The Freewheeling Podcast

Every European city that has taken space back from cars seems to follow the same script: a political leader announces a scheme, all hell breaks loose, the leader receives death threats, and then when the scheme is built everyone loves it and the leader is re-elected with an increased majority.
Milan is trying a different script.
My guest this week is Demetrio Scopelliti, who leads Piazze Aperte (Open Squares) for the City of Milan. Rather than announcing schemes, the city runs open calls asking communities which streets and squares they would like reclaimed. Projects are chosen for local consensus, ambition and feasibility, co-designed with residents, and implemented in weeks using traffic paint, planters, benches and ping pong tables.
Demetrio describes himself as like Robin Hood: taking space from cars to give back to people.
In today’s episode we discuss why tactical urbanism enables a city to be more radical, the fact that he welcomes conflict as an essential part of change and his advice to a city that thinks it might work in Milan but would never work here…

It sounds impossibly ambitious: a team of volunteers is seeking to build a brand new, million-person city on farmland in Suffolk.
The scale of what they have in mind is breathtaking, but they’re deadly serious.
Britain’s failed to hit its housing targets for decades, with the result that young people are not just priced out of home-ownership but even home-occupation.
Something must be done, so why not do something common in many other countries (and, once upon a time, here) and just… build a new city.
Steve McAdam is the Chief Masterplanner for Forest City 1. Given he’s my guest on the Freewheeling Podcast, you won’t be surprised to learn that the city he has in mind is anchored in sustainable transport: walkable, bikeable, with a rail spine and mass transit throughout. And, as you can tell from the name, lots of trees and nature.
Take a listen to the extraordinary story of how you build a brand new city.

One in five Swiss journeys are made using Digital Pay-As-You-Go, a system that uses your phone location to track your journeys and automatically charge you the cheapest fare for the journeys you make.
This offers the benefits of Contactless - plus many more.
Yet in the UK, we’re obsessed with “London-style” ticketing.
In today’s podcast episode, I’m interviewed by my co-host Katie-Lee English on why it’s time to move beyond Contactless cards.

Transport finds innovation hard. It is fiendishly complex, but the. Connected Places Catapult is trying to help people navigate their way through it. In this Interchat, Erika Lewis, the Catapult’s CEO, tells me how they try to connect an incredibly challenging sector - and how her career history in complex sectors has helped her do that.
Oh, and she tells me precisely what a Catapult is as well!
Interchats are a series of short conversations recorded on the conference floor at Interchange 26 in Manchester.

Andrew Browning is the founder and CEO of Schemeflow, an AI startup. Last week, we spoke about Combined Authorities; this week it’s AI.
He created his business just weeks before the launch of ChatGPT, so has been at the heart of the AI revolution, working both in London and Silicon Valley.
We discuss the willingness of the transport sector to adopt AI, what the AI tech bros are actually like from someone who knows them personally, and whether or not AI is going to create a jobs apocalypse. Spoiler on the last point: neither of us this think it will, net - but there’ll be big change.