Gabriella Bennett: Other possible cities.

Introducing Gabriella Bennett and her book

0:00Hello. What would a failing city look like? Would one be able to tell if, for example, London or New York were a busted flush? What would be the markers? Social discord, unwalkable streets, cultivated inequality and polarisation, declining mental and physical health might seem like some suitable measures. Perhaps a better question, though, one that doesn't expend excess energy on futile despair, is what would a growing city look like? This, as I read it, is the question Gabriella Bennett seeks to answer in her book, How to Build a City, Journeys into the Urban Future. which is coming out with headline press on the 13th of August this year, and documents both her personal story and her explorations of places, from the Ukraine to Tokyo, from Florida to the Arctic, that have begun to remake themselves fit for us now.

0:43Given urbanisation, different from city-making, but we can leave that for now, the central claim Bennett makes in How to Build a City is simple, insistent and Churchillian. The shape of where you live shapes the life you lead. Because cities both generate their crises and accelerate them, or perhaps aspects of modernity's alienation and disenchantment, the act of rebuilding is the central moral and creative problem of the urban future.

1:06If you can, please support the A is for Architecture podcast by either subscribing on Patreon or making a gift via Buy Me A Coffee. Links to these, and to Gabriella, and the book, are in the podcast description.

1:18A is for Architecture, a podcast about architecture, buildings, urban culture and space. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the A is for Architecture podcast. I'm delighted to be talking today to journalist and author, Gabriella Bennett. Gabriella, thank you for coming on the show. We're going to be talking about your book, How to Build a City, Journeys to the Urban Future, which you published with Headline Press, or which you are publishing with Headline Press in August this year. As I said, thanks for talking about it. It's a very interesting book. It's a very, how would I put it? Kind of shocking book?

1:53Yeah. Kind of shocking book? Anyway, we'll get to this. Maybe you don't feel it's shocking, but I think there is a certain shock value to it.

Growing up in Glenrothes

2:00But before we get to that, would you, Gabriella, introduce yourself? Well, firstly, thank you very much for having me, Ambrose. It's a pleasure to be on today with you. My name is Gabriella Bennett. I am a journalist and author. I live in Scotland, in a village between Perth and Dundee. And I am sort of, for the last 15 years since I've graduated, been working as a reporter and covering mostly the built environment. So the built environment is kind of one of these strange terms, I think.

2:33Sometimes it feels like it fudges things, but I think it's a bit of a coverable term. So I started off my career writing about home, a more kind of cosy, I suppose, and interior-focused look at the places where we live. And then as my career progressed and I began working as a reporter for newspapers, I broadened out my practice to start covering housing and legislation and architecture and design. And in the last six or seven years or so, I've encompassed travel as well.

3:09I think all these things are important because they are all interlinked and they are all reflected in the book that I have out in the middle of August, August 13th, called How to Build a City, which is an exploration of our shared world, I suppose, through the prism of the cities we live in. And the city, I suppose, can be read as a conceit, as a concept, as well as a place. But it looks at specifically the challenges that we encounter when we are thinking about how we're building.

3:45So social predicaments like loneliness and hostility faced by migrants, climate-related problems, the climate crisis, the climate emergency, whatever your choice of phrase is there. And then I also look at sort of conflict-based emergencies. So war on one level and more domestic crime for another. All of these things are kind of assessed and interrogated through the lens of home.

4:17So this is something that it's a subject I come to with my reporter hat on, with my writer hat on, but also from a very personal, a deeply personal place. I grew up in one of Scotland's experimental post-war new towns. I moved there when I was 12 from the south coast of England. And it was quite a, well, it was a huge culture shock as a 12-year-old girl. But it really shaped me as a person and it shaped the way I look at the world and look at place.

4:52So I come to the book from this place of kind of retreading over the familiar paths of my girlhood with this adult perspective, with my reporter's hat on. But I suppose I'm looking for answers in a way to questions that have been floating around in my head for the last 20 years. So that moment where you move up to Glenrothes, which is just north of Edinburgh, over the water.

5:22Yes. And you see this as being a sort of fundamental or instrumental moment. I mean, I can only imagine moving from the southeast to the south of England to the north of the centre of Scotland. It felt quite scary in a way. Certainly, weather-wise, it's scary. But what was it specifically about the place?

Culture shock in a Scottish new town

5:43So the village I grew up in on the south coast of England, Emsworth, this kind of idyllic fishing town, where it certainly is in the sunlit uplands of my memory. I mean, it felt deeply English. You know, this is a place of red brick and sun-scorched grass and mill ponds. And then I had never been to Scotland. I think my dad was working as a building surveyor at the time for the NHBC,

6:14and he got a job in Scotland and was commuting, but then decided to buy a house and renovate it. And that would be his new job, his new career. And this house happened to be at the top of Glenrothes. So neither my younger brother and I or I had been to Scotland ever, let alone Glenrothes, before we moved, you know, all got packed into the back of the family car with the dog and the cat and driven nine hours, ten hours north.

6:48I mean, it was just as much of a culture shock as you could possibly imagine. So Glenrothes is a place built in the shadow of World War II with, you know, kind of cheapish materials in a modernist style, very functional, very lacking ornament, you know, this kind of utilitarian place that at the time when it was built in the late 40s to roughly mid 60s, because it was built in phases, was seen as really quite futuristic, really quite,

7:20I wouldn't go so far as radical because I don't think it was quite one of the most radical new towns, but aesthetically, certainly it was really unlike, you know, some of the decorative periods in history that came before it. There was nothing like it around.

7:37So suddenly we're confronted with, you know, these kind of grey, the greytopia, you know, this really sharp edged, right angled, pebble dash kingdom.

7:52And I don't know, I'm someone that's very sensitive to an environment and it felt really quite disorientating, but it also didn't help that I was English in Scotland and in a small town. And I am wary about the language I use here because my experience is only personal and I can't speak for anybody else, but it was quite hostile to grow up as an English kid in a small Scottish town in the noughties.

