Centre for Cities

City Talks: British Rail with Christian Wolmar

Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined by Christian Wolmar, the writer and broadcaster and specialist in British transport. He is the author of several books, including Fire & Steam: How the Railways Transformed Britain, Are Trams Socialist? Why Britain Has No Transport Policy, and most recently British Rail: A New History, published by Michael Joseph in 2022.

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

City Minutes: How should local government be funded?

Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined by Researcher Stuart Bridgett, author of Pot Luck: What government needs to do to streamline local government funding, to discuss the Government’s long-anticipated plan to simplify the funding landscape for local authorities, first promised in the 2022 Levelling Up White Paper.

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

City Talks: Cauldrons of the future

Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined in this episode by Ian Goldin, Professor of Globalisation and Development at the University of Oxford, and Tom Lee-Devlin, Global Business Correspondent at The Economist. They are the co-authors of The Age of the City: Why our Future will be Won or Lost Together.

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

City Talks: What are the signs that the UK is levelling up?

Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined by Henry Overman, Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics, Research Director at the Centre for Economic Performance and Director of the What Works Centre for Local Economic Growth, which marks its tenth anniversary this year. They discuss how to measure the scale of the underperformance of cities in the UK and search for evidence that could point us towards the right solutions.

The discussion follows on from Henry’s recent post for the LSE’s Politics and Policy blog: Why the government’s levelling-up plans need a reality check.

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

City Talks: Carmageddon

Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined by Daniel Knowles, Chicago-based journalist at The Economist, about his new book, Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do About It.

Carmageddon is published in the UK as a Kindle e-book on Friday 16 June 2023 and can be pre-ordered online: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0C6RHS9YC.

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

City Minutes: Is the Midlands Engine firing on all cylinders?

Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined by Senior Analyst Anthony Breach and Researcher Matthew Coombes to discuss Centre for Cities’ recent report, All Cylinders: the Role of the Midlands Engine in the UK Economy, which shows that the Midlands economy is largely urban and explores the kinds of economic activity happening in the region.

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

City Talks: London and the rise of hybrid working

Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined by Dan Graham, Professor of Statistical Modelling at Imperial College London, and Paul Swinney, Director of Policy and Research at Centre for Cities, who are both co-authors of a new Centre for Cities report, Office Politics: London and the rise of home working.

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

City Talks: How inequality is changing

Joining Chief Executive Andrew Carter is James Plunkett, Group Chief Practices Officer at Nesta and author of End State: 9 Ways Society is Broken and How We Fix It and the Future State blog on Substack. They discuss James’ recent article, Unequality: When inequality changes, our strategies must too, which is the third in a three-part series of essays for a project with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, Social justice in a digital age.

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

Tackling regional economic inequality in the UK

Chief Executive Andrew Carter is joined by Anna Stansbury, Assistant Professor in Work and Organization Studies at MIT Sloan and co-author (with Ed Balls and Dan Turner) of a working paper titled Tackling the UK’s regional economic inequality: Binding constraints and avenues for policy intervention.

 

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

City Minutes: London’s role in the UK’s productivity slowdown

Andrew is joined by Analyst Guilherme Rodrigues and Researcher Stuart Bridgett to discuss the findings of Centre for Cities' new report, entitled Capital Losses: The role of London in the UK's productivity puzzle.