Podcasts about citymetric

Jonn Elledge is a New Statesman columnist, and a contributor to the Big Issue, the Guardian, the Evening Standard, and a number of other newspapers. He was previously an assistant editor at the New Statesman, where he created and ran its urbanism-focused CityMetric site, and spent six happy years writing about cities, maps and borders and hosting the Skylines podcast. He has written over a hundred editions of the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything. His new book is A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps. He previously wrote The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything: All the Facts You Didn't Know You Wanted to Know and, with Tom Phillips, Conspiracy: A History of Bollcks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them. Babylon 5 https://www.douxreviews.com/2015/08/babylon-5-series-review.html Life & Fate by Vasily Grossman https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n20/john-lanchester/good-day-comrade-shtrum The Truth about Markets by John Kay https://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1036&context=economics-faculty-publications Why there was no Danish holocaust https://www.history.com/news/wwii-danish-jews-survival-holocaust Nehru's affair with Lady Mountbatten https://www.indiatoday.in/india-today-insight/story/from-the-india-today-archives-1980-mountbattens-and-nehru-friendship-in-high-places-2413716-2023-07-30 Ethiopian food https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/ethiopian-food-best-dishes-africa/index.html This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

On this week's show I'm joined by Paris Marx, creator and host of the Tech Won't Save Us podcast. Paris is a socialist writer whose critical perspectives on technology have been published by NBC News, Jacobin, Tribune, In These Times, OneZero, Recode, Citymetric, Salon, and more. Paris is a PhD student at the University of Auckland researching tech futures, and completed a Master’s in urban geography from McGill University. They are also writing a book about transportation and technology for Verso Books. The podcast Tech Won’t Save Us challenges the notion that tech alone can drive our world forward by showing that separating tech from politics has consequences for us all, especially the most vulnerable. The show isn't simply about tearing down tech. It also presents radical ideas for a better world and better technology. Recent shows have included  Emma Kinema a former tech and games worker who is a Campaign Lead with the Communications Workers of America on the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees. She also co-founded Game Workers Unite Freelance writer and critic, Liz Pelly, discusses how the Spotify model of streaming music continues a long trend of exploitation in the music industry and why musicians need to organize around a vision for a different world of music. And, Will Evans, a reporter at Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting discussing his investigative reporting on how excessive productivity targets are causing high rates of injury at Amazon warehouses, how executives have misled the public about the problem, and what that suggests about the impacts of the company’s “customer obsession.”  You can check out the show at https://techwontsave.us/ and you can subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts.  On today’s show we’ll be talking about the need to take on the tech utopianism of Silicon Valley from a Left perspective. We'll also get into the push by the billionaire class for the kind of free-market, galactic capitalism we've discussed on the podcast.  You can follow Paris on Twitter @parismarx. Follow Tech Won't Save us: @techwontsaveus. You can support his podcast, too: https://www.patreon.com/techwontsaveus/

