Episodes

  • Unearthing the Future

    Unearthing the Future
    Aug 12 2025
    Some places feel like they’ve been waiting for you. Others barely tolerate your presence, indifferent to your wonder. I’ve traveled enough—across continents, cultures, and climates—to know the difference. I’ve stood on volcanic cliffs in the Aegean, wandered the souks of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, traced the edges of fjords and desert plateaus, and walked through cities that practically begged to be admired. But admiration isn’t the same as belonging. Most places, no matter how beautiful, remind you that you’re just passing through.But then there are the rare ones, like here in Le Périgord Noir, that refuse to play that game. They don’t care if you’re ready. They just are. And if you’re lucky, they let you feel it—the hum of the earth beneath your feet, the mineral memory in the air, the collapse of centuries into a single breath.The Dordogne valley caught me off guard in a way I didn’t expect. In some respects, it echoes my once-familiar mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee—not in landscape alone, but in something deeper, more atmospheric. The Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains hold you close with a soft, green hush, like an old song you half-remember. Their beauty is familiar, almost familial—humid, fragrant, and gently worn.But here, in Le Périgord Noir, the feeling turns—earthier, older, more elemental. And not just geologically, but civilizationally. This is a land that remembers. Its caves still cradle the ochre-stained breath of Paleolithic hands, and the hills carry the weight of Roman roads, templar and medieval fortresses, and hamlets both vanished and persistent. Time doesn't layer here—it seeps, settles, seeps forth again. You can feel it in the chill that clings to the stone walls of a half-collapsed barn in which a wild duck nurses her eggs, in the way the path bends not for efficiency but because it always has.The streams smell of limestone and leaf rot, edged with the scent of mushroom caps and waterlogged lichen. Fungi cling to the bases of black oaks, and the sun doesn’t pour through the trees so much as filter—dim, precise, like a cathedral’s light catching dust motes in mid-air. Spruce needles mix with smoke from a distant chimney. Every breath reminds you: something ancient is still alive here.They call it Noir for a reason—not just the color of the soil or the shade of the truffles hidden beneath it, but for the quality of the light itself. The darkness gathers in the understory, where ferns and moss curl low and quiet, and tree trunks rise like stone pillars out of shadow. It’s a darkness that feels cultivated, patient. Above, the canopy breaks open in sudden, holy shafts—sunlight not as warmth, but as revelation. The contrast plays tricks on your sense of depth, as if the forest is folding in on itself, layering time and silence. You walk through it as if trespassing in a forgotten prayer.I’d come to the Dordogne to spend the week with my friend, Olivier Pron—artist, world-builder, philosopher by accident and craftsman by blood—the fire already lit, the wine already breathing as we settled in to discuss a new project. The timeless, family home– built around a medieval bread oven–was perched quietly on land that had been occupied without interruption for half a million years, and it was already speaking to me.The hamlet where Olivier’s family farm sits consists of about five houses, and it isn’t marked by signage or ceremony. It’s not a destination. It’s a slow-breathing fold in the land, tucked just 900 meters from the glittering patience of the Dordogne River. A narrow and crooked paved path winds you into it, though to call it a “road” is already generous. More like a stone-lined vein leading you to the marrow of something older than memory.The first thing you notice is the minerality—a texture in the air, underfoot, in the bones of the buildings. The soil here resists. Orchards struggle. Fruit trees lean slightly off-axis like they’ve grown wise to disappointment. This is no Eden. The land doesn’t yield sweetness easily. But that’s not the point. This isn’t a place of abundance—it’s a place of resilience. The alluvial soils from the Lentinol—a nearby stream that swells and spills into a 100-year-old lake when it rains too hard—remind you that even modest water remembers its path.Five centuries ago, this stream—one that today barely warrants a name on a map—powered eight mills. You don’t need a cathedral to anchor a civilization. Sometimes a mill is enough.And while most of the world has moved on to stainless steel and silicon chips, Le Périgord Noir never quite signed the contract. The rhythms here are older, rooted in muscle, weather, and inheritance. Goat herders still walk the same limestone trails their grandfathers did, guiding shaggy-haired chèvres du Massif Central—hardy climbers with amber eyes and a taste for steep, unforgiving terrain. The sheep—mostly ...
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    27 mins
  • Citizen One: E12 - Fault Lines of Feeling

