Episodes

  • 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
  • Citizen One Episode 7: PCF's Michael W. Bischoff

    Citizen One Episode 7: PCF's Michael W. Bischoff
    May 6 2025

    In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, host Douglas Stuart McDaniel sits down with Michael W. Bischoff, Design Partner at Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, to discuss the evolving civic responsibility of architecture. As a steward of a legacy shaped by giants like I.M. Pei and Harry Cobb, Bischoff brings a generational perspective to the question: What does it mean for a building—especially towers—to behave like citizens?

    From adaptive reuse projects on Staten Island to the radical verticality of The Line at NEOM, the conversation explores the firm’s 70-year legacy, sustainable vertical urbanism, and how densification must be reframed as a necessity, not a burden. They discuss the importance of designing for the ground plane, and why AI in architecture should serve ideation, not just churn out endless renderings. With reflections on public space, climate resilience, and urban design as civic duty, Bischoff offers a compelling vision of architecture as memory, materiality, and meaning.

    This is a wide-ranging, quietly radical meditation on architecture as civic infrastructure—challenging listeners to see buildings not just as structures, but as narrative agents of our urban future.



    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 Episode 5, Part 1: Fractals, Entropy, and the Future of City Science

    Citizen One Episode 5, Part 1: Fractals, Entropy, and the Future of City Science
    Apr 10 2025

    Summary

    In this first of a two-part episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, host Douglas Stuart McDaniel engages with Ramon Gras, co-founder of Aretian Urban Analytics and Design, to explore the future of urbanism through city science. They discuss the intersection of data science, AI, and urban planning, focusing on the concepts of urban fractality and entropy, and how these elements influence socioeconomic performance in cities.

    The conversation delves into the importance of innovation districts, the role of AI and digital twins in urban planning, and the challenges faced in creating vibrant urban ecosystems. This conversation explores the intersection of urban design, technology, and climate resilience. Ramon and Doug discuss the potential of generative design to revitalize urban spaces, the importance of urban analytics in addressing climate change, and the need for cities to invest in data simulation tools. They emphasize the significance of integrating technology with human-centered design to create livable, resilient communities amidst rapid urban growth.

    In Part One:

    00:00 Exploring Urban Futures with Ramon Gras

    06:03 Understanding Urban Fractality and Entropy

    11:55 The Impact of Urban Design on Socioeconomic Performance

    18:14 Innovation Districts: Balancing Complexity and Accessibility

    24:12 The Role of AI and Digital Twins in Urban Planning

    30:03 Challenges in Creating Vibrant Urban Ecosystems

    53:43 Revitalizing Urban Spaces through Generative Design

    Part Two (Next Week)

    58:04 The Role of Technology in Urban Planning

    01:05:19 Urban Analytics and Climate Change Resilience

    01:25:28 Navigating Urban Growth and Livability

    01:39:05 Rebuilding Communities with Resilience in Mind



    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
  • Citizen One Episode 4: Digital Transformation in Global Engineering and Construction

    Citizen One Episode 4: Digital Transformation in Global Engineering and Construction
    Mar 25 2025

    In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, host Doug McDaniel sits down with Misha Nikulin, a digital innovation veteran in global engineering, procurement and construction, or EPC. Misha’s career spans over two decades at Bechtel, executive consulting at Deloitte, and leadership in digital transformation across the energy sector. Their conversation explores the evolution of technology in megaprojects—from Chernobyl's second sarcophagus to disaster-ready mobile command units—and what it means to build smarter cities and more resilient infrastructures today.

    Key Highlights:

    * The Long Arc of Innovation:Misha shares his journey from supporting radioactive storage and remote operations at Chernobyl to enabling real-time response systems for U.S. disaster relief. His insight reveals how emerging tech, from early smart job sites to digital twins, matures over time but often suffers from hype cycles and misaligned expectations.

    * The Integration Gap:One of the biggest industry failures? Digital integration across the entire lifecycle—from EPC to operations and maintenance (O&M). Misha explains how digital often lives in silos: owned by IT, poorly connected to operations, or lacking clear strategic alignment.

    * Digital Strategy on a Napkin:Doug and Misha reminisce about crafting digital strategies over drinks on a bar napkin—a reminder that the most powerful transformation begins with clear intent, not technology selection. Misha’s core advice: “Don’t skip the strategy. Don’t take it lightly—even if it’s written on a napkin”.

    * Rethinking Legacy:Legacy isn’t a dirty word. Misha reframes it as an asset—an opportunity to capture the knowledge of 30- and 40-year veterans before they retire. These individuals hold the keys to operational wisdom that tech alone can’t replicate.

    * The Emotional Vocabulary of Innovation:They dive into how words—like “digital twin”—carry emotional baggage, what digital threads and ecosystems represent, and why UX (user experience) is what finally makes tech real to people. GenAI’s breakthrough wasn’t just technical—it was giving people a window into AI they could feel.

    * Holistic Thinking is the Future:True transformation comes from seeing the full picture. Misha urges leaders to stop implementing isolated tools and start thinking holistically, aligning digital ecosystems with business outcomes, people, and culture.

    This episode is a must-listen for anyone working at the intersection of engineering, construction, infrastructure, operations, and innovation. Whether you’re a digital strategist, civil engineer, or systems architect, it challenges you to think bigger and bolder about what digital transformation really requires.

    Chapters

    00:00 Introduction to Digital Innovation in Construction

    05:02 Challenges in Digital Transformation

    10:10 The Role of Leadership in Digital Integration

    15:12 Understanding Legacy and Innovation

    19:55 Exploring Digital Twins and Their Applications

    24:55 The Importance of Digital Threads

    29:59 AI's Impact on Engineering and Construction

    34:49 Modularization and AI in Construction

    45:53 Rethinking Supply Chain Management

    48:15 AI in Real-Time Decision Making

    51:46 Trust and Adoption of AI

    55:18 Safety and Trust in Automation

    58:22 Foundational Technologies for Automation

    01:03:03 Predictability in Construction Projects

    01:11:36 Killer Apps for the Construction Industry

    01:21:38 Holistic Thinking in Digital Transformation



    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