Finding out what our urban futures hold in Ljubljana

Summary

The Urbanist – “Finding out what our urban futures hold in Ljubljana”
Monocle Podcast | April 2, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode of The Urbanist takes listeners inside the Urban Future “Better Cities” event in Ljubljana, a dynamic summit gathering mayors, urban planners, architects, and civic innovators to discuss and debate the future of our cities. Guided by Monocle’s Guy Delauney and guest speakers from across Europe, the episode delves into six major urban themes: City Centres, Tactical Urbanism, Circularity, Resilient Societies, Innovation in Governance, and Change Communications. Each segment spotlights practical challenges and creative interventions shaping urban environments, using Ljubljana as a lens for wider European (and global) urban discourse.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Meaning of Better Cities

• Gerald Babel Sutter (Co-founder/CEO, Urban Future) outlines the core aim of the event: connecting diverse city changemakers—politicians, administrators, civil society, and business—united by a drive to improve lives, despite varied local challenges.
  • Quote:

    “Better in the end boils down to making it better for the people that live in the city. And that is probably the common denominator for the people here." (03:03)

• Common urban challenges: Mobility is a “big topic”—most cities are still built for cars, and even successful pedestrianization can leave bigger mobility issues unsolved.
  • Quote:

    “Most cities are struggling with mobility... Most European cities are cities for cars... The positive part…[is] people making extraordinary things happen in cities around the world." (04:29)

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2. City Centres: More than Retail

• Jan Kathain (Architect, UCL Lecturer) discusses the shifting role of high streets and city centres, from retail spaces to multi-functional cultural and social hubs.
  • Quote:

    “City centres are where people feel belonging. They aren't just retail… they’re also places of culture, where you meet friends... If we stop changing the idea of what town centres are… people start to lose touch with their urban environment.” (05:48)

• On urban decay and opportunity: Despite decline, Kathain remains positive about adaptive reuse and cross-sector collaboration revitalizing high streets.
  • Example: Project in Wittenberg (East Germany) where authorities reclaimed empty retail units for new public purposes, tipping the balance toward regeneration.
  • Quote:

    “It's sometimes doesn't take that much to tip the balance. You get the first three actresses in, you activate the first pop-up shop and others come out of the woodwork.” (08:44)

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3. Tactical Urbanism: Small Interventions, Big Impact

• Alenka Korenjak (Founder, Prostorozh) introduces tactical urbanism as iterative, grassroots actions—often starting as tiny, low-impact "twigs" that catalyze broader change.
  • Quote:

    “You don't build a whole nest at once. You lay a twig, you leave it there, you put it to rest and then things start to happen. No one is bothered by the twig.” (09:50 & 00:11)

• Examples:
  • A waiting area built over a former VIP hospital parking spot, transforming it into a patient shelter (10:52).
  • Tactical urbanism isn’t always visible or material—can be bureaucratic changes or celebrations.
• Integration & challenges: With city governments now adopting these once-activist tools, it raises questions on how citizen groups evolve and interact with authorities.
  • Quote:

    “Where does this leave active citizens? Should they invent new tactics, new tools? Should they work with an additional layer of the city?” (12:34)

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4. Circularity: Human-centred Solutions

• Nicholas Marchese (Co-founder, Orange Sky) shares how his mobile laundry service for the homeless redefines “circularity” as not just environmental, but about creating restorative human connections.
  • Quote:

    “At the heart of what we do is humans... The power to sit down and connect is... the most important part of our ecosystem.” (15:07)

• On challenging bureaucracy: At the event, participants wrote "red tape" obstacles on actual tape, prompting reflection about the usefulness and necessity of rules.
  • Quote:

    “There's a lot of obvious things in the world... Something that I'm really curious about... is rules and regulations that are used as excuses not to try.” (15:50)

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5. Resilient Societies: Community-Driven Urbanism

• Sabine Mikhailescu (Co-founder, Dear Neighbour) emphasizes building resilient, inclusive communities as the backbone for social change.
  • Quote:

    “Basically, what we do is we build communities... through community interventions you can have an increased quality of life and you can solve a lot of the issues that we are facing today as a society.” (17:38)

• Method: Scale up grassroots initiatives by applying templates and guides—empowering 100+ neighborhoods in Romania.
  • Quote:

    “What I think we’re doing uniquely is doing this at scale... to connect the communities of neighbors among them so for them to learn from each other and... be sustainable even after they leave our program.” (19:39)

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6. Innovation in Governance: City Halls as Agents of Change

• Heather Hilmis Dotier (Mayor of Reykjavik) discusses balancing rapid urban change with public engagement and equitable growth.
  • Quote:

    “Cities change the world... They have to be innovative, progressive and good places for people to live in. Maybe too much change sometimes…but it was important and it is important to continue on that road and not stop.” (21:38)

• Initiatives: Denser, more active city life; inclusive, affordable housing; a new bus transit line to boost connectivity and accessibility.
• On communication: Candid about resistance from interest groups/media and emphasizes the need to explain the reasons (“the why”) behind policies.
  • Quote:

    “As politicians, we have to tell people what we are doing, why we are doing it. That is one of the things I talk strongly about…if you just see someone who wants to change your street and you don’t know why, it’s just annoying.” (23:53)

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7. Change Communications: Urbanism Through an Inclusive Lens

• Noorhan Bassam (Author & CEO, Gendered City) introduces “feminist urbanism”—underlining how cities often serve a default (male) user profile, marginalizing others.
  • Quote:

    “Your city is not gender neutral. Your city has a gender and it's typically a white, heteronormative, patriarchal, able bodied male.” (25:03)

• Examples of interventions: Simple infrastructure (toilets, signage, lighting) can transform girls’/women’s experiences of cities.
  • Quote:

    “Feminist urbanism is not about grand scheme of plans…but it’s really about the small things…like toilets…sometimes it’s an obvious exit sign…sometimes it’s really a small illumination.” (25:43)

• On branding & resistance: Change needs to be sold as an opportunity, not a loss; branding efforts should highlight gains (like safety and freedom) from active mobility, rather than loss of car privilege.
  • Quote:

    “Maybe we can do better in city branding, again from this human centered perspective…Being in a car is way more problematic than anything else.” (27:51)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Alenka Korenjak:
  • “You don't build a whole nest at once. You lay a twig, you leave it there…and then things start to happen.” (00:11, 09:50)
  • “E degeneration of city makers creates a monument of their own failures... Some shopping malls, some mixed-use areas, some commercial centers are planned in such a bad way, without any regard for public space.” (13:21)
• Jan Kathain:
  • “High streets are accessible, high streets are inclusive, high streets are democratic. And actually, high streets have a really broad appeal.” (07:18)
• Heather Hilmis Dotier:
  • “Cities change the world. They have to be innovative, progressive and good places for people to live in.” (21:38)
• Noorhan Bassam:
  • “Cities keep failing women... feminist urbanism…is about the small things, the systemic inequality.” (25:03)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro & Urban Future Overview (Gerald Babel Sutter): 01:17–04:11
• City Centres (Jan Kathain): 05:16–09:13
• Tactical Urbanism (Alenka Korenjak): 09:23–13:59
• Circularity (Nicholas Marchese): 14:07–17:10
• Resilient Societies (Sabine Mikhailescu): 17:14–20:55
• Innovation in Governance (Heather Hilmis Dotier): 20:55–24:40
• Change Communications (Noorhan Bassam): 24:40–28:30

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Final Thoughts

The episode underlines that creating “better cities” is a profoundly human task—reliant on empathy, communication, adaptation, and above all, collaboration. Ljubljana’s urban fabric, with its successes and shortcomings, mirrors debates happening worldwide. The solutions lie in a mix of small interventions, systemic reforms, and community-driven experimentation—a future built, in Alenka Korenjak’s words, “twig by twig.”

Transcript

[Alenka Korenjak]

You don't build a whole nest at once. You lay a twig, you leave it there, you put it to rest and then things start to happen. No one is bothered by the twig.

[Andrew Tuck]

What is the future for our urban environment? This is the Urbanist, Monocle's program, all about the cities we live in. And I'm your host, Andrew Tuck. This week, Monocle's Guy Delauney attends Urban Future, the so called Better Cities event, which is stopping in his hometown of Ljubljana. For this year's edition, we're going to explore the six main themes of City Centres, Tactical urbanism, circularity, resilient societies, innovation in governments and communication changes. With a selection of speakers who are in attendance. That's all ahead right here on the Urbanist. And I'm going to hand now over to our man in Ljubljana, Guy Delaunay.

