Skylines, The Citymetric Podcast

This week, it’s two interviews, unified by being at the intersection of politics and business, and also of my not really, if I’m absolutely honest with you, knowing what I’m talking about.First up, it’s Centre for Cities boss Andrew Carter, in our final “ask the expert” slot for the moment. This week, he’s telling me about Enterprise Zones, areas in which businesses are given special tax incentives to encourage them to invest. So, the question is – does this actually work, or just it just suck money from elsewhere?Then I’m off to City Hall to speak to London’s chief digital officer Theo Blackwell. He tells me about the city’s use of data, how it can improve life for Londoners and also, well, what a chief digital officer actually does.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

So does “cultured-led regeneration” actually work? Can a shiny new museum ever be enough to fix a struggling post-industrial city? Or a particularly big sports day?Carolina Saludes of the Young Fabians has been looking into these and other questions, and kindly agreed to come and answer them for us. We talk about Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture; her home city of Barcelona’s regeneration after the 1992 Olympics; plus, inevitably, Bilbao and its Guggenheim. And a good time was had by all.Also this week: Andrew Carter, chief executive of the Centre for Cities, gives us an urban policy wishlist for Britain’s new Prime Minister.By the next episode of Skylines, that job will almost certainly be held by Boris Johnson. May god have mercy on our souls.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Finland, Finland, Finland, as Monty Python once sang: Finland has it all.Well, it has some things anyway, and more to the point its embassy in London was kind enough to invite me to visit, and to learn all about the country’s smart cities projects.And so I did. We visited Helsinki; Espoo, a rapidly growing city in the suburbs of the capital, which is something like a cross between Silicon Valley and Milton Keynes; and Tampere, effectively Finland’s second city, an industrial hub about 100 miles to the north.We went to Kalastatama, a new smart district being built from scratch in Helsinki’s Docklands. We went to the Nokia office park to learn about smart lampposts, and what you do when your biggest most profitable company suddenly stops being the world’s leading manufacturer of mobile phones. We even went to some museums, because who doesn’t love a national history museum?So, this episode, we’re talking about everything we learned. To do that I’m joined by one of my fellow travellers and a friend of the podcas

This week's guest is John Boughton, teacher, historian and author of an excellent housing-flavoured blog, which last year appeared as a full-blown book. Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing is an incredibly readable look at the history, politics and architecture of public housing in Britain, from those first estates in the late 19th century to the Grenfell Tower fire of 2017.It is genuinely one of the best books I have ever read on such a wonkish subject, and the paperback edition has just been published. So this seemed like an excellent moment to talk to John about what got him interested in this subject, what he learned from writing the book, and whether he is optimistic about the future of housing in this country.Somewhere around the New Labour years, we take a short break in that conversation to talk to Paul Swinney, head of policy at the Centre for Cities, about a different aspect of the housing crisis: what the divergence in house prices between the London area and the rest of the coun

In the early hours of 14 June 2017, a fire broke out in a west London tower block; 72 people died in the resulting conflagration, many of them, tragically, because they had followed the official safety instructions to remain in their homes.At the time the Grenfell fire felt like a turning point in Britain’s attitude to social housing. Two years on, though, precious little seems to have changed.Stuart Hodkinson, an associate professor at the University of Leeds, has spent a decade talking to estate residents about their experience of regeneration and maintenance of social housing estates at the hands of private firms. He tells me how a disaster like Grenfell could have come to happen – and whether something similar could happen again.Also this week: Paul Swinney of the Centre for Cities tells me about Sheffield’s world-leading Advanced Manufacturing Park, which brings experts from different industries together with academics from the city’s universities to undertake joint research. The park is already a leader

This week, two disparate segments linked by the idea of trading with the world. Well, vaguely. It’s there, but you have to squint.First up: I make my regular visit to the Centre for Cities office for the Ask the Experts slot with head of policy Paul Swinney. This week, he teaches me why cities need businesses that export internationally to truly thrive.After that, we’re off to Liverpool, with New Statesman politics correspondent Patrick Maguire. He tells me why the local Labour party tried to oust mayor Joe Anderson; how the city became the party’s heartlands; and how it ended up with quite so many mayors.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week it's one of those two-for-the-price-of-one episodes where I'm not even going to pretend the conversations are connected. They are, however, both interesting, so here's more about them:In the first half, I talk to Skylines regular Paul Swinney, head of policy at the Centre for Cities, about what should really have been one of the big UK urbanism stories of the moment. Last week, the North of Tyne region – what would once have been called Newcastle and Northumberland, but not, vexingly, Gateshead or Sunderland – elected its first metro mayor, Labour's Jamie Driscoll. Surprisingly few people noticed. So Paul and I discuss why that is, and what effect the region's strange geography – excluding, as it does, what is effectively the southern half of a city – might have on the post.I the second half, we change gears as I nip out to Somerset House to chat to curator Karishma Rafferty about her work using festivals, installations and other cultural offerings to raise awareness of climate change. We also find

