In Our Time - The City - a history, part 2

Episode Date: April 1, 2010

Melvyn Bragg presents the second of a two part discussion about the history of the city. George Stephenson invented rail transport in the north-east of England in the 1820s, but it was not until over twenty years later that rail networks began to spring up to ferry workers in and out of the centre of British cities. When they did, this had a vast, transforming effect on the whole nature of cities - taking the pressure off dense, overcrowded central areas, but helping cities like London explode outwards.Victorian London was widely held at the time to be rather chaotic - especially in comparison with the grandiose, highly-orchestrated developments in continental European cities like Paris and Barcelona.The process of transformation was given another fillip by the introduction of the motor car. In this, the final part of a two-part special edition of 'In Our Time' exploring the development of cities, we're going to examine how Stephenson's invention transformed cities almost beyond recognition, and follow the story up to the present day.Peter Hall is Professor of Planning and Regeneration at The Bartlett School of Planning, University College London; Tristram Hunt is lecturer in History at Queen Mary College at the University of London; and Ricky Burdett is Professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1820s, a barely educated engineer from northeastern England needed to find a way to transport coal from the pit head to the River Tyne. Horses weren't fast enough.

In Scotland, six years earlier, James Watt had developed a modern steam engine. The engineer's name was George Stevenson, and he found a way to use what's engine to move the coal. And so the railways were born. Last week we traced the story of the growth of cities from their origins to their zenith at the start of the first millennium AD, when Rome's population reached one million, and we followed the cities longfall and resurgence

to the point at its height at the dawn of the 19th century when London's population finally matched that of ancient Rome. In this the final part of this two-part edition of In our time, looking at the development of cities, we're going to explore how Stevenson's invention transforms cities almost beyond recognition and take the story up to the present. We meet to discuss the development of the modern city,

Ricky Burdette, Professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics, Tristram Hunt, lecturer in history at Queen Mary College at the University of London, and Peter Hall, Professor of Planning and Regeneration at the Bartlett School of Planning University College London. Peter Hall, the railways were developed first in the northeast of England. How did that development occur and what consequences do? don't have? The first job was to shift goods, particularly coal, and these were necessarily short railways culminating in the first steam-driven railway, the Stockton and Darlington in 1825. Later on, though,

the principles extended to moving other kinds of goods, particularly in Lancashire. The cotton industry was booming, and they needed to bring the raw cotton in from Liverpool to Manchester and the surrounding towns and then shift the raw cotton out to the rest of the world because Lancashire was a workshop of the world. Hence you've got the second railway, which is the Liverpool and Manchester in 1830, but that by a brilliant notion, almost as an afterthought, became also the world's first passenger railway. We left the story last week in 1800 with London reaching a million, but not much different transport systems, not a great deal of difference from Rome, almost 2,000 years before, 1800 years before.

What the railway was going to do? The funny thing was that brilliant as they were in connecting cities, these great engineers and the capitalists who promoted the railways didn't see the prospect for suburban commuter traffic. The first station on Stevenson's line was at Harrow, about 11 miles out. The first station on Brunel's line was at Ealing, six miles out. And even then they didn't see the prospects.

They didn't promote commuter. muter traffic. The person who really began to do this was a city of London solicitor called Charles Pearson who promoted the Underground Railway, and that's the line that was open in 1863 from Farringdon and the City of London to Paddington and connecting actually out on Brunel's railway, and that deliberately promoted suburban traffic from the start. Tristramhant, the railways are coming into the cities then, and we have these amazing statistics about, well, you can tell us about how many great stations came into London in such a short time in mere 30 years. Can you give us the many effects that that had?

