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Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future

Auteur(s): Douglas Stuart McDaniel
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 Welcome to Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future. I’m Douglas Stuart McDaniel—author, innovation veteran, and accidental urbanist—exploring the forces shaping the cities of tomorrow. It’s not just a conversation—it’s a call to action. Here, we challenge assumptions, explore bold ideas, and rethink what cities can be—both now and in the future.

multiversethinking.substack.comDouglas Stuart McDaniel Science
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  • Unearthing the Future

    Unearthing the Future
    Aug 12 2025
    Some places feel like they’ve been waiting for you. Others barely tolerate your presence, indifferent to your wonder. I’ve traveled enough—across continents, cultures, and climates—to know the difference. I’ve stood on volcanic cliffs in the Aegean, wandered the souks of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, traced the edges of fjords and desert plateaus, and walked through cities that practically begged to be admired. But admiration isn’t the same as belonging. Most places, no matter how beautiful, remind you that you’re just passing through.But then there are the rare ones, like here in Le Périgord Noir, that refuse to play that game. They don’t care if you’re ready. They just are. And if you’re lucky, they let you feel it—the hum of the earth beneath your feet, the mineral memory in the air, the collapse of centuries into a single breath.The Dordogne valley caught me off guard in a way I didn’t expect. In some respects, it echoes my once-familiar mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee—not in landscape alone, but in something deeper, more atmospheric. The Blue Ridge and Smoky Mountains hold you close with a soft, green hush, like an old song you half-remember. Their beauty is familiar, almost familial—humid, fragrant, and gently worn.But here, in Le Périgord Noir, the feeling turns—earthier, older, more elemental. And not just geologically, but civilizationally. This is a land that remembers. Its caves still cradle the ochre-stained breath of Paleolithic hands, and the hills carry the weight of Roman roads, templar and medieval fortresses, and hamlets both vanished and persistent. Time doesn't layer here—it seeps, settles, seeps forth again. You can feel it in the chill that clings to the stone walls of a half-collapsed barn in which a wild duck nurses her eggs, in the way the path bends not for efficiency but because it always has.The streams smell of limestone and leaf rot, edged with the scent of mushroom caps and waterlogged lichen. Fungi cling to the bases of black oaks, and the sun doesn’t pour through the trees so much as filter—dim, precise, like a cathedral’s light catching dust motes in mid-air. Spruce needles mix with smoke from a distant chimney. Every breath reminds you: something ancient is still alive here.They call it Noir for a reason—not just the color of the soil or the shade of the truffles hidden beneath it, but for the quality of the light itself. The darkness gathers in the understory, where ferns and moss curl low and quiet, and tree trunks rise like stone pillars out of shadow. It’s a darkness that feels cultivated, patient. Above, the canopy breaks open in sudden, holy shafts—sunlight not as warmth, but as revelation. The contrast plays tricks on your sense of depth, as if the forest is folding in on itself, layering time and silence. You walk through it as if trespassing in a forgotten prayer.I’d come to the Dordogne to spend the week with my friend, Olivier Pron—artist, world-builder, philosopher by accident and craftsman by blood—the fire already lit, the wine already breathing as we settled in to discuss a new project. The timeless, family home– built around a medieval bread oven–was perched quietly on land that had been occupied without interruption for half a million years, and it was already speaking to me.The hamlet where Olivier’s family farm sits consists of about five houses, and it isn’t marked by signage or ceremony. It’s not a destination. It’s a slow-breathing fold in the land, tucked just 900 meters from the glittering patience of the Dordogne River. A narrow and crooked paved path winds you into it, though to call it a “road” is already generous. More like a stone-lined vein leading you to the marrow of something older than memory.The first thing you notice is the minerality—a texture in the air, underfoot, in the bones of the buildings. The soil here resists. Orchards struggle. Fruit trees lean slightly off-axis like they’ve grown wise to disappointment. This is no Eden. The land doesn’t yield sweetness easily. But that’s not the point. This isn’t a place of abundance—it’s a place of resilience. The alluvial soils from the Lentinol—a nearby stream that swells and spills into a 100-year-old lake when it rains too hard—remind you that even modest water remembers its path.Five centuries ago, this stream—one that today barely warrants a name on a map—powered eight mills. You don’t need a cathedral to anchor a civilization. Sometimes a mill is enough.And while most of the world has moved on to stainless steel and silicon chips, Le Périgord Noir never quite signed the contract. The rhythms here are older, rooted in muscle, weather, and inheritance. Goat herders still walk the same limestone trails their grandfathers did, guiding shaggy-haired chèvres du Massif Central—hardy climbers with amber eyes and a taste for steep, unforgiving terrain. The sheep—mostly ...
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    27 min
  • Citizen One: E12 - Fault Lines of Feeling

