4: BATS, BUILDINGS & BIG IDEAS (+ local action on water, + the urban impacts of tariff wars, and more...)

In this month's bumper episode we are joined by Malcolm Tait, Kiera Chapman and Hugh Ellis for a feature (45:13) on the UK government's planning reforms, how we can save nature and whether we need more utopian thinking to engage citizens in planning for sustainable communities. 

With Liz Sharp and Antonio Navas, Tom and Beth also dive into the local impacts of the UK's water crisis (20:35) and the urban impacts of tariff wars (33:37). 

Also on our radar (3:15):

• How levels of urbanization impact on Myanmar's earthquake resilience, and man-made factors shaping urban crisis 
• Paris city hall's anti-tagging campaign, and the implications for graffiti and protest art in urban public space
• Does Gen Z struggle to pick up the phone? The importance of communication amongst strangers to city life 
• The potential impacts of closing embassies in cities abroad on diplomatic relations globally 

Guests:

Liz Sharp is a Professor of Water and Planning in the School of Geography and Planning. She is an environmental social scientist whose work supports practical interventions related to water supply, waste and flooding. 

Antonio Navas is a Lecturer in the School of Economics. His work focuses on international trade, foreign direct investment and technology adoption. 

Malcolm Tait is Professor of Planning in the School of Geography and Planning.  He leads the  Planning for Nature project, and is interested in how planning relates to ecology, housing, and urban renewal.

Hugh Ellis is the Director of Policy for the Town and Country Planning Association and Honorary Professor of Utopian Studies (according to the website) at the University of Sheffield. 

Kiera Chapman is an author and Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. She was lead author on the Lost Nature report for Wild Justice.

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, and CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: urbanradarpod@gmail.com

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. And to Sam Burgum, for post-production editing and promotion.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_03 0:11

This month on Urban Radar we discuss is there a systemic water crisis and what can cities and regions do to address it globally?

SPEAKER_05 0:19

Are there winners and losers from Trump's tariffs and what can cities do to mitigate some of the economic impact?

SPEAKER_03 0:26

And as expectations heighten that planning reform can address big challenges of housing, infrastructure and technological innovation, we ask whether we need more utopian thinking about the role of urban planning in society. Welcome to episode four of Urban Vader, the podcast series brought to you by the Sheffield Urbanism Community at the University of Sheffield. I'm Professor Beth Perry, Director of the Urban Institute.

SPEAKER_05 0:52

And I'm Professor Tom Goodfellow in the School of Geography and Planning.

unknown 0:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 0:56

So, Tom, are you feeling stressed at the moment? You shouldn't be, because it was your birthday earlier this week, and I know you had a massage. You've exposed me. This is terrible. Happy birthday.

SPEAKER_05 1:07

That was days ago now. I'm not in stress. Actually, I'm tired of it. That doesn't mean you're just emailed. But I'm I am tired, Beth, so it might show.

SPEAKER_03 1:13

Well, the reason I'm asking is because it's actually we asked our amazing podcast uh assistant, Polly, to do us a calendar of particular international world days that we might want to celebrate or recognise in some way on the podcast. And it revealed that this is National Stress Awareness Month at the moment. And the hashtag for this month's campaign is Lead with Love, which I I kind of love.

SPEAKER_05 1:36

Lead with love. Well, yeah, I mean, speaking of love, I have been feeling the love, like the link here, for our Sheffield Urbanism community. Because one thing in the lead up to this podcast is just like the range of people we could invite to talk about different things happening in the news. It's so exciting. It really is. And I know that's kind of bigging ourselves up. Well, it's bigging our community up. But uh we have got some great people on today. Um and uh yeah, maybe we can say a little bit more about what's coming up.

SPEAKER_03 2:01

So, yes, what's coming up on this month's episode? As usual, Tom and I are going to share a little bit of what's on our radar, and then we're going to dive into a couple of features in more detail with some of these amazing colleagues that we've been talking about. Firstly, we're going to discuss how local interventions can help address water crises, uh, for instance, through rainwater harvesting at the local level, with our guest, Professor Liz Sharp. And then we're going to turn to questions around the urban impacts of Trump's tariffs and the tariffs wars with our guest, Dr. Antonio Navas.

SPEAKER_05 2:39

And then, as if that's not enough, we have a special feature where we are bringing in our colleagues Malcolm Tate and Kira Chapman, along with Hugh Ellis, who's a visiting professor here, usually based at the Town and Country Planning Association. We're going to be talking about bats buildings and big ideas in planning, the role of utopianism, uh, and whether we really can envisage planning. Once again, to think really positively about the kind of communities we want in the future, rather than just treating it as some negative force in society.

SPEAKER_03 3:07

Let's crack on.

SPEAKER_05 3:20

So, Beth, what's on your radar this month?

