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 148: LA’s Spring Street bike lane
This week we hear from Christopher Hawthorne, the LA Times’ longtime architecture critic and now Los Angeles’ chief design officer. He Holds forth on how Hollywood’s influence can be seen in everything, right down to the colour of the bike lanes on Downtown’s Spring Street.
Urban wildlife
This week we look at urban wildlife across the globe – and how people feel about it. Hear about kangaroos in Canberra, weasels in Cairo and even scorpions in São Paulo.
Tall Stories 147: Vienna and Joseph Stalin
Many monuments to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin quickly dismantled or destroyed after his death. Today Vienna is home to the only remaining memorial to the communist leader in western Europe.
Shared mobility
Electric scooters take over the cobbles in Lisbon, car-sharing app Mobility4All is putting senior citizens first and New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio calls e-bikes one of his city’s biggest dangers.
Tall Stories 146: Michigan Building
This week we head to Detroit to hear the story of a parking garage housed inside an old theatre.
Food & the city
What’s your city’s best-kept food secret? This week we sample a tasting menu across Europe to discover how different urban areas feel about food.
Tall Stories 145: Vienna’s ground-floor gas stations
There’s little room in Vienna for stand-alone service stations so petrol pumps had to be put into the ground floors of buildings. But many of these small and quirky stations are now disappearing.
France special
This week it’s all about France as be bring to air some of the stories we found while creating our special Gallic March issue of Monocle.
Tall Stories 144: Helsinki’s City Theatre
We head to Finland to discover the history of one the country’s modernist icons.
Elements: fire
We wrap up our four-part series on elements with a look at fires and the efforts around the world to control them.
