What is The Future for Cities?

Moein Nodehi tells people they will not save the world on their own, but their contribution matters. There will be broken pipes and hard days, and the advice is not to give up: do what you love, but if you want to contribute, do what is needed.

From the interview with Moein Nodehi in episode 478, on natural cycles and water recycling.

If you would like to support the podcast, check out the Building Better Cities book or our Patreon!

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Carvalho and colleagues' review of 19 urban case studies asks whether nature-based solutions can manage a city's water, energy and food together. This debate tests whether living infrastructure is a system or a set of single-purpose pilots.

One side points to Brooklyn Grange's rooftop farm, Singapore's vertical gardens, constructed wetlands that turn biomass into energy, and Seoul's Cheonggyecheon River restoration, and argues that a mosaic of small projects adds up to a citywide nexus. The other points to the missing food-energy data at large scales, the lack of grey water guidelines and the cost of retrofitting, and calls citywide reliance premature. Both agree the field needs standardised, multipurpose indicators that measure water, energy and food together. The research transcript is on the site.

(00:00) Living infrastructure or grey pipes

(03:03) The water-energy-food nexus

(04:27) The central question

(05:11) Brooklyn Grange and the Treehouse

(07:20) Micro success, macro silence

(08:23) The roof mosaic

(09:06) Missing food-energy data

(10:37) Constructed wetlands

(11:40) Grey water and technical barriers

(12:52) Cheonggyecheon River

(14:16) Costs and retrofitting

(16:03) Closing positions

(16:49) Where both sides meet

Research article: Nature-based solutions addressing the water-energy-food nexus: Review of theoretical concepts and urban case studies

Shownotes

Pairs with episode 478

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Moein Nodehi designs every project holistically. Shower water is treated by plants in a greenhouse that also grows food and works as a buffer space, so water recycling, food production, heating and cooling are designed together.

From the interview with Moein Nodehi in episode 478, on natural cycles and water recycling.

If you would like to support the podcast, check out the Building Better Cities book or our Patreon!

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Moein Nodehi says it is the responsibility of every developer, architect and home builder to do the right thing. His team reused a building's wastewater for its green walls and roofs without any policy, and the city then came asking for standards.

From the interview with Moein Nodehi in episode 478, on natural cycles and water recycling.

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Howard Kozloff, founder of Agora Partners, argues that public space is the product and buildings are the walls around it. Projects, in his practice, have to be financially viable and civically valuable together.

He calls the method entrepreneurial planning: developer discipline and risk tolerance applied to problems usually left to policy, so a plan shapes what gets built. Cities, he says, absorb shocks and still gather, and public space is what makes density livable. Government's useful role is a rule the land market can price on day one, and someone still has to own the operating costs or the welcome fails. He closes on people in the street, and on the claim that the demise of the city is greatly overstated.

(00:00) Cities absorb every shock

(02:11) Entrepreneurial planning

(06:40) Capital, design, and policy

(09:55) Why cities still gather

(12:47) Public space, not just density

(16:04) Capital misses the public realm

(18:48) Affordability is structural

(23:14) The developer's social contract

(27:36) Fears for the future of cities

(32:01) Government and predictable rules

(35:47) Innovation and building risk

(44:45) Reuse, stewardship, and labs

(52:11) People on the street

Show notes

Pairs with episode 475

What is The Future for Cities?

If you would like to support the podcast, check out the Building Better Cities book or our Patreon!

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Howard Kozloff says someone has to own the operating costs of a public space, and that this is a design and financing question if the welcome is going to last. Stewardship, for him, belongs in the capital structure.

From the interview with Howard Kozloff in episode 476, on public space as the product.

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Jagoda Adamus's 2023 paper asks what public spaces are worth when the market will not name a price. This debate tests whether total economic value can hold a plaza's cultural worth.

One side of the conversation treats culture, bequest, and the joy of a bench as human utility already inside the economic account, and points to hedonic prices and contingent valuation as the tools. The other treats David Throsby's cultural capital as a separate category, and argues that genius loci cannot be transferred to a shopping mall that only copies the functions. Both agree that floor area and commercial income miss what public space does for wellbeing, and that a city negotiates better when it can speak about worth in more than one language. The research transcript is on the site.

(00:00) What a plaza is worth

(03:17) Total economic value

(04:16) Cultural capital apart

(05:02) Pricing the unpriceable

(06:03) Urban squares resist the tools

(07:37) Scarcity and free riders

(09:28) Replacement and the mall

(10:18) Genius loci

(11:10) The language of capital

(12:28) Where both sides meet

https://doi.org/10.33119/GN/163105

Shownotes

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Howard Kozloff argues that land markets price a zoning rule as soon as a city approves it, sometimes overnight. A late demand for a park can stop a building that an early rule would have allowed.

From the interview with Howard Kozloff in episode 476, on public space as the product.

If you would like to support the podcast, check out the Building Better Cities book or our Patreon!