8:25So that definitely fed into this generally quite a lonely experience, quite a lonely childhood. But it also sowed the seed of thinking about how much place affects person and how the buildings we live alongside have an impact on the lives we lead. This was not something I was able to put into a kind of, you know, little sentence, you know, small little compact sentence like that for many, many years.

8:58But something sort of nagged at me, you know, I felt that me and Glenroth has had this unfinished business for so many years. And partly my work as a journalist has come about because I have this sort of unquenchable thirst for knowledge and understanding and I want to deeply understand the world that I move through. And I just could never get under the skin of Glenroth and I couldn't understand this place. And so part of this book was going back to the place where I called home and I do call my hometown

9:30and I feel both protective of it and loyal to it, but also the opposite of those emotions. I feel conflicted by it and I feel that it kind of let me down and maybe other residents in its own way. So the beginning of my book is about kind of laying those ghosts to rest and trying to understand what it was about Glenroth that made me feel lonely. And it was about the planning of this space, you know.

Post-war ideals and urban planning reality

9:57So part of the Scottish Newtown movement, like the Newtown movement in England, was this idea that it could be a garden city with a village feel. And there would be these great swathes of landscaping running through the housing estates and around, you know, kind of civic municipal buildings. But the practical application of that landscaping was not always particularly welcoming. And it wasn't great for women. You know, it made great parts of the town unwalkable at night because it wasn't very well lit.

10:29There's all these underpasses everywhere, all over the town, so many underpasses. And I think it was a really hostile urban planning feature. You know, I'd always get this prickle of fear walking under an underpass as a woman. And so, yeah, this is the kind of, this is the way in for me to start thinking about Glenroth. It's not extracting it as a place that feels personal to me, to something more abstract, and then trying to interrogate it for what it really was. And that new town movement, to link it back to your theses in the book,

11:03they're very much part of a kind of reconstruction of a society in the lee of European conflicts of the early 20th century, First and Second World Wars, where there's a, as I understand it, and I know Glenroth, I've spent time there, and I know the new towns quite well in Scotland. And there's a sense that they were utopic, and they were attempting to reconstruct society on better lines, lines that weren't going to go down that horrific trajectory that had seen so much devastation.

11:35But you don't feel like it kind of met that by the sound of it. But also, do you understand that to be a stated intention of these places, that they were, in a way, kind of healing places, places of, as you call it, reconstruction? There were a few really beautiful sentences and testimony that I read when I was doing my research in Glenroth's archives from the original planners and architects that worked on the town. And the way they described it was this kind of place of, it was almost a prize for surviving

12:09a world that had been so destroyed, and which had emerged, you know, kind of blackened and damaged. And the people who lived there were to be handed, who had kind of survived that, were to be handed something brave and hopeful, and it could be in the form of the town. And there was one prize, one testimony in particular from one of the planners that talked about, you know, he was never, he was never a soldier, he never, he never fought, he was never in the

12:43active theatre of war, but he felt its hangover like everybody else did, you know, and it weighed really heavily on these planners at the time, but they also saw it as this bittersweet opportunity to remake the past in a way, to try to fix, maybe naively, but I'd like to say hopefully, an idea that the world could ever find itself again in such a terrible situation where a war might happen.

13:17And I think these planners genuinely did believe that by remaking the world in a building way, in an architectural way, they had the chance to remake the future.

13:30But they also acknowledged that this was an experiment, that they were dealing with sometimes experimental materials. They were doing things on an enormously tight budget, and it was about making good of what they had. And I'd seen Glen Rothes described in a few articles as a concrete petri dish, and it kind of made me smile, because I do, I feel that as well. It was always an experiment, and it was still an experiment by the time I got to Glen Rothes in 2001. It's an experiment that even

14:05now is still spooling on. And the thing about experiments is that it's about taking some lessons, and saying, what can we learn from them, and discarding parts that haven't worked, while understanding that that is always going to be very subjective. So my experience of Glen Rothes will be different from the next person and the next person's. Now, my experience will always be colored or clouded, or however you want to put it, by the fact that I was English and moving there. And in some ways, that should have united me with almost everybody else that lived there, because I too was a

14:38newcomer, you know, everybody who moved to Glen Rothes in the 40s to the 60s and beyond, we were all new. But somehow for me, that difference calcified. And it wasn't something that united me with everyone else, it just made my differences more apparent. Now, I've done introspective work on that and reflective work through this book and otherwise. And part of that is perhaps my personality. But I think about what it means to move someone new and not feel welcomed and accepted. And I think

15:09it is very much an interior feeling. And I think it feels most apparent to those of us who crave belonging most. And I was always someone that deeply craved belonging. And I couldn't ever quite find it there. I thought about those new towns and that post-war moment, that post-crisis moment, and we'll get on to the crises that sort of organise your book as I read it. But I often wonder about that Newtown movement and the suburbanisation movements of the inner urban poor, particularly in Scotland, but all

15:40over the UK, and probably further afield as well, as a sort of coming home of colonialist thinking. So I think you frame it to a certain extent, and you can feel free to correct me, as a sort of something around a patriarchal kind of arrangement, where there is this kind of dominance of male sensibilities, male logics, that kind of are leveraged to deliver these places. A very kind of top-down approach to things from a male perspective. The very act of taking large numbers of disenfranchised

16:17lower middle and working class people and moving them has all the same characteristics of sort of Le Corbusier's proposals for Ethiopia, or even the act of moving large quantities of working class men around militaristically, which again, done on an absolute fragmentary budget. And the effect of this, to me, seems to be one of alienation. And I was wondering whether you found this environment, this specific environment, fundamentally a sort of alienating in that modernist sense, and whether that was why you could never feel at home in kind of one of these clinical, over-designed, and I think that's

16:52what the underpasses are about. It's over-design. It's not logic. It's too much time on a drawing board, really. Whether that was the alienation that you were experiencing. I think that's a really interesting point. And I think that there was an element of paternalism that it was impossible to ignore and is impossible to ignore. And that is so tightly bound with modernism and this idea of it holding the viewer or the resident, you know, depending on what kind of modernist structure we're talking about, at arm's length. It doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't draw you

