Have you ever felt how different cities feel, look, and smell at night? How everything is seems to be so different than during the day… having organised punk rock concerts and worked in a club myself during my teenage and student years, I had many touchpoints with the nighttime economy from early on. You might think now of all the clubs and bars… yes, they are part of that, but there is much more to it: workers in culture, logistics, health care, communication, and many more.

In today’s episode, I FINALLY have Simone d’Antonio on the show. Simone is based in Rome, Italy, and you may have come across Simone’s name at some point. Because he’s a familiar face in urban innovation circles, both in Europe and worldwide.

Currently, he is working with 10 cities on their nighttime policies and activities (find out more about the Cities After Dark URBACT Network here), and it was high time to connect online

In our conversation, he convinced me that working on nighttime policies is more than hanging out in bars…

Tune in to find out why the night doesn’t only belong to lovers, as Patti Smith once claimed, but to everyone.

Tune in to find out:

• What if the night-time economy was about care, culture, and community, not just clubs and bars
• Why cities at night are fighting a quiet war against the sofa and the apps on your phone
• Why the right to the city should be a 24/7 thing
• Why Naples might be the northernmost city of the Global South
• How urban nightlife differs depending on cultures, geographies and climates.

Almost every city has them - spaces and places that feel like they’re waiting. Waiting to be reawakened, reimagined, and reconnected to the people around them. Too often, though, that reawakening follows a predictable script: maximise economic return, build apartments, squeeze in shops, add a parking lot. Little thought is given to anything beyond profit.

That’s exactly why I loved hearing Alenka Korenjak and Zala Velkavrh from Prostorož (a not-for-profit urban design agency from Ljubljana/Slovenia) speak about “unloved” places - because it shifts the lens. It’s not just about return on investment, but about how people relate to space, how public life can be cultivated, and how cities can become more liveable, more layered, more human.

So when I spent a few weeks in Klagenfurt, it was high time to jump over the Karawanken Mountains to Ljubljana and visit the Prostorož studio in person on a Friday afternoon in May 2025.

Further info:

• More on Prostorož: https://www.prostoroz.org
• Alenka, Zala and Johannes on LinkedIn
• Cities Reimagined on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/citiesreimagined/
• The book I mentioned in the show: Vocabularies for an Urbanising Planet: Theory Buidling through Comparison - https://birkhauser.com/en/book/9783035623031

Hi and welcome back to the first episode of season 3 of the Cities Reimagined Podcast.

To kick things off, I’m joined by Donagh Horgan — a social designer, researcher, and all-round urban thinker who’s doing some pretty exciting work at the intersection of placemaking and tourism. Donagh is based between Ireland and the Netherlands, where he leads the Urban Leisure & Tourism Lab at Inholland University. He’s also a lecturer at Erasmus University Rotterdam and works with cities around the world to make them more inclusive, creative, and resilient.

In this episode, we dive into the changing role of tourism in our cities. Urban tourism exploded after the 2008 financial crisis — bringing in money, but also creating real tensions: rising rents, disappearing housing, and a sense of alienation for many local communities. Together with Donagh, we explore how regenerative tourism might offer a way forward — one that puts local people, stories, and places at the centre. We talk about reimagining tourism as something that can give back rather than just take, and how we might start thinking about cities as ecosystems again, rather than playgrounds for capital.

Donagh popped by my apartment while in Vienna and we had a great conversation — I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed recording it.