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Howard Kozloff calls entrepreneurial planning the habit of using developer discipline on problems usually left to policy, so a plan shapes what gets built. He treats the park and the sidewalk as the product.

From the interview with Howard Kozloff in episode 476, on public space as the product.

If you would like to support the podcast, check out the Building Better Cities book or our Patreon!

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Laetitia Dablanc, professor at the University Gustave Eiffel, says urban logistics in large cities already delivers the goods. The gap she names is planner skill, not a missing technology.

She places the most sophisticated logistics in large cities, defines a megacity as a connection of up to about 40 million people, and splits the field into warehousing and transportation. E-commerce, in her account, can be better for CO2 than store retail and worse for the quality of the jobs.

Robots already do the worst warehouse work. Transport models are about 20 years behind the city they describe. She is hopeful because solar panels, new vegetation, and a swimmable Seine are already here, and because she educates about 10 people a year to use that kind of tool.

(00:00) Cities are the future

(02:50) What a city is

(06:29) Mega-regions as one connection

(07:56) Warehousing and transport

(10:36) The goods system already works

(12:59) Air, noise, and the jobs

(15:16) E-commerce, carbon, and work

(17:08) Automation and warehouse robots

(20:45) Planner skills are the concern

(24:12) Transport models left behind

(27:35) Where skills still concentrate

(31:08) Hope, because the tools exist

(33:44) Engineering that is already here

(37:57) Educating ten experts a year

Show notes

What is The Future for Cities?

If you would like to support the podcast, check out the ⁠⁠Building Better Cities book⁠⁠ or our ⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠!

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Laetitia Dablanc points to solar panels, new vegetation, and two years of swimming in the Seine as engineering cities already have, and still do not use enough.

From the interview with Laetitia Dablanc in ⁠episode 474⁠, on urban logistics in large cities.

If you would like to support the podcast, check out the ⁠⁠⁠⁠Building Better Cities book⁠⁠⁠⁠ or our ⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠!

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Diogo Correia, Cristiano Vagos, João Lourenço Marques, and Leonor Teixeira test last-mile logistics in Portuguese cities. Over 76% of municipalities lack real-time tools, so a 15-minute city-led network is elegant on paper and hard to run.

The debate is whether a municipality should orchestrate shared hubs, cargo bikes, and a predictive map, or whether missing data and thin coordination make that role impractical. Proprietary vans account for up to 21% of CO2 in residential areas, and only about 2% of municipalities said they would not struggle to mobilise a 15-minute response.

Lisbon is the worked example: DBSCAN inside 1.5 kilometres, Uber's H3 grid, and Valhalla 15-minute bike isochrones. GDPR, hills, cold storage, and private operators who compete on routing are the constraints. The research transcript is on the show site.

(00:00) The last-mile free-for-all

(02:41) A 15-minute logistics question

(03:41) Logistics 4.0 and shared hubs

(04:40) Lisbon's tools and algorithm

(06:05) Data, privacy, and radar

(07:08) Sharing work with operators

(08:26) Hills, storage, and bikes

(09:46) What both sides still share

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13675567.2022.2130211

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Laetitia Dablanc argues that innovations come from a concentration of different people, and that a campus, a hospital, or a city hall still needs a big city to become real.

From the interview with Laetitia Dablanc in ⁠episode 474⁠, on urban logistics in large cities.

If you would like to support the podcast, check out the ⁠⁠⁠⁠Building Better Cities book⁠⁠⁠⁠ or our ⁠⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠⁠!

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Laetitia Dablanc says automated warehouses make the work less miserable, because robots take the worst jobs, and that training today's workers into the new ones will not be easy.

From the interview with Laetitia Dablanc in episode 474, on urban logistics in large cities.

If you would like to support the podcast, check out the ⁠⁠⁠Building Better Cities book⁠⁠⁠ or our ⁠⁠⁠Patreon⁠⁠⁠!

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V. Kelly Turner, associate director and professor of urban planning and geography at UCLA's Luskin Center for Innovation, on treating extreme heat as a daily planning problem: which heat, whose body, and what a city can still redesign.

She argues that heat, in the American Meteorological Society's definition, is a process, and that a temperature is only a snapshot of it. Thermal literacy is the working knowledge of why you feel hot, why a city heats up, and how to cool down. The urban heat island, she says, is a useful caricature and a poor guide to a person standing in sun or shade.

Her concerns are unequal access to cooling, streets designed without shade, and a spectacle of record temperatures that does not change practice. Her hopes sit with thermophysiology, cooling that changes what a body has to do, public water, and heat governance that is still young enough to build with equity in mind. She frames what a household can do as agency, and she keeps the problem collective.Cities, she says, are mutable: if we built them, we can retrofit them.

