What is The Future for Cities?

Howard Kozloff says someone has to own the operating costs of a public space, and that this is a design and financing question if the welcome is going to last. Stewardship, for him, belongs in the capital structure. From the interview with Howard Kozloff in episode 476 , on public space as the product. If you would like to support the podcast, check out the Building Better Cities book or our Patre...

Jagoda Adamus's 2023 paper asks what public spaces are worth when the market will not name a price. This debate tests whether total economic value can hold a plaza's cultural worth. One side of the conversation treats culture, bequest, and the joy of a bench as human utility already inside the economic account, and points to hedonic prices and contingent valuation as the tools. The other t...

Howard Kozloff argues that land markets price a zoning rule as soon as a city approves it, sometimes overnight. A late demand for a park can stop a building that an early rule would have allowed. From the interview with Howard Kozloff in episode 476 , on public space as the product. If you would like to support the podcast, check out the Building Better Cities book or our Patreon ! Episode generat...

Howard Kozloff calls entrepreneurial planning the habit of using developer discipline on problems usually left to policy, so a plan shapes what gets built. He treats the park and the sidewalk as the product. From the interview with Howard Kozloff in episode 476 , on public space as the product. If you would like to support the podcast, check out the Building Better Cities book or our Patreon ! Epi...

Laetitia Dablanc, professor at the University Gustave Eiffel, says urban logistics in large cities already delivers the goods. The gap she names is planner skill, not a missing technology. She places the most sophisticated logistics in large cities, defines a megacity as a connection of up to about 40 million people, and splits the field into warehousing and transportation. E-commerce, in her acco...

Laetitia Dablanc points to solar panels, new vegetation, and two years of swimming in the Seine as engineering cities already have, and still do not use enough. From the interview with Laetitia Dablanc in ⁠episode 474⁠ , on urban logistics in large cities. If you would like to support the podcast, check out the ⁠⁠⁠⁠Building Better Cities book⁠⁠⁠⁠ or our ⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠ ! Episode generated with ⁠⁠⁠...

Diogo Correia, Cristiano Vagos, João Lourenço Marques, and Leonor Teixeira test last-mile logistics in Portuguese cities. Over 76% of municipalities lack real-time tools, so a 15-minute city-led network is elegant on paper and hard to run. The debate is whether a municipality should orchestrate shared hubs, cargo bikes, and a predictive map, or whether missing data and thin coordination make that...

Laetitia Dablanc argues that innovations come from a concentration of different people, and that a campus, a hospital, or a city hall still needs a big city to become real. From the interview with Laetitia Dablanc in ⁠episode 474⁠ , on urban logistics in large cities. If you would like to support the podcast, check out the ⁠⁠⁠⁠Building Better Cities book⁠⁠⁠⁠ or our ⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠ ! Episode genera...

Laetitia Dablanc says automated warehouses make the work less miserable, because robots take the worst jobs, and that training today's workers into the new ones will not be easy. From the interview with Laetitia Dablanc in episode 474 , on urban logistics in large cities. If you would like to support the podcast, check out the ⁠⁠⁠Building Better Cities book⁠⁠⁠ or our ⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠ ! Episode ge...

V. Kelly Turner, associate director and professor of urban planning and geography at UCLA's Luskin Center for Innovation, on treating extreme heat as a daily planning problem: which heat, whose body, and what a city can still redesign. She argues that heat, in the American Meteorological Society's definition, is a process, and that a temperature is only a snapshot of it. Thermal literacy i...

V. Kelly Turner would cool a home by night ventilation and covered windows, and she refuses to call that a private duty. Agency, she says, still sits inside a collective challenge. The skill reduces strain on the grid and on a household bill. The responsibility for safe heat, in her framing, does not stop at the front door. Full conversation in episode 472: https://wtf4cities.com/2026/10/15/472i_k...

V. Kelly Turner and colleagues find that a satellite map of land surface temperature is a poor guide to theheat a person feels in Civano, Tucson. Painting a street white can cool the pixel and heat the pedestrian. The debate is on their 2022 paper in the Journal of Land Use Science. One side keeps 30 metre Landsat maps as the tool cities can actually use. The other shows how a morning snapshot, an...

