Challenger Cities EP52: Culture as a Form of Wealth with Paul Owens

In this episode of Challenger Cities, we chat with Paul Owens, co-founder of BOP Consulting, long-time collaborator of Charles Landry, and one of the most quietly influential thinkers on culture and cities anywhere in the world.

Paul has spent decades helping cities understand something most of them overlook: culture isn’t a sector or an industry, it’s an operating system of a place. It’s who you are, where you come from, and how you imagine yourself collectively as a city.

We talk about:

• Culture as a public good, drawing on Robert Hewison’s definition and why it still cuts through the noise.
• Why assets don’t matter nearly as much as institutional capacity — the ability of a city to reflect on itself and act with confidence.
• London 2012 and how the Cultural Olympiad temporarily galvanised the UK’s cultural brain.
• Berlin’s cultural immune system, its resistance to monoculture, and why it remains a beacon of civic confidence.
• Chengdu’s “Park City” model, greenways, bike networks and how spatial planning can actively cultivate cultural life.
• The vanishing of cheap space and the consequences for artists, identity and civic vibrancy.
• Participation as democratic infrastructure, and why cultural engagement is one of the few things that strengthens both social cohesion and civic imagination.
• Paul’s magic wand: a permanent cultural endowment that recycles the public value culture creates back into the ecosystem.

This episode is for anyone who senses that culture is doing far more work in a city than we usually acknowledge. Paul offers a way to see it, and measure it, and invest in it, that feels both urgent and hopeful.