Yes, I mean, the effect on the ecology of London is absolutely transformative because the mid-Victorian period is an era of laissez-faire, an era of competing private rail companies, all of them trying to put their own railway stations into London. So we're going to have Houston and Kings Cross and St. Pancras and Marlis and Marlabor. and Fenchurch and Charing Cross, going on and on and on, each of them connected with private companies. But what's so interesting is the cultural effect of the railway, because each of these railway stations is then also a cultural statement, many of them from provincial cities. So what is Houston, apart from a celebration of the power of the north? It's going to have a huge classical piece of architecture, the great Houston arch entrance to it,

What is St. Pancras other than a celebration of the might of the Midlands? These are the cities, Manchester, Birmingham, who are driving the Industrial Revolution, and they want to sort of have their say in London. So the railway becomes this interesting cultural debate in a sense between the cities of the north and London. You also just have a transformative effect in sense of space. These railways demand huge amounts of space, not only the stations, but the lines coming into them

and you read Dombey and Sun and Dickens' account of the sithing through of Somers Town in the north of London and Stag's Garden are destroyed by the arrival of the Iron Horse and there is a sense of entering a new age almost an atomic age is the sort of transformation in terms of our own thinking. And curiously they make almost a circle in London

but not in inner London. They are prevented, just like a lot of the great country estate owners wouldn't let railways come across their line. There's a body of influential opinion in, let's say, the West, there, in the Middle, the Mayfazas, which won't let them come there. They have to stay outside that inner ring. They begin on the edges of the city,

and then you see how the city grows around them. But the lines are very interesting, because they tend actually to go along the borders of greater states. They're not going to cut through the greater states. So you see the lines going into Victoria skirting some of the Grosvenor estate, the Duke of Westminster, land. Given to him by Henry A.

But what they do do is cut through working class districts because the wealthy landlords get paid off. They don't have to compensate right up until the late 1870s, 1880s, the working classes who are thrown out of their houses. So what you have, the consequence in the city, is actually increased overcrowding, are increased social problems by the arrival of the railway, the docks, and then the underground London,

in the 1860s was known as the time of great tearing down, this transformation in the city. It was also the time of great looking down. Dorei on the railways looked down on the London that people had never, not many people had seen before. London of bitter slums, poverty and so illustrated this. This was an insight into the two nations, as the Israeli called it, because where the railways went, they cut through areas which had traditionally been cordoned and, off from the sites of the bourgeoisie. And there are great accounts by angles of going along the railway and seeing the slums, particularly in Manchester, around Oxford Road. And there is this very graphic image by Dore, of a railway viaduct going across slum tenements

and seeing the lives of the others. So the railway opened up unexpected elements of urban life to people. London was felt to be chaotic. and unplanned compared to other cities. Would you agree with that? Oh, absolutely. I mean, this was the great complaint about London. London in the second half of the 19th century

was becoming the heart of the empire and yet compare it with Paris and Baron Hausman, which was becoming far more developed in a coherent manner. London was always felt to be under the whim of business interest, to have no coherent governance, which was beginning to affect.

how people could get around it. And this was the great element of the underground overcrowding on the streets. Can I turn to Ricky Burdette for this? These European cities, Paris, some people, most people have some idea of Paris, at least in Rome, were transforming themselves in a way that was not happening in London. Can you draw the comparisons there for us? Yes, I would use probably the example of Barcelona, roughly between the 1850s and the 1870s. These two cities, Paris and Barcelona, were completely transformed.

I mean, Paris, I think, 20,000 homes were knocked down, 40,000 were rebuilt by Baron Houseman because Napoleon III wanted to recreate a new city with all the people who were coming in, with the railways who were sort of serving them from the hinterland, but very much with an idea of improvement. I think that's a key concept. There's a social dimension to this argument, which is then realized in space. these great avenues were not just to facilitate movement, but also to provide gas, to improve the sewers.

