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
Grand tour
This week we head to Cairo to talk about how good design has helped the city change for the better, chat with Brazil’s tourism minister Marx Beltrão and catch up with Buenos Aires mayor Horacio Rodriguez Larreta.
Tall Stories 34: take a dive
Fernando Augusto Pacheco tells us all about his love affair with swimming pools, from his native São Paulo to his community pool in London’s Soho.
All aboard – choo, choo!
The city that is bringing back trains from the late 1950s, an award-winning station with no town and how Austria is aiming to become Europe’s largest night-train operator.
Tall Stories 33: Zurich’s drinking fountains
Switzerland’s largest city might be best known as a global centre for banking and finance but a quick glance at Zürich’s streets can tell a different story: the city is home to about 1,200 drinking fountains.
CityLab 2016, part 2
We continue our coverage of this year’s edition of CityLab, which brings together the world’s top mayors, urban leaders and innovators. Featuring the Good Chance Theatre in Calais, how Los Angeles is looking to transform its transport, a chat about housing with the mayor of Seattle, Ed Murray, and a…
Tall Stories 32: Trump Tower
As the world reacts to Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the US presidential elections, our New York bureau chief Ed Stocker takes a stroll along 5th Avenue to examine Trump Tower.
CityLab 2016
We report from CityLab 2016, a two-and-a-half day summit that has gathered the world’s top mayors, urban leaders and innovators for a series of conversations on ideas that are shaping our planet’s urban centres.
Tall Stories 31: The Kingsway
It was a road that was designed to deliver some imperial swagger to London but today there’s something depressing about The Kingsway. Wouldn’t it have been better if the Edwardians had left us a knot of alleys and streets instead?
Water
We learn how Unesco is trying to save Thailand’s landmarks from floods, discover Seattle’s innovative way of catching stormwater and head to Lesotho to profile Africa’s biggest water-transfer project. Plus: ‘Water: California’, a new photo series by photographer Mustafah Abdulaziz, commissioned by the Syngenta Photography Award.
Tall Stories 30: urban fox
A fox is perhaps the most famous form of urban wildlife, with an estimated 30,000 living in towns and cities across the UK. On this week’s ‘Tall Stories’ our contributing editor Andrew Mueller puts on his fluffy tail and explores what goes on in the mind of a fox that…