[Guy Delauney]

Rule number one, that is not made to be broken.

[Gerald Babel Sutter]

Yes, I'm losing my words here.

[Guy Delauney]

Welcome to Ljubljana and the 2026 edition of of the Urban Better Cities event. Now, as a host city, this is a good choice because it's got a fair share of the good, the bad and the ugly of urbanism, all contained in a compact capital. From humane shared spaces and sensitively repurposed Yugoslav factories to the surprisingly dense motorized traffic and obsession with shopping malls. It fits rather nicely with the themes of this year's shebang. Urban unicorns. Please take your seats. The magic is about to continue. The best way to get a start on this is to have a natter with Gerald Babel Sutter, who's the co founder and CEO of Urban Future. Gerald, just let's rewind a little bit here. What's the overarching idea of Urban Future and this Better Cities?

[Gerald Babel Sutter]

Eventually, it's really to get people together who transform cities who are already working anywhere in the city, whether it's politics or administration, or in companies or in organizations, in NGOs, in civil society. And they come together from all across Europe and beyond talking about how to do it.

[Guy Delauney]

You call this the Better Cities event? All the people who are coming here, do they have an agreement on what better cities look like?

[Gerald Babel Sutter]

Oh, no, it's different for everybody. You know, everybody comes from their own perspective. Making a city better in a city with 40% unemployment might be something very different to a city where you have a huge traffic or congestion problem, an education problem or whatever. So I think better in the end boils down to making it better for the people that live in the city. And that is probably the common denominator for the People here, when you're getting

[Guy Delauney]

together people from such diverse cities, what common points are those people finding?

[Gerald Babel Sutter]

It's their mindset, it's people who drive change. And when you drive change, it's more about how do you get people involved, how do you talk to people, how do you get people move in the same direction? It has more to do with leadership, with soft skills, with communication skills, with being passionate about what you do. And not so much on the technical aspect of, okay, how do I plan a pedestrian zone? And because of that, people who come from a small city can easily connect with people from a big city. And at the same time, people that come from mobility can easily connect with people from, I don't know, housing, because they understand the challenges of transformation. And the challenges of transformation are pretty much the same regardless of what area you're working in.

[Guy Delauney]

Are you seeing anything, Gerald, where the cities that you have represented here, whether it's through urbanists and mayors or through people with an interest in those cities where there are similar challenges that they're all facing at this point?

[Gerald Babel Sutter]

Yeah, I think most cities are struggling with mobility. It's a big topic. Most of the European cities are cities for cars, as it is the case for most cities around the world, actually. And there are different approaches, like I think the pedestrianization. What Ljubljana did, for example, is a good example for the city center, but it did not really solve the mobility problem in the city yet. But I think the positive part, and that's what keeps me running every day, is that I hear these stories of people that are making so extraordinary things happen in cities around the world. And if you start looking, you see them everywhere.

[Guy Delauney]

Now, with that said, are you excited

[Heather Hilmis Dotier]

to hear the speakers?

[Guy Delauney]

Yes. Let's get slotted into track one at this Urban Future event at Ljubljana. And that's City 7. And someone who knows all about that is Jan Kathain, not least because he lives in London, runs his own architecture practice and also a lecturer at University College London. Now, the question that's being posed in this particular track of this Urban Better Cities event is, is our obsession with city centres justified?

[Jan Kathain]

City centres are where people feel belonging. They aren't just retail. They don't just have a retail function. Town centres, city centres are also places of culture. They're places where you meet friends and where you feel belonging. And that's why we've got to invest in them. Clearly, as society changes, as social needs change, the places where we live, where we socialise, where we enjoy culture, where we work, have to change and Town centres have always been at the forefront of that change. And if we stop changing the idea of what town centres are and continuing intellectually and physically developing them, then people start to lose touch with their urban environment, they lose their sense of belonging, they become disillusioned. And a result of that is a lack of trust in democratic institutions. And this is happening all across the UK at the moment. And it is really sad to see.

[Guy Delauney]

The high street is the symbol, as you say, whether it's in London or whether it's somewhere else in the country. In the UK at least, people now think of those as places of charity shops, betting shops and branches of Costa Coffee and an awful lot of shuttered units.