Join us on this episode of the governance podcast between Simon Kaye and Mark Pennington for a conversation on the impact of Elinor Ostrom's work on public policy. Simon Kaye discusses his latest report for the New Local on how the ideas of self-governance and community power can transform public services in the UK. Subscribe on iTunes and Spotify Subscribe to the Governance Podcast on iTunes and Spotify today and get all our latest episodes directly in your pocket. Follow Us For more information about our upcoming podcasts and events, follow us on facebook, twitter or instagram (@csgskcl). Read the Report Think Big, Act Small: Elinor Ostrom's Radical Vision for Community Power The Guest Having been awarded a PhD in democratic theory from the Department of Political Economy at King's College London in 2015, Simon Kaye has worked as a researcher and educator in academia and think tanks, with roles at UCL's Constitution Unit, The Hansard Society, Queen Mary, and King's College London. His last role was as Research Director at the Project for Modern Democracy, running projects on Whitehall reform and the rebalancing of UK economic policy.   Simon has written and spoken on a diversity of subjects, including democracy and voting systems, localism and self-governance, political economy, historical methods, constitutions, conspiracy theories, and post-truth. He has published work in venues including History and Theory, Critical Review, European Political Science, and The Fabian Society. He has also penned articles for popular publications such as The Independent, Politics.co.uk, CityMetric, and CapX. He has contributed to several podcasts to talk about his research, presented at festivals and international conferences, participated in public lectures and panel debates, won several competitive academic fellowships, and appeared on BBC News as a political commentator.  Simon's research at New Local is focused around the Community Paradigm, drawing on his expertise in democracy and political economy. His major projects include work on mutual aid groups, the new working practices and relationships that emerged during the 2020 pandemic, and the landmark research of Nobel Prize-winner Elinor Ostrom into governance systems and community management of common resources. New Local's Ostrom project is a direct development of the original Community Paradigm and forms the intellectual grounding for much of our work on public service reform and the need for more autonomous and empowered communities.   Skip Ahead 00:26: the New Local have recently produced a very interesting policy report which tries to apply some of the ideas of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom to look at aspects of a possible policy reform agenda in the UK and perhaps other countries. Those of you who follow our podcast will know that the Ostrom's work is quite important at our Centre because of their focus on the relationship between formal and informal institutions of governance. So Simon, welcome to the podcast. I wonder if we could start off by you giving a bit of background on what you do at New Local. 02:25: You've produced with New Local what I think is an excellent report on Ostrom. I wonder if you could say more about why and how the New Local has become aware of the Ostroms' work? 06:40: If we think about some of the ideas in the report, as part of this community paradigm, you are pushing an agenda which is emphasizing this idea of decentralisation, of communities taking control of how public services are delivered, or assets are managed—the idea of communities having the space to craft their own hybrids between communities, markets and states. What would you say to the idea that in the UK people have been arguing for decentralisation for many years, there's lots of complaints in the British government about over-centralisation, and yet the decentralisation agenda never really seems to take root. What do you think it is about the Ostrom agenda that can possibly make that happen? 11:08: So you would say, for example, that the Ostrom agenda, in its capacity to appeal to people across the political spectrum, is different from --what we heard in the late 1990s and early 2000s during the Tony Blair premiership in Britain, was a lot of talk about stakeholderism and participation—and this Ostrom agenda has aspects of that but also appeals across political groupings in a way that perhaps that agenda didn't. 12:46: Could you say a little bit about what you think she means by the phrase “beyond markets and states”? 18:26: So it's really an argument there that there is no fixed boundary about what kind of institutional arrangement is appropriate for particular kinds of goods—that that is constantly moving and varying according to local circumstances. 20:11: That leads me to what I think is a strange paradox about British politics, which is that on the one hand we do get people complaining (and we've seen this in the context of the response to the Covid-19 pandemic) that there is too much centralisation and not enough scope for community decision-making. But at the same time, the minute you start to get local variety, you have people complaining that they don't like the fact that there are different outcomes in different places—you often get the phrase “the post-code lottery” that people want there to be a uniformity of provision of outcome while the localism agenda is pointing to something else. How do you square that circle if you're trying to sell this idea? 23:30: If I'm understanding your argument, you're saying there needs to be some kind of levelling mechanism in that you need some kind of minimum standard which everyone as a citizen is entitled to, but then over and above that, that's the space where local control should come into play. What would be your view on the levelling mechanism being something like a universal basic income? 26:34: Speaking of that, the government here is talking about a “levelling up” agenda. Is there any way in which what you're talking about can inform what that might look like? Can you give some examples of cases where community control can facilitate levelling up? 31:30: I remember very well there's a distinction Ostrom draws between what she calls a facilitator state and a controller state.     33:55: I was going to say, if you're starting from a position where a state – whether at the local or national level – is actually responsible for managing assets or resources, there's no way it can just disappear. At the very least it needs a mechanism for transferring authority, however much authority we're talking about. This is certainly not a laissez-faire approach. Let's move on to discuss the pandemic: arguably a problem which requires a centralised response to a large scale collective action problem. How do you think the relationship between the centre and localities plays out in the pandemic? 39:23: This feeds back to an earlier dilemma I was describing, which is: isn't part of the reason central government has followed such a top down approach that there has been a popular demand for centralised action? 44:16: So you don't feel that what's happened with the pandemic is that there is a permanent setback to the ideas of decentralisation—you think this is actually an opportunity to show what can be achieved by thinking in a different way.