SPEAKER_03 3:22

So, I've been thinking about water in the context of the planning reforms. There's two things going on at the moment. One is that there's planning for new reservoirs being built because there's ongoing concern that there's not going to be enough water. Um, some estimates that even in the east of England there'll be water shortages of up to 800 million litres per day by 2050. Um, so we're planning these new reservoirs. At the same time, we're planning these new AI data centres, which are extremely resource intensive. Um, so there's water scarcity, there's also a whole range of other issues in the press. Campaigners' data has shown that water pollution incidents are at a 10-year high. We've got water firms releasing raw sewage into our waterways, those water companies are racking up debt, left, right, and centre. Um, and so the government's been criticised for not paying enough attention to all of these things. And yesterday, actually, which was the 23rd of April, was the closing date for people to submit evidence to the government's independent water commission, uh, which is called the Cunliffe Review. Um, and that's going to report in June. Um, and so I'm really looking forward to talking with Liz later, uh, who has been submitting evidence to that independent water commission.

SPEAKER_05 4:35

Okay, great. Yes, we look forward to that a real water expert coming up. Um not that you're, you know, I'm not a water expert.

SPEAKER_03 4:42

I like to drink it and I wash in it, and sometimes I swim in it.

SPEAKER_05 4:45

Water matters to us all. But so what else has been on the radar?

SPEAKER_03 4:49

Um obviously a huge tragedy with the earthquake that happened in Myanmar, which is one of the worst earthquakes in recent history of the region, you know, 7.7 on the Richter scale, and has killed more than 3,000 people, but the estimates are expected to be higher. And I think there's a lot of stories unfolding in the media that indicate the urban scale of this disaster. Um and I was thinking about whether that's always the case, and I found a really interesting article about how levels of urbanization relate to the extent to which places are earthquake resilient. Um, and actually, Myanmar's in one of the worst positions it can be in terms of rates of urbanization, because it's in a very early to mid-stage of urbanization with a large rural population and but a growing number of people living in cities, but the city infrastructures are still quite fragile, um, the regulations for good building don't necessarily exist. So you have both huge impacts in rural areas and very poor urban infrastructure. Um, so many of those cities are going to need to be entirely rebuilt, um, and the capital city, of course, is four times the size of London, so that's going to take decades. But the other thing I was thinking, which just links to some of the questions we've had on previous radars, um, is that this layers on top of an already very multidimensional urban problem. Links to a few things I just want to quickly draw attention to. One is when in episode one, you know, Vanessa Castanbroto was talking about how natural disasters become disasters on the back of factors that are more or less entirely man-made. You were talking in another episode about the impacts of the reduction of US AID and international development funding. Um, and the US, of course, are providing a fraction of what they would have done. On top of that, you've got all of these questions around military control of capital cities and the strategies that people are using. And Myanmar's caught in this real interesting geopolitical position between US, China, and Russia. Um so one of the things that you do see happening is a lot of mutual aid that's now happening on the ground in these cities as people are trying to help each other to rebuild.

SPEAKER_05 6:56

Absolutely. In some ways, it also I mean it links in some ways forward to our discussion about planning because it reminds me, in a sense, of the Haiti earthquake of 2010, which was uh so devastating and enormous. And I think there was another earthquake in the same year of a similar level on the scale, and yet the built environment factors meant that the number of fatalities was vastly more in Haiti. And and this is very much about questions of planning and regulation as well, um, when we see those huge numbers of fatalities in urban areas.

SPEAKER_03 7:25

Because it all goes together. You need good governance in order to build strong infrastructure that has the possibility of protecting people, being more earthquake resilient in a world that is still rapidly urbanised.

SPEAKER_05 7:35

We do need you know forms of land use and building regulation.

SPEAKER_03 7:38

Um the last thing I want to just draw attention to that's on my radar was an article about the crackdown on graffiti tagging in Paris on historic monuments, um, on trunks of trees and old stone buildings. And the City Hall has declared war on this tagging through a kind of anti-tagging campaign. And obviously, there's a lot of legitimate concerns, you know, that graffiti is just mindless vandalism. One of the local Parisian resident activists described this tagging as like dogs pissing against a watermark territory. Um, and so I'm not trying to glorify graffiti, but it made me think about some of the work of our international collaborators who have been involved in the Sheffield Urbanism community. So there's Rika Citas, who's an academic at the African Centre for Cities, the University of Cape Town, and Gabriella Leo at the University of Lisbon, who have really been challenging this idea that graffiti is always an act of violent vandalism, that it's mindless. You know, Rika's work points to how graffiti is a real kind of critical practice, um, it's an alternative approach to cultural urban development, often used by young people who don't otherwise have a voice. It can be really racialized and gendered. Gabriella's work has looked at how graffiti is a way of challenging those kinds of urban norms. Um I think there's some interesting questions there. Like, why do some things get recognized as legitimate art, like Banksy, who is still doing uh street art without permission, whereas other things are really cracked down on. And I think one of the things is about whether or not it has a political message, of course. Um, I mean, there's lots of things you can find that sort of start to back this up. But one of the things I thought was quite interesting, linking to uh the revolution in Bangladesh that we were talking about last episode, um, was actually that there's this new book out that's uh called The Walls of Change from a Bangladeshi publisher, which is documenting how, as Bangladesh went through this massive revolutionary moment, we've already talked about the urban dimensions of that, um, the walls of the cities and the streets have become kind of canvases of resistance. Um, and I kind of quote, filled with graffiti demanding fairness, equality, freedom, and justice. Um, and so the book includes loads of different examples of this sort of transformative power of public art in shaping governance. So there's just this really fine line. You know, what is graffiti, what is vandalism, what is art, and what do we care about in our urban public spaces?