    Citizen One: E12 - Fault Lines of Feeling
    Jul 15 2025

    In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, host Douglas Stuart McDaniel speaks with architect and urbanist Marcella del Signore about her groundbreaking exhibition Emotional Geographies of the Mediterranean, currently featured in the Italian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.

    Associate Professor and Director of the MS in Architecture and Urban Design program at the New York Institute of Technology and a Founder and Principal of X-Topia, Marcella discusses how emotion—too often overlooked in data-driven design—is in fact central to how we perceive, inhabit, and construct space. Her project combines sensorial mapping, social media sentiment analysis, soundscapes, and walking interviews to chart the emotional layers of Mediterranean coastal cities.

    Together, Doug and Marcella explore the implications of mapping affective experience in a region shaped by migration, climate crisis, and cultural rupture. The conversation challenges the limitations of Human-Centered Design, proposing instead a shift toward relational-centered urbanism—one grounded in multiplicity, memory, and spatial justice.

    “Each image, each caption, becomes a subjective map,” Marcella explains. “And when we read them collectively, we begin to see how people feel their way through space.”

    Concepts like the emotional city or empathetic urbanism are no longer fringe or theoretical indulgences, Doug notes—they are simply new datasets we’ve long neglected.

    “They’re not woke or woo,” he said, “they’re just new data sets we hadn’t really considered before—just as valid, just as measurable.”

    Marcella agreed, emphasizing that emotions, sensory input, and embodied experiences are not intangible abstractions but critical indicators of spatial justice, cognitive well-being, and urban livability. This exchange crystallized a shift in discourse: from seeing affect as anecdotal or ornamental, to recognizing it as infrastructural—a vital layer of urban knowledge that expands how we assess, design, and care for cities.

    In the conversation, the pair critiques dominant architectural practices as "archetype factories"—systems that replicate reductive models of the “user” based on algorithmic patterns, market typologies, and cultural assumptions.

    These models often flatten human diversity into performative proxies, producing cities that optimize for efficiency rather than experience. In contrast, her work across neurourbanism, sensorial urbanism, and what she calls emotional urbanism seeks to reclaim space as a cognitive and affective ecology.

    Drawing on neuroscience, environmental psychology, and data-driven mapping of affective responses, she challenges the discipline to move beyond consensus and standardization toward architectures of multiplicity, memory, and perception. “We design not just with data,” she notes, “but with grief, with joy, with friction.” It’s a call to reimagine urbanism not as a delivery mechanism for normative users, but as an open-ended dialogue with the invisible infrastructures of emotion.

    From post-Katrina New Orleans to her work in Latin America, in the GCC region and Europe, Marcella’s practice asks us to rethink what it means to map, to know, and to study the emotional geography of the city.

    X-Topia is Marcella del Signore’s interdisciplinary design and research practice operating at the intersection of architecture, urban design, landscape, and emerging technologies. With offices in New York, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, and soon Riyadh, X-Topia blends academic research, public interest design, and speculative urbanism into a hybrid consultancy model.

    Founded during her time in post-Katrina New Orleans—where she also taught at Tulane for a decade—X-Topia initially focused on urban regeneration and resilience. Over time, it evolved into a platform for advancing sensorial and neurourbanist methods, applying them to both physical master plans and digital user journeys.



