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Are you interested in how to build better cities based on 5 years of conversations?
Our summary today works with the book titled Building Better Cities from 2026, by yours truly, Fanni Melles.
This is a great summary of what we have learned during the first five years of the What is The Future for Cities? Podcast.
Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how we can create better outcomes for us and upcoming generations. This book describes the dangerous memes to be aware of and the foundational pieces which we discussed on the podcast with multiple guests.
[intro music]
Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today we will introduce a research by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original investigation, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole documentation. This conversation was produced and generated with Notebook LM as two hosts dissecting the whole research.
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Speaker 1: So when you step out of your front door in the morning and you just look down your street, it is incredibly easy to feel like the city is just this massive concrete entity that’s happening to you.
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely. Traffic patterns, the endless construction, the way neighbourhoods are zoned, it all feels so permanent, like it’s entirely out of your control.
Speaker 1: It creates this huge sense of passivity. But today’s deep dive is geared toward completely dismantling that perspective. We’re pulling from a synthesis of over five years of expert conversations, which are captured in Building Better Cities by Fannie Maes, and the core premise here is just paradigm shifting.
Speaker 2: It really is. The big takeaway is that the city isn’t happening to you. It is an emergent property And you are its architect, honestly, whether you realize it or not.
Speaker 1: Exactly. And our goal today is to examine how you can reclaim that agency from the forces of urban stagnation. I like to think of emergence like a flock of birds, like those massive murmurations of starlings.
Speaker 2: Oh, the huge synchronized shapes they make.
Speaker 1: Yeah. There’s no CEO bird flying at the front with a megaphone shouting orders. That breathtaking coordinated swoop is just the result of a thousand individual birds reacting to the ones right next to them, and that’s what a city is: millions of us just going about our day reacting to local information.
Speaker 2: But to shape that flow consciously, the author argues we have to really examine the mental models or the memes that are steering our individual decisions. Because unfortunately, some of our most popular urban ideals are actually dangerous traps.
Speaker 1: Dangerous traps. Like what?
Speaker 2: Take the meme of degrowth, for example. It’s this argument that to save the planet, we need to fundamentally shrink our economies and just lower our living standards.
Speaker 1: The logic there seems pretty straightforward on the surface, doesn’t it? If human consumption is driving carbon emissions, wouldn’t consuming less directly solve the problem?
Speaker 2: It solves the immediate emissions problem, sure, but it completely destroys our capacity for long-term solutions. Breakthrough technologies, things like commercial nuclear fusion or hyper-efficient carbon capture, they require massive amounts of capital.
Speaker 1: And that capital comes from a growing economy.
Speaker 2: Exactly. If you force an economy into contraction, you dry up the funding for research and development. Degrowth basically stifles the very innovation we need to invent our way out of the crisis.
Speaker 1: Okay, wait. Let me unpack this then, because that brings up another meme the book challenges, which is sustainability. I thought sustainability was the ultimate gold star. Are you telling me that trying to use less energy and sustain what we have is actually a bad thing?
Speaker 2: It is when it traps us in a scarcity mindset. Sustainability implies a goal of merely surviving or just maintaining flawed systems. We shouldn’t aspire to sustain a system that’s heavily reliant on fossil fuels. The sources argue we need to aim for regeneration and abundance.
Speaker 1: Ah, so it’s the difference between rationing a shrinking pie and baking a completely different infinitely larger pie.
Speaker 2: That captures it perfectly. With energy, the goal shouldn’t be to painstakingly ration expensive fossil fuels. The goal is a future where solar and battery storage are so cheap and super abundant that we can power new solutions, like massive desalination plants that we just couldn’t previously afford.
Speaker 1: We want to thrive, not just tread water. But that leads to how we apply technology to these problems. A lot of cities have chased the smart city meme, right? They just slap a Wi-Fi sensor on a trash can and assume data will magically solve urban decay.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and treating technology as the end goal creates incredibly fragile, bloated systems A single software glitch or a cyber attack can freeze an entire transit system. Technology shouldn’t be the aim, it’s just applied knowledge. We need a smarter approach that focuses on human outcomes, not just gathering data.
Speaker 1: So if top-down tech integration makes a city fragile, and just sustaining things keeps us in a scarcity mindset, what is the actual design target we should be looking at?
Speaker 2: The target is antifragility, and this is distinct from resilience. A resilient system takes a shock, bends, and bounces back. But an antifragile system takes a shock and actually grows stronger from the disorder and stress.
Speaker 1: Oh, wow. So it’s literally like strength training at the gym.
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly.
