{"podcast":{"title":"Challenger Cities","slug":"challenger-cities-6959558","podcast_index_feed_id":6959558,"rss_url":"https://media.rss.com/challengercitytoronto/feed.xml","website_url":"https://challengercities.substack.com/","image_url":"https://media.rss.com/challengercitytoronto/20241125_031154_12bb296aa546a7561a00033f0e685478.png","author":"Iain Montgomery","episode_count":88,"summary":"Iain Montgomery of Now or Never Ventures interviews urbanists, creatives, transit and development types to explore how cities can punch above their weight and create distinctive new futures outside of the tired playbooks.","last_synced_at":"2026-06-12T06:17:04.276818+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/challenger-cities-6959558"},"episode":{"title":"Challenger Cities EP79: The Best Practice Industrial Complex with Gerald Babel-Sutter","slug":"challenger-cities-ep79-the-best-practice-industrial-complex-with-gerald-babel-sutter","published_at":"2026-05-05T15:55:51+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/challenger-cities-6959558/challenger-cities-ep79-the-best-practice-industrial-complex-with-gerald-babel-sutter","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/challenger-cities-6959558","url":"https://rss.com/podcasts/challengercitytoronto/2795892","audio_url":"https://content.rss.com/episodes/278784/2795892/challengercitytoronto/2026_05_05_15_47_53_12fb8166-3ac5-4d95-bbaf-97032771f69a.mp3","summary":"Gerald Babel-Sutter is the founder of Urban Future, a 14-year-old event that has grown from a workshop for ten city officials in Graz to a gathering of 2,000 people from 290 cities in 48 countries. The premise hasn't changed: get the actual project managers in a room, not the communications directors, and ask them to talk honestly about what went wrong. In this conversation we cover how a frustrated city official's complaint over a beer became the founding logic of one of Europe's most distinctive urbanism events, why Oslo's deputy mayor told a room full of city planners to never call anything a car-free city centre, what Helsingborg's annual fuck-up of the year award reveals about institutional culture change, and why Istanbul — four religions, sixteen million people, a more open visa regime — is where Urban Future is heading in April 2027. Gerald also makes a case that the knowledge flows in urbanism run almost entirely in the wrong direction, and that who gets a visa to attend whose conference is one of the most consequential questions in the field that nobody is talking about. https://urban-future.org/","meta_description":"Gerald Babel-Sutter is the founder of Urban Future, a 14-year-old event that has grown from a workshop for ten city officials in Graz to a gathering of 2,…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":3227,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/challenger-cities-6959558/episodes/challenger-cities-ep79-the-best-practice-industrial-complex-with-gerald-babel-sutter/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/challenger-cities-6959558/challenger-cities-ep79-the-best-practice-industrial-complex-with-gerald-babel-sutter.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}