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Citizen One E14: Heraclitus in the City

    Citizen One E14: Heraclitus in the City
    Jul 8 2025
    In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, I’m joined once again by author, architect, and urban theorist Ioanna Piniara. In Part 2 of our conversation, we dive into the politics of privacy, the afterlife of European modernism, and the spatial logic of neoliberalism. Her new book, We Have Never Been Private: The Housing Project in Neoliberal Europe (Actar Publishers), interrogates the fiction of privacy—not as a universal right, but as a spatial ideology rooted in segregation, individualization, and the instrumentalization of housing as a tool of economic control.Ioanna draws from the Heraclitean tradition of Greek philosophy, where opposing forces are not in conflict but in constant dialogue—each necessary to produce order and transformation. In her view, privacy and collectivity are not binaries to be resolved but dual forces to be designed together. When neoliberal systems elevate privacy as an isolated good, it collapses under its own weight. To reclaim its meaning, she argues, we must reintroduce the collective—not as its opposite, but as its condition. Like Heraclitus’s ever-changing river, the urban realm must balance and invite these tensions to shape a more just and livable order.In Part 1, we examined how the Barbican Estate in London and Berlin’s IBA ’84/’87 subtly codified new forms of social exclusion through architectural language, planning rhetoric, and the cultural myths of middle-class subjectivity. In Part 2, our conversation turns to Athens—and what emerges is a deeply layered portrait of a city caught between its Cold War reconstruction fantasies and its austerity-ravaged present.In this episode, we begin with Ioanna’s description of the Greek antiparochí system, which, beginning in the 1920s, offered a unique response to Athens’s housing crisis. Rather than build public housing, the government enabled private landowners to partner with developers: in exchange for their plots, owners received apartments in the newly built polykatoikíes—multi-story apartment blocks—while the rest were sold. This land-for-flats model fueled rapid urban growth, helped absorb waves of refugees and rural migrants, and shaped Athens into the dense, concrete city we know today. While it succeeded in expanding housing access, it also erased older neighborhoods and disrupted the city’s architectural continuity.Next, we turn to what is now known as One Athens, a luxury residential complex nestled at the foot of Lycabettus Hill—today a gleaming symbol of exclusivity, but originally the headquarters of Doxiadis Associates, one of the most influential planning firms in postwar Greece. Designed in 1957 by the renowned architect Constantinos Doxiadis and completed in 1971, the modernist complex embodied a bold new vision for Athens, steeped in the ideals of technocratic progress and spatial order. Backed in part by Marshall Plan funding, Doxiadis’s work translated American postwar values—suburbanization, private ownership, and efficient planning—into a Greek urban context. It was modernism not just as style, but as ideology.When the offices were vacated in the late 1990s and finally redeveloped in 2014, the transformation marked a dramatic shift. The site’s reinvention as One Athens introduced a new residential scale and typology into a city long shaped by the denser, more collective ‘polykatoikia’ apartment blocks. Once a hub of architectural experimentation, it was rebranded as a walled sanctuary of privilege—its rooftop pools and biometric gates a far cry from the postwar ethos of public-minded reconstruction. In that metamorphosis—from Cold War idealism to speculative real estate—we glimpse the full arc of postwar ambition collapsing into neoliberal exclusion.But Ioanna doesn’t stop there. She draws our attention to Kesarianí, a neighborhood forged in the crucible of refugee displacement and wartime trauma. Here, amid the grid of the Trigono settlement blocks, a different story unfolds—one of collective endurance, mutual support, and what she calls "housing as a resilient commons." These low-rise units, often dismissed in the official discourse of planning, have survived decades of political neglect, economic instability, and bureaucratic invisibility.Rather than being “upgraded” into luxury condos or hollowed out by speculation, the Trigono blocks remain socially vital, thanks in large part to informal solidarities, shared routines, and memory-based place-making. As we discuss in the episode, they challenge the very criteria by which we judge “successful” housing—inviting us to rethink how value is assigned, how privacy is practiced, and how architectural meaning is sustained outside the marketplace.Ioanna’s work illuminates a crucial tension at the heart of contemporary urbanism: the tension between spaces that produce isolated consumers, and those that nurture embedded citizens. What ...
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Citizen One Episode 13: We Have Never Been Private

