Skylines, The Citymetric Podcast

New Year’s resolution: this year, we’re going to be more international.To that end, on this week’s podcast, we’re talking about Africa. Nimko Ali is a Somali-born feminist activist and campaigner against female genital mutilation (FGM). She tells me about Somaliland, its history and why it’s definitely not part of Somalia; what life is like in the country’s capital Hargeisa; and her thoughts on Africa’s cultural prospects. Between us, we also come up with some novel ideas for some GPS-enabled goats.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

You better watch out, you better not cry, you better not pout, I’m telling you why – because for one week only, Stephanie Boland is coming back to the CityMetric podcast.In Prospect magazine’s offices in Westminster (from where she does her own excellent podcast, How To Fix, which you should all check out), we have a surprisingly involved conversation about the proper, anti-imperialist name for the archipelago perched off the north-western coast of Europe which contains the UK and Ireland.But the main attraction this week is the CityMetric Christmas quiz. Last year, Stephanie asked me a series of increasingly impossible nerdy questions – so this year I got my own back. It goes about as well as you’d expect.Thank you for listening this year. Why not tell your friends, through the medium of a five star iTunes review? Go on, it is Christmas.We’ll be back in January. Enjoy the holidays – and god bless us, every one.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is another guest-presented episode, at least of sorts. Back when we started this thing in early 2016, we had a proper producer: a guy called Roifield Brown, who makes all sorts of lovely podcasts. One of them is a music and interview-themed one called Friday 15, and a few weeks ago he was kind enough to invite me on to talk about my lifelong obsession with maps.So, this is that episode. For once, someone is going to interview me – and you get to listen to some tunes, too.Incidentally, we apologise for the delay to the Christmas special. We hope it should be with you next week.(No, this episode is not about Nice.)  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I’ve escaped London for a pre-Christmas minibreak, to visit the beautiful Austrian capital of Vienna. For some reason, visiting a liberal city that was once the centre of the world, but is now just the capital of a small and angry country, reminded me of an interview I did months ago about London getting the ‘ump about Brexit.So, here it is. James O’Malley is a journalist and occasional CityMetric contributor, who last appeared on Skylines episode 48. In a fit of rage in June 2016, he founded a petition calling for London to become an independent state. It was mostly a joke - but, as it turns out, a terrifyingly high number of people rather liked the idea, and he accidentally started a secessionist movement that he’s not entirely sure he agrees with.James tells me about his abortive political career, Brexit, city states - and whether he sold out.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I’m very excited about this week’s guest – so excited that one point this was going to be the Christmas special, but I got too excited to wait. I’ve even pitched this guest’s identity as a mystery at the start of the show, so in an ideal world I wouldn’t even name them here at all. But that’d be terrible SEO, so I’m going to get on with it and just hope that nobody actually bothers to read this thing. So:This week’s guest is Sue Jeffrey, the leader of Redcar & Cleveland council, and Labour’s candidate to be mayor of the Tees Valley. Sue was, tragically, unsuccessful in that race, losing 49/51 in the final round to the Conservative Ben Houchen. This result caused much consternation in the New Statesman office, and on this podcast – so much so, that it’s still an election that people reference to Stephen Bush and myself.Anyway: having accidentally turned Sue into a meme, I decided it was time to actually interview her. From her office in Redcar, she explained to me why devolution matters to regions like her

We can be a bit insular around these parts at times: banging on endlessly about transport in London or mayoral elections elsewhere in the UK.So, this week, we’re crossing the channel. Marie Le Conte is a London-based political journalist, originally from Nantes. Pauline Bock is the social media editor here at the New Statesman, and grew up somewhere in the vicinity of Strasbourg. I got them to tell me about French cities: how they’re run, what they do, and what they’re known for and, most importantly, why they all hate Paris. While we’re on the subject, we also speculate about why it is the French capital manages to so often smell quite so bad.That said, as I write, it’s Budget Day here in the UK. So before we get to France, I offer a quick run-down of what chancellor Philip Hammond offered to Britain’s cities – and exactly why his housing policies remain bloody terrible.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman's cities site, CityMetric. It's hosted by Jonn Elledge.  See acast.com/privacy for