This week it’s another live episode, of sorts. In early April I was lucky enough to chair an event at the Cambridge Literary Festival with the journalist and novelist John Lanchester. John was mostly there to promote his latest novel, The Wall, a “cli-fi” book about a Britain trundling on after catastrophic climate change has wiped out much of the planet. In the past he’s also written about other vaguely CityMetric-y topics like the housing crisis and the tube - so he’s a guest I’ve been hoping to get on for a while, and was kind enough to allow us to record our chat for posterity and podcasting purposes.Incidentally, I didn’t find a way of turning the conversation to the tube. We do lose ten minutes to talking about Game of Thrones, though.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Last year, Burhan Wazir wrote a lovely piece for the New Statesman under the headline, “The changing shape of Britain’s mosques”. In it he talked about how the country’s Islamic community had initially co-opted sitting rooms and former pubs for its places of worship, but had gradually, over the decades, begun to build bigger, more communal mosques on the scale of churches or even cathedrals.All this sounded like it might make an interesting podcast, so I asked if Burhan fancied a chat. He suggested we go one better, and visit the stunningly beautiful New Cambridge Mosque, which is currently nearing completion.So that’s what we did. Dr Timothy Winter, chair of the Cambridge Mosque Trust, gave us the tour; then the three of us sat down and recorded a podcast about it. This, as you may have gathered, is that podcast.Also this week: Paul Swinney of the Centre for Cities, on the skills gap in UK cities.The reason I was in Cambridge, incidentally, was to speak to the writer John Lanchester, about his new novel of c

The last few of these things have been quite serious, so let's mix it up a bit with some spurious nonsense. And what better way to do that than to invite Sarah Manavis back on, to answer a question I've been pondering for a while: why, exactly, does she hate London, the city in which she has chosen to live? This takes a while, because she keeps banging on about her dog.To mix things up a bit, we also have our regular Ask The Experts slot with Paul Swinney of the Centre for cities. This week: why are exports so important to cities?Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I’ve been on holiday, and when I came back the entirety of British politics was on fire. So, on this occasion, I’ve fallen a bit behind with my podcasting. Sorry, gang.No matter, though, for here’s a guest episode. City Talks, as you may know, is the monthly podcast from our friends at the Centre for Cities, hosted by chief executive Andrew Carter. Last December it released an episode posing the now depressingly topical quesiton: how will Brexit affect British cities? He’s joined by Naomi Clayton and friend of the podcast Paul Swinney in an attempt to answer that question.We’ll be back with a full-blown episode of Skylines next week.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week’s podcast is a live show, recorded at the New Local Government Network’s annual conference on 26 February. (We did this last year, and nobody got fired, so here we are again.)The topic under discussion this time is inclusive growth – who is losing out from our current economic model, and how we fix that. To discuss that I was joined by Paul Najsarek, the chief executive of the London Borough of Ealing; Tamar Reay, who works in procurement at Preston City Council, and has worked on the “Preston model”, in which councils do more to support local businesses; and Stuart Field, the founder of social enterprise Bread Funds UK.Live shows are FUN and we haven’t done enough of them, so in the no doubt highly likely event you’re reading this as someone with both a venue and some recording equipment, why not drop me a line?Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and

Two interviews this week, which are both about the future of our cities but are otherwise unrelated except for allowing me to come up with a sort of pun on the word “high”.First up: drones, the remote-operated buzzy flying things that recently managed to shut down several of London’s airports. The innovation charity NESTA has produced a report looking at what drones will do for our society, how we need to regulate them, and what role local government is likely to play in that. I spoke to the report’s author Kathy Notstine about all those things and asked: is it worth it?In the back half, I talk to Skylines regular Paul Swinney of the Centre for Cities about the future of the high street – that, for non British listeners, is what towns generally call their central retail area (the name is roughly analogous to “Main Street”). Paul tells me how cities can regenerate their high streets in the age of Amazon.Next Tuesday, incidentally, I’ll be recording the second live edition of Skylines at the New Local Governmen

Baby it's cold outside – or at least it was, in certain parts of the world, when we recorded this, ho hum.Anyway, that's the week's topic. Inspired by the polar vortex, which has seen temperatures of -30C in the US Midwest, we're chatting extremes of weather, with the New Statesman's US editor Nicky Woolf and its in-house midwesterner Sarah Manavis. We also talk about extreme heat and, this being CityMetric, manage a long and detailed argument about which temperature scale is actually better.(I'm not going to lie to you: everyone was in a particularly unruly mood that day, and at one point I had to leave the recording for a moment to deal with an editorial problem, so I'm a bit nervous of what they said behind my back. What's more, there was a problem with Nicky's mic that means his words are accompanied by a low hiss as if he's speaking parseltongue, and the process of editing that out means he sounds like he was literally phoning it in. All things considered, I am slightly terrified to hear the results of t