V. Kelly Turner finds optimism in a simple fact: cities are mutable. If people built a hot street, they canretrofit it, and local staff writing heat plans already know their cities. She points to the City of LA andLos Angeles County, where the people on heat action plans now know heat as well as they know their streets. Full conversation in episode 472: https://wtf4cities.com/2026/10/15/472i_kelly...

V. Kelly Turner says heat is a verb. A weather-app temperature is one snapshot of an energy exchange, and a city that plans to manage heat still has to say which heat. Air temperature, a surface, and sunlight on skin are different. She wants that distinction in everyday language and in local government. Full conversation in episode 472: https://wtf4cities.com/2026/10/15/472i_kelly-turner-associate...

Geoffrey West, theoretical physicist and distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute, on urban scaling laws,cities that grow faster than exponential, and what happens when populations start to shrink. He treats the future of cities as the future of the planet. Cities drive resource use and climate change because that is where the people are. Without immigration, much of Europe and the United...

Geoffrey West on urban populations growing faster than exponential, and the strange present in which some cities cannot build housing fast enough while others are already contracting.   He calls the far side of that growth a singularity: depopulation, contraction, and possibly collapse. The short-term future of cities is both problems at once. Find out more in the  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠...

A research debate on the 2007 paper Growth, innovation, scaling, and the pace of life in cities, by Luís M. A. Bettencourt, José Lobo, Dirk Helbing, Christian Kühnert, and Geoffrey B. West. When a city doubles in population, wealth and invention grow by more than double. Biology does the opposite: a larger animal uses energy more efficiently and lives more slowly. The paper's growth equations...

Geoffrey West on urban populations growing faster than exponential, and the strange present in which some cities cannot build housing fast enough while others are already contracting.   He calls the far side of that growth a singularity: depopulation, contraction, and possibly collapse. The short-term future of cities is both problems at once. Find out more in the  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠...

Geoffrey West on urban populations growing faster than exponential, and the strange present in which some cities cannot build housing fast enough while others are already contracting.   He calls the far side of that growth a singularity: depopulation, contraction, and possibly collapse. The short-term future of cities is both problems at once. Find out more in the  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠...

“We’ve been optimizing what’s familiar rather than asking what’s possible.” Are you interested in the Middle East as a testing ground for urban solutions? What do you think about mistaking innovation for progress? How can we improve our from-design-to-implementation ratio? Interview with Shawn Meyers, Middle East Masterplanning Director. We will talk about his vision for the future of cities, urba...

Are you interested in the Middle East as a testing ground for urban solutions? What do you think about mistaking innovation for progress? How can we improve our from-design-to-implementation ratio? Trailer for episode 468 - interview with Shawn Meyers, Middle East Masterplanning Director. We will talk about his vision for the future of cities, urban progress, desert architecture, urban participati...

Are you interested in what we can learn from the Middle East regarding urban cooling? Our debate today works with the article titled A systematic review of passive cooling strategies integrating traditional wisdom and modern innovations for sustainable development in arid urban environments from 2026, by Shiva Manshour and Steffen Lehmann, published in the Discover Cities journal. This is a great...

Are you interested in the Middle East as a testing ground for urban solutions? What do you think about mistaking innovation for progress? How can we improve our from-design-to-implementation ratio? Trailer for episode 468 - interview with Shawn Meyers, Middle East Masterplanning Director. We will talk about his vision for the future of cities, urban progress, desert architecture, urban participati...

Are you interested in the Middle East as a testing ground for urban solutions? What do you think about mistaking innovation for progress? How can we improve our from-design-to-implementation ratio? Trailer for episode 468 - interview with Shawn Meyers, Middle East Masterplanning Director. We will talk about his vision for the future of cities, urban progress, desert architecture, urban participati...

"I’ve really been trying to make the case that last mile delivery is a public good that the government should be investing in. You can only exist in a city because of this transport system. It’s bringing you the food you need to eat. You would die without it." Are you interested in urban freight as the movement of gods across scales? What do you think about the trust needed for expert vi...