Speaker 1: Because if you sit on the couch, your muscles atrophy and become fragile. But if you lift weights, you’re deliberately introducing stress, and the muscle uses that shock to grow back stronger. We basically need our cities to hit the gym.
Speaker 2: That biological mechanism translates perfectly to urban design through something called residuality theory. Instead of trying to predict future crises, planners expose their designs to random chaotic stressors in simulations.
Speaker 1: Just throw everything at it and see what happens.
Speaker 2: You model a cyber attack, a massive flood, a power spike, and you see what core components or residues survive. Then you build loosely coupled modular networks around those strong residues. So if one section floods, the failure is contained, and the rest of the city keeps humming.
Speaker 1: So how does that actually change the physical space?
Speaker 2: It leads to highly multifunctional spaces. Instead of a concrete parking lot that sits empty for hours, you build a space that’s parking by day, a vibrant market by night, and underneath, it’s designed to absorb floodwater during a massive storm.
Speaker 1: That’s incredible. It adapts to the stress of the moment. Which brings us to the physical materials, right? The actual concrete and green spaces.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Anti-fragile design relies heavily on blue and green infrastructure. We’re talking about sponge cities. For decades, the meme was to fight nature with rigid concrete walls.
Speaker 1: And concrete is fragile over a long enough timeline. It eventually cracks.
Speaker 2: Exactly. So a sponge city integrates nature instead. You use wetlands, permeable pavements, and urban forests to literally soak up excess water. And through evapotranspiration, these plants release moisture and actively cool the surrounding city blocks.
Speaker 1: It acts like a massive natural air conditioner.
Speaker 2: It really does. And this rethinking applies to our streets, too. Historically, transport was all about movement, just shoving cars from A to B as fast as possible. But streets have a dual nature. They are also about stay.
Speaker 1: So treating streets as places for human connection, not just traffic pipes.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Transforming them into plazas and micro parks.
Speaker 1: Okay, this all sounds amazing. Sponge cities, vibrant streets. But I have to ask, how do we actually build this when it takes five years just to get a permit for a shed? The bureaucracy is just suffocating.
Speaker 2: It is, and the book addresses this head on. The danger here is the we’ve always done it this way meme. Outdated zoning laws totally stifle innovation. The proposed solution is a shift toward hybrid governance, like using charter cities as sandboxes.
Speaker 1: I don’t know. Whenever I hear regulatory sandbox, it sounds like a playground for corporations to bypass safety laws.
Speaker 2: That’s a valid concern, but the goal of a true sandbox isn’t to remove standards, it’s to change how they’re met. Current codes are prescriptive. They dictate exactly what pipe to use. A sandbox uses outcome-based rules.
Speaker 1: So they dictate the result, not the method.
Speaker 2: Yes. The government just says, “Ensure the water leaving this building meets this purity standard however you wanna do it.” It lets engineers test new low-carbon materials safely. You test, you prove it works, and then you scale it to update the city’s codes.
Speaker 1: That makes sense. But waiting for a government to approve a sandbox takes time. If we wanna move from passive residents to active architects today, what do we do?
Speaker 2: We use the concept of stigmergy. It’s an idea from social insects, actually. When an ant finds food, it doesn’t hold a meeting, it just drops a pheromone trail.
Speaker 1: So the environment itself becomes the hard drive storing the information.
Speaker 2: Precisely. In human terms, stigmergy means one person’s small effort leaves a visible trace that inspires others. If you see a trash-filled lot, you don’t lobby the council, you just plant a community garden.
Speaker 1: And that physical trace changes how neighbours behave. Someone else starts weeding, another brings a bench.
Speaker 2: It allows decentralized actions to spontaneously organize into massive civic improvements. And what’s wild is that the author scales this ambition all the way to space cities.
Speaker 1: Wait, space cities? How does building on Mars fix my street?
Speaker 2: Space settlements are the ultimate sandbox. On Earth, the environment is forgiving. In space, you have zero margin for error. You are forced into intense innovation just to survive.
Speaker 1: Because if the life support fails, you can’t just open a window.
Speaker 2: Exactly. You have to invent flawless closed loop life support and extreme battery tech. That intense forced innovation provides civilizational redundancy and directly spills over to solve problems right here on Earth.
Speaker 1: It’s the ultimate stress test. So the core message is really that urban decline is not inevitable. A city is an ongoing conscious evolution.
Speaker 2: And you are participating in it every single day.
Speaker 1: Yes, every time you demand better rules or leave a positive stigmergic trace like that community garden, you are writing the code for your city’s future.
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