Another special edition of the podcast where we were delighted to be joined by Jonn Elledge. Jonn is a journalist and works freelance now but has before  written in the Guardian, was assistant editor of the New Statesman as well as, as many of you will know, editing the City Metric website and the Skylines podcast. A bit different from the usual episodes as we focused on transport as well as the usual issues of housing and the commercial aspects of TfL.You can visit CityMetric at: https://www.citymetric.com/The Greggs map of Britain article is: https://www.citymetric.com/business/what-map-uks-1650-branches-greggs-can-tell-us-about-british-high-street-1669All 150 episodes of Skylines can be found at: https://www.citymetric.com/content/skylines-podcast but only after you've listened to CommsCAST.

How will transport in cities change after the COVID wave subsides? Will financial worries make high-frequency public transport a thing of the past, just when we need it most? And will we even WANT to live in cities any more? Jonn Elledge of urban nerdery site CityMetric talks to Ros Taylor about the future of trains, buses and bikes… and why we might have missed the COVID opportunity to rethink transport. “Uber isn't even good for Uber drivers. The company clearly wants to phase them out.” “The Government is going to have to subsidise London's transport again. If it doesn't the city will grind to a halt.”“If London life no longer exists as it once did, what's the point of spending a fortune to live there?” “I do worry that anything we were going to do about traffic, the moment has now passed.” Presented by Ros Taylor. Produced by Andrew Harrison. Assistant producer Jacob Archbold. Music by Kenny Dickinson. Audio production by Alex Rees. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Cities have been epicenters of the global Covid-19 pandemic. While life for the public has changed immeasurably in just a few short months, urban authorities have also had to quickly respond to new challenges and responsibilities to keep their residents safe – often bringing them into conflict with national and state governments. To discuss how the public and policymakers across the globe have adapted to the pressures of the pandemic, Andrew Carter is joined by resident experts from three cities: CityMetric’s Editor Sommer Mathis, in New York City, USA Chief Resilience Officer for the City of Salvador Adriana Campelo, in Salvador, Brazil Centre for Cities’ Senior Analyst Kathrin Enenkel, in Berlin, Germany Together they reflect on their own experiences in lockdown in cities across the world, and provide insight into how their city, state and national governments have handled the crisis.