“That’s some section, that section 106.” “Best there is.”The British government defines “affordable housing” as housing which is priced at no more than 80 per cent of the average local market rent. The eagle-eyed among you may have spotted some problems with this definition.To discuss affordable housing, or rather it’s the near total lack of it, I went to see Rose Grayston, a senior policy officer at the housing charity Shelter. She tells me why affordable housing isn’t actually affordable, and what we really need to do to fix the housing market.We also, for the wonks among you, chat about the problem with viability assessments and why the dreaded Section 106, under which developers are supposed to build affordable housing, often doesn’t deliver.Incidentally, there’s a rather weird noise in the background of the last three minutes of the interview. I have no idea what that is either, but you aren’t imagining it, I promise.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman's cities site, CityMetric. It's hosted by

This is a bit of a departure for Skylines: we’ve got a sort of guest host. Joshua Bryant, an environment engineering student at UCL, got in touch to offer me an interview with some experts on slums. And I had an annoying gap in the schedule and, more importantly, the interview was really, really interesting – so I said yes.As to who is being interviewed: Himanshu Parikh is an Indian engineer and the developer of “slum networking”, a holistic concept for upgrading the forgotten parts of developing world cities where over a billion people live; Priti Parikh is a professor at UCL, as well as Himanshu’s daughter. They tell Josh about how we can improve the world’s slums, the role played by foreign aid, and why toilets are not in fact everything.Because this is new territory for us, I’m particularly keen to hear what you think. If you have any strong feelings about the idea of more episodes with guest presenters – or anything else we do or don’t do, come to that – then please do get in touch on Twitter (@jonnelled

We’ve had a bit of a run of serious, thoughtful episodes of late, so this time we’re going to the opposite extreme.This week, Stephanie joins me to debate some very serious and important questions from the audience, including: What is the ontological origins of tube-iness? Bendy buses, good or bad? Does Yorkshire really deserve devolution?For reasons that are less clear we also step outside of the normal CityMetric brief to discuss university tuition fees and the feminism of Senator Bernie Sanders. It all made sense at the time. Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman's cities site, CityMetric. It's hosted by Jonn Elledge and Stephanie Boland.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

One of the enduring questions in English cities policy these days is: what's gone wrong in Yorkshire? Earlier this year, after all, a number of metropolitan regions – those around Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool among them – all elected their first metro mayors. Yet neither of the conurbations in what was once the West Riding of Yorkshire – one centred on Leeds, the other centred on Sheffield – did the same. This is particularly surprising, since the Sheffield City Region deal was supposed to have been agreed ages ago.So: what went wrong – and is it likely to go right any time soon? To discuss this, I'm joined by a man who knows more about devolution policy in god's own country than anyone else on the planet, James Reed, the political editor of the Yorkshire Post. He tells a tale of power struggles, factionalism, back-stabbing and betrayal. It's like Game of Thrones, only with more transport funding.Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman's cities site, CityMetric. It's hosted by Jonn Elledge.

We talk a lot – on this podcast, and on the website from which it spun off – about the practical side of cities: buildings and roads and railways and so on. But that's only half the story, of course. So this week, we're talking about the other half: shouldn't cities be fun, too? And what can we learn when we try to make them so? To discuss the joyful and spontaneous side of city life, I'm joined by Usman Haque, founding partner of the interactive architecture firm Umbrellium. He tells me about his experiences developing virtual pedestrian crossings, which can move about at will, and getting a thousand people to construct a temporary skyscraper in Singapore. We also discuss his favourite entries in this year's Playable Cities Awards, in which he was a judge. 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, I'm talking to one of the stars of the cities world. Richard Florida is a professor of urban studies at the University of Toronto, as well as the co-founder and editor-at-large of CityMetric's esteemed American rival, CityLab. He was in London this week to promote his new book, The New Urban Crisis.I was lucky enough to grab half an hour with him, albeit in a fairly noisy hotel bar. (Ah well, at least you can tell it's real.) Richard tells me how "superstar cities" like London, New York and San Francisco can deal with the problems of their success, such as unaffordable housing; as well as what those cities which have been left behind can do to catch up. You can read my review of The New Urban Crisis here. 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.