[Jan Kathain]

High streets have always been places of transition. They've never stood still from the high street being a place of retail exchange. We're moving into an era where the high street is much more a place that responds to the concept of the experience economy. So as there is decline, there is all that opportunity that I see constantly. And I think there is a really bright future for high streets. High streets are accessible, high streets are inclusive, high streets are democratic. And actually high streets have a really broad appeal.

[Guy Delauney]

What's the experience in, say, Europe, in mainland Europe? What's the concept of high streets and high street regeneration here? And what are you hearing from people when you're at Urban Future about what their experiences are and sort of solutions that they're finding?

[Jan Kathain]

Clearly there are parallels. What Europe is discovering, and I think what the UK has discovered a few years ago, is that solving high streets is starting to collaborate across sectors, from communities to the public sector, to the private sector, to NGOs that operate locally, to the health service and other public services. And that by working together we can actually have a really compelling vision for town centres. I heard of a wonderful project in Wittenberg in East Germany. Retail decline has set in, but the local authority managed to proactively take ownership of ground floor uses and put amazing public provision into those, which has bled out across the whole town centre in terms of introducing new public spaces, new approaches to placemaking. And that's all come from taking ownership and starting sowing the seed in an empty retail premise. And the funny thing is it sometimes doesn't take that much to tip the balance. You get the first three actresses in, you activate the first pop up shop and others come out of the woodwork and they'll say, oh, this works for me, this is great, I can have part of my business be in public display. And there is a real benefit to that.

[Alenka Korenjak]

Better cities by rules. Break the rules and create better cities by design. If I could do this, you can too.

[Guy Delauney]

We're sliding onto the second train of this year's Urban Better Cities event. And it's one which is very close to my heart, Tactical Urbanism. Because I have known our next contributor for quite some time, Alenka Korenjak, who is the founder of Prostorozh. She's also here with her colleague Zala Velkeberg and Tactical Urbanism. Well, I think I'll leave it to Olenka, first of all, to describe what you see as Tactical Urbanism.

[Alenka Korenjak]

The name evolves, but the actions are always, I would say, a reaction to proper planning of the city is the Tactical Urbanism. And it's always a small start, how to change and make things better. And it's always a reaction. I would say you don't build a whole nest at once. You lay a twig, you leave it there, you put it to rest, and then things start to happen. No one is bothered by the twig, by the individual twig.

[Guy Delauney]

With your Tactical Urbanism, Olenka, do you see this as a series of twigs that you've laid? Because I've seen your projects here in the flesh, in Ljubljana. Small neighbourhood interventions which make a big difference to the people who live there.

[Alenka Korenjak]

Yeah, it's a tweak. And it's not always that. It looks really flashy. It can be also a bureaucratical tweak. It also can be just a celebration on the street. It doesn't need really materialization as such to move things forward. Forward.

[Guy Delauney]

What's your favorite twig that Prostoro has laid here as Tactical Urbanists in Ljubljana?

[Alenka Korenjak]

It's the waiting area that we constructed as part of our research in the largest hospital area, not just in Ljubljana, but in the whole of Slovenia. We occupied a former VIP parking area and turned it into an outdoor shelter for patients.

[Guy Delauney]

I mean, this is the whole thing, isn't it, About Tactical Urbanism is you're looking at spaces which are already there, whether they're green spaces, unused buildings, a car park, and you're finding better uses for them.

[Alenka Korenjak]

Yeah, actually, but finding also first, I think this medical institution, what we started is what Zala mentioned, is this research. So not doing it for ourselves, not doing it for beautiful Instagram photos, but doing it for people that need them the most. And at that particular location, because it was too important to be reserved just for one group.

[Sabine Mikhailescu]

Sure.

[Alenka Korenjak]

People maybe don't like the tactical intervention. It happens all the time in Tactical Urbanism. We've all been there. We hate the colors, hate the design, whatever, right? What's really important for us is that we have produced plans for this particular public spaces where you can say, okay, you hate the tactical intervention, let's renew it, let's renovate. We should make this public space better. Right? And the tactical part is just an intermittent occupancy, let's say.

[Guy Delauney]

Is it becoming easier for tactical urbanists to interact with city authorities? Are city authorities now seeing the value more of tactical urbanism?