There were only 340 kilometers of new sewers built in Paris in a very, very short period of time. Barcelona also restructured by a great engineer, Il del Fons Serda. In 1859, he drew up a plan, and that was realized in the space of 10, 15 years. there the city actually increased fivefold from this very tight, unsolubrious, historic centre that was there before. And I think that's where also planning started. Sardar was not just an instrumental planner, as we now would call it,

but actually a theoretician. The word urbanism, some say, actually came from him. And the concept was that to restructure land and restructure the city with Great Avenue, also restructure society. Also saying something about the power of the place and what the place stood for. Exactly the issues of a centralised power creating a vision to be able to change what happened in Barcelona, in Paris, but not in London, as Tristan was saying. We see today in Shanghai, we see in Sao Paulo and we see in Mexico City.

Although the British, as it were, didn't do it in their own cities, they tended to do it abroad. New Delhi is a good example of creating a splendid city. Can you describe one or two of the imperial cities which were being built as a result of the ability to build cities on this scale because of the development of the railways? Well, I think to make vivid in our minds what the impact of Edward Lutyens, the great British architects of the beginning of the 20th century did,

you have to think of old Delhi first. The amount of concentration of people, the density of human habitation, the literally seething masses on the streets, is what was the antithesis. Sleeping on the streets and living on the streets as well. That's what was there. So when in 1915, unfortunately just the beginning of the First World War,

Lutyens was asked to create this new city, the symbol of the empire that we were talking about before. He created these grand avenues, I mean, much wider than the Chanselizé in Paris, with great monuments at the head, the India Gate or the Secretariat building. And these are structures, these are urban environments, which sort of celebrate a sort of procession rather than everyday life. And I think if you think of Brasilia built much later on in the mid-20th century, you have very, very similar motifs in terms of power, centralised power, imposing its vision of what that city could be.

What is interesting about New Delhi, of course, because of two world wars, it wasn't until the independent state of India in 47 was able to, let us say, enjoy the facilities that were left by the British. Peter Hall, one of the transformations the city underwent in the 19th century in the age of Relaos was the attempt not only to introduce planning, but really to get to grips with what has plagued, literally, often, most cities since they've been big, which is that disease, a lack of water, principally, lack of sewage clearance.

How did the Victorians take this on? Well, it was difficult for our Victorians simply because, because we were different. We didn't have a houseman. We didn't have a central power. And the Victorian parliaments twisted themselves in circles to try and get an effective water supply and an effective sewer system to the degree that in 1858 there was the great stink because all the sewerage was being dumped in the Thames and Parliament almost came to a standstill. Because they couldn't breathe the air, right? Absolutely. And finally, they got another great Victorian.

engineer, Basil Jet, to construct the great sewer system, which few people realise because it's under their feet. And he did some great works, including constructing the Victorian embankment, that contained not only one of his major sewers, but also a new road, of course, the embankment, which wasn't there before, and also significantly one of the last bits of the underground railway to get today's circle line. But that was rather rare, and we tended to leave all this, including water supply, to private companies that didn't often do a great job, especially in the poor districts. And London really didn't get completely free of the resulting diseases until the end of the

19th century. There were still cholera outbreaks in parts of East London in the late 19th century. So it was a long job, and it wasn't very well done. Trust Ramon, we're talking about massive constructions and reconstructions here. We've talked about the 10 news stations that came in, this great sewer system, as Peter has indicated, Baseljet and the embankment and so on. Is this generating crisis in itself?

We have the crisis of what it's trying to solve. Is by solving it creating more crises? Oh, yes. I mean, there's a strong sense that housemanization, and this is a word which comes back into Britain. On the one hand, it's a source of admiration what houseman achieves. On the other hand, what housemen himself did in getting rid of the poor from certain districts,

and increasing overcrowding in the poorer neighbourhoods, is used as a criticism. So when Joe Chamberlain begins his reconstruction of Birmingham, and part of that is getting rid of the private water companies, getting rid of the private gas companies, municipal socialism, municipalising these essential utilities. Which worked? Which worked, which increased life expectancy,

which increased the purity of the water supply. I mean, the story of the Victorian city in the second half of the 19th century under progressive administrations, the London County Council, the stalwarts in Glasgow, Joe Chamberlain in Birmingham, is a retreat from the laissez-faire which saw life expectancy collapse to the levels of the black death in the 1830s and then grow again during the second half of the 19th century. But there was criticism that overcrowding, particularly in London, and particularly in the east end of London, because not only do you have the railways there, you have the docks.

