Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

Friends, I want to tell you what we just pulled off, because most of you have watched me build toward it for a while and I think it finally matters. Premium Pulp Fiction, my indie traditional publishing startup within the Citizen One World ecosystem, just brought our first Ukrainian novel into English. The new novel is Scions of the Last Hope by M. Van Shamrai, launching August 1. You can pre-orde...

There are people who fear they’ll never see the world. There are others who see all of it and come home exactly as heavy as they left, counting cities the way you’d count change. And then there are people like me, who somewhere along the way felt hope finally outrun the fear — the belief that the longing you carry out of a place isn’t the cost of leaving it but the evidence that it mattered. I wen...

I wrote this one at 35,000 feet, in economy, on a China Eastern A350 somewhere over the darkness between Moscow and St. Petersburg on my way to Shanghai. While everyone around me slept, I was thinking about Shanghai — not the Shanghai of now, but the Shanghai of the 1930s, the one that lived mostly in the heads of people who would never go there. That Shanghai was a genre before it was a place. It...

Two blocks from where I live in El Raval, there’s an archaeological excavation underway. I pass it often enough now that it’s become part of my daily geography — a fenced rectangle of disturbed ground, archaeologists at work, construction paused but not stalled. This started as a straightforward public-space upgrade. The Jardins del Doctor Fleming and Plaça de la Gardunya are being renovated — new...

Welcome back to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future. I’m Douglas Stuart McDaniel. Today, I want to tell you a bit about my neighborhood in Barcelona. Not the Barcelona of postcards — not Antoni Gaudí’s spires dissolving into sky, not the wide geometry of the Eixample, not the Gothic Quarter all dressed up for tourists. Those places are real, and they matter. **But they are not where cities do...

In this episode of the Premium Pulp Fiction podcast, my guest is Maksym Van Shamrai — millennial novelist, cultural theorist, and Ukrainian expat. In 2010, Maks had just finished his doctoral studies in Kyiv. His thesis examined something called cultural anthropocentrism — the idea that humans are both the authors of culture and the products of it. Heavy stuff. The kind of thing you wrap in abstra...

In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future , I sit down with Derek Lumpkins to talk about cities and neighborhoods—but not in the way cities usually get discussed. We didn’t start with master plans or policy language. We started with Roxbury . With lived memory and 150 years of Black history. With what it means to grow up inside a neighborhood that is always being talked about , ra...

Welcome back to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future and—I am excited to say— Premium Pulp Fiction . I’m your host, Douglas Stuart McDaniel, and before we go any further, I want to pause for a moment. We’re recording this at the start of a new year, in a world that feels simultaneously exhausted and overheated. Wars that refuse resolution. Cities under pressure from climate, inequality, and pol...

Cities are a form civilization often takes. They were never its starting condition. Since my first travels to Türkiye several years ago—through Istanbul, İzmir, and Ephesus—and also across archaeological sites in Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia, Göbekli Tepe has remained on my research radar**. Not as an archaeological revelation or a sudden conversion to deep prehistory, but bec...

I recorded this episode on Christmas Eve, not out of allegiance to any particular religious institution, but because Christmas Eve still does something rare in the calendar. It creates a pause that doesn’t belong to any authority. It marks an ending without demanding resolution. It gives many of us permission to stop moving for a moment and ask where we actually are. This episode is about time — n...

In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, I return, unexpectedly, to a place I thought I had metabolized years ago: Western North Carolina. The hills that raised me; the place where the word home was always complicated; the terrain where beauty and hardship braid together in ways outsiders never fully see. This Citizen One episode begins with a simple message from an old friend:...

In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future , I take you deep inside the Smart City Expo World Congress in Barcelona—a place that, for one week each year, becomes the beating heart of global urban imagination. It’s a strange crossroads: urbanists, technologists, ministers, consultants, researchers, civic reformers, start-up evangelists, sovereign delegations, and the wandering tribe...

