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
Tackling Detroit
Detroit: What is to be done? We collect advice on bringing people and money back to the city from neighbourhoods and experts around the world who’ve been in financial trouble themselves.
The high streets
On a high: why we’re optimistic about our high streets. We talk about how to perfect scale, mix and mobility in London, Santiago and Vancouver.
From the rubble: demolition
Demolition: when is it time to clear it all away and start afresh? We speak to those who decide when to list buildings, those who build new, and the artists, activists and architects that are taking action.
London maps
London maps: why the map app didn’t start with the smartphone (Georgian women had one, kind of) and how cartography provides insight into social histories and imagined futures.
Exploring cities in summer
Summer: we cycle, swim, and rooftop-gallery hop to explore how cities transform during the fairer season. Plus, we meet Toronto’s planning commissioner.
Glass cities
Glass act: as our cities move from being grey-brown concrete jungles to green-blue glass ones, we meet the people that love glass, hate glass and make a business of reinventing it.
Up on the roof
Up on the roof: what are cities doing with the space on the tops of buildings? From explaining the roof terrace café boom in Madrid to a skyline-defining park in Singapore.
Reconciling cities post-conflict
How We Reconcile: we visit post-conflict cities (and one New England suburb) where interventions in our built environments have been major parts of bringing two opposing sides together.
Deconstructing city halls
City Hall: From inside to out, we look at city halls in London, New York, Perth, Toronto, Boston and São Paulo, to see how their designs reflect the cities in which they stand.
Placemaking
Why we make “place”: David Michon reports from The Future of Places conference in Stockholm and meets the people pushing forward urbanism’s hottest new buzzword, “placemaking”. Why does it have as much value in Manama as it does Manhattan?
