Centre for Cities

City Talks: Can we address the housebuilding crisis by building on the ‘grey belt’?

Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined by Tom Dobson, Managing Director of Quod, Heather Sargent, Barrister at Landmark Chambers, and Ant Breach, Associate Director at Centre for Cities, to discuss the Labour party’s proposals to release land for housing development on what it calls the ‘grey belt’ – poor-quality or unsightly greenbelt land.

If elected to government, Labour will come under immediate pressure to implement planning reforms and boost housebuilding. Labour has pledged that it would build 1.5 million homes and sees the ‘grey belt’ as an important route to doing so. Are its proposals enough to fill the housebuilding shortfall and relieve the pressure on cities? How would greybelt development work in practice? And what more needs to be introduced?

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

City Talks: Sharing the benefits of a high-tech economy

Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined by Professor Neil Lee, Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics and author of Innovation for the Masses: How to Share the Benefits of the High-Tech Economy. Neil talks about the patterns that emerge when comparing the characteristics of innovative economies around the world, why policy makers are starting to think and talk differently about Silicon Valley and lessons the UK can learn from Switzerland about using labour policy and devolution to improve economic productivity.

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

City Talks: The UK’s towns tsar

Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined by Adam Hawksbee, Deputy-Director of Onward and Chair of the Towns Unit at Number 10 Downing Street and the Department for Levelling Up – also known as the Government’s Towns Czar – and by Paul Swinney, Director of Policy and Research at Centre for Cities. The Government has a £1.5bn long-term plan for towns. So, how should we be thinking about towns and should this shape the work of Centre for Cities?

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

City Minutes: Key races in the 2024 Metro mayor elections

Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined by three people with insights into several upcoming 2024 Metro mayoral elections to find out more about the candidates and discuss some of the local issues that voters will be thinking about when they go to the polls on 2 May.

He speaks to Jane Haynes, Politics and People Editor at Birmingham Mail and Post, and Birmingham Live, about the race for Metro mayor of the West Midlands. Then Oliver Pridmore, Agenda Editor at Nottingham Post and Nottinghamshire Live, joins Andrew to discuss the first-ever Metro mayor elections in the East Midlands. Finally, he speaks to Rob Parsons, Northern Agenda Editor at Reach, who is covering the Tees Valley Metro mayoral elections and the race to be the first Metro mayor of the North East.

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

City Minutes: Why mayoral elections matter

Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined by Director of Policy and Research Paul Swinney and Associate Director Anthony Breach, here to explain why 2024 represents a major milestone in devolution in England. They look ahead to May’s mayoral elections, when eleven areas and over a third of the UK population will be covered by Metro mayors, and discuss how mayors’ influence over national policy debates is likely to grow in future.

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

City Minutes: The geography of charitable giving in the UK

Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined by Rob Johnson, Analyst at Centre for Cities and author of a new report, Donation nation: The geography of charitable giving in the UK. Rob looked at giving patterns and asked the question, does local giving behaviour match this variation in need and does it go to the causes that most reflect local need? He outlines his findings and tells Andrew about the implications of the findings for local authorities, and where national policy and the ‘levelling up’ agenda can help.

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

City Minutes: The latest data on economic performance across the UK

This is a special episode of City Minutes looking at the findings of Cities Outlook 2024 – Centre for Cities’ annual snapshot of economic activity in the UK’s urban areas. In part 2, Andrew Carter is joined by Director of Policy and Research Paul Swinney to discuss the importance of urban economies in the UK and why we’re all affected by urban areas’ economic performance over time.

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

City Minutes: How places have fared since 2010

This special episode of City Minutes examines the findings of Cities Outlook 2024 – Centre for Cities’ flagship economic health check of the UK’s urban areas. In part 1, Andrew Carter is joined by Director of Policy and Research Paul Swinney to discuss Chapters One and Two of the report, where Centre for Cities shows what has happened to people’s incomes up and down the country since 2010, a record period of historically weak productivity growth.

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

City Talks: Are we seeing the arrival of the post-retail High Street?

Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined by Dr Lucy Montague, Senior Lecturer at Manchester School of Architecture and co-author (with David Rudlin and Vicky Payne) of High Street: How Our Town Centres Can Bounce Back from the Retail Crisis (RIBA Publishing, 2023), which surveys the current state of the UK’s bricks-and-mortar retail sector in a hundred case studies – from traditional high streets to out-of-town retail developments, in places both big and small.

They discuss what happened in the sector during the 00s and 10s, the origins of the current crisis, and the impact of Covid. Despite its many challenges, Lucy finds reasons for optimism on the high street, as long as the UK is open to change – whether it’s stronger planning policy to encourage a greater mix of uses or action on business rates reform.

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

City Leaders: Cllr Huw Thomas, Leader of Cardiff City Council

Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined by Cllr Huw Thomas, Labour Leader of Cardiff City Council since 2017. Cllr Thomas talks about Cardiff’s economic role in the city-region, describes the balance between competition and collaboration that it takes to make city-region devolution succeed, and explains why leading a city council is “a job like no other”.

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