The construction of the London docks in the 19th century is a massive process with huge consequences. And the poverty in the East End to go back to what Ricky was talking about about Old Delhi, is you have this interconnection of thinking about conditions in London in the heart of the Empire in the East End and what's going on in some of the old towns in the imperial cities. Ricky and then Peter. What is interesting what Tristan is saying about Paris, which is you're talking about 100 years ago or more, is that you could say that some of the social problems of Paris today, in the beginning of the 21st century,

were caused by the planning decisions taken by housemen and those who followed him. Simply put, the fact that a lot of the poor people, a lot of the industries were pushed out beyond the ancient walls as they were then, beyond the periphery. You have a ring of poor people living in 60s, 70s, blocks around the edge of the city with hardly any services, and I think that undoubtedly has led to some of the sort of violence amongst those communities. So the structure that civil engineers make remain for a long time.

They literally just sort of support different dynamics of social interactions. Peter? There are some interesting similarities between Paris and London, I think, and also a critical difference. In London too, we pushed the more noxious industries. outside the boundary of the old London County Council, which is today what we broadly call inner London, out into outer east London. And that became London's dumping ground. And it's been a tremendous problem to get rid of all the excrescences out there. In the same way, as as Ricky has described, Paris moved all this noxious stuff outside. And so you've got a ring of industry, which ironically then became Paris's red belt in the 1920s, it was where they voted communist or socialist, and that's almost all been swept away by de-industrialisation, and the red belt has gone sort of blue, if that's the right

colour. But I think there was one major difference that the better-off people preferred and still do prefer to live in Paris along the Grand Boulevard and close by, whereas our better-off people, use the railways early on to escape. And so you get the Metropolitan Railway, that first underground, building a line out through Hampstead towards Harrow in the 1860s, 1870s. And the middle class followed. And later on, that became Metroland, the dream celebrated by John Betchaemen and others, as the vision of the good life. Paris didn't share that vision of the good life and that's the critical difference between the cities. We should also just remember when it comes to these Great Planned City, the close correlation

between civil engineers and military engineers. Part of the housemanesque dream was also to get rid of the cobbled streets which are used as ammunition by the poor and also to open up the big boulevards to prevent barricades but also for the movement of troops. And that's what happens in the imperial cities. The destruction of many Indian cities after the 1857 Indian rebellion or First War leads to a vision of town. planning, which makes imperial control a great deal easier.

I mean, that partly what Delhi's about, Lucknow's about, the reconstruction of the urban form for colonial power. What we're talking about, it seems to me, Ricky Biddhar, is the enormous energy and invention that these crises are brought out in those who are grappling with them. The cities were growing up from 1800 to 1900, London went for a million to how many, Peter, about... 1800 to 1900 to 1900, from 1 million to around 6 million. Yes. and they're booming all over the place.

So you have to face this. And that's bringing out a great age of inventiveness, particularly in engineering. That's right. And I think the reason you see the changing form of the city, is that engineers, planners and politicians, importantly, needed to come up with completely different solutions of how to house larger and larger numbers of people.

So what we call in the trade typology, building form, basically whether you have an eight-story building and it's 100 metres long or a single little house is how cities were changed in order to accommodate these large masses. So in Vienna at the beginning of the century, you started a new typology of social housing, which I think has had a strong impact on the rest of the 20th century. Here in England it was done differently with philanthropic housing,

for example, the Peabody estates. But that inventiveness is still there. If you go to some of the contemporary booming cities, the equivalence of London today, you see the most extraordinary, I have to say, rather grotesque invention being imposed on the people who live there. But it's still happening. Which cities you're alluding to? I'm thinking of Mexico City. I'm thinking of Lagos.