Casablanca is 102 minutes long. Citizen Kane runs for 119. This, the 150th and final episode of Skylines, the CityMetric podcast, is longer than either, at 124. You lucky, lucky people.I’ve loved doing this show over the last four and a bit years – it’s been a great opportunity to chat to interesting people about everything from transport and housing to smart cities and regional identities, with the odd argument about the tube or episode about ancient history thrown in for flavour. But for all sorts of reasons – not least of which is that I’ve stepped down as editor of CityMetric – this felt like the right time to stop.I wanted to go out with a bang, though, and to hell with worrying about self-indulgence. So in this final, feature-length episode of Skylines you will hear:Barbara Speed, my first co-host and the opinion editor of the I Paper, on her enduring love of baked goods chain Greggs;Our founding producer Roifield Brown, on the podcast’s origins, his native Birmingham and his love of San Francisco;New Statesman political correspondent Patrick Maguire on the rise of the metro mayor, and a movie about both zombies AND public transport;The Guardian’s media editor Jim Waterson, one of our more frequent guests, on why Britain’s transport network is quite good, actually;New Statesman political editor Stephen Bush on the best and worst cities for party conferences;The New Statesman’s former environmental writer India Bourke on the joy of nature;The Centre for Cities’ Paul Swinney on the town/city divide;Our current producer Nick Hilton on the fun he’s had turning my rubbish into a podcast;An interview with myself, about my favourite things about doing the show, conducted Agnes Frimston (who, when not being my wonderful and tolerant partner co-hosts the Chatham House podcast, Undercurrents);And last, but very definitely not least, Sommer Mathis, CityMetric’s new editor in chief, on how she got into urbanism and her plans for the site.All that, plus some clips from listeners, and some previously unreleased bits of my entirely excellent former co-host Stephanie Boland.Thanks for tuning into Skylines these last few years. I’m gonna miss you guys.Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman’s cities site. It’s presented by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Partly because of the crisis, partly for reasons we’ll come to in a moment, our production schedule on Skylines has got a bit lax. So the first of this week’s interviews – with my pal Claire Cocks in Palermo, about what lockdown, Italian-flavour, looks like – is already a little out of date. Italy, unlike the UK, has begun lifting its lockdown. But it’s still a fascinating insight into both what a stricter lockdown looks like, and also into how great Palermo would be if she were allowed to see it at all – so I’ve kept the interview, but added a brief update from Claire about what the situation there is like now.Our second interview is with Hala El Akl, a senior associate at PLP Architecture and chair of the ULI’s UK Urban Art Forum. She tells us exactly why cities should be paying more attention to the role of arts and culture, and what she hopes to do with the role.Before I go – the explanation for the lax schedule I mentioned. In case you’ve missed the announcements on social media: Skylines is coming to an end. I’ve handed over the reins at CityMetric to the new editorial team, led by the outstanding Sommer Mathis, and the next episode will be number 150. For those and a host of other reasons, this felt like the right time to stop.But don’t worry, because our final episode is going to be an absolute monster, in which I speak to all sorts of people who’ve been involved in the show in some capacity over the last four and a bit years years, about their favourite episodes, what they would have liked to have spoken about but didn’t, and also, inevitably, the tube. It’s the messy self-indulgent send off this podcast deserves, and I hope the final product is as much fun to listen to as it was to record.Incidentally – as part of that I’m going to include some clips from listeners, being nice and/or mocking me in an amusing fashion. If you’d like to be one of them, email me your clip to jonnelledge at gmail dot com under the subject line “Final Skylines”.Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman’s cities site. It’s presented by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I’m still locked down, and so, I assume, are you, so this week’s show is a game of two-halves.In the present, I speak to my lockdown companion, my partner Agnes Frimston – who, as it happens, co-hosts the newly weekly Chatham House podcast Undercurrents – about how much fun she’s having being shut in a one-bedroom flat with me with no end in sight. We also talk about the various coping strategies the world at large is developing to help it get through lockdown; how public services are faring; and how the crisis might change the world and its politics.We also put on mousturising face masks. While recording. It was that kind of day.After that, an interview, from the before times. Back in March, I spoke with Donna Hall, the former chief executive of Wigan council and chair of the New Local Government Network. We talked about the interlocking crises – budgets, social care, and so forth – that were afflicting England’s councils even before the pandemic arrived. Once we’re out of this mess, such issues are, I fear, only going to get worse.Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman’s cities site. It’s presented by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Apologies for the fact this week’s podcast is a little bit late. But in my defence, both time and the calendar have lost all meaning.Anyway. Something like a third of the world is currently in lockdown to deal with the coronavirus crisis, including Skylines’ little corner of it. So on the assumption that she didn’t have anywhere more fun to be right now, this seemed a good moment to invite my former co-host Stephanie Boland to Skype back into the podcast for the first time in about a year and a half. We discuss the strangeness of London, and its entirely empty transport system, in lockdown; how the UK government is doing at handling the crisis; and how it may, or may not, change the world and its politics.If you enjoyed this one and are a relatively recent subscriber to Skylines, then why not check out some episodes from Stephanie’s era as co-host? You can hear more of her in episodes 15-38, plus 51, 63, 100, and probably some more that I’ve forgotten because it was ages ago.On a different matter – the pandemic has meant a year’s delay to all this year’s English mayoral elections. That sadly means that the mayoral walks series is almost certainly finished, for the moment. But I nonetheless hope to persuade Sadiq Khan and Shaun Bailey to go for a walk with me at some point in the future. It’s good to have goals, isn’t it?Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman's cities site. It's presented by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The mayoral walks mini-series began in an act of trolling. Rory Stewart launched his campaign to be mayor of London through the unusual strategy of walking all over London and tweeting about it; I have spent large chunks of my life walking all over London and tweeting about it; Twitter at large suggested we combine forces, and maybe turn it into a podcast. And, once a couple of other candidates had helpfully put the pressure on by offering to go for a walk with me too, Stewart agreed. And suddenly what had started by taking the mick on Twitter because I was bored had become an actual thing.Alas, when the day finally came we were defeated by London’s famous weather: on the appointed morning, Friday 28 February, it was bucketing down, which isn’t really a good match with the Skylines recording equipment, also known as “my phone”. So instead this podcast was recorded in a cafe in South Kensington.During its course, I asked Rory why he felt London was crying out for a former Tory Cabinet minister as its independent mayor; why he had chosen to campaign by walking and, more recently, asking to sleep one night a week in other Londoners’ houses; and whether he thinks he really has a hope of defeating Sadiq Khan. All that, and we also chatted about his proposals to sort out the capital’’s housing and transport systems, and Rory ate some porridge, too.Incidentally, there’s a moment in this one when the candidate is unexpectedly enthusiastic about my proposals that we start giving the Overground network different line names and we have to stop talking about it before it takes over the entire podcast. Though we did discuss it for ten minutes after recording.This may be the last of my mayoral “walks”. I’m talking to the staffs of both Khan and his Tory rival Shaun Bailey, and am open to approaches from other candidates desperate for coverage... But at time of writing nothing else has been agreed. We shall see. If you happen to see someone running for mayor, send them my way, would you?Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman's cities site. It's presented by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In all the excitement over the London mayoral election, and Brexit, and coronavirus, and the end of civilisation as we know it, it might have escaped you that there are mayoral elections due in other English cities in early May. So, on this week’s podcast, we're looking at one of those. The last time Skylines spoke to Jen Williams, politics and investigations editor of the Manchester Evening News, it was to talk about exactly what had gone wrong with the northern rail network. Since that's still going wrong (lol), that’s our starting point this week, too. But we swiftly move on to talking about our real topic: Greater Manchester’s upcoming mayoral election and Andy Burnham’s record as mayor, as well as homelessness, policing and, my personal favourite, bus regulation. If you’re on Twitter and you don't follow Jen already, by the way, you’re doing it wrong: she’s on @JenWilliamsMEN. Next time, all being well, I’m off for a walk with independent London mayoral candidate Rory Stewart.Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman's cities site. It's presented by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This week, it’s the second in our mayoral walks mini-series. Sian Berry is the co-leader of the Green party, a member of the London Assembly, and is currently running as the party’s candidate to be mayor of the capital for the third time. A few weeks before Christmas, we spent a gloriously crisp winter afternoon together walking from Manor House station to Dalston together, a route chosen mostly because it took us along Green Lanes (geddit?). Along the way we talked about, among other things, air pollution, and how to fix it; how London can reform regeneration schemes so that they don’t screw over existing residents; and, something which Sian still has personal experience of, the capital’s private rental sector. We also ended our walk at a community “parklet” – a parking space, converted into a teeny, tiny park – and talked about how to take back space from cars.My next walk, all being well, will take place later this month, and will be with the man who inspired the whole project, Rory Stewart.Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman's cities site. It's recorded and presented by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In just over three months, England goes to the polls, again, for local elections. This time round the big story, at least so far as we’re concerned, will be the mayoral elections in London, Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and various other cities and city regions.To find out what to expect, I invited the New Statesman politics editor Stephen Bush back to Skylines to tell us what to look out for. At one point he genuinely argues that the exciting thing about these elections is that all the incumbents might win. Seriously.Also, while we’re here, we use our chat as an opportunity to trail our new podcast, Prime Ministerial, which looks back over 40 years of recent British political history.Lastly, a PSA for those who may have missed it: this is my last week on staff at the New Statesman. I’m off to freelance and work on some personal projects for a bit. I’ll be contributing to both the NS and CityMetric for a while yet, however, and Skylines will continue, at least for the moment... Stay tuned for further announcements.Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman's cities site. It's hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Rory Stewart likes to walk around London. So do I. And so, a few months ago, someone on Twitter gave me an idea for a fun wheeze: that we could walk together and turn it into a podcast.That walk will, hopefully, happen soon. But in the mean time I've been out and about with a number of the other candidates to be mayor of London.So this is the first of a mini-series. My companion on this walk, which took place last November, is the Liberal Democrat candidate Siobhan Benita. She took me to the Latin American market in Seven Sisters, which is currently under threat from developers, to talk about gentrification, housing, and all the things she'd hope to achieve as the mayor of this fine city.The next walk – though not necessarily the next episode – will see me wander through a different stretch of North London with the Green candidate and that party's co-leader, Sian Berry.Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman's cities site. It's hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I’ve barely been in the office since we released the last Skylines, so this week it's a guest episode. Commonwealth Voices is another podcast series from our founding producer Roifield Brown, of Map Corner fame. Last year it produced a lovely episode on the air pollution crisis currently afflicting Kingston, the capital of Jamaica. Here's Roifield's blurb:What happens when air quality is so dangerous, it brings businesses, schools and other services to a close and hundreds of people to the doors of public health clinics? The Jamaica Environment Trust were already calling on the government to tackle the public health risks of contaminated air and water. In 2018, when the decades old problem of fires at the Riverton city Dump resurfaced, their calls got louder.It's a lovely story – if you enjoy it please do check out the rest of Commonwealth Voices and Roifield's other podcasts. I'll be back with a normal episode of Skylines soon.Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman's cities site. It's hosted by Jonn Elledge and produced by Nick Hilton. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I realised earlier that this is the fourth Skylines Christmas Special, which apart from being a marker of quite how long I've been doing this thing now, presumably explains why there are giant steampunk robots marching across Victorian London again. Anyway. On this week's show, we're not going to talk about the election result – partly because I'm too depressed, partly because we've now got about four and a half years to think about that, but mostly because this episode was recorded 10 hours before the exit poll came out so we had no idea what the result was even going to be. (If you've just joined us: the left lost.)Instead, we're going to have a lovely conversation with Jay Foreman, distinguished host of such YouTube series as Unfinished London, Map Men and other things that frankly I wish I'd thought to do before he got there first. Jay tells me how he came to make a career making videos about London; how he and his co-host Mark Cooper-Jones had a blazing row about their favourite map projections; and why he's now six months into an online argument with a man who wrongly believes that Woking is in Greater London. It was, frankly, tremendous fun to record, so I can only hope it’s as fun to listen to. Not least because I realised afterwards I’d screwed up the recording and am nervous about how it sounds.Anyway. Happy Christmas, everybody – we’ll see you in 2020.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.

