Challenger Cities EP66: Urbanism Without the Excuses with Mikael Colville-Andersen

In this episode of Challenger Cities, Iain Montgomery is joined by urban designer, filmmaker, and author Mikael Colville-Andersen for a wide-ranging conversation about why cities so often know what works, yet struggle to act on it.

We start with train stations and the importance of arrival, before moving through cycling, design, experimentation, Nordic urbanism, and finally Mikael’s recent work in Ukraine, where urbanism takes on a very different meaning.

We cover:

• Why train stations are still one of the clearest signals of a city’s confidence and priorities
• What cities lose when arrival becomes a throughput problem rather than a civic moment
• Why Copenhagen doesn’t have “cyclists,” only people on bikes
• How removing friction works better than persuading or moralising
• Why design creates behaviour, and why blaming people misses the point
• Paris as an example of what happens when infrastructure forces constant negotiation
• The limits of theory, optimisation, and data-heavy urbanism
• Why pilot projects shouldn’t be scary, and how fear quietly paralyses cities
• How Copenhagen built momentum by testing ideas quickly and publicly
• What the Nordics get right, not as a model to copy, but as a cultural operating system
• Democratic urbanism and designing cities for the five-year-old and the ninety-year-old
• Trust as an overlooked form of infrastructure
• Mikael’s work in Ukraine, where benches, trees, and shade become “urbanism as medicine”
• What peacetime cities should learn from urban interventions built under air-raid sirens
• A provocation: what would happen if one city simply did everything it already knows to be right?