Can differences in the personality traits of citizens explain variations in economic outcomes between cities – beyond the standard wisdom offered by economic geography?

Psychology and economics have historically been considered poles apart, but a belief that fresh insights into phenomena like economic growth can lie in the cross-disciplinary territory between these two fields, has brought them closer together.

For this episode of City Talks, Andrew Carter is joined by Harry Garretsen,  Professor  of International Economics and Business at the University of Groningen and Janka Stoker, Professor of Leadership and Organisational Change at the same university. Along with colleagues, they are the authors of a brilliant and fascinating paper entitled The Relevance of Personality Traits for Economic Geography:  Making Space for Psychological Factors. This paper, which forms a starting point for the podcast discussion, looks at geographically clustered personality traits – such as neuroticism and conscientiousness – in a sample of 63 different UK cities, and maps these characteristics onto the economic performance of these places.

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

A flurry of assessments of various Brexit deals has been released over the last week or so, each looking at the different impacts that leaving the EU will have on the economy. Only the Government study — EU Exit: Long-term economic analysis —  looked at the geography of the different deals, however, and how they might affect different areas. This in itself reveals something about how we think of the economy.

For this episode of City Talks, Andrew Carter is joined by Centre for Cities colleagues Paul Swinney and Naomi Clayton to discuss Brexit and its potential or likely impact on cities across the UK.

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

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.