Category: Weekly reflection
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The Gulf is already the testing ground
This week’s episodes of What is The Future for Cities? podcast ran through a double habit. Tuesday’s research debate (467R) worked through a 2026 systematic review by Shiva Manshour and Steffen Lehmann of 30 studies on passive cooling in hot, arid cities. Thursday’s conversation (468I) with Shawn Meyers, Middle East Masterplanning Director at DLR Group,…
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Last-mile freight is still waiting for a real plan
This week’s episodes of What is The Future for Cities? podcast ran through a simple mismatch. Passenger travel in many US cities is getting cleaner. Freight is not. Tuesday’s research debate (465R) worked through a 2024 paper by Thomas Maxner, Giacomo Dalla Chiara, and Anne Goodchild: a content analysis of municipal plans in 58 major…
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What we plant today still matters in 100 years
A clogged artery gets a stent. Blood moves again in that one place. The rest of the body can stay sick. That is the picture this week’s research episode (463R) of What is The Future for Cities? uses for Barcelona’s superblocks. A 2025 BMC Public Health paper by Perez and colleagues looks at three early…
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From sustaining the fragile to building the antifragile
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…
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Right-size the energy, then count what it actually does
If a home battery keeps the hospital online during a winter storm, and the accounting system cannot put a dollar on that, what number have we actually written down? This week on What is The Future for Cities? podcast that question ran through two episodes. Tuesday’s research debate (459R) unpacked the 2020 National Standard Practice…
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Beautiful models, unused decisions
This week’s episodes of What is The Future for Cities? podcast turn on a gap that is now hard to ignore. We can build extraordinarily sophisticated digital replicas of cities. We are much less good at getting those replicas into the rooms where planning actually happens. Tuesday’s research debate (457R) unpacked a 2025 systematic literature…
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The future is more alive, not just more efficient
This week’s episodes of What is The Future for Cities? podcast turn on a quiet, uncomfortable idea: adding more nature, or more green credentials, is not the same as building a living system that actually works. The research debate unpacked a 2017 literature review on biodiversity–ecosystem service relationships in urban areas. The interview with Caroline…
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Diversifying our urban food systems and urban food prints
This week’s episodes of What is The Future for Cities? podcast examined two linked questions that sit at the heart of how cities will feed themselves in a changing climate. The research debate in episode 453R asked whether crop diversification reliably produces climate-related resilience for rural households, based on a 2022 research article by Ronnie…
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From curb battles to circular systems: Designing for the package or the person?
This week on What is the Future for Cities? podcast we sat with a deceptively simple question: how do the systems that keep cities supplied actually shape the places we live in? Episode 451R examined a 2026 systematic literature review by Jiayu Joslyn Sun, Lóránt Tavasszy and Ron van Duin. It mapped the interface between…
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Building cities for our grandkids: Beyond digital twins and algorithms
This week on What is the Future for Cities? podcast we released two episodes that tackled one of the most important tensions in urban planning today: how do we harness powerful digital tools like digital twins and AI without losing sight of what makes cities truly alive? From a research debate on the maturity of…