    Citizen One Episode 13: We Have Never Been Private
    Jun 24 2025
    In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, author, architect and urban theorist Ioanna Piniara joins me for the first of a two-part conversation spanning European postwar reconstruction, Cold War urbanism, and today’s smart city futures. Her new book, We Have Never Been Private: The Housing Project in Neoliberal Europe (Actar Publishers) challenges the prevailing narrative of privacy as a fundamental right under siege. Instead, Ioanna contends that privacy is a historically constructed spatial and legal fiction—one that has long served as an instrument of neoliberal subject formation, segregation, and accumulation of wealth.In Part 1, we examine two of the three case studies in her book: the Barbican Estate in London and Berlin’s 1980s International Building Exhibition (IBA). Both projects—often lauded for their architectural ambition—emerge under her analysis as mechanisms for reorganizing the city around new forms of social and spatial exclusion. The Barbican’s fortress-like aesthetic, one that has been adored and despised over decades, didn’t just embody Brutalist design—it engineered a new spatial contract for the middle class. The IBA, positioned as a progressive experiment, reveals how even left-liberal planning tools can reproduce segmentation and disparity.The Barbican: A Spatial Contract for the Postwar Middle ClassWe examine how the Barbican’s Brutalist design—often mistaken as an egalitarian gesture of postwar renewal—was in fact a highly coded spatial contract. With over 100 distinct apartment typologies, it enacted class segmentation through spatial form—less about serving functional diversity, more about encoding social hierarchy. Enclosure, density, and inward-facing design consolidated the aesthetic of privatized enclave, while the absence of affordable housing signaled a decisive shift away from social and economic inclusion.Ioanna details how the Barbican turned housing into a device of symbolic capital—projecting stability and distinction for a new professional-managerial class while erasing the working-class presence in central London. The promise of privacy here wasn’t a retreat from capitalism; it was a performance of entitlement inside it.Berlin’s IBA: Critical Reconstruction and the Theatre of ParticipationNext, we shift to West Berlin’s IBA, an exhibition that sought to reconcile the failures of modernist planning with more participatory urbanism. But as Ioanna explains, this was often a performance of inclusivity, not a redistribution of power. While the IBA invited architectural experimentation, it did so within tight ideological boundaries. Participation was procedural rather than structural, aesthetic rather than legal—a gesture without governance teeth.We discuss how the IBA’s “critical reconstruction” became a narrative apparatus—mobilizing memory, identity, and cultural capital to restabilize a city fragmenting under Cold War pressures. Despite its progressive veneer, the project preserved exclusionary dynamics: land remained concentrated, typologies served symbolic functions, and renters were increasingly displaced by speculative ownership.From Welfare Typologies to Data-Driven Urbanism: The Smart City Through a Rearview MirrorThroughout our conversation, we draw connections to contemporary smart city districts—where algorithmic governance and high-tech façades extend the logic of privatized urbanism. Ioanna warns against mistaking data integration for civic openness. From Songdo to NEOM and Masdar City, many of today’s smart city schemes rehearse the same narrative tropes as the Barbican and IBA: the promise of innovation masking systems of control, segmentation, and scarcity.Together, we trace how both historic and futuristic housing models use architecture to encode ideology—through typology, ownership models, and access to privacy. The home, she argues, is not just where we live—it’s where we are made legible to systems of power.Themes Explored in Part 1:* Privacy as legal and spatial construct, not natural right* The production of the “neoliberal subject” through housing typologies* Symbolic capital and its role in architectural authorship* Participation without power as a performative mode of governance* The continuity between welfare-era housing and platform-driven smart cities* Spatial strategies of exclusion, from brutalist enclosure to sensor-based sortingIn Part 2, we’ll look at Ioanna’s third case study of Athens, where overlapping ownership regimes, economic-crisis era redevelopment, and the fragmentation of public authority reveal how legal ambiguity and community cohesion can both obstruct and protect urban life—operating in the legal gray zones where resilience persists beneath visibility.—Subscribe to Citizen One for more episodes at the intersection of design, governance, and the urban futures we’re still trying to ...
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    1 hr
  • Citizen One E11: Robotic Translations

    Citizen One E11: Robotic Translations
    Jun 19 2025

    In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, host Douglas Stuart McDaniel speaks with Venezuelan architect and theorist Daniela Atencio, author of Robotic Translations: Design Processes – Latin America, (Actar Publishers) about how Latin America is reprogramming the future of digital design—through resistance, reinvention, and entanglement.