[Alenka Korenjak]

The big debate right now in tactical urbanism is that the tools that were once, you know, considered activists are now part of the regular trade of the cities, of the authorities, which in my opinion is totally fine. But it opens up new questions. For example, where does this leave active citizens? Should they invent new tactics, new tools? Should they work with an additional layer of the city? I think this is something that we'll have to see.

[Guy Delauney]

We're sitting here in the convention center, which is on the one side you've got bejigrade neighbourhood, and on the other side you've got this enormous new construction going on at the railway station, which is going to be another kind of shopping centre. What do you make of the fact that you've got this going on with the new shopping centre over to our right, while over to the left here you have a load of space which is in many cases going unused.

[Alenka Korenjak]

E degeneration of city makers creates a monument of their own failures. We can observe the failures from the 60s on, and every generation has their own one. You know what makes me laugh with your question is the fact that I don't think we'll run out of business. Some shopping malls, some mixed use areas, some commercial centers are planned in such a bad way, without any regard for public space or for the real needs of people. That's for sure. Someone somewhere will need our revitalization knowledge. Mistakes for a lot of money.

[Guy Delauney]

Clap your hands, who cares? And if you're in a limbo, yes,

[Alenka Korenjak]

just clap your hands. Can we do it one more time?

[Guy Delauney]

Nice. The next track, Art the Urban Future Better Cities event is circularity and I suppose at least geometrically, there's a very strong connection here with what Nicolas Marchese is doing with Orange sky, which involves laundry. And of course laundry involves washing machines, which involves drums which go round. So that's pretty circular, isn't it, Nicholas?

[Nicholas Marchese]

That's it, yeah. A couple of Years ago, in 2014, my best friend Lucas and I had an idea to put two washing machines and two dryers in the back of a van with four wheels and go around and wash and dry clothes for free. And our little mission statement back then was to improve the hygiene standards of the homeless. But what we realized is that Orange sky was much more than that.

[Guy Delauney]

As we're talking about circularity, Nicholas, I want to know, how do you think your project fits into this idea that in the conference programme here, it talks about circularity as being a break from waste and business as usual?

[Nicholas Marchese]

Yes, we provide washing and laundry services. Yes, we use a lot of water. Yes, we use a lot of power to dry clothes. But actually, at the heart of what we do is humans. And as humans, we're incredibly complex, lonely, isolated, and the power to sit down and connect is sort of the most important part of our ecosystem. So, you know, circularity comes in lots of different shapes and sizes. It looks at, you know, how can we create the least amount of environmental impact in the community, but how do we actually provide healing, care and comfort to the communities that we operate in?

[Guy Delauney]

They're sitting in front of me and in a red hard hat, which helpfully has hard magic markers down the front in large letters. Why are you doing this?

[Nicholas Marchese]

Outside of Orange Sky, I'm really interested in how we can experiment, how we can use curiosity to change things. So at the Urban Futures conference today, we've been exploring red tape and human centered design. And, you know, there's a lot of obvious things in the world, and something that I'm really curious about at the moment is rules and regulations that are used as excuses not to try and. Absolutely, we need to keep people safe. But the artwork today was actually getting people to write on red tape. What is the red tape? And it was really interesting getting people to think about bureaucracy, but what is the actual bureaucracy that they're up against? And have they actually gotten curious around why it exists?

[Guy Delauney]

It looked like a crime scene by the time it finished, like somebody being outlined in chalk, but it was red chalk. There was a human shape back then.

[Heather Hilmis Dotier]

Yeah.

[Nicholas Marchese]

And human centered design, you know, this idea of, how do we design things with a human in mind? Like this idea of human centered design. Is this utopia around, like. Absolutely. Let's design something that works for the human, but if the human can't afford it, if the human isn't able to operate it, then we've completely failed as designers or architects. You know, I'm really interested in this balance between wisdom and action. And it's all well and good to have a conference for three days and talk about utopian or unicorn scenarios, but what I'M really interested in is can we create these moments where people can be inspired to try something?

[Guy Delauney]

This is Joe.

[Heather Hilmis Dotier]

APPLAUSE I'm very happy to have you on stage.

[Guy Delauney]

Let's move on to track four of the Urban Future Better Cities event. And this is Resilient Societies and how cities can evolve beyond old models, but be adaptive, connected and climate ready. And. And here to discuss it with me is Sabine Mikhailescu, who is the co founder of Dear Neighbour, which is based in Romania's capital, Bucharest.

