This month’s Mobility & Design Special takes a wide-ranging, wild ride through the fast-changing world of modern transport, examining how cities move, how public spaces evolve, and how design shapes the environments we inhabit daily. But before diving deep into the mechanics of contemporary transit, editor in chief Andrew Tuck has something rather more pungent on his mind: the historical reality of urban mobility and its unexpected parallels to modern-day debates.
Unfortunately, it transpires that "The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894" is an urban myth. The enduring story was that someone had written to The Times of London that year predicting that every street in the British capital would be buried under nine feet of manure within 50 years if something wasn’t done about the millions of pooping horses that transported goods and people around the metropolis. But what is historically true is that there were, according to the London Transport Museum, some 300,000 such working animals operating within London in the late 1890s. And yes, they left an immense amount of manure in their wakes, alongside the grim reality of regularly dropping dead directly on busy city streets.
It serves as a remarkably useful image to mentally hold onto whenever modern critics let out a collective harumph about the proliferation of dockless share bikes currently populating our city streets. London today accommodates about 55,000 shared bicycles, which frequently cause daily debates and social media friction as riders discard them willy-nilly across narrow pavements and pedestrian walkways. As someone who routinely utilizes every single form of urban transport available, Tuck notes that he fully understands the occasional disdain in which e-bikers are held by other road users—especially during moments when he is doing his absolute best to sympathize with an irked black cab driver caught in congestion.
Yet, he also recognizes firsthand how these two-wheeled innovations unlock the city in miraculous, unprecedented ways. Swapping a stifling, 40-minute underground Tube journey for a breezy, 20-minute pedal push on a pleasant spring or autumn day amounts to nothing short of urban bliss. So, while there are inevitable public splutters, policy missteps, and teething problems, for every sensationalized tale of e-bike armageddon—or nostalgic reminiscences of how flying on a commercial airplane in the 1950s was once considered a moment of unbridled glamour—truly great, democratic steps are being taken around the world when it comes to the evolution of urban mobility. And, thankfully, none of them involve the backbreaking labor of shovelling tons of animal dung from city thoroughfares.
To capture some of the profound changes currently at play across the global transit landscape, the publication compiles an annual survey highlighting the best-in-class operators and forward-thinking innovators, while confronting some of the complex challenges waiting on the road ahead. In this latest edition, readers are invited on board the Shinkansen’s new supreme class in Japan, whisked through the bustling traffic of Nairobi on an electric motorbike to observe grassroots transit shifts, and given a front-row seat to hear what the staggering rise of Chinese automakers actually means for the once-untouchable soft-power influence and market dominance of Germany’s legendary car marques.
This landmark issue also doubles as the autumn Design Special, arriving with a couple of star commissions overseen by the publication’s newly elevated executive editor for design, Nic Monisse. Having transitioned smoothly from design editor to executive editor of design, Monisse has gained not only some nicely crafted parentheses in his masthead title but also a palpable dollop of extra professional gravitas. Fancy job titles and structural elevations aside, Monisse has commissioned a fine, thought-provoking essay from design correspondent Stella Roos, exploring a watershed 1947 competition hosted by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. That historic contest sought to establish a new standard for inexpensive, mass-produced furniture and successfully kick-started the postwar American design scene. It remains fascinating to observe just how many now-classic domestic designs were generated by that single competition, though Roos astutely asks whether today—in an era when consumers can readily purchase a brand-new sofa for a couple of hundred pounds—we might actually be suffering from an overabundance of cheap, disposable design.
In addition to looking back at foundational moments in modernism, Monisse has been exceptionally busy cajoling 10 leading international designers and architects to take the publication on a deeply personal tour of a specific building that has fundamentally shaped their professional practice and worldview. Renowned artist Theaster Gates takes readers inside an unassuming electrical substation in Chicago, while the magazine joins Joana Abreu at her father’s architectural office in Abu Dhabi to explore the spatial memories that inform her work. Reflecting on these personal architectural touchstones, Tuck ponders what environments shaped his own sensibilities, suggesting that growing up inside a classic 1960s home perhaps left him forever feeling entirely at ease around modernism, clean architectural lines, and plentiful natural light.
Finally, the journey culminates within the magazine’s dedicated Expo section. Marking issue 198 of the publication, the editorial team notes with pride that as they approach their milestone 20th anniversary, their founding promise to relentlessly innovate within the medium of print continues to burn just as brightly as it did on day one. For this special edition, the team has doubled the length of the Expo section for the very first time. This unprecedented expansion allows acclaimed photographer Thomas Prior’s stunning visual profile of the Tokyo Fire Department’s elite Hyper Rescue 8 unit to blast across the pages with the immersive impact of a curated gallery exhibition. It is precisely this kind of bold, tactile visual storytelling that explains why print magazines continue to remain such powerful cultural plays in the digital age, and why the team remains deeply passionate about making the publication month after month.
