Iain Montgomery joined as a WRLDCTY Fellow in 2025 and has been hosting rich and candid conversations with peer Fellows - including this one with our co-founder, Anupam Yog about conscious cities, experience improvement districts (XIDs) and the need for empathy and connection for the urban world to make good on its promise of enhancing human potential.
Strategy, insight and innovation for companies and cities to become more interestingly less wrong.
The world doesn’t need another ‘smart city', it needs more conscious ones. This week on Challenger Cities, I'm back with the WRLDCTY fellows and Anupam Yog, who might just be the first person to convince me that mindfulness belongs in urban planning. We primarily talk about two very different places, Singapore and Ramsgate, and what they share; a sense that towns and cities, like people, sometimes need to stop performing and just breathe. Anupam’s framing of the Conscious City really stuck with me, especially the bit about “don’t just do something, sit there”. Because in a world obsessed with metrics, what most institutions, be they municipal bodies or corporate entities, skip over is the simplest act of research ... observation. Lots of people want their city to be more like Singapore, understandably so, but I think this conversation is quite good for how our cities can understand what makes it what it is, what we can be inspired by, what we can steal or copy and how we can focus on being unique to our own context too. That reframing of "live, work, play" to "live, move, rest" btw ... absolute gold.
WRLDCTY Iain Montgomery BRILLIANTLY SAID🙌👌👏🙏💚✊🤠✅