17:26to it and make you feel often. It doesn't make you feel held by it, I suppose. But it's also worth noting that Glenrothes is a place that, unlike some of the other Scottish new towns, was built around industry. So it was built around a super pit, a colliery, that gave employment to thousands of men. And this colliery was built at, I mean, enormous expense, something like, I mean, millions of

17:57pounds in 1960s money. And then, because the colliery had been built on very, a land that was easily flooded and within the earth, sort of tributaries of water in the earth. But there was also issues with resource extraction being cheaper elsewhere and being able to sort of find coal elsewhere for cheaper. The mine closed, you know, very quickly after it opened. And overnight, you had hundreds

18:27of men, thousands of men who were essentially unemployed, so offered jobs elsewhere, but those jobs were in England, or other mines that were equally condemned. And so they would have had to leave their families. So of course, this is not a reasonable relocation package, you know. So overnight, you've got an entire town, you know, essentially a company town, I suppose, in some ways, that has been completely cut off. So you've got this sense of neglect and alienation and

18:59isolation that creeps in. So I think this plays a huge part in Glenrothes. And it's the feelings that

Economic shocks and industrial collapse

19:06I picked up on when I got there, you know, I'm, I believe that the places that we live alongside do hold on to feelings and memories, and they embody a certain energy in however we choose to read that energy. Maybe it depends on whether we're sensitive to that energy or not. But I don't believe that you can have a town where such a, I mean, it was kind of a catastrophe, really, for those men and their families. And that kind of, that kind of, yeah, being, being so routinely kind of forgotten and

19:43neglected, and then poverty sets in, took a long time for that to sort of wheel its way out. But Glenrothes is also a place of, ever since it was created, a place of real regeneration. So every time its industries have closed, and this is like a recurring thing. So after the mine, it rebranded itself as, you know, a place of sort of nascent technologies, and loads of factories opened. And it was, I mean, a real hub for a while. There was almost 200 factories scattered around

20:19Glenrothes, which is a huge, crazy number, huge number. And then it got this nickname, Silicon Glen. And eventually, those wound up as outsourcing, it was moved to China. So then it became very neglected again. And then it recharged its batteries in it, and it found new industries for those people. So I mean, Glenrothes has been described as the street fighter of Scottish new towns, because you kick it to the ground, but it will always make, it will always get back up again. And I find that the kind of, that's the hopeful angle, that's the hopeful side.

20:53And understanding that a city is something that will have a downward trajectory, but very often it will swoop up again, because that cycle of regeneration, it keeps turning all the time. Do you want to come to this idea of home that you've talked about as this kind of principal unit of analysis that you take this through? But perhaps to frame it again, the book again, maybe you could talk to some of the principal crises that you encounter in your travels, in your study of cities, I guess it's globally, because I think that's a, for me, that's an

21:27important part of the book. And that's why I described it as a kind of, not controversial, but kind of startling book, really, because you want to look very squarely at the relationship of cities to these crises, and how the crises are revealed and played out in urban space. It took me a long time to work out how I was going to structure this book and organise my findings. And for a long time, I thought I might do it by material or era, and then blend in

22:03these crises as we went along. But it soon became apparent to me that the crises themselves were the guiding force, because it was a crisis that from which my own hometown grew and that being the

Frontiers of crisis and the loneliness epidemic

22:20starting point for this book. So I began to think about places that felt as if they were frontiers in some way, frontiers of crisis, but also frontiers of resilience, that being the flip side of crisis. And I looked at places where a particular predicament was playing out. So that might be a social predicament. So I travelled to Tokyo and spent two weeks in Tokyo, two and a half weeks in Tokyo,

22:57understanding what was driving its loneliness epidemic. You know, 2021, Tokyo, Japan, sorry, declared a national loneliness epidemic. And some of the numbers are really, really quite startling, you know, huge numbers of people dying alone, you know, per capita, way more than anywhere else in the world. And so much of the culture is spent alone. And I started to think, well, how much of that is

23:28being is being accelerated by the organisation of home and the city and where we live. And I suppose my kind of journalistic sense kicked in there as well. And I wanted to look at these places that felt extreme and places that felt like epicentres of something. But then within all of those cities, those kind of examples, I do blend in other places. And I tried to link it link together, this idea of, you know,

23:59broadening out one of these or any of these predicaments and saying, Okay, so I'm going to Helsinki, to try and understand why a underground city might be scooped from Helsinki's bedrock. But it's also a kind of dual purpose city where all these places are bomb shelters, first and foremost, but they're dual purpose, and they can be used as shopping centres or metro stations or go-karting rinks or reservoirs and peacetime. So this idea of, yeah, the dual purpose and the overlapping

24:31kind of genre bending renegade nature of these crises, lots of which bled into each other, lots of which, yeah, might dip in and out of each other.

24:46But all of which fed back to the central premise, which is, the idea of the city is, is, is a one of great interest to me. But ultimately, when you live in a city, there is no city, there's only home. There's only the familiar constellation of objects and infrastructure we live alongside bridges, bins, libraries, old flats, you might have lived in new flats you want to live in. And only through home can we make the problem personal. And only through home can we understand what tips a crisis, which often feels like this quite esoteric, abstract idea

25:23from our day-to-day lives. You know, I read the words climate emergency and see this terrible flooding in, you know, Pakistan or earthquakes in Turkey. And I feel awful, but it doesn't, it doesn't impact my life directly or so I feel, but only through the idea of home can I make it mean something. When a city is home, it starts to become mine. And that's where individual empowerment comes from. And this idea that the city, city's problems can be my own, but so can the solutions.

25:58That's something that I started to cover more of in my journalistic work, you know, I tried to, I tried to look at more solutions based reporting and be drawn to places and to people necessarily, because that's, you know, it's such a huge, a hugely important part of our cities. A city is really just a nucleus, an intense concentration and focus of people. That's what we mean by a city really. And then the shape of our city is organized via the people who live there. So I know what people

26:30mean to me. I know what home means to me. And then the city kind of falls out through that. But also it's about my happiness in that place, you know, a city giving me what I need to survive and how it has a direct influence on the way I move through the world. That is when home comes in, because it means it's personal to me.

