Electric, productive, multifaceted, and beautiful, the city has always represented one of humankind’s greatest achievements. And today, for the first time in history, most people live in cities. The quality of these spaces will determine the quality of people’s lives and the best future that we can imagine is one in which our cities thrive. This means we should care a lot about how we build our urban spaces.
There is a tension though at the heart of thinking about how to create better cities. Any attempt to imagine what our cities will look like in the future relies on planners with ideas for how things should develop. However, some of the most beloved cities in the world—like London, New York, and Shanghai—grew organically, long before urban planning emerged as a modern discipline. In contrast, many of the cities shaped predominantly by planners have struggled to foster the same level of human flourishing.
This is not to suggest that a “return” to a world without planning would be either possible or preferable. But, we need to find a better approach than what is currently practiced. We are inspired by modern cities that experienced most of their growth following urban planning’s introduction like Singapore and Tokyo. These cities show that there is a way to combine the wisdom of organic growth with the insights of urban planning to create places that effectively blend the old and the new.
The aim of Urban Progress is to identify and promote ideas that can transform urban planning and policy for the better and help us build the next generation of thriving cities.
We are based in Toronto and we care deeply about actionable ideas. So, the majority of our articles deal in some way with ideas that would benefit this place. At the same time though we think that this city represents a unique test bed for what the future of urban progress might look like. Toronto is the fastest growing city in North America while at the same time suffering from the application of some of the worst ideas that emerged at the early stages of urban planning - including one of the largest missing middle problems of any city in the world. We think any solutions discovered here will have a lot to teach us everywhere else.
Cities are places of activity, growth, and change.The ideas we publish should be directly tied to real transformation. Sometimes that means detailed policy proposals, other times action can be as simple as adopting a particular mindset or understanding more about an urban environment. But, no matter what, we always seek practical takeaways.
Cities are complex organisms. The current approach to ‘managing’ them and addressing problems is to create rules of similar complexity. We believe that this is the wrong way to consider the problem. Instead we look for clear ideas that can cut through noise - not add to it.
One of the most fun things about cities is the novelty of ideas and culture that they generate. What is new does not always work out but it is essential if we want to transform things for the better. We want to be a place that nurtures innovative approaches that have a chance to make a real difference.
Cities arrive at their patterns of life through the interaction of the citizens that live there. This order is beautiful, fecund, and ultimately emergent. No one person can decide what it will look like. We have ideas for how our publication will develop but we want to see what works best - which patterns repeat - and then let that work thrive rather than hold it back.
We unapologetically imagine cities with more people, more energy, and more dynamism. We recognise that there are real challenges associated with this but we ultimately identify with the YIMBY movement and believe places like Hong Kong and New York show that the tradeoffs that come from the growth of cities are more than worth it.
