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
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?
A developer’s trust
Can I trust you? We find out how we can learn to trust developers, meet the man behind “If you see something, say something” and get between someone else’s sheets at the headquarters of Airbnb.
Conference circuit
Conference circuit: we check in at the annual conference of the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, and take you back to the New Cities Summit in São Paulo. Plus, a special interview with documentary filmmaker Carlos Rossini.
The annual New Cities Summit
New Cities Summit: The Urbanist heads south to São Paulo for the second annual New Cities Summit. We speak to urban thinkers, entrepreneurs and an ambassador about what cities are doing right, the future of “smart” and lessons we should learn from Brazil’s biggest city.
Istanbul’s next step
Istanbul is a city were urban issues can incite mass protest. We take a look at how Turkey’s largest city is taking steps to once again become a global hub for commerce, culture and transport.