I'm thinking of Johannesburg. And I'm thinking of Dakar and Mumbai, which are amongst the fastest-growing cities in the world today. And what is being imposed in a grotesque way? Well, what is really happening is that instead of the seamless city, which in many ways we've been talking about up until now, even Barcelona and Paris and London, has more or less grown in a sort of organic but connected way, what you're seeing in the cities that I'm referring to is a city of difference. You begin to see gated communities appearing, literally people living either because they're very rich or they're very poor in an environment which has a wall around it. It doesn't connect with the surrounding streets. You have tower blocks, which are surrounded by a sea of concrete and maybe car parking spaces if it's for the rich or nothing at all if it's for the poor.

And I think in that sense you'll begin to see a very, very different cityscape from the one that perhaps we've been used to for the last hundred years or more. We should just remember, though, and in a sense this echoes the industrial city. One of the first gated communities was Victoria Park in Manchester, where Cobden himself lived. And there are very interesting echoes between the slum worlds of the booming developing cities and the type of urban typology there and the early industrial city. The rich were desperately scared of the poor.

And you had absolute frisson in London in 1887 where the poor marched and rioted essentially, bloody Sunday in Trafalgar Square. And the whole of the upper and middle class community were absolutely terrified of the poor. and that helped trigger a revolution in housing. That Parliament passed the first acts to house the working class. And out of that came our equivalence of Vienna. In fact, there's an interesting estate between Houston and Simpancra Station still there, the Ossleston Street estate, which was modelled on the Karl Marxhof in Vienna.

But the general pattern with us was to build cottage estates on the edge of London, emulating what the better off people are able to do for themselves in their new suburbs. So we're talking about outwards. The railway is taking the city outwards, enabling people to live further away and yet work in the city every day, long hours. That had not been possible from any distance. Most people walk to work until the time we're speaking of. So it was pushing the city outwards.

It was destroying the city or reshaping or destroying whichever way inside. But we also have the city. the idea, Peter Haw. We have the idea of the city is becoming a degrading, morally dreadful thing. We have Mayhew in London and Dickens in London and this is becoming a place

that is a wicked and destructive place for humanity and for the soul and so on, and this is pursued in the 19th century. Well, that I think is true and of course one has to face the fact that the city was a pretty awful

place, particularly unless you were rich. Unless you were rich. But even if you were rich, you couldn't really escape life in the city because it still was terribly smoky. It still smelt a lot terribly a lot of the time.

And that's why the really rich retreated to their big country estates, only coming to London for the season. Can we just interpell it here? Sorry. And also the middle class is that the most significant line I think in London at that time was from Richmond the first line going looping around London and taking people to the city and calling

it various places so you could get out of the city and to suburbs with your own house, your own garden and apple trees, and be in your own little country estate? That was exactly the purpose of that line, which came just before the underground. It was called the North London Line, now relabel the London Overground. And all along that line in places like Highbury and Hampstead and Bronsbury and out to Richmond, you got, as you say,

these wonderful new estates that were commercially developed. So it was still the model of the merchant city. Private capital built those railways and other private capital came along and built the houses. We've talked about the railways and it concentrated largely on London. Can we move to the car and concentrate on West of America here, Ricky Burdette? The car comes in and does it add to what the railways has done? or does it change the way the rows have gone to the cities?

I think it took what the railways did and multiplied it by 100. It sort of magnified this destruction of the city core. And I think you only need to think of some of the cities in northern England and think of the elevated motorways that cut through them. Even the city that I was brought up in Rome, this great imperial ancient city, has the remnants of 1950s, planning for there for all of us to see with great Roman monuments literally just cut in half.

You can see the side of a great arch with a motorway at sort of second floor level, which you can see from your bedroom. But of course, the landscape, which changed most of all was the American city, as you've alluded to. The notion of a city which celebrates the car, the freeway, the ability to move at great speed from your suburban house, maybe 10, 20, 30 miles away from your place of work, was exactly what drove the shape of the vast metropolitan regions of the West Coast and many other parts of the United States.