Well, here we go again. We’re seven days out from polling day here in the UK, and I don’t know about you but I’m not feeling great about it.So as a form of therapy I dragged Patrick Maguire, who’s been travelling around the country as part of his role as the New Statesman’s politics correspondent, back to the podcast to offer some reassurance. He couldn’t offer any.Anyway - we did have a fascinating chat about regional differences in voting patterns; how parts of Wales and the North East have never been the anti-Tory heartlands which they’re sometimes portrayed as; whether housing, transport and other similarly wonk-ish concerns are coming up on the doorstep; and how Napoleon III’s stay in Southport helped it win the title of “the Paris of the North”.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 podcast has been a bit parochial of late (read: London-bound) so this week we're going abroad. Max Rashbrooke is a journalist, author and policy wonk based in Wellington, the capital of New Zealand, with whom, a very long time ago, I used to work. We chat about the cities of his homeland, how one might travel between them, and how they came to have the sort of housing crisis that can almost make London look good. We also talk about New Zealand's politics and history more broadly - as well as its relationship with its bigger, better known neighbour Australia.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.

Skylines is out and about again this week. Epping Forest is a 13 mile long strip of wooded land straddling the border between London and Essex. I often visited during my childhood, have walked bits of it since, but I've never done the whole thing.So last week, I did, with a man who's just written the book on the subject. Luke Turner, with whom I worked briefly a depressingly long time ago, is the co-founder of the culture website The Quietus. He's also the author of Out Of The Woods, which he modestly describes as “a critically-acclaimed memoir of sexuality and nature”. He kindly agreed to spend an autumn day walking with me from Manor Park to Epping, all the while telling me about his book, the history of the forest and its place in the psyche of the city, and how it came to be owned by the City of London Corporation. We also talk, variously, about hermits, hallucinations, cows and our former boss Jeremy Hunt.Some excellent production work courtesy of our producer Nick on this one incidentally – while the podcast was recorded on location, the woodland sound effects are sadly a later addition.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, I finally invited someone I should have asked years ago onto the podcast. Anoosh Chakelian is a long time colleague of mine at the New Statesman – she joined the staff literally two days before I did – whose work focuses largely on public services and the state of the public realm. She also earlier this year replaced Helen Lewis as co-host of the main NS podcast, on which she is doing an excellent job.Anoosh joins me to talk about a subject very dear to her heart: outdoor gyms, which offer free community classes, and many of which are now under threat. While she's around we also chat about austerity, London's best parks, and why west London is not frankly very good.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.