SPEAKER_05 10:00

I think it's also it's very much about place and a kind of wider uh idea of what's appropriate in a in terms of urban culture, right? I mean, because I've just recently been in Athens where graffiti is very much I don't know the full regulatory, you know, system around it, but it's kind of embraced as part of what the city is, and it's almost like a tourist feature. I mean, having said that, some of it had the word tourism with uh quite rude four-letter words before it because Well, that's another issue we're going to have to cover. Yeah, but I do wonder if there's something about Paris as well. It's like I I don't know if graffiti will ever be fully accepted as part of the mainstream French representation of its urban modern culture.

SPEAKER_03 10:37

I mean, there's a differentiation here between tagging, which is just initials, and the kind of political art and the messages. So there's also these contradictions that cities have to face. And just to give one last example, like there's a huge tradition of political graffiti in Buenos Aires, for instance, in the 1970s and the 1980s, where activists were painting the names of corrupt military officers or missing civilians on the wall. And um the modern city government in Buenos Aires, you know, they still prosecute artists for some of that work that was so political, you know, and at the same time they commission street art. So there is this sort of um juxtaposition, this contradiction in how we value these sorts of things. So, Tom, your turn. What's on your radar?

SPEAKER_05 11:33

Well, one of the first things, perhaps the the the biggest story of of the month in many ways in in April has of course been the Trump tariffs. Possibly Trump. And we yes, we mentioned it uh in passing earlier, I think, but of course this is when it really hit with these kind of extraordinary reciprocal tariffs, as they were called, and these escalating tariffs between the US and China. So I have been thinking about the scale of the economic hit that that's going to have around the world and what it means for cities. So we'll be picking that up later on uh with uh other guests. Um yeah, and I think it's it's it's obviously very different implications for cities in different parts of the world. I'm thinking that can there be some winners from this? I mean, we often hear this mantra of there are no winners in a trade war, but it's also hard to believe that there might not be some benefits that will uh accrue to certain cities in certain parts of the world or certain sectors of the economy in certain cities. A second thing I've been thinking about, very, very different and much closer to home, Manchester, in fact, is this story uh that came up just a couple of days ago around Gen Z students in Greater Manchester and how they are going to have the opportunity to be taught soft skills in the first trial of its kind in the UK, which is aimed at teaching this generation essential schools that they are skills, sorry, that they're perceived to lack. So this comes out of research suggesting that Gen Z, um as I will call them, I think I said Gen Z, and we were all getting very American here.

SPEAKER_03 13:00

I don't know all of those.

SPEAKER_05 13:02

No, I'm gonna say Z. I don't say Z. But then when I say Gen Z, I end up saying Gen Z anyway. So Generation Z, as they are known, young people They're younger than us.

SPEAKER_03 13:11

There is something you since your birthday. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 13:13

So one of the one of the people I'm getting younger every day. Uh one of the people in the company delivering this research, which will be co-delivered by Manchester's universities as well, although I think primarily delivered online, perhaps ironically, because it's really about face-to-face communication skills and and actually telephone skills, right? So there's a sense in which young people have been affected by what one um person from the the organization leading this training called the five C's, which is COVID, climate change, cost of living, cyberspace, and conflict. It's not necessarily clear how all of those relate to the problem of Gen Z communication, but there's this idea that there's a generation of people who are scared to pick up the phone and rely heavily on texting. Although I would say a lot of young people are using voice notes, but anyway. But there's a sense in which actually having a direct conversation is daunting to people who haven't grown up with that being normal, as perhaps our generation did. So it's interesting to think about what it means for cities, you know, if you actually have a decline in communication between people who don't know one another. Um so there's uh actually a guide, a useful guide I found in a Daily Mail article which was also covering this story.

SPEAKER_03 14:16

I think you just yeah.