(00:00) Heat is a verb

(01:54) Futures we plan for

(04:10) What thermal literacy means

(06:58) What counts as a city

(07:58) The heat island straw man

(13:04) Inequity, shade, spectacle

(16:21) Heat in ordinary days

(19:47) The three Ps of heat

(23:36) Water as a cooling tool

(26:57) Building heat governance

(31:40) Agency, not blame

(33:40) Heat exposure settings

(35:56) Cities can be redesigned

(39:17) Bridging research and policy

Pairs with episode 471

Show notes: https://wtf4cities.com/2026/10/15/472i_kelly-turner-associate-director-and-professor-of-urban-planning-and-geography-at-uclas-luskin-center-for-innovation/

What is The Future for Cities?

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V. Kelly Turner would cool a home by night ventilation and covered windows, and she refuses to call that a private duty. Agency, she says, still sits inside a collective challenge.

The skill reduces strain on the grid and on a household bill. The responsibility for safe heat, in her framing, does not stop at the front door.

Full conversation in episode 472: https://wtf4cities.com/2026/10/15/472i_kelly-turner-associate-director-and-professor-of-urban-planning-and-geography-at-uclas-luskin-center-for-innovation/

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V. Kelly Turner and colleagues find that a satellite map of land surface temperature is a poor guide to theheat a person feels in Civano, Tucson. Painting a street white can cool the pixel and heat the pedestrian.

The debate is on their 2022 paper in the Journal of Land Use Science. One side keeps 30 metre Landsat maps as the tool cities can actually use. The other shows how a morning snapshot, and a coat of reflective paint, can miss or worsen mean radiant temperature for the person on the street. Shade cools that person and keeps the asphalt from charging overnight, with a night-time catch when a dense canopy holds heat in.

(00:00) White streets and pedestrians

(02:46) Civano as a laboratory

(03:39) Mean radiant temperature

(06:00) A 10am satellite pass

(07:03) Walking with MaRTy

(08:46) The cool-street trap

(10:57) Shade and stored heat

(11:37) Trees that warm the night

(12:40) Which heat problem

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1747423X.2021.2015003

Shownotes: https://wtf4cities.com/2026/10/13/471r_more-than-surface-temperature-mitigating-thermal-exposure-inhyper-local-land-system/

Pairs with episode 472, V. Kelly Turner: https://wtf4cities.com/2026/10/15/472i_kelly-turner-associate-director-and-professor-of-urban-planning-and-geography-at-uclas-luskin-center-for-innovation/

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V. Kelly Turner finds optimism in a simple fact: cities are mutable. If people built a hot street, they canretrofit it, and local staff writing heat plans already know their cities. She points to the City of LA andLos Angeles County, where the people on heat action plans now know heat as well as they know their streets.Full conversation in episode 472: https://wtf4cities.com/2026/10/15/472i_kelly-turner-associate-director-and-professor-of-urban-planning-and-geography-at-uclas-luskin-center-for-innovation/

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V. Kelly Turner says heat is a verb. A weather-app temperature is one snapshot of an energy exchange, and a city that plans to manage heat still has to say which heat.

Air temperature, a surface, and sunlight on skin are different. She wants that distinction in everyday language and in local government.

Full conversation in episode 472: https://wtf4cities.com/2026/10/15/472i_kelly-turner-associate-director-and-professor-of-urban-planning-and-geography-at-uclas-luskin-center-for-innovation/

If you would like to support the podcast, check out the ⁠Building Better Cities book⁠ or our ⁠Patreon⁠!

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Geoffrey West, theoretical physicist and distinguished professor at the Santa Fe Institute, on urban scaling laws,cities that grow faster than exponential, and what happens when populations start to shrink. He treats the future of cities as the future of the planet. Cities drive resource use and climate change because that is where the people are. Without immigration, much of Europe and the United States would already be shrinking, even while other places cannot build housing fast enough.

A city, for him, is a machine for social interaction: A talks to B talks to C. Globalization widens that loop and also risks sanding off the diversity of thought cities need. He wants the rise in living standards kept, and energy returned to the sun. A science of cities would predict the rough baseline for roads, police, crime, and patents from city size alone, then ask why a particular city beats or misses that line. The same scaling laws show up from Cleveland to cities in Chile, China, and Sweden.Episode 469 is the debate on the 2007 paper he co-authored.

(00:00) Cities need science

(00:58) Who Geoffrey West is

(02:06) Cities and the planet

(07:39) Immigration and the singularity

(17:39) A machine for interaction

(23:30) Globalization and diversity

(27:43) What to sustain

(36:13) Three concerns

(42:23) Why cities outlast companies

(50:42) A science of cities

(01:02:41) How scaling laws work

(01:13:02) A precarious planet

Show notes and transcript:https://wtf4cities.com/2026/10/08/470i_geoffrey-west-theoretical-physicist-and-distinguished-professor-at-the-santa-fe-institute/

What is The Future for Cities? podcast

If you would like to support the podcast, check out the ⁠Building Better Cities book⁠ or our ⁠Patreon⁠!

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