In roughly the same manner as the Greenland Ice Sheet, the London mayoral election is hotting up. Ex-Tory Rory Stewart has entered the race as an independent and is chatting about it to anyone who goes near him. Continuing Tory Assembly Member Shaun Bailey gave a speech to the party's conference, and is refusing to chat to pretty much anyone. (No change there: during the selection race last year, he was the only shortlisted candidate to refuse to talk to us, forcing us to replace him with some music.)To discuss what all this means for the race, and whether it threatens Labour incumbent Sadiq Khan in next May's contest, I'm joined by New Statesman political correspondent Patrick Maguire, who, it's fair to say, has views. Also this week, the sort of Liverpudlian Patrick and sort of Londoner myself debate a question for the ages: which is better, Birmingham or Manchester?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.

One of the more exciting things to have happened in the already fairly exciting world of housing and planning policy in recent years is the rise of the YIMBY movement. Intended as a counterbalance to the "Not in my back yard" lot, YIMBYs aim to show politicians that there's support for policies that would get more housing built.They also, on occasion, write for CityMetric – so I invited two of them on to tell us about their work. John Myers is leader of the London Yimby group, while Sam Watling is director of Brighton Yimby. They tell me about the movement’s origins, its policy goals and how exactly they're going to solve the housing crisis.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.

The present is terrible and the future may be worse, so let's take refuge in the past. Monica L. Smith as an archaeologist and professor of anthropology at the University of California Los Angeles, whose latest book is Cities: The First 6,000 Years.In it she investigates why cities first emerged, how they have evolved, and why people are drawn to them. She was kind enough to pop by New Statesman towers to give us a flavour, and tell me why cities first emerged, where you can find their ruins and what they have to teach us today.If you like this one, by the way, you might want to check out episode 19, from way back in September 2016, when I spoke to the US history podcaster Rob Monaco about how it was we came to invent cities in the first place.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’m on my summer holidays, so here’s a guest episode.Skylines’ founding producer Roifield Brown recently teamed up with Luton’s own Claire Astbury to launch a new podcast. Map Corner covers maps, cities, transport systems, and all the other things that Skylines listeners are into.They were kind enough to invite me on to talk about maps, Spain and Helsinki the other day, so this is that episode. It isn’t just me though - there’s also an extensive discussion of the British road number system, along with much, much more. If you like Skylines, you’ll like this, and you should subscribe immediately.All being well I’ll be back in two weeks.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.

A few weeks ago, a man called Samir Jeraj got onto the Northern line of the London Underground at Bank station, promptly got his bag strap caught in the doors, and then spent the next 15 stops hoping in vain that the next would be the one where the doors in question would open again, freeing him again. He ended up at the end of the line in Edgware.This struck me as very funny, and since Samir is a housing campaigner and the author of The Rent Trap, I thought that a fun thing to do for the podcast would be to recreate the incident and then interview him about rent controls while trapped in a tube train’s doors. The result was… well, you’ll find out.I’m about to go on my holidays, by the way, so the next one will be a guest episode from friend of the podcast Roifield Brown. I'll be back with your next regular episode of Skylines in early September.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.