Peter Holt, can you give us more detail about how this happened and the pace it happened in Los Angeles? Well, the strangest feature of the Los Angeles story is that this famous dispersed form, ten suburbs in search of a city as it's been called, was a result not originally of the car, but of one of the biggest public transport systems the world has ever known, the big red cars, they were called 1100 miles of light railways built by an entrepreneur called Henry Huntingdon,

his name still preserved in the Huntington Museum. And that allowed people to move out in exactly the same way as they had in London. but then in the 1920s car ownership grew in Los Angeles faster than in any other city previously until even by 1930 it had achieved levels only reached in other cities in the world well after World War II and they had a great debate about what kind of city shall we have and the reformers won they said we don't want to be another New York we'll be an entirely different kind of city a car-based city.

A city can disperse and even lose its central business district. We don't care because it can be a delightful city. That word was used. And they went that way. And they let the public system rot, really? They let that vast public transport system rot. It completely closed down. Ironically, years later in the 1980s,

they reopened a bit of it as the first of the new light rail system, the blue line along the old Huntington line. but what they had done is decide to go the automobile way. As a result, they got terrible traffic jams. The pictures in the L.A. and the 30s are horrendous. And then they started building the freeways. The first of these freeways opened in 1940, and the rest followed after World War II.

Just before you come in really interesting, one thing that American car, when it took over, partly because they were producing so many cars, partly because they associated it, or it was associated with, I don't know which was chicken and which was egg. this was the American individual way. You were in charge of her own destiny.

You were an individual. You controlled everything. Wasn't this public people looking after you? It was you in your car doing what you wanted to do. And that seems to have been, you tell me, seems to have been a powerful motivator. In Los Angeles today, I think Peter will confirm this. More than 80% of the population go to work

use a car, and less than 20% use public transport, so the things have turned round. Interestingly, in Tokyo, which is still today in terms of metropolitan area, largest city in the world. It's exactly the opposite. That 80% take a form of public transport, either a bus or an underground or an overground, and less than 20% take cars. But I think one should also think of the impact of all these statistics on people's lives.

I was shocked a few weeks ago to learn that in Bangkok, where it can take anything up to three or four hours to take a child to school on the other side of town, kids are put in their cars in pajamas because they might as well get another two hours sleep and are fed on the way back because there's no time to eat at home. Now think of the disruption of what we're talking about a sort of infrastructure on the psychology

and the relationships between families and everything else. This leads to an issue what's happening in these new exploding countries. Which model are they following? And there is still in America a deep cultural hostility towards, transportation. I lived in Phoenix, Arizona for a while where they're laying out a light tram system and the debates about this being a vehicle for socialism and this being a vehicle for

collectivism was absolutely that. And I think to return to Rookie's point about the modernism of the car and the hostility of the car to the cultural fabric, in a way it does have an echo of the railway, because if you think as you go into Newcastle upon time and the railway cuts right through an old Saxon keep right through the castle, and they had no... embarrassment about that and the ambition of the motorways and the freeways had that same confidence about reshaping

or untrammeled greed. No, but also I think it was a confidence point. I mean, you think about the... Confidence you could just dispossess the country of its past and people of their houses. It's a funny sort of confidence. Well, there's a celebrated speech by Lord Halesham when they destroyed the Eastern Arch in London about

those countries which are bewitched by the past and seek to preserve the historical fabric are in decline, you know, great nations, great empires are not, you know, beholden to this legacy. And actually, we want, you know, more motorways, more freeways. And more destruction. Just because as a law doesn't mean you have to believe in Tristan. No, no, no, I generally don't believe Lord Helford. Peter. Well, I think there's a very interesting contrast, even conflict here, between what you can call

the individualist approach and shrined, especially in America and perhaps Australia. and the more collectivist approach, which has always prevailed in mainland Europe. And it's no surprise that in mainland Europe, in Germany and in France and now very powerfully in Spain, you've got enormous investment in new public transport systems, especially tram systems, but also metro, which in some places have actually reversed the trend in Freiburg, Germany, which is a small university city. They have more use of public transport

