Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future cover art

Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

By: Douglas Stuart McDaniel
Listen for free

About this listen

 Welcome to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future. I’m Douglas Stuart McDaniel—author, innovation veteran, and accidental urbanist—exploring the forces shaping the cities of tomorrow. It’s not just a conversation—it’s a call to action. Here, we challenge assumptions, explore bold ideas, and rethink what cities can be—both now and in the future.

multiversethinking.substack.comDouglas Stuart McDaniel Science
Episodes
  • Redlining Didn’t Disappear. It Learned New Software

    Redlining Didn’t Disappear. It Learned New Software
    Feb 6 2026
    In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, I sit down with Derek Lumpkins to talk about cities and neighborhoods—but not in the way cities usually get discussed.We didn’t start with master plans or policy language. We started with Roxbury. With lived memory and 150 years of Black history. With what it means to grow up inside a neighborhood that is always being talked about, rarely talked with, and almost never trusted to define itself.Roxbury matters because it exposes something cities prefer to hide: the way stereotypes quietly stand in for governance. How assumptions about race, class, and behavior become shorthand for decisions about investment, policing, education, and opportunity. Not announced. Just understood. Embedded in tone. In posture. In who gets listened to.This is also why Derek’s work in DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—matters now more than ever, precisely because the field is under strain.What’s happening to DEI today isn’t subtle. The language remains, but the commitment is thinning. Roles are being eliminated, renamed, or buried inside HR. Expectations remain impossibly high, while power contracts. Derek describes a familiar pattern: organizations say they want honesty, but recoil when that honesty threatens comfort, hierarchy, or control.DEI has become an easy target because it forces proximity. It asks institutions to look at who benefits, who bears risk, and who has historically been excluded from decision-making. And in moments of uncertainty—economic, political, cultural—institutions tend to protect stability over introspection.What gets lost in the backlash is that DEI, at its best, was never about optics. It was about stakeholders. About whether people who live with the consequences of decisions have any real say in how those decisions are made. About whether cities, companies, and governments can move beyond symbolic inclusion toward shared accountability.In this episode, we don’t talk about DEI as a slogan or a checklist. We talk about it as a profession that has been asked to absorb institutional failure while being stripped of real authority. A field that was invited into rooms at the height of moral urgency—and is now being quietly sidelined as political winds shift and budgets tighten.Derek is candid about the toll this takes on practitioners. Many are asked to be translators, buffers, and shock absorbers—expected to carry the emotional weight of structural problems they did not create and are not empowered to fix. Burnout isn’t a failure of commitment. It’s a predictable outcome of being positioned between institutional inertia and lived reality.This is why the current moment matters more than ever.As cities face widening inequality, displacement, and distrust, retreating from equity work doesn’t make those tensions disappear. It simply removes the people trained to name them early, before they harden into crisis. When DEI is reduced to compliance or eliminated entirely, what follows isn’t neutrality—it’s silence.And silence, in cities, commonly benefits the already insulated.What Derek makes clear is that the question isn’t whether DEI “worked.” The question is whether institutions have ever been willing to let it work. Whether they are prepared to move beyond listening toward recognizing the existing agency of a plurality of stakeholders. Whether they are ready to treat marginalized communities not as problems to be managed, but as partners with legitimate claims on the future.That question doesn’t go away just because an acronym falls out of favor.From there, the conversation moved—literally and metaphorically—across borders.We talked about El Raval, my neighborhood here in Barcelona. A neighborhood that tourists experience as “gritty” or “authentic,” that inmobiliarios, or realtors here, talk about its dangers on their clickbait TikTok reels. Residents of El Raval, however, experience this district as layered, culturally rich, both vibrant and fragile, and under constant negotiation. Raval is not broken. It’s over-observed and under-protected. Like Roxbury, it’s a place where outside narratives arrive faster than local agency.That’s where travel enters the frame.One of the sharpest throughlines in this episode is how wealth functions as mobility—not just physical movement, but cognitive freedom. The ability to leave. To compare. To see that the way power operates in one city is not inevitable, just familiar. Travel exposes the lie that “this is just how things are.”For people without that mobility, stereotypes harden into destiny.We talked about Tulsa—not as a historical abstraction, but as an example of how cities remember selectively. How Black prosperity is tolerated until it isn’t. How destruction is framed as tragedy rather than policy. And how the long tail of that violence still shapes who is considered a legitimate stakeholder today.Derek is clear-eyed about this: ...
    Show More Show Less
    1 hr and 18 mins
  • Premium Pulp Fiction S1 E3: A Citizen One Literary Imprint

