Challenger Cities EP92: Cities Are Mental Weapons with Giacomo Biraghi

Giacomo Biraghi has spent fifteen years and two thousand interviews trying to answer one question: is there really a distinctive European way of making a city? His answer, after all that fieldwork, is a cheerful and slightly heretical no — what actually runs the modern city, he reckons, is a global, real-estate-driven standard, and we should be a little more cynical about the green, healthy, peaceful renderings we keep selling ourselves. This is a man who's built his whole life around cities and stays ahead of the curve by avoiding urbanists — going out of the bubble to talk to the venture capitalists and technologists who are quietly deciding what our streets and buildings become, whether or not the word "city" appears anywhere in their job title.

We get into why Italy is secretly the master of sprawl rather than the piazza (and what the rest of us should be hiring Italians to teach us), why the future of cities is being written in Zurich and Stockholm rather than at the planning conference, and the idea that gives the episode its title: that cities are mental weapons, and the real work is citizen-making, not city-making. You don't need a big budget or an important title to change your patch of the world — you need to actually show up for the place you live. It's one of my favourite conversations of the series so far. Have a listen, and if it lands, come and be utopian with us in Turin this October.