now than they did 35 years ago, and far less car use. And this has extended into the surrounding area. And this trend, this counter trend, is occurring all over Europe. Can we stick for a moment where the cities who've got there, Trist from Hunt? The cities that we, the British built in other places, which

had to adapt to new circumstances. And there's a very, I think, for me, anyway, fascinating transmutation takes place. Let's take New Delhi What is it a noun that makes it so much a proud part of India's history? Well, there is this very interesting relationship to the colonial past in many post-colonial nations. If you look to begin with to Dublin, say, in the 1960s and 1970s, when there was a strong Republican belief that you had to destroy the Georgian past as a way of ridding the British imperial presence and the memory of that. And you see that in many former imperial cities across the world.

There is now an understanding that actually this historic legacy, and you look at Lachin's own architecture, and it incorporates so much of indigenous Indian architectural traditions, that this is part of the story. So it's almost generational. So there's no longer this instinctive hostility against the imperial past. So we have the very rich irony now of the Prince of Wales's architectural trust rebuilding Georgian homes in Kingston, Jamaica, and with great

neighbourhood enthusiasm for this. And I think people do have a sense that this is part of the architectural fabric and the post-colonial sort of antagonism is no longer so ready today. Also, they're very well laid out for the way present day powerful governments operate, given that they all these cities we're talking about, surrounded by seas and seas. of shantitowns, some of the shantitans, shantitans, it is bigger than London itself. So there's a sort of barricaded sense about those new centres, isn't that? And, I mean, partly because of British imperial policy,

which simply did not allow indigenous people to own land within the cities. They wanted them kept away. And there is this moment when the colonial powers retreat, and it's not just in British imperial cities, it's in French imperial cities, Portuguese as well, that the new elite simply take over the, the urban typology and wealth now replaces race as what bifurcates the city.

In terms of the informal city, I think there's no doubt if you look at all the major metropolitan areas which are now growing faster than ever before and I'm really thinking about cities in the global south and South America. What you're seeing there is in some cases, Mexico City, San Paulo, nearly 60% of the population lives in shatting.

towns. There's a very famous photograph of a shanty town, a favela, in San Paolo, where there's basically no water or sewers, and right next to it has just been erected three or four tall white buildings with the balconies, where

the people there are so rich that they have actually swimming pools on each terrace. So there you literally have in stone inscribed the difference between rich and poor. It's a complete Engels territory that. I mean, you are back to the industrial city again. You are. But I think one of the most interesting features about Latin America, which you must remember is also a post-colonial empire, the Spanish empire, which disappeared nearly 200 years ago, is that you've got the development of these vast shanty towns in the suburbs extending farther and farther out. And yet they have actually regularized themselves in many cases. And in Mexico City, as in San Paulo, you have areas that were slums.

only 30 years ago that are now respectable middle class areas. They put the water in, they put the sewers in, and they've become desirable places to live. The big problem, as Ricky has said earlier there, is transport because they're so far from the jobs which are generally in the centre of the city. But they've made a remarkable innovation in those Latin American cities, which is possibly equal in its impact to the railways in our cities,

which is BRT, bus rapid transit. first of all in Curitiba in Brazil and now in Bogota, a city of 6 million people, which is running on the basis of express buses. This is a city almost the size of London working, I saw it a few months ago, on the basis of an express bus system.