This week, we’re off to China. Now the U.S. bureau chief for the South China Morning Post, Robert Delaney spent many years as a foreign correspondent reporting from the world’s most populous country.He now has a novel out: The Wounded Muse, based on real events that played out in Beijing as the 2008 Olympic Games approached. He spoke to us about how China, its economy and its cities have changed over the past two decades.This episode we also go back to the Centre for Cities’ Paul Swinney to ask another big question. If agglomeration – being able to get more people to more jobs – is the key to economic success could lack of good transport be the thing that’s holding England’s cities back?Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week’s podcast is a bit of a sandwich. In the middle, you’ll find an informative and nutritious conversation with Paul Swinney of the Centre for Cities, in which we try to answer a big question about cites. Generally speaking, in a phenomenon known as “agglomeration theory”, bigger cities are richer and more productive than smaller ones. That, though, doesn't seem to hold true in the UK, where - London excepted - the most productive settlements tend to be smaller.So, does size matter? And if so, why doesn't the rule hold in the UK?On either side of that though you'll find a rambling discussion about food in cities with Sarah Manavis and Nicky Woolf. What's with the midwest and fast food? Which cities are the best places to eat? And most importantly of all, will Sarah ever stop torturing our producer Nick by swearing?Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out inf

This week, 'tis the season for large chunks of the population of any major city to up-sticks and head back to whatever small town they grew up in. Also this week, the racing driver Lewis Hamilton alienated his entire hometown by saying that he always wanted to get out of the slums. Lewis Hamilton grew up in Stevenage. At any rate: this feels like a good excuse to talk about, for want of a better phrase, shit towns, of the sort people tend to run away from so that they can live in the big city. To do that, I'm joined by two of my colleagues: Rohan Banerjee, who grew up in Thanet, the Kentish island which has twice now failed to choose Nigel Farage to be its member of Parliament; and Sarah Manavis, a refugee from Dayton, Ohio, who requires an enormous amount of bleeping out. We talk about the economic and cultural forces that drive people to move away from their hometowns, and what, if anything, could make them move back.I'm about to break off for Christmas, so this will be the last Skylines of the ye

Good news, everyone: this podcast doesn't even glance at Brexit. Bad news: it is about environmental catastrophe, or at least, the infrastructure that might save us from it. First up, I talk to the New Statesman environmental writer India Bourke about her recent trip to Oslo, where she learned all about carbon capture and storage, and visited a very exciting energy from waste plant. (Christmas has come early to the CityMetric offices.)Next, I talk to Sebastian Maire, chief resilience officer for the city of Paris, about what the French capital is doing to prepare itself for a changing climate. One of its biggest projects at present is grassing over its school playgrounds – a scheme with as many social as environmental benefits.And then, we're back in the podcast bunker again, to talk about vertical forests and other forms of green infrastructure.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge.Skylines is supported by 100 Resilient Cities. Pioneered by

This week, I’m chatting about the housing crisis with the Centre for London. Last summer, research manager Victoria Pinoncely was co-author of the think tank’s report, “Borough Builders: Delivering more housing across London”. She tells me about the role the capital’s 32 boroughs could play in solving its housing crisis, and the barriers preventing them from doing so. We also talk about the lessons all this holds for the rest of the country, as well as the housing market in her native France.Also this week, I talk to Andrew Carter, chief executive of the Centre for Cities, for our regular Ask the Expert segment. In a sort of sequel to our conversation in episode 110, I ask something that’s been bothering me for a while. Every other industrial revolution has created jobs and raised incomes – so why is everyone fretting that the automation one be any different?Lastly, some housekeeping: after nearly two years of producing this thing myself, this week we have a new producer, in the form of Nick Hilton (@nickfthi

You'll be delighted, I'm sure, to learn this podcast is not about Brexit.I've been in Newcastle, capital in the north east of England, for a couple of days: partly for work, partly just because I wanted to get out of London for a bit, and it was the largest British city I'd never been to, and people kept telling me it was cool.And it is. It really, really is. Stunning architecture, great cultural offering, some seaside, a metro and the best collection of bridges you will find pretty much anywhere. You should go there at once.So – why did it take me so long? Or to put it another way: why don't we talk about it more? To find out, and to discuss the region and its politics more broadly, I spoke to local journalist Chris Stokel-Walker, and recorded it on my phone.While I'm here, some housekeeping. This is sort of a good news/bad news thing. The bad news is that Skylines is going fortnightly: I'm moving to a new role, and just won't have time to put out a podcast every week any more. If there's enough of an outcry