    Atencio, trained at SCI-Arc and now professor of architecture at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia—where she founded the first architectural robotics program in Latin America—challenges the sterile universality of Western architectural robotics labs. Atencio draws from the lived complexity of the Latin American context—where scarcity breeds ingenuity, and every robotic gesture is entangled with human error, material resistance, and historical ghosts. She proposes a radical departure from dominant narratives of control and precision, toward a design ethos informed by chaos theory, mestizaje, and the politics of the glitch.

    Here, mestizaje becomes a design principle: a hybrid, decolonial logic of making that blends advanced robotics with traditional craft, obsolete machines, and the rhythms of human bodies. Movement is central—not as programmed automation, but as improvisation, dance, and tension. Atencio recalls the Colombian la Jonna dance, a ritual form that resists functionalist motion, as a metaphor for how humans and robots can co-perform—entangled in mutual adaptation, rather than one commanding the other.

    Together, Atencio and McDaniel unpack how the architectural canon—shaped by American military-industrial legacies and Silicon Valley utopianism—can be decolonized through embodied knowledge, non-linear feedback, and the unlearning of Western binaries. They explore what it means to code with one’s voice, to choreograph through error, and to trust emergent behavior over deterministic scripts.

    Atencio’s “robotic translations” are exactly that: translations across systems, materials, cultures, and ways of knowing. They carry meaning from one context to another—not to flatten difference, but to expose it, to inhabit it. These are acts of cultural hacking that embrace friction, failure, and feedback as part of the design process. This episode explores what emerges when robots are not tools of control, but collaborators in a messy, bodily, entangled world.



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • Citizen One E10: Memory, Stone, and Silence

    Citizen One E10: Memory, Stone, and Silence
    Jun 10 2025

    In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, host Douglas Stuart McDaniel sits down with independent researcher Evelyn Meynard to uncover the forgotten legacy of Chilean modernist Emilio Duhart. From his early years in remote Cañete to working under Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier, Duhart’s journey defies the canon of modern architecture—and reveals a rich, symbolically charged Latin American modernism rooted in myth, memory, and political rupture.

    There are names you expect to find in the story of modern architecture—Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Oscar Niemeyer. And then there are the names you have to go looking for. Emilio Duhart is one of those names.

    Born in remote Cañete Chile, Duhart studied at Harvard, worked under both Gropius and Le Corbusier, and went on to design one of the most symbolically charged buildings in Latin America: the United Nations ECLAC building: the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean headquarters in Santiago. And yet—outside Chile, his name barely registers.

    This week, I’m joined by Evelyn Meynard—independent researcher and author of Re-Imagining Modern Architecture: Emilio Duhart 1940–1970. Her book, published by Actar, is part biography, part excavation, part act of repair. And it arrives at a time when the Global South is being reframed not as architectural periphery—but as a site of poetic, ecological, and political intelligence.

    What Evelyn brings forward isn’t just a forgotten architect. She traces a deeper story—about memory, materiality, silence, and design as a cultural language. Through Duhart’s eyes and journals, she takes us inside Le Corbusier’s atelier in Paris where he worked side by side with the likes of Iannis Xenakis, Balkrishna Doshi, and others.

    We talk about modernist adobe–not concrete–houses for the Santiago elite in the 1940s. We explore how Duhart was thinking about sustainability and accessibility long before those terms became mainstream—designing passive water systems, integrating landscape and climate into his buildings, and proposing electric transit for the elderly and disabled—decades ahead of his time. We’ll also examine the haunting what-if of his master plan for Santiago: a pedestrian-first, ecologically attuned greenbelt capital that was never built. And yes—we’re going to talk about how Evelyn’s earliest memory of modernism came not from a textbook, but from a school she attended as a child, unknowingly designed by Duhart himself.