What if cities stopped marketing themselves and started remembering who they are? That’s the question at the heart of this week’s episode of Citizen One:Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series. This week, I have a conversation with Ryan Short , author of The Civic Brand and founder of CivicBrand — a firm reshaping how communities think about identity, engagement, and belon...

In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series , host Douglas Stuart McDaniel traces a single day on the Mississippi Gulf Coast into an inquiry about what resilience really means — not as a buzzword, but as a lived condition. The story begins in Old Metairie, Louisiana, in a po’boy shop thick with fried shrimp, football, and loyalty — and follows a...

In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, I return to my ancestral grounds of East Tennessee to explore the hidden consciousness of a river — and by extension, of every city built upon the bones of older worlds. This podcast essay traces the evolution of what was, for sometime, considered Stephen Holston’s River, and before that, the Cherokee...

What if housing were designed not for banks, but for photons? This deceptively simple question sits at the heart of Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong’s work, and in this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future , they join Douglas Stuart McDaniel to explore how light, not leverage, might reshape the foundations of our cities. Their book, 8 Minutes, 20 Seconds: Housing After Banking , takes...

Welcome back to the Season Two premiere of Citizen One, Exploring Our Urban Future. I'm your host, Douglas Stuart McDaniel, currently back on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. This season, I'm changing up the rhythm and structure of Citizen One a bit. Each episode will include, as always, a deep exploration of urbanism and the past, present, and future of cities, followed by a segment on narrative archi...

Some places feel like they’ve been waiting for you. Others barely tolerate your presence, indifferent to your wonder. I’ve traveled enough—across continents, cultures, and climates—to know the difference. I’ve stood on volcanic cliffs in the Aegean, wandered the souks of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, traced the edges of fjords and desert plateaus, and walked through cities that practical...

In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series , host Douglas Stuart McDaniel speaks with architect and urbanist Marcella del Signore about her groundbreaking exhibition Emotional Geographies of the Mediterranean , currently featured in the Italian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale . Associate Professor and Director of the MS in Arc...

In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future , an urbanNext original podcast series, I’m joined once again by author, architect, and urban theorist Ioanna Piniara . In Part 2 of our conversation, we dive into the politics of privacy, the afterlife of European modernism, and the spatial logic of neoliberalism. Her new book, We Have Never Been Private: The Housing Project in Neoliberal...

In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, author, architect and urban theorist Ioanna Piniara joins me for the first of a two-part conversation spanning European postwar reconstruction, Cold War urbanism, and today’s smart city futures. Her new book, We Have Never Been Private: The Housing Project in Neoliberal Europe ( Actar Publishers ) cha...

In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future , an urbanNext original podcast series, host Douglas Stuart McDaniel speaks with Venezuelan architect and theorist Daniela Atencio, author of Robotic Translations: Design Processes – Latin America , (Actar Publishers) about how Latin America is reprogramming the future of digital design—through resistance, reinvention, and entanglement. At...

In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future , an urbanNext original podcast series, host Douglas Stuart McDaniel sits down with independent researcher Evelyn Meynard to uncover the forgotten legacy of Chilean modernist Emilio Duhart. From his early years in remote Cañete to working under Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, Duhart’s journey defies the canon of modern architecture—and re...

In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future , an urbanNext original podcast series, host Douglas Stuart McDaniel sits down with Dr. Assia Crawford—architect, biodesign researcher, and author of Designer’s Guide to Lab Practice and Bios In Search of Zoe —to explore what it truly means to co-design urban futures with living organisms. Trained as a conventional architect in the UK, Cra...

A Citizen One Journal Before diving into this next Citizen One episode—a short-form, audio-only reflection I’m calling a Citizen One Journal —I wanted to share a thoughtful signal boost we received this week, and one I didn’t expect. You can read or listen to the essay, The Reasonable City: What Happens When a City Knows More Than Her Citizens? , just below. Fernando Fernández-Monge, senior associ...