Jonn Elledge of the New Statesman and City Metric site and podcast talks about transit maps, Helsinki and his love of Spanish cities.The Helsinki map is the work of Jug Cerovic, here is Jug's Twitter and his website See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 podcast: Agnes Frimston, deputy editor of the Chatham House magazine The World Today, and co-host of its podcast Undercurrents. If you’re interested in international affairs, you should definitely subscribe to the latter, because both she and it are brilliant, even if it did take us three goes to record the intro because she kept laughing at my podcast voice.(Agnes' comments, of course, reflect her own views, not those of Chatham House.)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 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 country has done to the wealth divide in this accursed nation.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.

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 in its field – so can it help pull Sheffield out of its economic doldrums?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, 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 time to talk about Somerset House itself, and – not at all parochially – Westminster council's proposals for pedestrianising part of the Strand.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 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 climate dystopia novel The Wall, as well as other topics including Brexit, the housing crisis and, er, Game of Thrones. You can hear the recording of that event on the next Skylines.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.

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 opt-out information.

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 Government Network’s annual conference in London. If you’re a local government professional, why not pop along?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.

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 this one, but there we are.)Also this week, I talk to Paul Swinney of the Centre for Cities about the other big freeze (DYSWIDT?) affecting British politics: austerity. Just how much damage has it done to our cities?The conversation was inspired in large part by this year's addition of the Centre's annual Cities Outlook report. You can find that here.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, 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 information.

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 the Rockefeller Foundation, 100RC is dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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 (@nickfthilton), which should improve the sound quality markedly. Please make him feel welcome, but please don’t tell him how much better at this he is than I am.We’ll be back in a fortnight. Tara.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.

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 - or even better, desperate promises of cash - we may reconsider this decision in the new year; but for the next few months at least we're cutting back.The good news is that it isn't going anywhere: we'll still be talking about cities, transport and other such nerd ambrosia. And the even better news is we're getting a proper producer, so it should sound better than it does when I'm in editing it.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.

110. The rise of the robotsThis week, it’s about work, automation, fear and loathing in god’s own county of Essex.New Statesman tech writer Sarah Manavis has been to Tilbury to visit an “Amazon fulfilment centre”, which is almost exactly as fun as it sounds. She tells me what the experience taught her about modern corporate culture, as well as complaining about having to get up in the morning and also about her puppy Martha.Dove-tailing neatly with the issues raised by that conversation, this week’s Ask The Experts segment with Centre for Cities boss Andrew Carter concerned what automation will do to Britain’s cities – and how government can avoid repeating the mistakes it made in the 1980s.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 is a repeat – sorry gang, I’ve been horrendously busy.But, there are quite a lot of episodes of this thing now. And as the audience has grown, that means a lot of you haven’t heard our early work. So, to plug the gap, here’s an example of it. What follows is the original blurb, from August 2016.On this week's podcast, we're talking gender. Which of course is not actually the same as sex – the former is social, the latter biological – but until such time as HBO makes a hit sitcom called “Gender and the City”, this is our title and we're sticking to it. Anyway. This week's guests: Caroline Criado-Perez is the writer, journalist and feminist campaigner, who wrote a fantastic feature for us on why cities need to take women into account when planning. She gives us a whistlestop tour of her findings, from playgrounds in Vienna to toilets in Mumbai. Lauren Elkin is the author of "Flaneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London", recently serialised on BBC Radio 4. She tells Stephanie about the origins of the book, and why walking can be a radical act. Sarah Coughlan and Marissa Santikarn are two-thirds of the Berlinials podcast. They tell us about the joys and hassles of ex-pat Berlin. Lastly, Stephanie and I discuss how her experiences of London differ from mine (most notably: I get cat-called surprisingly rarely). And we talk about how cities could be made more welcoming for women. Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman cities site. It's presented by Jonn Elledge and Stephanie Boland, and is a Roifield Brown production. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This month, Emma and Steve are joined on the podcast by Jonn Elledge, Editor of the New Statesman's City Metric website. We discuss our recent World Cup of Political TV event and Our Friends in the North.

This month, Emma and Steve are joined on the podcast by Jonn Elledge, Editor of the New Statesman's City Metric website. We discuss our recent World Cup of Political TV contest and Our Friends in the North.