Category: Weekly reflection
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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…
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Learning to grow greener futures: Five lessons from forest management and urban forestry
This week on the What is the Future for Cities? podcast we explored how both natural forests and urban tree canopies can adapt to rapid climate change. Episode 447R presented a lively debate based on a major 2019 study of 125 tree species in the eastern United States, while episode 448I featured an in-depth conversation…
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What if every time we built something, the world got better? 5 lessons on regenerating our cities
This week on the What is the Future for Cities? podcast we explored two complementary perspectives on urban transformation. In episode 445R, a research debate unpacked the 2024 paper by Yang Zhang, Chang Liu, and Caixia Hou on the driving mechanisms of green regeneration in old industrial areas, using evolutionary game theory focused on public…
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From over-optimized designs to evolutionary urbanism
What makes a city truly resilient – beautiful, highly optimized designs, or robust, low-maintenance systems that actually work when maintenance is imperfect? This week on What is the Future for Cities? podcast we explored exactly that tension. Tuesday’s Research episode (443R) debated a 2025 paper on enhancing resilient sustainable cities through public perspectives, using the…
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