John V Willshire is the third corner of a loose triptych of British innovation-strategy types I can never quite give a single job title. He runs Smithery, carries a little yellow card called an obliquoscope for teaching himself to notice things, and has a gift for the metaphor that reframes everything. In this case, swapping the language of levers and control for gardening where you can't tell a plant what to do, you can only offer it a trellis and see what climbs.We get from there to Sussex, its

en

64:07

Challenger Cities EP93: The Maker is the Medium with...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/07/15

You cannot build a humane, serendipitous city with teams who are transactional, risk-averse and don't really know themselves. It's not my usual territory, and it's a tough argument to have with the logical, rational, "serious" types who populate engineering, economics and urbanism — but I've been converted. The unlikely converters are Florence Okin and Sam Cohen, who run a workshop called Know Thyself under their business The Twenty Six Collective, and who arrive at cities from completely outside

en

43:53

Challenger Cities EP92: Cities Are Mental Weapons...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/07/07

Giacomo Biraghi has spent fifteen years and two thousand interviews trying to answer one question: is there really a distinctive European way of making a city? His answer, after all that fieldwork, is a cheerful and slightly heretical no — what actually runs the modern city, he reckons, is a global, real-estate-driven standard, and we should be a little more cynical about the green, healthy, peaceful renderings we keep selling ourselves. This is a man who's built his whole life around cities and

en

47:31

Challenger Cities EP91: Expanding Your Luck Surface...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/07/02

In this spirit of being the world's most eclectic podcast about cities and places, this episode is a bit random. Which is good, because it's with Matt Ballantine and he's written a book, called Random with Nick Drage.Some might say 120 short stories that can be shuffled into any order isn't actually a book, but I read it as one, and it's excellent. Plus many of the stories are about cities, places and people in them. In a world where we spend so much time filtering out opportunities for luck,

en

64:03

Challenger Cities EP90: It Only Sounds Mad Because We...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/06/29

This is an episode about a big, ambitious idea. Which is why people are quick to label it as crazy. But Britain, like many developed nations has a housing crisis. The country simply doesn't build enough good homes for the people who want to live there, and incremental approaches are going to solve for it. So along comes Shiv Malik, a journalist by trade, with an idea for a new city, not too far from Cambridge, becoming a place one million people will call home. Naturally, he's had a lot of scrutiny,

en

94:37

Challenger Cities EP89: To Do, Not Just Be with Gil...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/06/25

This episode is a zinger. Because Gil Penalosa came in ready to talk! He doesn't hold back as he discussed the issues with Toronto municipal projects, where the city could be amazing but is often found lacking in ambition. We explore ideas from the absolute basics of providing space to walk, why we might want to reframe the idea of the NIMBY to the one of the CAVE person - Citizens Against Virtually Everything!, and how rather than debating an idea to death ... maybe we just try it and see what

en

58:36

Challenger Cities EP88: The Neighbourhood is the...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/06/21

Alicia Pederson went from a Renaissance literature PhD and a two-year stint as an au pair in Florence to becoming one of the best voices on a deceptively simple idea: the courtyard in the middle of apartments. After watching family friends priced out of Chicago one by one - not because they disliked the city, but because the only family housing on offer was a million-dollar house with a private yard - she started asking why North America builds apartments as huge, hotel-like buildings when European

en

60:32

Challenger Cities EP87: Bringing Sexy Back to Transit...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/06/15

Canada is about to spend more on transit and rail than the oil sands are worth, and it's doing it without a national rulebook, a training pipeline or much recent memory of how to build well. So is that a crisis, or the best shot a country has ever had at becoming a genuine transit Challenger? This episode is a double act with two people who think about this for a living.Mark Salsberg is co-founder of TRACCS (the Transit Rail Association for Canadian Contractors, Maintainers, Operators and

en

58:37

Challenger Cities EP86: How the Robocars Meet the...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/06/11

Good new Challenger Cities episode today, all about autonomous vehicles and the bit that our guest, Bern Grush, thinks cities need to be thinking about more now. Like them or not, robotaxis are coming to cities. And for all the spectacular technology that helps cars drive themselves, the have some meaty challenges ahead. One of them being what happens when they interact with the curb. We've already seen how fleets of autonomous cars can create new forms of congestion, and we've seen tragic accidents

en

68:41

Challenger Cities EP85: Canada Needs a Railway...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/06/08

Canada is, well might be, building a high speed train. At long last after 50 odd years of talking about doing so. But concerningly, there is much negative noise around the project as it seems it might not really be learning the lessons for how successful projects have been delivered elsewhere, and where projects for building fast trains have gone wrong.This podcast is with Michael Schabas, a Canadian, who knows all about how to make these projects successful. It's a really honest and open

en

72:51

Challenger Cities EP84: The De-Risking Industrial...

Challenger Cities ·

2026/06/03

Two risk-management cultures looking at each other across a table, each waiting for the other to move. That's rail's relationship with venture capital. Iain talks to Richard Fisher, founder of Future Travel Studio, about why nobody would fund his Dream Suite flatbed seat for trains, even after InnovateUK had backed it and operators had tested it. About rail's proposition gap, the incumbents who monetise complexity rather than solve it, and why every discipline in the chain can be doing its job

en

All Episodes

Similar Podcasts

Soundcheck

WNYC Studios

NBC – The Great Detectives of Old Time Radio

Adam Graham

Podcast Patapoe

0d0a

Comixity : Podcast & Reviews Comics – Comixity.fr

Steve, Sam, Jonat, Bunny, Laure.

How Very Hannah

Bear Lane Productions