SPEAKER_05 14:17

Although it was originally broken by The Guardian. Um and you there's literally like some guidance there about how to begin a phone call, making the right first impression, owning the call rather than letting the call own you, how to judge cues from the person you're talking to if you can't see them. I think a lot of things we probably take for granted. But it got me thinking about the nature of cities if we have a kind of diminishment of interpersonal communication, and actually the idea of cities without conversation among strangers, which is really fundamental to what cities are. Okay, so it's long been believed, and um scholars like Iris, Marion Young have written about cities as kind of collectives of mostly strangers, and much more recently, um Sean Fox and uh Levi Wolfe in a paper by Fox and Wolf, which of course is great, and another paper by Wolf and Fox that just came out.

SPEAKER_03 15:05

You're just saying animals.

SPEAKER_05 15:06

I know. Uh I mean it conjures up all kinds of images of cities at night. But um they've looked not just at cities being places of strangers, but places explicitly of social interactions between strangers, and this is what makes cities what they are, right? So it's this idea that you have the possibility of frequent encounters between strangers that is central to urbanness. So I think it's really interesting to think about what it means if that aspect of um urbanism is diminishing somehow.

SPEAKER_03 15:33

Aaron Ross Powell Well, there's a presumption there as well that somehow the physical and the digital worlds are separate, and of course, actually the online world is full of strangers, and that's possibly why there is some certain kinds of suspicion of some technologies over the others. Like um, if you think about whether you pick up the phone and how scams work, lots of young people are taught not to answer the phone if you don't recognise the number. And of course, young people have skills that we as older generations don't have, so it's not about saying one or the other. Well, I was thinking though, uh earlier this week, I was at the Festival of Debate in Sheffield and Sheffield have a series of city strategy goals called Sheffield City Goals, and one of them is very much about giving young people voice. Yeah. Um, and I think that really brings the importance of this question of intergenerational communication to the fore. Um, not presuming one technology is necessarily better than another, but what makes real communication? How does that happen face to face? But how does it happen in physical environments? And what are the assumptions that we make when we make decisions as cities? Like if we want young people to come and help make decisions, how do how do you getting that communication right? So there's probably soft skills we all need to learn.

SPEAKER_05 16:42

And I'm I imagine that's a story that will run and run. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:44

So there's something else you want to cover, isn't there?

SPEAKER_05 16:46

Yes, in very different matters. So again, I'm thinking quite internationally here, although I don't want to focus too much on the US. I think following from our discussion a few weeks ago or a couple of months ago now about USAID and its urban impact, we've now seen this quite extraordinary story that broke three or four days ago from the time of recording about Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State in the US, announcing radical cuts to the State Department, including the closure of potentially large numbers of embassies across the world, particularly in Africa, and the closure of huge parts of the organization. And this really got me thinking because I mean it's a it's a it's a it's a remarkable story in many ways. One, because what was being proposed was a new approach to Africa that would simply be about counter-terrorism, US advantage, uh, surveillance and epidemic health surveillance, which is a a real radical slimming down of what partnership means. But um also it was it was then announced that this was a hoax and it was fake news. So we're now in a world not only of fake news but where the kind of uh US government is creating its own fake news in some sense. But clearly there's something behind the story. It was a leaked document. Um and what interests me in terms of the urban dimensions is actually just this question of embassies and of foreign presence in cities, because in capital cities particularly, embassies and um consulates and diplomats have always been part of what cities are, once again. If you go back to ancient Greece, they had this term xenos that means stranger, which we know mostly today from the word xenophobia, but they also had a person who was called a a prozenos, um, uh, which was uh a sort of honorary consul in each of the Greek city-states who was there to represent foreigners. And apparently ancient Persia had an even more advanced system of kind of diplomatic relations. So the the Greek polis, the city, would had as as a central part of it the people who represent others elsewhere. Um, and if you start closing down embassies and you literally start to think we're not going to have diplomatic presence, I mean that's fundamental for international relations, but also I think for cities, and partly because the embassy is actually quite a focal point in many cities. If I think about African cities I know, the US Embassy particularly is normally the biggest, fanciest, most expensive, largest plot, most fortified building in the city. This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole of thinking about, like, for example, in Addis Ababa, the the UK embassy uh is a plot of land of some 80 acres, right? So it was which is about the size of 60 football pitches, which was given to the British by Emperor Menelik because he wanted to keep them at bay in a time of colonial land grabbing. Um, and they still have most of that plot today. So there was a big story a few years ago as well about the selling off of the UK Embassy in Bangkok, which was an enormous plot of land and sold for £420 million, right? Uh and now being redeveloped as a shopping mall. So I'm also thinking, what is going to happen to those buildings and those spaces? And of course, the fact that a real estate developer is in the White House is is not, I don't think, entirely irrelevant to what might happen if this goes ahead.

SPEAKER_03 19:42

But it's interesting because there's another side to it as well. I mean, you've talked about the impact on the cities themselves, but presumably there's also symbolic power. There must be something that there's giving up, and that these embassies, this presence in capital cities, has always benefited those countries themselves. It's not just a totally altruistic act of looking after your own whilst they're abroad. That there's other kinds of things going on there.