26:54So what does the city mean in the broader literature or the way that you've encountered its expression beyond gathering together of a large number of people, which is, I think, pretty much what it means. Certainly, in those discussions around X number of people living in cities by whatever date is 2030, 2100. Yeah, it's a very nebulous kind of concept, actually. Yeah, it differs, differs country to country. Well, that's, that's, that's a good point as well. A city means something different,

27:24depending on where you go. And it means something and it's up to each country to define its city, as it should be, of course. But this is why it was so important for me to do a global overview of the, of, of the city of home. And to really try to get under the skin of many places, it could have easily been a book about UK cities, or even Scottish cities. And equally, any one of these chapters could have been a whole book in itself, right? Because it's so vast and sprawling.

27:56But yeah, my, my idea of making it global is to try and find patterns and connections between these places. And to show that, although a city means something different, no matter where you go, there are things they all have in common. And there are things that we pick up on when we travel to these cities, or when we go and visit friends, or when we choose to live there, or when we, you know,

28:26our home city, our new cities, there are things they share and things they can learn from each other, lessons and pointers. But ultimately, a city's development needs to come from the city itself.

Rebuilding libraries under fire in Ukraine

28:42This is something I thought about a lot when I visited Ukraine. And I spent three weeks in Ukraine in March 2022. No, sorry, March 2024. To April 24, traveling around different cities, trying to understand what it meant to be a city that was rebuilding while war was still spooling on. So my experience, for instance, of Glenrothes was a very much a post-war city, or an urban area town, really.

29:13But what does it mean to be building, you know, almost defying logic, when your rebuilt library in Harkin, for instance, will very likely be shelved again, you know, and even targeted it being an expression of democracy and culture. And we know these things are targets in war. And what I found particularly insightful was that it isn't just about the material expression of building for survival, or functionality, but a symbol of hope and motivation, and a kind of an act of faith and

29:50trust in the future, that there will be a future. And this idea that what else are we going to do, we have to go on. And it sends a sign to an enemy, you know, we are building a city for ourselves for when we'll be glorious. This is what some of the architects when I spoke to you, in Kyiv and in Harkiv, you know, they very much explained that it wasn't just what it was about rebuilding what was lost, but it was also about, yeah, a certain symbolic act.

30:23It seems to me and following your example, for example, from Kiev is that the notion of crisis, it's very dependent upon the way that we describe the crisis. And obviously, you're a peddler of words, so it's all in the words. But could it be that we are sort of talking our way around a series of crisis? And I come back to Glenrothes as well, is that we've, in a way, typecast a series of pretty brilliant places, Glenrothes, or Iska Bride, or Irvine, or wherever it is in the Scottish Newtown things, or Milton Keynes, or Harlow, or so on. We've kind of framed them now as sites of crisis.

31:00We've framed almost everything as a crisis. And I wonder whether that's a particularly, I would say, useful, but also good thing to be doing. And I guess this is a slightly antagonistic question. I'm really aware at the moment of the crisis of confidence in young people and their anxieties about the world. And yet, they are going to live longer, healthier lives than any generation in human history. They're going to have more things, more leisure, eat more diverse and healthy food,

31:36if they choose. They will be more entertained. They will be more comfortable. By any metric, they're living like kings and queens. So I wonder about these crises and this articulation of crisis and how useful it is to talk about the world in this way, given the anxiety it seems to me to generate in teenagers, school kids, even my primary school aged children. So that's my kind of contentious or attitude-y question here. Is this just how you're choosing to see this?

32:06I think this depends on your reading of crisis. I use the word with caution. And I make a clear delineation that when I think about things like the climate, so the cities that I look at through the prism of climate, I look at, I mean, I think that's, these are places that have been hollowed out by, or in some places, completely destroyed by what we call natural disasters, which is kind of a strange term for me. But then I look at other

32:40things that have been considered crises, you know, by somebody else's definition, like loneliness, for instance, but I don't, I don't call it a crisis. I would call that a social predicament, because I think it's still important to have a spectrum of crises. And I think somewhere in the middle, you have words like, well, maybe it is at the other end, emergency. I think about the phrase housing emergency, which is, it's used so much now that it's devalued it, it's decommissioned the idea of its power. And not everything can be an emergency. We've had a housing emergency in

33:13Scotland for the last 20 years. Now that can no longer be an emergency, if that has been happening for more than two decades. So I am wary about using this word. But I also see it as a guiding principle. And I think it's an easily accessible and understandable word. But when you come to the subject green, and when you are somebody who wants to learn more about what is governing our cities, and the gravest challenges that will affect us now and in the future.

33:46And I am very careful to try and use the right words for the right reasons and in the right situations. But I also consider so in my in my section on climate, I look at how Japan rebuilt some of its cities after the 2011 tsunami. And I don't know that you could describe that as anything other than a crisis and how it bled into other crises. You know, for instance, some of the cities that were particularly

34:21that were what so there was a city that suffered something like 80% of building loss and seven to 8% of office population was killed. And that crucially bled into this this loneliness epidemic, if you want to call it that, because the response, especially in the older communities, older generations, they were annexed from their communities, they were unable to use tech to, you know, contact their families in a in a meaningful, consistent way. I mean, figures,

34:57most recent figures in the UK show something that something crazy, like, a third of people over 60 don't, don't use the internet in the way that people under 60 use it, you know, so there are these real barriers. But I do think it's very important to differentiate and make sure that the right word is used at the right time. So I, I do agree that a crisis is a big word, and it feels like a word that is banded about a lot. And it seems to be, it seems to be an easy word. But in terms of approaching my subject matter,

35:34it, it came to me very, very kind of obviously and shut in sharp relief that there was really very few other ways in which I could understand a challenge that affected one city in particular. It had to, it had to, it kind of had to be this. I want to come to this idea of home and home making. And you ask these, these two interrelated questions, what makes a city abide? What makes a city sustain? And how does a city make us belong? And, and you come at this through this notion of, of home. I guess there's two questions for me off the

36:09back of that one is, how does thinking about the city through the spectrum of home, change the way we might think about the making of cities, and the remaking of cities. And off the back of that, how have you found through your travel through your study? How have you found people framing home? Like, how is it consistent as a existential condition? And how does it differ? Because I think that will, I think that naturally will lead on to the following question, which is, given these crises,

36:43and given the remaking that needs to occur, what are the solutions that are being put forward? But perhaps we can come to that afterwards.