[Sabine Mikhailescu]

Basically, what we do is we build communities and we do so because we believe that through community interventions you can have an increased quality of life and you can solve a lot of the issues that we are facing today as a society. From discrimination to radicalization to homophobia to misogyny to basically, everything that's bad under the sun can be fixed. If you gather your neighbors together and you sit at a table and break bread with them and try to do something for the neighborhood that you live in together with them, you talk about

[Guy Delauney]

the importance of getting your neighbors around the table and breaking bread, talking to each other. Are you facing a little bit of reluctance, a little bit of shy neighbor syndrome?

[Sabine Mikhailescu]

People find it a little bit too vulnerable and a little bit too cringe to put themselves out there and knock on their neighbor's door and say, hey, I've seen you around, I would like to know you better. And I think we could do cool things together, so let's grab a coffee. And I think this is one of the important parts in our work that we sit with this discomfort and we encourage the neighbors to go through these very cringy, uncomfortable processes of putting yourself out there and being consistent in their approach.

[Guy Delauney]

What do you do then? I mean, do you hold a little party? Do you hold a get together somewhere neutral? Is it one of these things where you tell everybody they've won the lottery, but they need to turn up at this place at this time?

[Sabine Mikhailescu]

Actually, they come to us because they have to apply, apply for the program. So it's, we already have one partner in the community who wants to change things for the better. And from then it's just a process of getting more people on board. And we go to them and we help them gather these people around by telling them, okay, what is the way you envision your community in 15, 20 years, 50 years?

[Guy Delauney]

For the rather Dear Neighbors in other

[Sabine Mikhailescu]

European cities, obviously there's a lot of community programs and that's amazing because grassroots movements are the ones driving the change. But what I think we're doing uniquely is doing this at scale. We have 100 communities in Romania and this methodology works. And we can implement like, we can deploy it in whichever city we need to, as opposed to the very local initiatives that, I don't know, maybe some people gathered in a neighborhood in Paris because they needed bark for their children and they built that park and that's the only thing that they're doing. So what we're trying to do is to do this at scale, to connect the communities of neighbors among them so for them to learn from each other and also to make sure that we equip them with the skills in order for them to be sustainable even after they leave our program.

[Guy Delauney]

Because this means all the time you're not getting people trying to start from nothing and reinvent the wheel. You know how to do it. You've presumably got templates.

[Sabine Mikhailescu]

Yeah, exactly. We have templates, we have guides. But regardless, we work with each community according to their needs.

[Guy Delauney]

Now, fresh from a rapturous reception on the main stage here at the Urban Future Better Cities event, is the mayor of Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, Heather Hilmis Dotier. And I thought we could talk, Heather, about innovation in governance because that's track five of this year's event. What does that mean to you?

[Heather Hilmis Dotier]

It means that you are always trying to find new solutions to the challenges in our city to be innovative and work with the their society on trying to do things better.

[Guy Delauney]

And we're talking about, as the conference programme puts it, city administration as agents of change.

[Heather Hilmis Dotier]

I think we are absolutely agents of change and change happens in cities. Cities change the world. They have to be innovative, progressive and good places for people to live in. And in my city we have been changing so much. So I really think that the people in Reykjavik think of the city as the city council, as people that are working for change. Maybe too much change sometimes because we have been progressing because we needed that, because we were a little bit old fashioned car city. So we are now trying to be more dense, more lively, more music and more food. And. And we have been changing a lot and it was important and it is important to continue on that road and not stop.

[Guy Delauney]

You mentioned that Icelandic people can be very attached to their cars. But I know that you're also very concerned to have active mobility, reliable public transport and an equally crucial element which I think also sometimes gets forgotten in all of this, is to have affordable and well located homes. How are you achieving all of these goals and how are the people reacting to your initiatives to do this?

[Heather Hilmis Dotier]

This is one of the fights that we are having. And people think maybe we are driving this change too fast. But not the majority of the people. The majority of the people are happy with it and want a lively and a beautiful city where you can walk and sit down and, and interact with others to have this like affordable housing everywhere. Not only social, like affordable. You can buy a part of your house, you're a student, you're elderly, disabled people, you know all that. So all our cities are accessible. And we are now also introducing the bus transit line to connect all those districts together. So even though we are in a different parts of the city that, that we all are in the same, so we feel like we can travel between and we belong to the same city.