    Citizen One: E12 - Fault Lines of Feeling
    Jul 15 2025

    In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, host Douglas Stuart McDaniel speaks with architect and urbanist Marcella del Signore about her groundbreaking exhibition Emotional Geographies of the Mediterranean, currently featured in the Italian Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.

    Associate Professor and Director of the MS in Architecture and Urban Design program at the New York Institute of Technology and a Founder and Principal of X-Topia, Marcella discusses how emotion—too often overlooked in data-driven design—is in fact central to how we perceive, inhabit, and construct space. Her project combines sensorial mapping, social media sentiment analysis, soundscapes, and walking interviews to chart the emotional layers of Mediterranean coastal cities.

    Together, Doug and Marcella explore the implications of mapping affective experience in a region shaped by migration, climate crisis, and cultural rupture. The conversation challenges the limitations of Human-Centered Design, proposing instead a shift toward relational-centered urbanism—one grounded in multiplicity, memory, and spatial justice.

    “Each image, each caption, becomes a subjective map,” Marcella explains. “And when we read them collectively, we begin to see how people feel their way through space.”

    Concepts like the emotional city or empathetic urbanism are no longer fringe or theoretical indulgences, Doug notes—they are simply new datasets we’ve long neglected.

    “They’re not woke or woo,” he said, “they’re just new data sets we hadn’t really considered before—just as valid, just as measurable.”

    Marcella agreed, emphasizing that emotions, sensory input, and embodied experiences are not intangible abstractions but critical indicators of spatial justice, cognitive well-being, and urban livability. This exchange crystallized a shift in discourse: from seeing affect as anecdotal or ornamental, to recognizing it as infrastructural—a vital layer of urban knowledge that expands how we assess, design, and care for cities.

    In the conversation, the pair critiques dominant architectural practices as "archetype factories"—systems that replicate reductive models of the “user” based on algorithmic patterns, market typologies, and cultural assumptions.

    These models often flatten human diversity into performative proxies, producing cities that optimize for efficiency rather than experience. In contrast, her work across neurourbanism, sensorial urbanism, and what she calls emotional urbanism seeks to reclaim space as a cognitive and affective ecology.

    Drawing on neuroscience, environmental psychology, and data-driven mapping of affective responses, she challenges the discipline to move beyond consensus and standardization toward architectures of multiplicity, memory, and perception. “We design not just with data,” she notes, “but with grief, with joy, with friction.” It’s a call to reimagine urbanism not as a delivery mechanism for normative users, but as an open-ended dialogue with the invisible infrastructures of emotion.

    From post-Katrina New Orleans to her work in Latin America, in the GCC region and Europe, Marcella’s practice asks us to rethink what it means to map, to know, and to study the emotional geography of the city.

    X-Topia is Marcella del Signore’s interdisciplinary design and research practice operating at the intersection of architecture, urban design, landscape, and emerging technologies. With offices in New York, Rio de Janeiro, Rome, and soon Riyadh, X-Topia blends academic research, public interest design, and speculative urbanism into a hybrid consultancy model.

    Founded during her time in post-Katrina New Orleans—where she also taught at Tulane for a decade—X-Topia initially focused on urban regeneration and resilience. Over time, it evolved into a platform for advancing sensorial and neurourbanist methods, applying them to both physical master plans and digital user journeys.