The universal act of homemaking

36:50Yes. So home, the act of making home, which is a phrase I use quite a lot, is something that feels deeply, deeply human. And something that we all really share in different perspectives and different ways. But when I was trying to think about, you know, the language that I used when I wrote this book, I was thinking about words like architecture, and even the city, I suppose, in some ways.

37:24And they felt like words that were quite, but could be quite cold, quite clinical, that didn't draw you in, that didn't make you, I suppose, feel something. But home was something, you know, you ask, you box pop somebody as a journalist in the street, and you say, how do you feel about Glasgow's architecture? They know what you mean. But sometimes they've struggled to sort of grasp onto an individual, a particular specific example, unless they are into it, and they, and they, and you know, they can think of something off the top of their heads. But

37:55ask them to think about home. That's, that's something that you can very easily get to. And so it had to be through this, through this prism, and then you can broaden out from there.

38:08What I found in my research was that there was this really strong desire to make home. And that is something that's so deeply, tightly woven into ideas about identity and belonging. That means something enormously important to me as well. This idea of when I moved to Glenrothes from Emsworth, I was looking for another way to make home. And it took me a long time to feel like I belong

38:39there. And I've written a chapter about digital cities and what it means to try and find a home for yourself on the internet in the, in the age of information. And I played a video game called The Sims. Have you, have you heard of The Sims or played The Sims, Ambrose? I've heard of it. I have absolutely no faculty at all with computer games. Well, I was really into this computer game when I was younger. So it's basically a world building game in which, well, but that isn't even quite doing it justice because it's really

39:09a homemaking game, but it involves you as a player making your house and building it out from the inside, choosing the decoration, and then your characters live inside it and you can direct them and make them live together or not, as you may, as you may wish. But what was so interesting to me is when I started to research this game, this game that I really lost myself in as a, a young sort of teen, early teen, trying to find my place in the world, I realized and discovered that the video

39:45game creator, Will Wright, who had created Sim City, first of all, which was this kind of curious, bloodless, municipality building game in which you, you know, made an entire, as the name suggested, made an entire city and organized how your oil refinery might, might work, and then you've got your factories. And it was really successful, but he struggled to make another video game after that. And after he did, he, sorry, before he did, he was caught up in the 1991 firestorm. So very similar

40:21to the firestorms that we had in LA last year in, in Oakland, and his house was destroyed. So in this, in the aftermath of that, in this kind of reaccumulation of belongings, and what it meant to fill a home, he became interested in home kind of building software, discovered that these sort of interior design softwares in which you just make a home and design it, and you can kind of mock up what you want to do to your own house, had like millions and millions and millions of users,

40:51like far more than could ever have been actually building and decorating their homes. And he kind of, you know, came to this idea, extrapolated from there and said, well, actually, what if people are not just only interested in using this as a tool for their own homes, but like, they want to get lost there. This is a sort of fantasy island to which, in which to belong to somewhere. And from that point, he made The Sims. And this is one of the most successful computer games of all time. And it's something that is born of catastrophe. And, you know, I can't ever understand what it must be

41:26like to lose your home in such atrocious circumstances. But I do know what it's like to remake home and to keep remaking home, and to be pulled by an instinct that feels so deep and human and primal. And I think that's something that we all have in common. The city might mean something different to us all. Architecture might mean something to us all. And it does. And home does. But home is a universal language. And it's something that is so rooted inside who we

41:57are. You know, I write about refugee camps in Jordan, and this idea of refugees recreating homes that they have made for themselves, homes that they've left behind in Syria, right down to, you know, the kind of the urban space and where a courtyard might be and where the where their tent is in this refugee camp camp, they move everything around. And they're trying to kind of recreate so

42:29faithfully this place they've left behind, you know, the urge to remake the places we come from, it never leaves. And I think only through that can we understand what it means to try and make these places better for ourselves, and for other people. I think it's I think it's a completely crucial part of being a human being. And it's not just about the construction of relationships. I moved from Scotland down to Margate, and it felt like a deeply scarring thing, because we had a lovely life and home.

43:02We rented a little flat, and we had friends and a very good social network. And we came down sight unseen and into a winter in East Kent, and it was horrifying, actually, windy and cold and wet and not home. And over the years we've lived in Margate, my wife has kind of connected into a social group, and that feels for her very much like home. But that's not just what you're saying here. You're

43:33saying that the materials, the spatial and material characteristics of the place are significant and effective. So again, in your search, what do people do? They recreate what they came from, what does that mean? Does that mean a threshold and a fire? Or does that mean a secure bedroom for the women and children? Or does that mean a standalone detached house with a garden and a place to park the car? Like, are there commonalities within this? Or is it a synthesis between that

44:05kind of social network, either leavened or mediated by physical infrastructure? I think this is a good point. And I just want to also quickly, briefly touch on your experience of moving from Scotland to Margate and say, you know, the things that you touched on there, this idea that you moved down and what it was, it was cold and windy and rainy, but that's Scottish weather as well. But it was, it was obviously something beyond that, you know, it was just how a place made you feel. And you obviously had those deep connections and feelings to your home in Scotland.

44:36And you were then waiting to feel those things, you know, and having to kind of cultivate them in your new home. And I think that's something that we can all identify with. And a line that I use in the book quite a lot is there are no generalizations to be made about home. And there are no generalizations to be made about the city. And one person's experience will vary wildly to the next person's. And those examples of refugees trying to recreate the city they left behind in their refugee camps.

