The subject of this episode is the future of local government in UK cities, or to put it another way — is your council about to go bust? Should you be worried? And what should be done about it?

To debate these questions, Andrew Carter is joined by Professor Tony Travers from the London School of Economics and Emily Andrews and Martin Wheatley from the Institute for Government.

This episode is part of the Centre for Cities City Talks series, please rate, review and share the episode if you enjoyed it.

In this episode of City Talks, Andrew Carter is joined by Amy Goldstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist at The Washington Post and author of the widely-acclaimed book Janesville: An American Story. Published in 2017, the book charts what happens to an industrial town in the American heartland when its biggest factory closes and offers important lessons about the impact of economic disruption on communities.

This episode is part of the Centre for Cities City Talks series, please rate, review and share the episode if you enjoyed it.

The UK has been grappling with poor productivity for a number of years, with the gap between the country’s performance and that of its neighbouring economies in Western Europe receiving a great deal of attention. In this episode of City Talks, Andrew Carter is joined by Dave Innes, Policy and Research Manager at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and Paul Swinney, Head of Policy and Research at the Centre for Cities, to discuss productivity and its broad implications for living standards, as well as the policy questions that arise from it. Both the Centre for Cities and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation are doing considerable work around this issue, and the discussion provides a valuable opportunity to explore common themes as well as areas of disagreement between the research efforts of these two organisations.

This episode is part of the Centre for Cities City Talks series, please rate, review and share the episode if you enjoyed it.

In discussion with Andrew Carter, Sir Richard Leese, leader of Manchester City Council, Deputy Mayor of Greater Manchester Combined Authority and a leading light in the core cities agenda, tells the story of the urban revival of Manchester over the last quarter century.

This episode is part of the Centre for Cities City Talks series, please rate, review and share the episode if you enjoyed it.

Centre for Cities welcomed Sir Richard Lease as guest speaker at a City Horizons event on 12 July 2018.

In this audio recording of the talk, Sir Richard reflects on 20 years as Leader of Manchester City Council, overseeing major transformations of the city, from its regeneration following the 1996 IRA bomb, to its successful bid to host the 2002 Commonwealth Games.

Could the various populist ballot-box successes of recent years be seen as the revenge of 'left-behind' places against the status quo? And are they driven more by territorial factors than social or demographic ones? These are the arguments made by Andrés Rodríguez-Pose, Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, as set out in his recent paper: 'The revenge of the places that don't matter (and what to do about it)'. http://www.cpes.org.uk/dev/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/andres_rodriguez_pose.pdf

In this episode of City Talks, Professor Rodríguez-Pose joins Andrew Carter to unpack his theory and explore how place-sensitive policies and interventions could be used to develop the potential of the 'places that don't matter'.

Read Centre for Cities' blog with further reflections on this podcast here.

This episode is part of the Centre for Cities City Talks series, please rate, review and share the episode if you enjoyed it.

Are Britain's big city regions moving towards, or away from, having more integrated transport systems?

To address this question, our host, Andrew Carter, was joined by Vernon Everitt, Managing Director, Customers, Communication & Technology at Transport for London, and Jonathan Bray, Director of Urban Transport Group, which is the membership organisation for the country's big city region transport authorities.

A recent report by Urban Transport Group — 'Number crunch: Transport trends in the city regions' — which sets out the travel patterns of the past decade and projects future trends, provides a basis for the discussion. You can download the report here:
http://www.urbantransportgroup.org/resources/types/reports/number-crunch-transport-trends-city-regions

This episode is part of the Centre for Cities City Talks series, please rate, review and share the episode if you enjoyed it.

At a City Horizons event held on 9 April 2018, Bruce Katz, former Centennial Scholar at the Brookings Institution, discussed his latest book The New Localism: How Cities Can Thrive in the Age of Populism, which he co-authored with Jeremy Nowak.

Set in the context of rising populism and rejectionism in Western political systems, The New Localism explores how cities are at the vanguard when it comes to finding innovative locally-led solutions to issues that have long been ignored by national governments.

In his talk, Bruce explored some of the key themes emerging from the book and discussed what opportunities this new era of localism offers the UK in the context of ever-increasing political polarisation, and the fallout of Brexit.

What are some of the challenges and opportunities presented by measuring the performance of modern economies - particularly those of Britain's cities?

To address these questions, our host Andrew Carter is joined by Paul Swinney, Head of Policy and Research at Centre for Cities and Diane Coyle who is the inaugural Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, ONS Fellow on Measurement Issues in the Modern Economy and the author of several books, including 'GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History'.

This episode of City Talks was recorded at the launch of Cities Outlook 2018, the flagship report published annually by Centre for Cities on the economic health of British cities.

The report focuses on the impact of automation and globalisation on British cities over the next decade or so. It presents a mixed picture, finding, for example, that whilst automation and globalisation are likely to bring opportunities and boost jobs growth in all UK cities, the quality of the jobs created will vary: they are more likely to be high-skilled in the Southeast and low-skilled in the North. This may further deepen the political and economic divides across the country.

To discuss the findings contained in Cities Outlook and their implications, Andrew Carter was joined at the launch event by a diverse panel: Marvin Rees, mayor of Bristol, Gemma Tetlow, Economics Correspondent at the Financial Times and Naomi Climer, commissioner on the Future of Work independent commission and past President of the Institution of Engineering and Technology.

Some of the issues raised in the discussion were the fact that lifelong learning – currently a weak area for Britain – will become increasingly essential and that a Universal Basic Income may need to be introduced to help those left behind.

This episode is part of the Centre for Cities City Talks series, please rate, review and share the episode if you enjoyed it.