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
Comedy and urbanism
Laughter is often the best way to deal with complex issues so it’s no wonder that it can make city living more agreeable. This week we explore how humour can be found in the built environment.
Tall Stories 185: Ghosts
Andrew Tuck contemplates the urban apparitions that bring a sense of belonging to the cities in which we live.
Kindness
Can a city be kind? And how do citizens, activists and civic organisations show they care about building friendly places?
Tall Stories 184: Bank of Georgia, Tbilisi
We visit the Bank of Georgia’s Tbilisi HQ: a unique building that takes its design cues from the ‘Space City’ concept, aiming to cover less ground and give the surrounding area back to nature.
CoMotion LA 2019
Although it might seem ironic to hold a mobility conference in Los Angeles – infamous for its traffic woes – civic leaders, transit authorities and private mobility companies were in the city last week for the third edition of CoMotion LA. Monocle’s Carlota Rebelo reports.
Tall Stories 183: The Flower Nagai Line, Yamagata
We take a trip on the Flower Nagai Line, a quirky train line running through Japan’s Yamagata prefecture, that makes for a particularly unique commute.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, part 2
In the second part of our series, we look beyond Germany to ask a fundamental question: why do we divide people? From a 3,200km land border in North America to Europe’s last divided capital, we explore what lessons – if any – we’ve learnt from Berlin.
Tall Stories 182: New York’s streets
We take a look at the streets of New York through the eyes of one man. Originally from Virginia, Matt Green has made it his mission to walk every single street in the Big Apple’s five boroughs – a process that has taken him seven years and counting.
The fall of the Berlin Wall, part 1
Thirty years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, we ask what life was like for citizens in a divided Berlin and discuss some of the lessons we can learn from the German capital to help repair the divisions faced by cities today.
Tall Stories 181: Eleftheria Square, Nicosia
We visit Eleftheria Square in Cyprus’s capital, where a redevelopment designed by Zaha Hadid is still in construction 14 years after work started. Nicosia-based architect Charis Christodoulou updates our Athens correspondent, Daphne Karnezis, on the latest.
