The Grand Challengers Podcast

83 Episodes

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#72 - Joshua Harrison: The action-inaction dilemma, fire gardens and cities that appreciate

2026-10-2601:46:55

We have known how to fix most of our environmental problems for decades. So why do we keep not doing it? Joshua Harrison calls it the action-inaction dilemma. As Director of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure at UC Santa Cruz and co-founder of the New York green infrastructure company Leaf Island, he works where art, ecology and systems strategy meet. His argument is that the gap is no longer science or technology. It is what we value. We talk about why insurers spend so little on ...

#71 - Jennifer Koster: Resilience is the new luxury, for both built and human infrastructure

2026-09-2801:41:31

What if the most important infrastructure in any building is the people inside it? Jennifer Koster has spent more than 25 years building companies across tech, construction and regenerative development. Along the way she reached a conclusion most engineers never get to: humans are a system too, and we need our own infrastructure to function properly. In this episode we explore both sides of that coin, the built infrastructure and the human one. For practitioners, Jennifer explains...

#70 - Tim D. Fletcher: The permeable engineer, saving a stream with its catchment and tanks for platypus

2026-09-0701:54:40

Rain falls on a suburb. It hits roofs, driveways and roads, and within minutes it is in the local creek, running high enough to flood the burrows where baby platypus are sheltering. They can swim, but they still need to breathe. A few dry weeks later the same creek is too shallow for an adult to move through safely. Tim Fletcher has spent his career in the space between those two extremes. Tim is Professor of Urban Ecohydrology at the University of Melbourne and heads the Waterway Ecosystem R...

#69 - Silvia Oppliger: Switzerland's sponge city network, breaking silos and the trouble with a "spongy" word

2026-08-2401:25:51

Ask ten people what a "sponge city" is and you will get ten different answers. Silvia Oppliger knows this better than most, because asking that question is how she opens almost every conversation she has. It is a good word for catching attention, she says, and a really spongy one for everything after that. Silvia is an environmental engineer and the coordinator of the Swiss Water Association's National Sponge City Network. Over three years she has pulled federal offices, cantons, municipaliti...

#68 - Haris Piplas: "Co-opetition" and the honest city - what urban regeneration should and shouldn't be

2026-08-0301:32:47

Billions in international money poured into Sarajevo after the siege ended. What got built was a city with more shopping malls and less public green space than the one that had been destroyed. Money was never the constraint. Coordination was. Haris Piplas is Director of Integrated Urban Solutions International at Drees & Sommer and a lecturer at ETH Zürich. He trained as a landscape architect in Sarajevo, an urban designer in Berlin, and took his doctorate in architecture in Zürich. His a...

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