SPEAKER_05 20:04

No, there's yeah, I mean, there's all the kind of altruism and there's the soft power, the hard power, and then there's this just this is this in a way, this is the stuff that I'm really interested in, right? It's kind of urban geopolitics of this, you see this one-upmanship in space between um the Chinese embassy and the US Embassy in cities abroad. And so for the US Embassy to kind of give those up and then potentially to be turned into commercial sites is is is quite significant, I think.

SPEAKER_03 20:37

So let's dive into one of these issues uh straight away. Um we're really delighted to be joined by Liz Sharp. Liz is a professor of water and planning in the School of Geography and Planning and has a lot of expertise around sustainable urban drainage. She's also a member of Sheffield University's Water Group and has recently submitted evidence to the Independent Commission on Water and an alternative People's Commission on Water as well, I believe. So welcome, Liz. It's really lovely to have you here. And it's great to be here. Thank you, Beth. I want to start a bit with just some of the big picture stuff. You know, do you think there is a systemic water crisis? You know, what are the key elements of this and how do they interrelate?

SPEAKER_02 21:19

So, yes, there is a systemic water crisis because everywhere really, because climate change is going to change our weather and or is already changing our weather such that we have unexpected dry spells like at the moment, in the middle of spring when we're expecting all our reservoirs to fill up, and then we have lots and lots of very heavy rain all at once. And all of that together is part of our water crisis, which means our our you know our infrastructure wasn't built for that amount of use and for those sort of extremes. And we need to find ways to adjust um both our consumption and our infrastructure to fit in with it.

SPEAKER_03 22:00

Um I was interested just to know a bit more about the kind of spatial impacts of this broad crisis. I mean, how does it really have different impacts on different places, either within the UK or internationally, based on your expertise?

SPEAKER_02 22:12

I mean, I think it's both geographically and temporally varied. So at times um places will flood, and I guess the places that will flood are primarily the lowland places, but I mean we need to bear in mind there's also surface water flooding that can happen in lots of locations, um, or um surface water contributes to sewer flooding. And I know that Tom was um had some terrible sewer flooding not long ago. Um, you know, and that and that comes because of really heavy rainstorm, overwhelms the um the sewers in the area, and um and they overflow into uh into homes in in slightly low-lying areas. So you know, Tom must live along the line of the main the sewer nearby and uh too much rain and it all came into your cellar.

SPEAKER_03 23:00

Some of our international um listeners might be surprised to hear what the problem we have with water in the UK, because we're such a rainy country, at least we have a very rainy reputation. But we also have too much water in some places, like flooding, and not enough in other places where we have drought. Um this is really where you live. There is a postcode lottery, isn't there, of like what your relationship to and access is.

SPEAKER_02 23:23

Yes, except a lot of people could actually suffer from both. So, like, particularly let's say people in the south east. The south east is chronically short of water. You know, compared to the the population and the rainfall, you know, our amount of rainfall per person is actually quite low, lower than Jerusalem or something like that. And that's because we've got quite a densely populated area over quite a large, you know, large area of Greater London. So in Greater London, you are likely to suffer from water shortage, but there are also some really bad flooding problems that go on there. Um and there's a you know there's a big risk of of coastal flooding because the Thames barrier built 30, 40 years ago, probably won't be big enough to withstand the coastal surges we might get in the future. Meanwhile, we've got you know heavy rain and it again overwhelms the sewers in London. So these problems locally there are geographical patterns, so somebody in a low-lying area is more likely to be flooded. But on a national level, I think these problems can happen everywhere. I mean, in in 1995, we had a really bad drought in Yorkshire. And in Yorkshire, for example, we're very dependent on how much rain there's been this year, because we're relying on reservoirs that fill up in the winter and then we use them in the summer. In London, in the southeast, they use more groundwater. So that tends to mean it lasts for, you know, you need a couple of dry years before you run out of water in the southeast. So, in some respects, although London has this thing about its population and its water use, we're also very vulnerable up here.

SPEAKER_05 24:53

I mean, water, like so much else in our country, has undergone waves uh of privatization. And and I'm wondering, in view of discussions about nationalisation of various industries in in very recent times, whether you think that is part of the solution to the problem here.

SPEAKER_02 25:10

I mean, there are ways in which I think having a nationalised water sector would would make things easier. Um but I I guess what I feel like is that the problem isn't just the ownership structure, the problem is also the fragmented spread of responsibility for different jobs. So the water companies do water supplier and sewerage, um, but the local authorities do local drainage, and the environment agency does river drainage, and the highways agency does highways drainage, but the water companies are obliged to take all the water from the highways without being paid anything. So there's all these anachronisms in the setup, which might have made sense when it was done, but now when we have different priorities, it ends up meaning that people don't do things because somebody else gets the benefit, or vice versa. So it's a very messy system.