    Premium Pulp Fiction S1 E3: A Citizen One Literary Imprint
    Jan 16 2026
    Welcome back to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future and—I am excited to say—Premium Pulp Fiction. I’m your host, Douglas Stuart McDaniel, and before we go any further, I want to pause for a moment.We’re recording this at the start of a new year, in a world that feels simultaneously exhausted and overheated. Wars that refuse resolution. Cities under pressure from climate, inequality, and political fracture. Technologies advancing faster than our capacity to govern them. Institutions losing credibility while still holding enormous power. For many people listening, this year didn’t begin with hope so much as vigilance.That context matters.Citizen One was never meant to be escapist. It exists because moments like this demand clearer thinking, longer memory, and a willingness to stay present inside complexity rather than retreat from it. The stories we explore here—about cities, systems, culture, and power—are not abstractions. They are the environments we’re already living in, whether we’ve named them yet or not.So if you’re listening from a place of uncertainty, fatigue, or quiet resolve, you’re not alone. This space is for people who are still paying attention, still asking better questions, and still trying to understand how the future is being shaped in real time—often without our consent, but never without consequence.With that in mind, let’s step into today’s episode.Before I begin, I also wanted to share some important context with you. Citizen One is much more than a podcast. It is an emerging media brand where we explore stories at the intersection of innovation, culture, memory, and the past, present and future of cities.But today, we’re stepping into a slightly different kind of narrative frontier. I want to take a moment to introduce Premium Pulp Fiction, our Citizen One literary imprint and publishing empire.This episode is also a crossover—one that connects what we do here at Citizen One with a parallel storytelling project rooted in the same curiosity about systems, human complexity, and consequence, but expressed through fiction.It’s called Premium Pulp — an independent traditional publishing imprint where quality, depth, and risk-bearing imagination come first.At its core, Premium Pulp Fiction publishes speculative fiction, noir-inflected narratives, historical fiction, and narrative nonfiction concerned with power, memory, technology, and the quieter mechanics of how societies endure, adapt, and fail over time.Beginning this year, we will be publishing a very small number of carefully selected titles, and unlike many modern indie or hybrid publishers, we fully finance standard book production. Our authors never pay for book production or global distribution; they also receive the resources to leverage an integrated marketing and publicity ecosystem built from a network of preferred, vetted, award-winning suppliers.Over the last 15–20 years, most small presses have been forced into one of three survival models:1. Author-funded or cost-sharing modelsThese include hybrid presses, “assisted publishing,” or thinly disguised vanity presses. Production costs are shifted to the author—sometimes partially, sometimes entirely—and the imprint’s role becomes administrative rather than editorial. Marketing support, when offered, is usually modular, outsourced, or pay-to-upgrade.2. Grant-subsidized or institutionally anchored pressesUniversity presses, arts-council-backed imprints, or nonprofit literary houses can sometimes fully fund authors, but they rely on external subsidy. Their marketing reach is often limited, conservative, or academically scoped, and publicity ecosystems are modest by design.3. Micro-indies operating on sweat equityThese presses finance production out of pocket, but at minimal levels—basic editing, templated design, limited print runs—and expect authors to self-market aggressively. Publicity ecosystems are informal at best and nonexistent at worst.What almost never exists anymore is a small, independent imprint that does all three of the following at once:* Fully finances production (developmental editing through distribution)* Retains editorial authority and risk (rather than transferring it to the author)* Provides an integrated marketing and publicity ecosystem rather than ad-hoc supportThat model used to be normal. It was called publishing.While publishers exist across a wide range of sizes and models, the largest U.S. trade houses—commonly referred to as the Big Five—retain the scale, capital, and specialized editorial, marketing, and publicity infrastructure required to support broad distribution and coordinated campaigns at volume. Most small and independent presses operate with significantly smaller budgets and far fewer specialized departments, and as a result, authors are often expected to source, coordinate, or directly manage much of their promotional and publicity work themselves.This context is what makes...
    Show More Show Less
    13 mins
  • Citizen One S2 E9: Taş Tepeler, 9000 BCE