    This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit multiversethinking.substack.com
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    1 h et 1 min
  • Citizen One E14: Heraclitus in the City

    Citizen One E14: Heraclitus in the City
    Jul 8 2025
    In this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, an urbanNext original podcast series, I’m joined once again by author, architect, and urban theorist Ioanna Piniara. In Part 2 of our conversation, we dive into the politics of privacy, the afterlife of European modernism, and the spatial logic of neoliberalism. Her new book, We Have Never Been Private: The Housing Project in Neoliberal Europe (Actar Publishers), interrogates the fiction of privacy—not as a universal right, but as a spatial ideology rooted in segregation, individualization, and the instrumentalization of housing as a tool of economic control.Ioanna draws from the Heraclitean tradition of Greek philosophy, where opposing forces are not in conflict but in constant dialogue—each necessary to produce order and transformation. In her view, privacy and collectivity are not binaries to be resolved but dual forces to be designed together. When neoliberal systems elevate privacy as an isolated good, it collapses under its own weight. To reclaim its meaning, she argues, we must reintroduce the collective—not as its opposite, but as its condition. Like Heraclitus’s ever-changing river, the urban realm must balance and invite these tensions to shape a more just and livable order.In Part 1, we examined how the Barbican Estate in London and Berlin’s IBA ’84/’87 subtly codified new forms of social exclusion through architectural language, planning rhetoric, and the cultural myths of middle-class subjectivity. In Part 2, our conversation turns to Athens—and what emerges is a deeply layered portrait of a city caught between its Cold War reconstruction fantasies and its austerity-ravaged present.In this episode, we begin with Ioanna’s description of the Greek antiparochí system, which, beginning in the 1920s, offered a unique response to Athens’s housing crisis. Rather than build public housing, the government enabled private landowners to partner with developers: in exchange for their plots, owners received apartments in the newly built polykatoikíes—multi-story apartment blocks—while the rest were sold. This land-for-flats model fueled rapid urban growth, helped absorb waves of refugees and rural migrants, and shaped Athens into the dense, concrete city we know today. While it succeeded in expanding housing access, it also erased older neighborhoods and disrupted the city’s architectural continuity.Next, we turn to what is now known as One Athens, a luxury residential complex nestled at the foot of Lycabettus Hill—today a gleaming symbol of exclusivity, but originally the headquarters of Doxiadis Associates, one of the most influential planning firms in postwar Greece. Designed in 1957 by the renowned architect Constantinos Doxiadis and completed in 1971, the modernist complex embodied a bold new vision for Athens, steeped in the ideals of technocratic progress and spatial order. Backed in part by Marshall Plan funding, Doxiadis’s work translated American postwar values—suburbanization, private ownership, and efficient planning—into a Greek urban context. It was modernism not just as style, but as ideology.When the offices were vacated in the late 1990s and finally redeveloped in 2014, the transformation marked a dramatic shift. The site’s reinvention as One Athens introduced a new residential scale and typology into a city long shaped by the denser, more collective ‘polykatoikia’ apartment blocks. Once a hub of architectural experimentation, it was rebranded as a walled sanctuary of privilege—its rooftop pools and biometric gates a far cry from the postwar ethos of public-minded reconstruction. In that metamorphosis—from Cold War idealism to speculative real estate—we glimpse the full arc of postwar ambition collapsing into neoliberal exclusion.But Ioanna doesn’t stop there. She draws our attention to Kesarianí, a neighborhood forged in the crucible of refugee displacement and wartime trauma. Here, amid the grid of the Trigono settlement blocks, a different story unfolds—one of collective endurance, mutual support, and what she calls "housing as a resilient commons." These low-rise units, often dismissed in the official discourse of planning, have survived decades of political neglect, economic instability, and bureaucratic invisibility.Rather than being “upgraded” into luxury condos or hollowed out by speculation, the Trigono blocks remain socially vital, thanks in large part to informal solidarities, shared routines, and memory-based place-making. As we discuss in the episode, they challenge the very criteria by which we judge “successful” housing—inviting us to rethink how value is assigned, how privacy is practiced, and how architectural meaning is sustained outside the marketplace.Ioanna’s work illuminates a crucial tension at the heart of contemporary urbanism: the tension between spaces that produce isolated consumers, and those that nurture embedded citizens. What ...
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    1 h et 1 min
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