SPEAKER_05 26:02

So it's part of the overall logic of having this segmented privatization. Because uh John Conliffe, Sir John Cunliffe, who's leading this water commission that partly prompted this conversation, has also kind of expressed these concerns around poor decisions and poor performance with within companies themselves.

SPEAKER_02 26:17

I mean, I I on the whole, I guess, you know, if you really want my kind of political instinct, yes, I think it would probably be better. Because I think that when people are working for a nationalised service, they have an idea of trying to do things for the people and for the social well-being, which is not the ethos which the companies are encouraged to have. So I think that that that there is an argument for that approach. But I kind of feel like actually there are a lot of things that you can do to help solve the problem, even while companies are private.

SPEAKER_03 26:50

Well, let's come on to those things because I know in your own research, Liz, you're very committed to action-oriented research, working with communities that makes a difference. And yes, you're not waiting for the reform of the system before recognizing that cities and regions at a local level, we can do something about this. So can you maybe tell us a bit about your project, which I think is called or has been called magic, you know, mobilizing adaptation, governance of infrastructure through co-production. It's Malvio, but I love why we need to be the professor of magic. I mean, that's great. Um But yeah, tell us a bit about that work and like why these local solutions that are less technological, maybe more about reuse, controlling demand, why do they matter so much?

SPEAKER_02 27:31

I mean, I think in this case, what we were trying to do was to think about how the community in Halland East Riding could be engaged in processes of trying to manage flood risk in the area. Context for that work is that it's an area which has suffered from really chronic flooding. And people are actually quite terrified of flooding. Flooding has had really terrible effects on some people's lives, and there's a very strong folk memory of the terrible floods in 2007 when 8,000 homes were inundated. And when we initially researched before we did magic, we we talked to people and they were like, well, if it happens, it happens. Um and uh and a belief that the authorities, well, you know, they they won't do anything. And I suppose we wanted to address that sort of feeling of a lack of agency. Um, I mean, it obviously it needs work by the authorities, and they are doing quite a lot to try to address the the flood risk in Hull. Um and I suppose our our work was trying to explore some of the things that people can also do for themselves.

SPEAKER_03 28:35

Um like what? Can you give some examples of things that really do make a difference? You know, if someone knows that they do these small actions, they might stop their neighbour's basement from being flooded. You know, they might be much more likely to do it.

SPEAKER_02 28:48

Yeah. I mean, well, there's kind of there's there's two sets of things. So something that that you can do to help you that I could do to help Tom's basement stop being flooded would be to if I had a big water tank in my yard and it took all the water from my roof, then that water would not go into the sewer, which goes down under Tom's house. I mean, and it probably does actually give them where our house is.

SPEAKER_03 29:09

Let's not put into the blame game here. We're all friends. We we started by saying how much we love our community.

SPEAKER_02 29:16

Um and you know, and then I could use that water for um, I mean, ideally for feeding my toilets and my washing machines to save me paying more water, you know, paying for my water and and and watering my garden and washing a car and all these different things that one uses non-drinkable water for. You know, not everybody has space for a big water tank, but a lot of people have space for a water butt. Um and so a water butt can both supply the user, the owner with water, but it can also do a little bit if it as long as it's empty or has some space at the time the rain starts, it ha it you know, it can take that water out of the sewage system. And it's one of these things where you know my water butt won't actually stop trans flooding, but if everybody across the neighborhood had them, it could.

SPEAKER_03 30:03

And so maybe the last thing I just want to explore with you is um we started by saying that you'd submitted evidence to the Independent Water Commission and this alternative People's Commission for Water. Are these the kinds of things you said? You know, lots more local people doing rainwater harvesting, or you know, what is the balance between the local innovation that people can do themselves and the kind of structural change that we need? So my fundamental argument is we need both.

SPEAKER_02 30:29

Um there's no point, you know, I it's not wouldn't it would be completely inappropriate for people to be told, you know, you need you all need to hold back the water to stop people flooding. It probably wouldn't be enough, but also it's dumping responsibility on the public. The authorities need to take action. But I feel they're missing a trick because they don't ask for help. And people actually would like to help. They like the idea of, you know, and it was very clear from Hull, they loved the idea that they could do something and that they could take action. Um and I think what I'm seeking to do is to invite the authorities to work with communities more. Ultimately, that's what I was trying to demonstrate to the authorities is that they can work with communities. Now, if that's one respect in which I feel that coming back to the privatization question, it would be so much better if that question or that request did not come from a privatised water company that you didn't trust.

SPEAKER_05 31:28

How top-down do you think government can or should be? Because I'm thinking about the huge water crisis in somewhere like Cape Town, where I was there in 2018 during that, and they literally had, in a shower in a hotel or whatever, they had these timers, right, saying you should not spend more than 90 seconds and say you'd be in the shower and then alarm would go off. And I think this was some kind of directive from the city government. I mean, that kind of heavy-handed. We also know that in some contexts the trust of government is is quite low, and actually if things come out of community organizations, they're much more likely to be adopted by communities. So I wonder what kind of level of messaging from government might be suitable here.