    Citizen One S2 E9: Taş Tepeler, 9000 BCE
    Jan 16 2026
    Cities are a form civilization often takes. They were never its starting condition.Since my first travels to Türkiye several years ago—through Istanbul, İzmir, and Ephesus—and also across archaeological sites in Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia, Göbekli Tepe has remained on my research radar**. Not as an archaeological revelation or a sudden conversion to deep prehistory, but because, as a narrative architect, I’m drawn to how settlement systems form—especially the ones hiding in plain sight.**Taş Tepeler has lingered in my mind in precisely this way, not as a city or urban form, but as a system of worldbuilding and story ecology that invites harder questions about how civilizations function beneath their visible forms: coordination, legitimacy, labor, belief, and power.The logic that structures human worlds long before they crystallize into cities.Taş Tepeler offers evidence of something more elusive and, in many ways, more instructive: civilization as coordinated life before urbanization. We don’t see clear evidence of dense settlement cores. No large concentration of permanent housing blocks. No streets, markets, or municipal hierarchy. None of the architectural signals we rely on to tell ourselves that “civilization has begun.”And yet the civic coordination is unmistakable. Across multiple sites, deliberately distributed across the landscape, we see coordination that exceeds kinship or coincidence. A shared symbolic grammar appears again and again, not as local improvisation but as something collectively maintained. Labor is organized at a scale that no single community could sustain alone. People gather repeatedly—on rhythms that imply scheduling, expectation, and return—rather than accident or crisis.Memory here is not stored in text or archive, but anchored in place. That anchoring is not passive. It is actively staged.There is so much exciting work going on now across the Taş Tepeler sites: archaelogical work, paleo-environmental research, cultural heritage management, and ethnoarchaeology. And recent excavations reveal narrative systems embedded directly into architecture: reliefs depicting sequences rather than symbols, animals and humans shown in motion and interaction, vessels and figurines designed to be handled, repositioned, and displayed. These are not static images. They appear to be prompts for retelling.Some installations appear deliberately constructed to accommodate small groups seated together, facing shared visual fields—spaces where stories could be enacted, repeated, and remembered through gesture and movement as much as through speech. If this is not theatre in the modern sense, it is unmistakably performative.In societies without writing, narrative is not entertainment. It is governance. Stories encode precedent, obligation, consequence, and identity. They allow rules to survive complexity without law codes, and memory to persist without archives.Taş Tepeler suggests that long before writing externalized memory onto clay or parchment, humans externalized it into space, sequence, and ritualized performance. Authority does not reside in an office or a law code; it operates across time and distance through participation, repetition, and shared obligation. Nowhere is this clearer than in the way these communities treated their own past.Structures were not simply abandoned when they fell out of use. They were deliberately backfilled—often with more labor than their original construction required—sealed with care, and preserved as memory rather than erased. Human remains were curated, repositioned, and integrated into walls and floors over generations. New structures were built alongside old ones, not on top of them, maintaining a legible landscape of accumulated history.This is not disposal. It is archiving—performed spatially rather than textually. The way human remains appear at Taş Tepeler adds another layer to this memory architecture. Rather than isolated grave fields, fragments of human bones and prepared crania recur in niches, built contexts, and fill deposits. This integration of the human body into the fabric of communal space is not random. It is part of the same durable system of place-based remembrance that we see in architecture, narrative imagery, and the sequencing of built enclosures — a set of conventions that carries memory across generations without text or archive.What emerges is an early form of memory architecture: a system in which collective history is embedded into the built environment itself, allowing authority, identity, and obligation to persist across centuries without documents, institutions, or states.Civilization here is not remembered. It is inhabited. These are not private acts or isolated rituals. They are public behaviors, negotiated in common, and sustained across generations.That is what makes them _civic_—even in the absence of streets, councils, or walls. Settlement is not the ...
    Show More Show Less
    36 mins
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.