Editor’s letter: From horse manure to e-bikes, our November issue shows how mobility keeps changing city life

Unfortunately, it transpires that “The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894” is an urban myth. The story was that someone had written to The Times of London that year predicting that every street in the capital would be buried under nine feet of manure within 50 years if something wasn’t done about the pooping horses that transported goods and people around the city. But what is true is that there were, according to the London Transport Museum, some 300,000 such animals in London in the late 1890s. And yes, they left a lot of manure in their wakes. Oh and regularly dropped dead on the streets.

It’s a useful image to mentally hold when people harumph about the number of share bikes on our streets. London has about 55,000 and they cause daily debate as riders discard them willy-nilly on pavements. As someone who uses every form of urban transport, I understand the disdain in which e-bikers are held (especially when I’m doing my best to sympathise with an irked taxi driver). But I also know how they unlock the city in miraculous ways. A 40-minute Tube journey swapped for 20 minutes of pedal pushing on a pleasant day? Bliss.

So, while there are splutters and missteps, for every tale of e-bike armageddon or how in the 1950s flying on a plane was a moment of unbridled glamour, actually great democratic steps are being taken around the world when it comes to mobility – and, thank goodness, none of them involve shovelling dung.

To capture some of the changes at play, each year we compile a survey of best-in-class operators and innovators, plus some of the challenges on the road ahead. This time we get you on board the Shinkansen’s new supreme class in Japan, nip through Nairobi’s traffic on an electric motorbike and hear what the rise of Chinese automakers means for the once-untouchable soft-power influence of Germany’s car marques.

This issue is also our autumn Design Special, with a couple of star commissions from our newly elevated Nic Monisse – he has gone from design editor to executive editor (design), gaining some nicely crafted brackets and a dollop of extra gravitas. Fancy job titles aside, Monisse has commissioned a fine essay from our design correspondent, Stella Roos, about a 1947 competition by Moma in New York to find the standard for inexpensive furniture and kick-start the postwar American design scene. It’s fascinating how many now-classic designs were generated by the competition but Roos also asks whether today, when you can buy a new sofa for a couple of hundred pounds, we have too much affordable design.

Monisse has also been busy cajoling 10 designers and architects to take us to a building that has shaped their practice and outlook. Theaster Gates takes us to an electrical substation in Chicago, while we join Joana Abreu at her father’s office in Abu Dhabi. I wonder what shaped me? Perhaps growing up in a 1960s home has left me always feeling at ease around modernism and as a fan of a straight, clean line and plentiful light.

Finally, there’s our Expo. This is Monocle issue 198 and I’m delighted that, as we approach our 20th “birthday”, our founding promise to always innovate in print still burns bright. This month, we have doubled the length of the Expo section for the first time to allow Thomas Prior’s photographic profile of the Tokyo Fire Department to blast across the pages like a gallery exhibition. This is why magazines continue to remain such powerful cultural plays. It’s also why we love making Monocle.

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