SPEAKER_02 32:02

Well, it I mean, I think that's really my point that I think that the water companies are not the right people to be sending the messages. Um, you know, local authorities or the environment agency would be better, but better still would be if they worked with rivers trusts or indeed with local community groups, clubs for allotments or um residence associations or you know, or whatever, local community groups, to actually say, right, we'll give you some sponsorship if you can promote this amongst your people and this is how you do it, you know. And and because people and the other thing there, of course, is you don't motivate people by saying this is good to stop or you might motivate them by saying this couldn't help stop flooding. But the other thing which is really important is that by stopping flooding, you're stopping pollution. So we're hearing so much about the combined sewer overflows at the moment. But if you think, well, if I still water in my house, it can help stop something overflowing in my local river. Well, that's actually quite motivating because a lot of people love their local waterways.

SPEAKER_03 33:02

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that makes a lot of sense why one of your key recommendations was for these democratically steered catchment bodies so that you can bring these coalitions together at the local level. And it helps address all of these complex, intertwined issues, doesn't it? Yes. I mean, I think we need to wrap up there for now. We'd like to get you back on at some point. Um, again, many of these issues they don't go away, so I'm sure we'll come back for some more watery talk later. But for now, thank you very much, Liz. It's been a pleasure to have you. Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_05 33:39

We are very pleased now to be joined by Dr. Antonio Navas, who is a senior lecturer in the School of Economics here at the University of Sheffield, and we are going to be talking about the big one: the Trump tariffs, and some of the impacts, particularly for cities in different parts of the world. So, this is a huge issue, obviously, and people will be very differently affected in in different parts of the world. But there is also a sense that there's a global economic impact that will affect everyone. I wonder if you could just tell us about what you think some of the most significant impacts might be on cities around the world and where they might fall the hardest.

SPEAKER_00 34:15

So basically, the notion of tariffs affecting cities in particular is related to the fact that for a long time industries have found that clustering into a particular location uh helps them to develop a competitive advantage in the global market, no, either because being close to your competitors makes also knowledge more diffused across them. But obviously, the uh concentration of economic activity in a single location makes this single location more exposed to uh external shocks like this one, no, like the existence of uh of an increase in tariffs which may affect the whole the whole region and as a whole. So it is actually interesting to see uh what could be the trade-offs regarding this, no, how much of the uh concentration or diversification you would like to have, no, because it's in the competitive advantage, but being more exposed to these type of shocks.

SPEAKER_05 35:08

And I mean the most obvious effects that come to mind for non-experts uh such as myself would be for US consumers, right? Um, trying to acquire Chinese products that are now much more expensive, and to some extent the other way for Chinese consumers, but also Chinese producers. But if we accept the point where we're at now, where the rest of the world is on a kind of flat 10%, which is still a significant tariff but much lower, what might some of the effects be, let's say, in European cities of this trade war but just between the US and China? So if we just think about the how the US and China tariffs will affect us, for example?

unknown 35:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:47

Well, it's difficult to answer this question because there are multiple effects. No, so from a point of view of the flat tariff, in principle, what is happening here is that uh the relative prices between different countries have not changed. So this will imply that not necessarily we're gonna lose a terrible market share in the in the US because our our international competitors are gonna suffer from the same uh tariff, no? But it's m so more complicated is whether you um your industry is involved in what is called global value chains, no? So the the the production of the good may end up being uh involve uh different kinds of locations and the good moving around. And if the if the good pass around different jurisdictions with different tariffs, this will end up in an increase in the price of the good and a deterioration in the competitiveness of the of the product.

SPEAKER_03 36:39

Aaron Powell You get the impression that those cities that have done well out of globalization and the concentration of global economic activity, um so they've played well at this globalized and localized game, actually may be more adversely affected than perhaps places that have been traditionally left behind or left out of that kind of circuit of global wealth creation and value extraction. I'm wondering if you think that's that's right. Um, but also whether or not then those places that are reliant on a single industry, and I'm thinking about kind of Scunthorpe and what's happening at the moment with the British steel and the sort of Chinese own industry and potential renationalisation, you know, whether when you're dependent on a single industry, even if that crisis hasn't been caused by the current tariff wars, it makes you more vulnerable.

SPEAKER_00 37:29

Yes, in principle, um being super concentrated uh in a particular activity exposed you to more shocks, no? And and there is a debate within the uh economic profession of how much you should diversify your economic activity, taking into account that more concentration many times imply um building up a stronger competitive advantage, but at the same time it exposed you to more risk.

