The Urbanist
Monocle’s guide to better cities. Explore urban innovation, cutting-edge infrastructure, and compact living with insights from planners, architects, and city leaders.
Latest Episodes
Tall Stories 4: Waikiki Natatorium War Memorial
This week we head to Honolulu to visit one of the grandest and most peculiar buildings in the city. Not only does it commemorate the service personnel who died in the First World War but it’s also an open-air sea-water swimming pool. ‘Tall Stories’ is a weekly feature brought to…
Density
How do you tackle overcrowding without expanding a city’s footprint? We explore a new study by Hassell and chat with Joel Kotkin, who’s challenging the conventional “pack-and-stack” and high-rise strategies. Plus: 60 years of designing Hong Kong.
Tall Stories 3: Cooperative Building
This week we head to what was once Belgrade’s grandest edifice: the Cooperative Building. Established as the HQ for a joint-stock company, it became the seat of several institutions over the years and today houses the Belgrade Waterfront project. Our guide is Milutin Folic, Belgrade’s city architect. ‘Tall Stories’ is…
National identity
What is it that makes us feel like we belong somewhere? From Estonia and France to Canada and Italy, it’s all about the sense of a nation as a whole – and often, what makes them proud too.
Tall Stories 2: Queen Square
The starting point for this week’s ‘Tall Stories’ is a tiny square of metal screwed on to concrete in London’s Queen Square. It’s all about memory and healing, an explosion echoing across 101 years. ‘Tall Stories’ is a weekly feature brought to you by the team behind ‘The Urbanist’.
Urban experiences
This week is all about how we experience our cities. We discover the joys of urban tree-climbing, hop over to sunny Portugal with our Lisbon Passport and hear the sounds of the Amazon in Times Square.
Tall Stories 1: The Casson Pavilion
In the debut episode of ‘Tall Stories’, Monocle’s editor Andrew Tuck takes us on an urban journey through a house that was never intended for people to live in: London’s Casson Pavilion. ‘Tall Stories’ is a weekly feature brought to you by the team behind ‘The Urbanist’.
Going forward
We hone in on a debate underway in Montréal and ask if all heritage has to be beautiful. We also discover a company that’s connecting people in Porto through a mesh network and hear an audio essay on city cycling by our editor Andrew Tuck.
How do we age in our cities?
As more and more people move to cities, it is important to ensure the built environment is prepared to receive them at all stages in life. This week it’s all about urban ageing: from an architect’s solution to the global ageing crisis, to designing “age-friendly” cities. Plus: we examine Tokyo’s…
One step at a time
The floor we step on every single day is an essential piece of urban design. We examine Portugal’s limestone calçadas, Singapore’s unique ‘five foot ways’ and Turin’s covered pavements. Plus: we imagine a world in which every single step we take in a city is converted into energy.