45:09Sometimes it's a case of yes, moving tents in a way that is representative of the houses in a street they've left behind. Sometimes it's trying to recreate a courtyard. It's often governed by practicality, what's possible, what's affordable, what is movable. Sometimes, you know, a tent is movable, but other more permanent kinds of infrastructure aren't. So I think it is always going to be very specific and personal. But, you know, to come back to Glenrothes again, one of the

45:44reasons why I struggled to get a kind of foothold in this town for so many years when I moved was because there were no visual signifiers of anything I'd left behind. This was somewhere that that had purposefully tried to look so different and futuristic. And when I was doing my research from the archives, this was something that I expected to come up time and time again, you know, like often we feel like our experiences are the universal experience. And I was reading this testimony

46:17from, you know, in particular, there was a couple who had moved, the first people who had moved to Glenrothes, in fact, in the late 40s, or maybe 51. And they were just delighted, you know, even though there was in Glenrothes at the time, there was as much unbuilding as there was building, there was these vast slicks of mud and, you know, it was it was it was quite a bleak and an empty place. But there were houses and there was this promise and this suggestion. And I think hope is a very

46:48powerful thing. And I think that the idea that you can be part of something that will change history, I mean, that sounds kind of lofty and and big, but it's about momentum there and thinking if I can get in early, I can have a say in how we model our talents. And it sounds, you know, that absolutely can come from the individual. And one of the interviews that I do in my Glenrothes chapter is with

Civic art and community self-determination

47:15the environmental artist David Harding, who founded the Glasgow School of Arts environmental art course, who died just a couple of months ago, and who I spent some time with before his death, and he was employed as Glenrothes town artist. So this is thought to be the first appointment of an artist of this kind in the world, basically a civic art artist that came to a new town and responded to his environment by looking around speaking to people, crucially, and then making sculptures

47:53and artworks and etchings based on what he saw. This is a way to put identity into a place that is brand new and identity and art is what people associate with, you know, a landmark. It gives them something to hold on to. What David Harding did was he was also an activist in his own way. So he spoke to tenants, social housing tenants who said, well, we want to paint our front doors different colours, for instance, because this is what we had in our own, in our old, you know, airship villages, mining villages that we left. We want to be able to have more individuality. We don't like the kind

48:28of homogenous look of this. And the planners wouldn't be swayed by the residents directly, but they would listen to David. And he went and kind of lobbied them in his very, you know, charming, persuasive way. And the residents got their colourful front doors. And this is something that's really crucial, understanding that you have to have these kind of almost patrons, I suppose, brokers who are who are cultivating relationships between resident and the kind of top, top line, you know, highest

49:02end of planning and architecture and making sure that you've got those clear and open lines of communication. But it's crucial to have somebody that truly believes in community. And David Harding was somebody who had moved from Leith, this densely populated part of Edinburgh. And he understood what it meant to have a community, and to be reliant on your neighbours, and to let people be reliant on you, which is really a kind of bedrock of community, you know, being okay with being a burden, because other people will be a burden to you, you know, sharing that kind of responsibility.

49:35So he was a crucial person there, a real key figure in making sure that people were allowed to have a say in their environment, they were allowed to take aspects and features from these worlds that they'd left behind, and enact them. We can also see this, there was a really interesting, another social housing housing project that I profiled in Peru, I think it was Peru, where residents were housed in

50:07housing within a certain plot of land. And it was often if they were often put or relocated in parts of the city where the land was cheap, and they could live, or the state could pay that rent on the land easily, but it was so far away from their communities, you know, it was impossible, and they wouldn't stay for very long. And they'd sort of make their way back to the old bits of the city that didn't particularly serve them, but felt like home. So there was this landmark intervention, about 15 years ago, where their homes were handed to them, they were first of all, they were built in

50:39plots that were expensive, but in the way to offset that, they were in better locations. So the houses were built in a better area of the city, more connected, better links to their communities. But in order to offset the cost, because this was a state intervention, they had to be built half finished. But actually, this is what people wanted. This is what residents wanted, because they were able to finish their houses in a way that was individual. They could make sure that, you know, they could add a room when they wanted, they could take away when they wanted. Building costs

51:11and labour were much cheaper. But it was also this idea of self-determination that's so powerful in regeneration and rebuilding. And also just the act of like,

51:22trust, yeah, trusting that a person can know best what kind of house works for them, not just being given a social house that the state deems appropriate for you. It's saying, no, here's, here's some power. Here's some control. And that might not be something that you felt for a long time. And let's see where this goes. And it, you know, it showed the outcomes were so powerful. It showed that people stayed in those houses for longer, their quality of life was better, their health was better. They were able to keep employment for longer. They were able to

51:53keep their families together in more meaningful ways. So it worked. How do you scale up this home making? So your framing is as, as we talked about, through the perspective of the personal, the embodied, the situated experience of place through the home. But how does that curl us into a city? Because your book is called How to Build a City. And what things, what structures, both material and social, political are required? And this comes

52:25back to the initial part of our conversation around Glenrothes and around paternalistic models of renewal or remaking out of the back of crisis. What role do the big noises have here? Or is it all possible from the ground up in your telling and in your experience of it? Scalability is also the thorn in my side and the question I come back to most often and the question I'm most asked. And I, I have found really interesting examples of places that have been scaled.

53:03But I also am a reporter and a writer, not an economist, or, you know, I don't deeply have deep understanding of funding models and kind of funding models that link and tie into state, tie into private investments. So I can speak most confidently on examples I have found that feel like they have legs. And what struck me is often that there are two answers to this question. So I'm going to go

53:39the first but first of all, I went to see this really amazing talk by the sociologist

Private investment and housing in Vienna

53:45Ruha Benjamin in a conference in Barcelona, a few years ago, and this is in the book. And she talked about this idea of kind of ambition, and not just citizens, citizen ambition, but civic ambition. And this idea that we are routinely told that safe, equitable housing for all is, you know, a pie in the sky dream that is just too, we're asking too much for individual people to have a safe home. But space tourism, you know, the idea of colonizing Mars, oh yeah, that's totally possible.

