Postcards from the Future

POSTCARD FROM UTRECHT: Healthier living and the AoU Congress

July 2025July 2025

Spending six days in the Netherlands to attend the Academy of Urbanism Congress in the Dutch city of Utrecht in June brought home the huge benefits from sustained public investment in creating connected cities and healthy neighbourhoods. Revisiting Amersfoort, Utrecht and Rotterdam before ending up in Amsterdam showed how much could be achieved over a…

POSTCARD FROM KERALA AND TAMIL NADU: What future for mid-sized cities?

May 2025July 2025

Travelling around Southern India in February 2025, which was a pleasant break from gloomy England, I was struck by the visible transformation since our previous Indian Urban Futures conference in Tirunelveli and Chennai back in 2019. Streets were cleaner, rural road surfaces have been upgraded, and new intercity highways have opened with imposing flyovers. Forests…

Postcard From Reggio Emilia: Wellbeing and economic growth through cooperation

February 2025July 2025

Reggio Emilia stands out as a city with institutions that secure high levels of cooperation and wellbeing. Along with other cities in Emilia Romagna it provides inspiration for how to transform a city to meet the needs of all.

POSTCARD FROM BOLOGNA, ITALY: learning from a modern renaissance

June 2023July 2025

Returning to Northern Italy by rail in early April 2023 for a ten day stay in Bologna, my partner Esther and I were struck by how well everything now seemed to work. Whereas both our governments appear out of touch, Italian cities have had enough autonomy to create great places to live and work, while…

Postcard from Trieste, Italy

November 2022July 2025

Visiting the peripheral Italian city of Trieste for the first time to assess it for the Academy of Urbanism’s Great City Award, I was glad to come across travel writer Jan Morris’s final book, which she titled memorably Trieste and the meaning of nowhere. Located on a spit which juts out into the Adriatic on…

Postcard from the West Coast of the US: Providing housing (5/5)

March 2020July 2025

Providing housing In our travels from Vancouver to Palo Alto we were appalled by the shortages of affordable housing, and the number of people sleeping on the streets. Despite, and possible because of, higher salaries along the West Coast, housing is generally as unaffordable as in London. But the extremes are even more noticeable, as…

Postcard from the West Coast of the US: Connecting places (4/5)

January 2020July 2025

Connecting places In our three weeks of travelling between Vancouver in Canada and Palo Alto in Northern California we set out to experience a range of types of transport. Transport systems not only shape the character of cities, and affect how well communities work together, but they also have measurable impacts on pollution and…

Postcard from the West Coast of the US: Growing intelligent/smarter cities (3/5)

January 2020July 2025

Growing intelligent or smarter cities One city that offers a glimpse of a better future is Portland Oregon, which is widely known among urbanists for pioneering the principles of ‘Smart Growth’. I was particularly keen to return to Portland to see how it had developed since I visited it fifteen years earlier, since when…

Postcard from the West Coast of the US: Fostering innovation (2/5)

January 2020July 2025

Fostering innovation and new work This is the second set of impressions from a three week return visit to California and the North American West Coast in which my partner Esther and I travelled from Vancouver in British Columbia to Palo Alto in Northern California, a distance of a thousand miles. This one deals…

Postcard from the West Coast of the US: Growing good cities (1/5)

December 2019July 2025

Growing good cities The latest in my Postcards From the Future, which now number over 40, deal with the links between technological change, urban growth, and human wellbeing. My journey from Vancouver in British Columbia on the West of Canada to Palo Alto South of San Francisco in California took in some of the…

Postcard from Sarajevo

August 2019July 2025

Moving to a market economy and sharing land value uplift Returning to Sarajevo for a research conference almost fifty years after I had worked there as a management consultant for McKinsey and Company raised some fundamental questions over how the countries of Central and Eastern Europe should use their recently won ‘freedoms’ to build […]

Postcard from Dublin

July 2019July 2025

Balancing diverse objectives One of the delights of Ireland is the enjoyable conversation and gossip. It was even one of the four defining features of Dublin’s shortlisted bid to be World City of Design. But talk is changing, as Dublin has become part of the global economy, while the former Docklands is like a…

Postcard from Hangzhou and Shanghai

April 2018July 2025

Transforming Megacities A week in China as guest of the Bluetown/Greentown Group provided an exceptional opportunity to reflect on why China has been so successful in recent years and where its cities are going. Commissioned to give a presentation on Smart New Towns to a conference of 300 of the Group’s 20,000 employees enabled…

Postcard from Grenoble

December 2017July 2025

Bridging the gaps Three days in the historic university town of Grenoble with a group of academics, council leaders and others from Oxford was a truly memorable experience. The colloquium also provided a fantastic opportunity to consider what makes a medium-sized city ‘great’, and to learn from their pioneering LIFE programme about effective cross-disciplinary…

Postcard from Aarhus

October 2017July 2025

Developing a cultured and sustainable city Returning to London from the Academy of Urbanism’s superb Congress in Aarhus, Denmark’s Second City in a country the size of Scotland, I realised I had not seen a beggar, a fat person or any litter for six days. Prices may be twice as high as in the UK,…