    According to Meynard, When Brasilia was inaugurated, many Europeans came to the inauguration, even Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. But soon, a series of negative articles from architectural magazines in Europe and North American quickly undercut the achievements of Latin American modernism. She contends that, until the 21st century, few talked again about Latin American architecture.

    This episode is about more than buildings. It’s about the work of remembering—of rebuilding the archive—and of asking who gets written into the story of our cities, and who gets left out.



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com
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    1 hr and 21 mins
  • Citizen One E9: The City as a Living Organism

    Citizen One E9: The City as a Living Organism
    May 27 2025

    In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, host Douglas Stuart McDaniel sits down with Dr. Assia Crawford—architect, biodesign researcher, and author of Designer’s Guide to Lab Practice and Bios In Search of Zoe—to explore what it truly means to co-design urban futures with living organisms.

    Trained as a conventional architect in the UK, Crawford now finds herself running a research lab at CU Denver’s College of Architecture and Planning, immersed in the world of living materials, from fungal networks and photosynthetic ceramics to microbial leather and speculative mycelial architecture. Her journey from blueprints to petri dishes and laminar hoods reframes architecture not as the art of controlling space, but as the ethical and ecological act of codesigning with living systems.

    Together, they discuss:

    * The shock of letting go of design control when working with biological organisms.

    * Why failure in the lab is not a setback but a threshold to deeper understanding.

    * How the mycelium leather chair became a symbol of decentralized, open-source material research.

    * Salvador Dali’s prediction that the future of architecture is going to be soft and furry.

    * The evolution of “contamination as pedagogy”—why Crawford actively tries to infect her students with curiosity.

    * Her graphic novel Bios In Search of Zoe, written during COVID, and how it became a speculative, feminist, AI-mediated reflection on ethics, ecology, and transformation.

    * Why AI’s failures—especially in representing race, gender, and age—are the mirror of our own digital biases.

    * How bio-design is disrupting the patriarchal canon of architecture by inviting more women, interdisciplinary voices, and care-based practices into the lab.

    * The urgent question: Can buildings decay with dignity? What if architectural materials decomposed not into waste, but into nutrient?

    This episode is a call to reimagine both the form and function of the city—not as a static object but as an evolving organism, deeply entangled with microbial life, ecological justice, and speculative futures.

    Chapters

    00:00 The Future of Design: Living Materials

    01:50 Dr. Assia Crawford's Journey into Bio Design

    05:05 Trial and Error: The Scientific Method in Architecture

    07:36 Cultural Shifts: From UK to US Architectural Education

    10:54 Hands-On Learning: Engaging with Living Materials

    15:49 Lab Practices: Scaling Biological Materials for Architecture

    20:27 Challenging Assumptions: Ethics and Aesthetics in Bio Design

    25:24 Contaminating Ideas: Shifting from Sterility to Symbiosis

    27:16 Bios in Search of Zoe: A Graphic Novel Exploration

    31:58 Visual Storytelling and Personal Narratives

    34:12 AI and Character Development Challenges

    37:36 Implicit Bias in AI and Character Representation

    40:24 Feminist Perspectives in Bio Design

    43:42 The Spectrum of New Bio Design Practices and Careers

    47:09 The Intersection of Biological Materials and Sustainability

    50:03 Buildings as the Next “Fast Fashion” and the Urgency of Environmental Action

    54:16 The Role of Decay and Regeneration

    59:19 The Need for Radical Change in Consumer Culture



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com
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    1 hr and 9 mins
  • Citizen One Episode 8: The Reasonable City

