Show Notes
Alicia Pederson went from a Renaissance literature PhD and a two-year stint as an au pair in Florence to becoming one of the best voices on a deceptively simple idea: the courtyard in the middle of apartments. After watching family friends priced out of Chicago one by one - not because they disliked the city, but because the only family housing on offer was a million-dollar house with a private yard - she started asking why North America builds apartments as huge, hotel-like buildings when European cities solved this centuries ago. Her answer is the courtyard block with apartments that live like houses, with a front door onto the street and a back door onto a shared green courtyard. It's a housing idea that's genuinely lovable, demonstrably doable and cheaper to build ... and, as we get into, almost entirely illegal to build in many North American cities. In this conversation we dig into why a shared courtyard somehow feels more private than a fenced backyard, why your kids don't actually want a yard (they want friends to play with), and why the amenity-stuffed apartment building — gym, dog wash, rooftop — is starving the very neighbourhood that should be the amenity. Alicia and Iain make the case that density is a feeling before it's a number, that the cities which kept their apartments are the ones that proved resilient, and that the fix isn't masterplanning but handing cities back their oldest tool: lay the streets, cut the right parcels, and let a hundred small builders fill them in. We also push on where it's hardest — the cold-start problem, who governs the shared space, the parking question — but suspect you will come away convinced this is a concept every Challenger City should be looking at as it reimagines the home, the street and the shape of a life.
More from Challenger Cities
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Airports can anxiety machines dressed up in statement architecture. So how do you design for delight in the different modes people turn up in, while building something designed to last decades? Chris Belisle cut his teeth on airports in Asia in the mid-2000s, when the growth was so relentless that a firm would hand an entire airport to a designer barely out of school and tell him to get on with it. Think Hong Kong, India, the Philippines etc. I assume most architects spend their twenties detailing stairwells, so that’s quite the apprenticeship, and it shows in how he talks about terminals through the course of this conversation as much more than big buildings. Philip Galway-Witham is, in his own words, a fellow geographically confused Brit, which makes two of us in this chat. He’s a Resilience Leader for Gensler’s Northeast region, which I find a rather interesting title, because Gensler use that term ‘resilience’ where most firms probably still say ‘sustainability’. Capital-S Sustainability is a badge that doesn’t really say what it was a few years ago. You can’t just bolt some kind of green façade onto a building and lay claim to your sustainability creds in a press release. Obviously, that is a good thing, we have matured. Together, Phil and Chris co-lead Gensler’s aviation practice in Canada from Toronto. Gensler being the largest architecture firm on the planet, which means if you’ve flown anywhere lately there’s a fair chance you’ve sat, queued or watched the world go by in something they designed. I’ve spent a decent chunk of my recent working life on the future of stations and airports, so I’m rather pleased we’re doing a proper episode on airports in relation to cities.
Challenger Cities started as an attempt to shake things up in Toronto. So when a municipal lawyer left her partnership to run for mayor, I wanted to hear why. Laura Dean isn't a politician. She spent her career working out why the city says no, and how to get it to yes. We talk about why Toronto has so many ways to block things and so few to let them happen. We also cover the plans the city still doesn't have, and her positive pitch for a city that's "better, easier and more beautiful". And she has a case for seeing the race as more than a two-horse contest. https://lauradeanformayor.ca/