54:19And actually, it's just about, you know, us broadening the horizons in our mind. And if you're not seen as wanting this kind of progress, and you're, you know, it's you're aggressive, you're not, you're not thinking about progress in a way that feels ambitious and modern, and you're not reaching in the same way. And I think actually, I reject that. And it's about looking again at the locus of ambition and saying, maybe we need to reconfigure how we are addressing some of the things that feel important in our in our time and where we are at with things.

54:59So this is where housing comes back in and kind of, you know, re enters the conversation. One of the more, some of the more interesting examples, I try not to use words like success or failure or good or bad or ascribe moral values to the places that I go to see because I'm aware they are subjective. And what is a success to some people are not a success to other people. But if I can intensively use the word successful here, there were some really interesting housing developments in Vienna, I went to go and see where the developer had understood that in order

55:37to create communities and scale these and link them up, there had to be you had to stimulate private investment. And I think so often in our communities, and sometimes in my sort of more unevolved earlier journalism, I would very much look to the state, you know, why is the Scottish government not doing more on this? Why are we not getting this, you know, X, Y and Z. But actually, some of the most interesting projects I've seen have been the ones that have worked out how to stimulate and attract the right kind of private investors. So I went to see this really interesting co housing development in

56:11Vienna, where often the co housing blocks that I went to there had been themed by like what, what the residents wanted from for their home. So there was a block that was that was attractive to people who were into music and culture. And they had, you know, the National Orchestra had played on the roof garden and things like this. And in all of these blocks, the bottom floor had been given over to businesses, so to entrepreneurs. And this worked particularly well in areas that had high levels

56:46of residents who had migrant backgrounds, because it's something like a resident who lives in a city with a migrant background is three times more likely to be an entrepreneur than a native. So this is a way in which you can, you can cultivate more diverse neighborhoods, but also with that level of businesses along the bottom floor, you do other things like you guarantee that footfall will be good throughout the day. And you, you know, you make sure that antisocial behavior is something that is always

57:19looked sort of scrutinized, because if you're a business owner in a neighborhood, you don't want people hanging around outside, you know, on bikes or throwing things, whatever. So you're more likely to be on the phone to the council saying this has happened. You know, so there are there are various ways in which those businesses work. It's also just bid for residents, it's good to have a shop downstairs, it's good to have a crash down there, a bike repair shop, all these things that used to be, you know, the death of the high street is such a hackneyed, you know, journal, journal easy kind of

57:51phrase that you hear so often. But the revival of the high street can happen by some of these interventions, by understanding that private investors are not always the enemy. I think we have to really scrutinize who is coming into our communities and what their intentions are. But, you know, if we get the right kind of private actors in, this is a way in which these communities can be scaled, and then not sort of copy pasted into other places, but look at how they can be adapted and tweak to

58:23a different local environment. And then you can kind of, you know, involve public public consultations, or you might have a business owner here that wants to be involved in another community three miles away because he's got a brother who might want to run his shop here. So that's how you build community. That's how you build networks. That's how you bring money in. That's how you make people feel like a city can belong. There aren't easy answers. But in the way that you said, you know, we look at things

58:56at the moment through this prism of crisis. And what if this isn't actually the way what the world is? What happens if actually things are great and better than they ever have been? And I think this is a great way to look at it in terms of how to scale a city. We're often told it it can't be done. It can't be replicated at scale. It's too expensive to build these things that actually offer a good quality of life with high quality housing and good features and places that make you feel good with high levels of amenities. But what if we can do it? What about if it's just

59:31shifting money and finding resources from different pots and bringing it all together? It's already happening. It's just about kind of moving it all together in a way that feels right. I want to finish on one last question. In the three parts of your book, Peace, Planet, and People, they're presented as interrelated, overlapping. They're inseparable. And I think at some level, that's sort of baked in or designed into the way it works. But given that complexity,

1:00:02how do designers, city makers operate? How should they learn about this? And how should they organise to engage with this? You're not an architect, but you've spent enough time looking at it. So probably you're going to have to speculate quite wildly. And I was wondering whether the example from Sweden, Tebro, might be one way of thinking about it.

Experimentation and failure in Swedish test towns

1:00:25So the book, just to catch listeners up who haven't read the book, Ambrose is talking about the very first chapter in the book, even before my Glenrothes chapter, in which I go to a craft town in rural Sweden called Tebro. And I meet an architect and a city architect. And I walk around Tebro and we go to

1:00:55this kind of urban playground, which has been built on disused railway lines. And it has acted as a, yeah, as a Petri dish for different kinds of interventions. So this is a test site of sorts. It's a place that has been used to experiment and play around with different ideas that might benefit the people of Tebro. So these range from all sorts of things, you know, some completely egregious and

1:01:29crazy to very practical and, and maybe even slightly prosaic. So we're talking, you know, an urban forest and urban flower farm, a sort of model of the solar system strung up on the old railway lines overhead, a huge model, Eiffel Tower, but then some really beautiful lights that have been made by the local glass maker and which play a song, a sort of classical song, a piece of classical music

1:02:02when you walk under them. And that particular proposal was brought to life on these, on these train tracks. Some of the, some of these proposals are not really possible to bring to life, but this is a place where you can play around with ideas. So the architects have brought to life these lights and I went and stood under them and they're very beautiful, made by this very talented glass blower in the village, in the town, which I would also went to go and see. And what was interesting is that in trialing ideas

1:02:33like this, you can work out what works and what doesn't. So kind of like Glenrothis in a way, or any experimental place. So they found out that people did love to walk underneath them, but some local young people had thrown stones at the glass lamps and they had broken and the glass maker didn't want to replace them for free, completely fair enough. So that was, that kind of, that was the end of that particular proposal. But what it baked in was this idea of playfulness and, but most, most important of all, of failure. And this is something I think about a lot. When I think about cities, we've become

1:03:04quite risk averse and we've become, you know, so focused on success and optimization, right? Optimization is like one of these words that I just keep hearing all the time. I can't go for a walk anymore. I have to, you know, get my steps up and I have to try and get to a 10,000 rather than just enjoying going and walking the dog. But actually here in Tebow at this urban test site, there is a place to get things wrong and trial them, trial them and see what works and finesse in a way that feels quite