    Citizen One Episode 8: The Reasonable City
    May 13 2025
    A Citizen One Journal Before diving into this next Citizen One episode—a short-form, audio-only reflection I’m calling a Citizen One Journal—I wanted to share a thoughtful signal boost we received this week, and one I didn’t expect. You can read or listen to the essay, The Reasonable City: What Happens When a City Knows More Than Her Citizens?, just below.Fernando Fernández-Monge, senior associate at the Bloomberg-Harvard City Leadership Initiative, just published a deep and generous reflection on LinkedIn and Substack about the Citizen One podcast episode where I featured the design science work of Ramon Gras and the Aretian team. His essay—titled “The Performance of the Form”—cites recent episodes of the show, including our conversation on fractality, nested agglomeration, and measurable urban performance.Fernando’s piece doesn’t just validate their work. It also acknowledges Citizen One as a new platform that helps surface and share voices like Ramon’s—and elevate the Aretian team’s research into the broader future-of-cities conversation. As the host of Citizen One, an urbanNext original podcast series, I am profoundly grateful to show up as an accidental urbanist, translator, and scribe.In each of these conversations, I haven’t been leading the narrative—just listening for the signal, and helping others articulate and share the work they’ve long been doing.I am also energized by how Fernando has situated the Citizen One series within the broader conversation around data-informed urban design, and challenges all of us to grapple with the tensions between performance, policy, and political reality.What stood out most to me is that he asked hard questions about endogeneity, actionability, and the lived “stickiness” of cities. And he still found room to amplify the value of the ideas—particularly in thinking through how cities can reason with us, not just react to us.This kind of engagement is exactly why Citizen One exists: to surface conversations that don’t usually make it past the white paper or the design render.This week I am also sharing a new solo monologue episode—it’s a live reading of a recent essay of mine, “The Reasonable City: What Happens When the City Knows More Than the Citizen?”That essay, like Fernando’s review, circles the same question:What does it mean to build cities that are not only smart, but wise?Thanks to all of you who have supported the podcast and this broader work around civic design, narrative intelligence, and digital civitas. And to Fernando: thank you for showing what it looks like to think publicly—and generously.Let’s keep building. And now, here’s my new essay.The Reasonable City: What Happens When a City Knows More Than Her Citizens?By Douglas Stuart McDanielSomewhere along the way, we decided we weren’t up to the task.Not of building cities—our cranes never sleep—but of reasoning with them. Of holding space for contradiction, consequence, complexity. So we did what we always do when something feels too broken or too big: we outsourced it. First to planners, then to platforms, now to artificial intelligence.The smart city was just the opening move. A city of sensors. Metrics. Surveillance. Optimized to the edge of the uncanny. A dashboard utopia where everything is measured and nothing is questioned. As Anthony Townsend put it in Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia,¹ this brand of urbanism is less about citizen agency than it is about centralized control wrapped in big tech’s friendly UX.Smart cities react.But cognitive cities? They’re supposed to respond.First, a little context. The term cognitive city emerged in the early 2010s at the intersection of urban informatics, living lab research, and adaptive systems theory—shaped by scholars such as Andrea Caragliu and Chiara Del Bo in Milan,² Herman Schaffers, formerly of the European Network of Living Labs,³ and later amplified by industry voices like Dirk Helbing at ETH Zurich,⁴ as well as early work at IBM’s Cognitive Solutions Group⁵ and Siemens Global Smart Cities,⁶ as an evolution beyond the smart city, envisioning urban systems that learn, reason, and respond in real time.Cognitive cities don’t just track—they interpret. They don’t just automate—they anticipate. They imply systems that can think, learn, and adapt. But if a city starts to reason, we have to start asking the question: on whose behalf? And more uncomfortably: whose values is it reasoning with?Because let’s be honest—if we’re building systems to be more rational than us, it’s kind of a confession.We don’t actually trust ourselves to be reasonable. Not in the public sense. Not in the civic sense. And not when it counts.What is reason, in the context of urban life, if not the ability to act beyond self-interest? To design for people we don’t know and will never meet? And to resist the urge to optimize for the ...
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    11 mins