The Urbanist is a weekly radio programme produced by Monocle 24, a speech-based internet station based at Midori House in London. Launched in October 2011 alongside the station's debut, it has run for over a decade, initially as a 50-minute show before shortening to 30 minutes in 2015. Hosted primarily by Monocle editor Andrew Tuck, it targets city mayors, urban planners and architects with discussions on urban design, infrastructure and policy.
The programme examines global city challenges through interviews and on-location reports. Recent episodes cover New York's housing co-ops and congestion mapping, San Francisco's post-pandemic downtown recovery, Melbourne's new Metro Tunnel, and preservation efforts in Buffalo and Vienna. "Tall Stories" segments spotlight buildings like Bucharest's Casa Vintilă Brătianu or Tallinn's Song Festival Grounds, while other features address tree-planting in Sierra Leone's Freetown, worker housing in Saudi Arabia, and public art in Abu Dhabi.
Monocle 24, which grew from a 2008 podcast with 250,000 monthly downloads, now sees 2.5 million monthly programme downloads and a weekly listenership of about one million, mostly via apps. The Urbanist marked its 10th anniversary in 2021 with retrospectives on urbanism's evolution. Though Monocle maintains bureaux in cities including New York, the show remains London-centric, offering European listeners detached insights into worldwide urban shifts—from historic restorations to debates on density and sustainability—without prescriptive solutions.