[Guy Delauney]

How easy do you find it is to get this message across to people in Reykjavik, bearing in mind presumably there are some interest groups who aren't particularly happy about the steps that you're taking.

[Heather Hilmis Dotier]

The hard thing for us maybe is that those who own the newspapers are not quite happy with us. But of course, wheat I as a city we are always going out with information. As politicians, we have to tell people what we are doing, why we are doing it. That is one of the things I talk strongly about, that we talk about why. Why are you changing the street? Why are you changing the policy? Like what is it? That is the end goal. Because if you just see someone who wants to change your street and you don't know why, it's just annoying. And then we just go to the vote and we have been voted over and over again and I hope that that will continue because people feel that the city is progressive and it's like in the right direction.

[Guy Delauney]

We're moving on to the final track of this year's Urban Future Better Cities event here in Ljubljana. And it's change communications, which is extraordinarily important because you can only achieve change if you communicate it properly and talk about that with me, I have Noorhan Bassam, who is the author of the Gendered City and the CEO of the organization of the same name.

[Noorhan Bassam]

I realized that your city is not gender neutral. Your city has a gender and it's typically a white, heteronormative, patriarchal, able bodied male. I realized that my male friends, colleagues, they don't go in the same restrictions I do. Yeah, I called myself the feminist urbanist. And it's all. It all started with one question. I think the whole book and organization, it is how cities keep failing women.

[Guy Delauney]

I lived in Cambodia for quite a number of years and I remember there was a statistic there that if a school had decent toilets, girls were more likely to go and get an education. So something as simple as installing a toilet could be a life changing thing.

[Noorhan Bassam]

Totally. I always say feminist urbanism is not about grand scheme of plans and this master plans, but it's really about the small things, the systemic inequality, something like toilets actually always come up. Still in all parts of the world, a park lacks clean public sanitation. This is when limitations to even mothers and girls to enjoy picnics for longer times. So it is really the small things. Sometimes it's an obvious exit sign in a park, sometimes it's really a small illumination in certain area or a better design for an underpass makes it or breaks it on how you walk and navigate your city.

[Guy Delauney]

Let's get on to the communications aspect of it. We've seen city mayors in particular driving a lot of change and recently, particularly recently, coming up against a lot of resistance that's driven by disinformation. So I'm thinking about here, ultra low emission zones, low traffic neighbourhoods. The way in which those things are presented certainly in certain quarters is the authorities are trying to take something away from you. Now what sort of mindset does this require of the people who want to implement the change if they wanted to be viewed in a positive light? And for people to want that change and to want to work with that change.

[Noorhan Bassam]

I'm actually part of the active transport line. They are trying to develop guidelines and trying to look at things differently. And we need to change even how we are branding our cities and how it can definitely benefit the environment because we know that it is more freedom to be using active transport or walking or just lingering and resting.

[Guy Delauney]

Walking and riding my bike and feeling safe. Walking and riding my bike feels like a gain that that I'm gaining those things rather than I'm losing the possibility to drive a car in this space or park a car in this particular location. Are the people who want to make those changes in our cities though communicating that in the right way?

[Noorhan Bassam]

I think there can be a better job done there. Personally. I used to drive a car in some contexts and when I moved to Amsterdam it was pretty push to drive my bike. Being actually in a car is way more problematic than anything else. So I love that they pushed me actually to bike and now I see the freedom and the autonomy I have in the agency. But maybe we can do better in city branding again from this human centered perspective rather than what has been for the longest the branding indices were.

[Guy Delauney]

And that just about wraps it up for this year's edition of the Urban Better Cities event. The crew are now in full on party mode, as you can hear, and the conversations will be going on late into the evening. But perhaps the connections which people have made here will have an enduring legacy in terms of how our cities look in the future.

[Andrew Tuck]

And that's all for this week's edition of the Urbanist. You can follow us for new episodes of the show every week. And you can subscribe to Monocle magazine for reports on all things design, architecture and urbanism, too. Just visit monocle.com and my thanks to the production and editing duo this week of Guy Delaunay and David Stevens. I'm Andrew Tuck. Goodbye and thank you for listening, City Lovers.