And about 50 years ago, Bogota had a population of 100,000, so it's gone from 100,000 to 6 million. I mean, I think one of the interesting differences compared to the 19th century and go right back to Vienna, is the horizontalisation in a sense of the urban. form, whereas traditionally density

would require you to build up. Now you just go out. And the difference with Britain is the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, and the arrival of Greenbelt's. And the Greenbelt is a unique in many senses, urban form for Britain, which other countries have tried. There was a big debate

in Portland, Oregon about having an urban growth boundary to try and prevent urban sprawl, suburban spruel, ex-urban sprawl, all the rest of it. Whereas in the global south, there's there's no chance of that. You're going to know about South America, Africa. Are you talking about Asia as well? Yes, where you're having these huge, not just cities,

just sort of mega sprawls where cities link up together. And it's, I mean, the model is almost the North East American coast now. But I think in some of these cities are also some things we should be looking at, which are actually interesting in terms of today's debate about sustainability. I mean, it is fascinating that despite all the social problems clearly of, say, Mumbai, that nearly... Chinese times of about 7 million people. Where as the size of London, exactly.

Daravi being the largest in fact in the world, I think, at the moment. But nearly 60% of people in Mumbai walk or cycle to work. So just purely in terms of the sustainability argument, that's actually quite interesting. Work sometimes means literally doing whatever you happen to be doing in terms of picking up goods from in front of your front door. That is very different from these megacities that we've actually been describing. But I think the model here is an interesting one. New York City today actually has a very interesting split in terms of nearly 24% of the population in Manhattan walk to work.

That's a very, very high percentage. 60% take public transport. So it's the most European city, as Peter was saying. But in the States as a whole, 90% of the population goes to work by car. And I have to say that probably most of the emerging... Surging cities of the global south are following the American model of 20 years ago rather than the more sustainable model that we're talking about now. Do you see a new, Peter Hall, do you see a new shape coming out globally in these cities,

or are they all different stages of stages that the older, by not much, actually, by a couple hundred years ago, 150 years, older cities have been through? Are they all following the same plan? Is it higgledy or do you see a shape coming to them? So we will soon be able to say all cities are like this? There is a common shape emerging, and it's variously described as the mega region or the megacity region, which is a vast area embracing perhaps 20, 30, 40 cities, and a population that can go as high as 100 million. The archetypes here are the Pearl River Delta of southern China between Hong Kong and Guangzhou,

and the Yangtze River Delta, also China, between Shanghai and Nanjing. But we have, I think, an emerging megacity region in southeast England, which is up to 100 miles from London, except that the Green Belt and other controls, in effect, mini-green belts, have actually given that our megacity a much more coherent urban form. There was an idea at one stage, Tristram, that the, the cities would really disappear because with all the technology you could work at home

and why did you have to go anywhere except into the garden for a cigarette or whatever it was. That doesn't seem to have caught on, does it? No, I mean, yes, you're absolutely right. There was this wonderful idea with the internet and information technology, you know, the urban form would crumble. But people have realised that, first of all,

the importance of sociability, the importance of what we now call, you know, social capital, but also business still works on face-to-face contact. And again, this goes right back to the heart the Industrial Revolution. You look at Manchester. Manchester wasn't simply about mills. Manchester wasn't simply about factories. It was about human contact in the exchange. It was about the pubs and the coffee rooms and the gentlemen's clubs. And people value both on economic grounds and social grounds and civic grounds, the urban form. I think we need to be a

bit careful to talk about cities from this rather comfortable, slightly Western Eurocentric point of view. there's a new phenomenon, which is shrinking cities. Cities like Liverpool, like Budapest, like Detroit, like Cleveland, which have halved in the last 20, 30 years, for reasons to do with one simple thing, the economy. And I think what to do with these cities, how to retrofit them so that they don't die is very, very important. And here I would totally agree with Peter that public transport

is one of the central ways of resolving it. But of course, you need to go somewhere. in order to do something in order to be able to keep a city alive. And I think this goes right back to the beginning of your programmes last week, that cities rise and fall, that Carthage and Alexandria and Athens and Rome rise and fall. And we do have to accept maybe cities like Detroit, maybe cities like Liverpool, have that same cycle. And Ricky's absolutely right.

What do you do about it? That's another program. Thank you very much, Ricky Bedet, Peter Hall and Tristram Hunt. Next week we'll be talking about the great 19th century essays and critic William Haslett. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes

about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.ukuk forward slash radio 4.