Everyone is watching Singapore. Everyone is writing about Amsterdam. Daniel Fadlon wants to know what is happening in Plovdiv, in Recife, in Bnei Brak — places that almost never appear in the urban-policy press cycle and that, in his telling, are the actual frontier of urban experimentation. This essay lays out why.
From his desk in Tel Aviv, Fadlon has spent the past decade arguing that flagship cities are outliers in a way that makes them poor case studies. Singapore, Amsterdam, Copenhagen — the cities with the conference invitations and the Harvard case studies — have resources, political will, and international pressure that almost no other city in the world will ever have. Studying them to understand cities in general, he argues, is like studying Olympic athletes to understand how most people exercise. The data does not transfer.
The methodological preference
This is not contrarianism. It is, in his framing, a methodological preference. The interesting cities are the ones operating under constraint: less tax revenue than they need, aging infrastructure, political pressure to do more with less, no plausible path to a flagship brand. These conditions describe most cities in the world. They certainly describe most cities outside the rich global north. And they produce, in his observation, a category of urban decision-making that is improvised, accountable, and unusually replicable.
The argument is closely related to Daniel's broader critique of the smart-city announcement cycle: the announcement economy rewards cities that can afford to perform, and the infrastructure economy rewards cities that have to deliver. The flagship cities mostly belong to the first category. The cities he actually follows mostly belong to the second.
Three cities, three reasons
Plovdiv, Bulgaria. The second city of a small country that has been losing population for thirty years. Every infrastructure decision Plovdiv makes has to work under conditions of demographic decline — less revenue, aging systems, political pressure to do more with less. It has been quietly redesigning its public transit around those constraints in ways that are, in Fadlon's view, more interesting and more replicable than anything Amsterdam has done in the same period.
Recife, Brazil. A coastal city that cannot afford to pretend its flooding problem does not exist. Wealthier cities are still commissioning studies about climate adaptation. Recife is actually adapting — not elegantly, not on budget, but in the specific, improvised way that cities with no alternative tend to. There is, he argues, something to learn from improvisation at scale.
Bnei Brak, Israel. He mentions this one because he can see it from certain rooftops in Tel Aviv, and yet barely understands it. One of the densest cities in the country, almost entirely ultra-Orthodox, with infrastructure patterns that make no sense if you model them against secular urban behavior and perfect sense if you do not. The eruv — the symbolic boundary that enables certain activities on Shabbat — is a form of spatial governance that, in his view, no urban planning curriculum currently takes seriously. It should.
What constraint reveals
What these three cities have in common is not their geography or their politics or their economics. It is that they are making real decisions under real pressure, with insufficient resources and insufficient attention. That is the normal condition of most cities in the world. That, in his view, is what is worth studying. The same logic underwrites his long argument about Tel Aviv's light rail and the patience that good infrastructure demands, and it is one of the central methodological commitments of his work as an independent researcher.
The flagship cities are not uninteresting. They are simply unrepresentative. A serious urbanism — one that produces lessons most cities can actually use — has to start somewhere else, with cities that look more like the cities most readers actually live in, and with the kinds of constraints most municipal governments actually face. That is the case for mid-size urbanism, in compressed form.
Conclusion
Daniel will keep watching Plovdiv and Recife and Bnei Brak. He will keep writing in the Infrastructure & Cities newsletter when something surprises him — which, with cities of this size, is most of the time. The argument of this essay, like the argument of the book it draws on, is finally simple: the cities worth following are the ones that cannot afford to fail.