If you step onto your street in the morning, it is easy to feel like the city is a finished object. Traffic, zoning, the next crane on the skyline: they can look as if they were decided somewhere else, long before you arrived. This week’s episodes of What is The Future for Cities? take that feeling apart. Tuesday’s research conversation (461B) works through Fanni Melles‘ 2026 book Building Better Cities, a synthesis of five years of podcast conversations. Thursday (462B), Fanni sits with Ben Vass, senior research engineer, to look back on those same five years and forward to the next ones. The shared thread is simple and demanding: a city is an emergent property, and we are already its architects.

Treat the city as something you write, not something that happens to you

The research episode opens with a murmuration of starlings. There is no CEO bird. The shape appears because each bird responds to the ones beside it. A city works the same way. Millions of local choices add up to streets, markets, and rules. That is why the book treats passivity as the first problem to solve. If the city is happening to you, you wait. If you are an architect of it, you start leaving traces. The episode calls this stigmergy: one person plants a garden on a neglected lot, someone else weeds, someone brings a bench, and the place rewrites itself without a master plan. The book also names the memes that keep us waiting: degrowth that dries up the capital for invention, the smart city that treats a sensor as a solution, and codes that take years to permit a shed. Urban decline is not a law of nature. It is a pattern we can interrupt.

The future is already here, just not evenly distributed

Fanni loves that line, and Thursday’s conversation makes it concrete rather than poetic. Lab-grown meat. Full self-driving in an electric car. Lives in Melbourne that already look unlike their parents’ lives in Hungary, and children who will find a steering wheel almost as strange as a rotary phone. The point is not that every city has these things. The point is that some places already do, which means the bottleneck is rarely imagination. Knowledge and intelligence, Ben argues, have stopped being the main constraint in much of the world. Atoms still matter. Regulation, in his view, is the last remaining bottleneck. When we ask why a working future has not arrived on our street, we should look at where people are allowed to build, not only at what engineers can invent.

Energy abundance is a city-making material

Energy is the basis for everything, as far as this conversation can see. Fanni picks up a distinction she heard from Karl Rabago: the interesting shift is not only cheaper energy, but energy that is low cost compared with the value it unlocks. Ben points to four small modular reactor startups that have already gone critical, to robots installing solar, and to a nuclear renaissance that is trying to mass-produce rather than merely prototype. His punchline is blunt. If we let people build and sell energy, abundance becomes thinkable. If we do not, cities keep rationing a shrinking pie. The research episode says the same thing in another register: sustainability that only maintains a fossil-dependent system is a scarcity story. The design target is a surplus large enough to power desalination, cooling, and the next round of solutions.

Automating grind is how more people get to be ambitious

Ben’s hope is not a gadget list. It is what happens when AI, biotech, and robotics take mental and physical toil off the table, and when more people can reach abundance. He wants that to make pride and excitement socially acceptable again, including the long view of reusable rockets and a civilisation that looks up. Fanni adds the urban version: we can be the architects of the future if we choose to be. Do not let the future happen to us. That is the opposite of the doom-and-gloom feed she keeps accidentally meeting. Because of the podcast, she knows the feed is not the whole world. People are already building the solutions. The lesson is to keep that knowledge louder than the moral badge of despair.

Do not sustain the fragile. Build on what survives

Fanni changed her mind on sustainability. After reading David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity, she no longer wants to sustain systems that are not worth keeping. Residuality theory, which Ben uses almost every week, gives that instinct a method. Expose a design to messy shocks. See which residues stay alive. Build the next system around those residues so failure stays local. The research episode translates that into streets and parks: a lot that is parking by day, a market by night, and a sponge in a storm; wetlands and urban forests instead of concrete walls that crack. Resilience bounces back. Antifragility gets stronger. Cities need the second.

The two episodes (461B and 462B) do not offer a five-year master plan. They offer a stance. Examine the memes that steer daily choices. Prefer outcome-based sandboxes to “we have always done it this way”: set the result, not the pipe, then scale what works. Leave a visible trace that neighbours can join. Ask, on your own street, whether you are rationing a fragile system or building one that can take a shock and improve.

If you walked your block this week as its architect, what is the first fragile thing you would stop trying to sustain?

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Next week we are investigating liveability with Laura Reupke!

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Share your thoughts – I’m at wtf4cities@gmail.com or @WTF4Cities on Twitter/X. Subscribe to the What is The Future for Cities? podcast for more insights, and let’s keep exploring what’s next for our cities.

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