You know, it’s easy to forget, after the coughing and the comedian with the P45 and the bit where the sign started disintegrating, that there was a far bigger problem with Theresa May’s speech: it was bad. To be specific, the housing policies the prime minister unveiled yesterday were in no way an adequate response to the housing crisis – which, you’ll recall, is disadvantaging the young, holding back our productivity, and (though I don’t care so much about this part) wrecking the Conservative party’s electoral chances. It is in some ways May’s good luck that nobody will have been paying the slightest attention to the actual content of her speech, or they might have noticed quite how completely bloody useless it was. Anyway: this seemed like a good moment to drag Stephen Bush back into the podcasting basement to discuss all this. We cover the Conservative party’s long-standing failure to tackle this issue; our suggested solutions; and how exactly we can get rid of buy-to-let. All that, and you can learn about

There’s been something of a spate of natural disasters recently, from hurricanes to wildfires to floods. So this week, the New Statesman’s environment writer India Bourke joins me to talk about the weather. We discuss whether things really are getting worse; what role climate change is playing in the situation; and what impact rolling news has had on our perception of the situation. India also interviewed the climate scientist Saleemul Huq, to hear his account of the recent devastating floods that left a third of his native Bangladesh under water. You can hear that conversation on the podcast, too. 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.

Oh, capitalism. You had a good run. But then Transport for London decided to ask Uber to take some responsibility for the safety of its passengers, and thus did what 75 years of Soviet Communism failed to do and overthrew the entire economic system of the Western world. Thanks, Sadiq, thanks a lot. In the unlikely event you've missed the news, the story so far: TfL has ruled that Uber is not a fit and proper company to operate cabs, and revoked its licence. Uber has three weeks to appeal before its cabs need to get off the road. To commemorate this sad day, I've dragged Stephen Bush back into the podcasting basement, so we can don black arm bands and debate what all this means – for London, for Uber, for the future (if it has one) of capitalism. 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.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

So, this is a bit anecdotal but I think it holds true nonetheless: walkable cities are more exciting cities. Not only do they tend to be healthier and less polluted than those built around the car: they’re also more likely to have what one can only describe as cool stuff. To talk about why we should all get walking, and what mayors and planners can do to encourage us, this week I’m joined by Steve Chambers, from the charity Living Streets. We talk about the planned pedestrianisation of London’s Oxford Street; what a ‘walking network’ might look like; and what we can all learn from Coventry. 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.

I’m just back from my holidays, and generally having That Sort of Week, so I’m going to be honest: this is another of our more spurious episodes. It’s also one that’s almost literally designed to generate angry letters reading, “Not everyone lives in London you know!” Here’s the premise. Both my colleague Stephen Bush and I grew up in east London. But we didn’t grow up in the same east London. He grew up in the proper, undeniable East End of the city, in Tower Hamlets; I grew up 10 miles and three boroughs further out in Havering, the last place you come to before falling out of official bounds of the city altogether. So – did we really both grow up in London, or just Stephen? Where does the city end, and something else start, and what defines it? Is it transport, commuting patterns, culture, what? There’s only one way to settle this. Fight. 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 informat

This week, we’re asking a question for the ages: Why does York look like a chocolate box while nearby Wakefield looks like hell? In the early 1960s, at a time when visions of the future were all concrete and cars, and even York still thought of itself as a manufacturing centre, some British cities decided to smash up their heritage while others decided to preserve it. Jim Waterson, political editor of Buzzfeed UK and a York native himself, joins us to talk us through this forgotten moment in Britain’s architectural history. Then we ask the audience: what are the best and, especially, worst urban regeneration schemes? 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.

I don't mean to worry you, but if you live in a city, the air you breathe is probably killing you. As many as 40,000 deaths a year in the UK have been linked to air pollution; the WHO reckons that, in 2012, it was a factor in one in every eight deaths around the globe. So, that's the cheery topic for this week's show: why the air is disgusting and what we can do about it. To discuss it, I'm joined by the New Statesman's environment correspondent India Bourke and our Wellcome scholar Sanjana Varghese. We also speak to Simon Alcock of ClientEarth, about the environmental law charity's ongoing efforts to hold the British government to account for its repeated breaches of European law on air pollution. Don’t have nightmares, now. 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.

Well, this is new: our first crossover with another podcast. Exciting times. The podcast in question is Talking Headways which, in its own words, "explores the intersection of transportation, urban planning and city living". It’s hosted by Jeff Wood, who also runs the San Francisco-based transport consultancy the Overhead Wire, also produces the Direct Transfer daily newsletter. The plan is that we'll do two of these crossovers. This week, I'm asking Jeff some big questions about transport in the US: why some cities have it, why most don't, and whether that's likely to change. At some future date, if all goes to plan, we'll swap roles, and Jeff will interview me about the situation here in the UK. (Both episodes will be available in a slightly different version on the Talking Headways too.) 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.