1:03:35fresh to me. I mean, I couldn't really think of anywhere else that's doing something like this. And this idea is already being scaled. The two architects, Anders Berenson and Leif Arnland, have already scaling it. They've been getting some money from the Swedish government to go and roll them out in other locations in Sweden. So there's this place that I come from, you know, where I'm thinking, what if every town, what if every city had a place where we could experiment, where we could test new ideas, where we could show members of the public, this is what this will look like. This is what this

1:04:08will feel like. What do you think? And really bring them in. The public consultations in Tebow have been astonishing. It's like, you know, over two thirds of the town have come and looked and walked under the lights and given their opinions on the different proposals. It really, once you make it solid, you can really bring things to life for people. And I think that's an essential part of a city's development and evolution, bringing in people who live there. It sounds so simple. It sounds so like too obvious, but it's, it can be something that's overlooked because then things come up that

1:04:42you might not have experienced. And I think about Vienna here as well, and this city that has adopted a gender mainstreaming approach where from a very basic bedrock on the planning level, it's understood that women and men move through the city differently, they have different needs, and those should be accounted for in the design and execution of the city. And in doing that, all these things sprung up, you know, the way that women do different kinds of care work, and they might use public transport differently. And it's helped a city be more inclusive, not just for women, but for all different kinds of

1:05:17people, for men who do different kinds of care work, you know, a disabled, hearing from a disabled woman that works in a city, or moves through a city has also informed how a disabled man might move through a city. And when we understand that the user experience, to use that slightly bloodless plodding term, when we understand that different users must be factored in from the very beginning, we start to unlock a city, and we start to make it open to people who have been

1:05:48yeah, locked out of places for so long. So that is important, the cross pollination of ideas is important, this idea of going to different places, taking back something, and then applying it in this localised, specific way. Because I do think it's important that things are

1:06:12are led by internal practitioners. But it has to, we have to have some sort of, you know,

1:06:21formalised network of ideas where we can pick and choose things from other countries. And I do think this is where Scotland is, it can fall down on a state level, especially. I mean, the Scottish government is really poor at being able to understand how to pick ideas from other countries, you know, it's very sort of, I find it very blinkered, and it just thinks I want to do things my way. And it's the best way of doing things. And I think that's a mistake. But yeah, to get these different voices in is essential. I mean, for instance, in the US, something like 80% of planners are white.

1:06:55The developers making apps that map our cities, like Google Maps, for instance, are either white or Asian, it's something only like 5% of app developers at Google are black. And this is borne out in very real ways in our cities. So there's this great example of Google Maps, when you when you put your location into Google Maps, or you put your destination into Google Maps, and it's guiding you with its voice. There's an example that says, Malcolm X Avenue in New York. And originally, the voiceover

1:07:33narrated it as the Roman numeral, not X. So Malcolm, yeah, 10 Avenue. And it just shows that there's clearly no black planners, you know, no black developers, sorry, working at Google, who might understand that Malcolm X Avenue is an X's, you know, is the man himself, rather than this Roman numeral. So it's so important to reflect these voices to be able to understand that the city contains so many more different experiences, and it has to be has to be factored in from the very

1:08:05beginning. My final point here is something that I want to be wary of. So my book finishes in Starbase, this

Company towns and the future of Starbase

1:08:13sort of a place that I describe as a as a space city, or the closest thing we have on earth to a space city. So this is a small village on the Texas Mexico border that I traveled to, where Elon Musk has created, it is basically SpaceX's HQ. So Elon Musk's rocket factory. And you know, Musk and the company has applied for city status for Boca Chica, which is the name of the village, to expand it into a city called

1:08:45Starbase, which is essentially a company town, where employees of SpaceX will live. But already, and I'm careful how I word this, but already there are certain loopholes that have been tickled, I suppose, manipulated by SpaceX, and it's already being run by a board of SpaceX employees. It is astonishing how quickly a new city and especially somewhere like America, hyper privatized, can be

1:09:20taken away from kind of, yeah, a state ownership or a state run place, and be made into this kind of almost little kingdom of Musk and of SpaceX as a company. And I think we have to be wary of private actors, you know, especially nefarious private actors. We have to ask questions about who is running our cities, and what why they're doing that, and what their goals are. And, you know, when I think about those,

1:09:53those business owners who run businesses from those Vienna ground floor flats, that's an example of, to my eyes, you know, it feels like a good idea, although I try not to say good or bad, but that feels like something that could benefit the community, let's say. In somewhere like Starbase, I'm less sure. I'm less sure that this is a place that's been developed as a place from which rockets are built and rockets are launched. And then eventually the idea is to develop a kind of space tourism hub, if you like. I'm not particularly sure that the intentions of

1:10:27Starbase are to benefit the community. You know, all the residents of Boca Chica, apart from three or four holdouts, one of whom I met, and it's in the book, have been bought out. It's not going anywhere, you know, somewhere that is grinding its heels into the mudflats. It's located in this astonishing place. You know, it feels so far from anywhere. It's kind of silty, boggy, but just, just an unbelievable place. But it's, it's, it's, it's there. It's not going

1:10:58anywhere. So I think we need to be scrutinizing these places and interrogating them because it's not, it's not straightforward anymore. That is a good point to finish on, Gabriella. Thank you so much for speaking with me. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure. You've made my brain properly work this morning, but in the best possible way. Thank you for having me. I'm very grateful.

1:11:20The inferno of the living is not something that will be. If there is one, it is what is already here. The inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many. Accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension. Seek and learn to recognize who and what in the midst of inferno are not inferno, then make them endure and give them space. That's Italo Calvino, of course, in Invisible Cities from 1972. By Jove, it's bloody good. Read it all and become an excellent person. Please see the

1:11:52podcast description for links to Gabrielle and the book, which you should buy and read ASAP. Also, because you love it, links to ways you might be pleased to support the podcast. And thanks for listening.

1:12:08Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.