SPEAKER_05 37:56

I always have in my mind these what they call the monotowns in the Soviet Union, right? Where uh after 1991 or whatever, with this neoliberal shock therapy, all these cities completely collapsed because they were so dependent on one industry. Um Or Detroit in the in the US with the car industry. Yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, the rust belt. But I am wondering, I mean, you hear this mantra of nobody wins in a trade war and uh everyone will become poorer, and we hear this astonishing, you know, the whole thing could cost the global economy one trillion. But it's hard not to think there might be some beneficiaries. And I'm partly interested in, I guess, other parts of the global south that have been struggling to move up value chains or get into manufacturing. When the first tariffs were announced with these extraordinary high tariffs on places like Lesotho as a manufacturing site in Africa, you know, that had really built its economy around free trade with the US and around manufacturing and would have been devastated. I mean, do do we see that possibility? Again, maybe China also outsourcing more, doing more to get around the tariffs?

SPEAKER_00 38:57

I mean, uh there is of course this possibility because nobody wins in a trade war of those who participate in a trade war. But the fact is that if you don't participate in that trade war, you may end up like winning. You know, like for example, and we have evidence that in the first US-China trade war, there were countries that they were benefiting. Uh for example, one of the biggest beneficiaries was uh Vietnam, who see most of uh many, many multinational corporations moving production from China into Vietnam in order to avoid the Chinese tariffs. And and what is uh probably less investigated, and actually we have that in our research agenda in the Swiss group, also regions within a country may not only may be impacted unevenly, but there could be regions that will win, okay? And regions that will lose. So we are focusing, of course, on how devastating could be um the impact in in, for example, the car industry in the UK, which is actually very, very important, which is highly localized in in Coventry and the West Midlands. But there could be other areas in the UK that thanks to the to the trade war may end up like uh winning.

SPEAKER_05 40:10

I suppose it's also just relative, isn't it? Like uh the the relative, there's an inequality question, even if there are places that don't necessarily win, they may lose significantly less. I mean, we tend to hear more about the places that lose. Uh one article I read was quite interesting about Ireland and about Botox production and how all of the world's Botox, whether for cosmetic or medical purposes, is created in Ireland and mostly in um uh one town that's that's going to be devastated by tariffs to the US. But we don't hear so much about, you know, there was this article that looks at the inequalities in the UK between different cities, with Coventry possibly the worst hit by tariffs, and I think York the least hit. And presumably that's not because York benefits, but because it simply isn't dependent on those kinds of industries.

SPEAKER_03 40:53

I'm just interested in hearing the conversation and thinking about the winners and losers narrative itself. I mean, it suggests such a zero-sum game, and elsewhere on this podcast we've been kind of critical of that sort of discourse. And I was wondering within your research group here, which you mentioned earlier, but I don't think we spelt out Sheffield, Urban International Trade and Environmental, so it's called sweet.

SPEAKER_00 41:17

Yes, sweet.

SPEAKER_03 41:18

Um But to what extent are you looking at kind of alternatives to this zero-sum winners and losers type narrative? I mean, what are the alternatives? Can cities and regions opt out? Um do we want to look more at community wealth building as kinds of responses to resisting the shocks that come from this externally i i imposed global market?

SPEAKER_00 41:41

In in order to kind of mitigate the negative effects of of in particular regions, no, the government should provide uh some sort of finance, trying to avoid shortening the cash flows for these industries and eventually subsidizing innovation because at the end of the day uh innovation and quality improvement may mitigate the disadvantage brought by tariffs. No, at the end, you the only way that you can uh avoid that your product all of a sudden becomes more expensive is because it becomes more attractive to customers. That would be my my recommendation on where on where to go on this. Opting out from the global system is is actually complicated because it makes the industries uh gain in monopoly power, so saying, by the lack of competition, and we know that this has uh very negative effects in the in the long term because they don't have the incentives to become better and to become more competitive.

SPEAKER_05 42:42

So opting out from the from the global uh in uh world is not is not an is not an option to my and then presumably you know as long as we have governments that are obsessed with growth and with the problem of inflation, I mean the main thing that people will be trying to do, city and national governments, will be to get out of the tariffs somehow, like negotiate special deals. And I mean, this is obviously, you know, anyone who's sort of studied development and how it's happened, you know, the the the the opportunities for corruption in that space of import licensing, who gets to import, who doesn't, who gets out of the tariff regimes. And you can imagine in the context of devolved power, actually, that if particular sectors, let's say in the US or China or anywhere, um want to lobby uh to try and get exempted, as we've already seen happening in some cases, from the tariffs, there will be cities where those sectors are concentrated, and those city governments will also take part in that lobbying. So there might be some interesting roles for city governments in trying to get certain sectors exempted from tariffs.

SPEAKER_00 43:43

And this has happened. Uh so uh we must remember that this is not the first time that President Trump uh tries uh tariffs as the way to go. Uh, but in the during the first US-China trade war, which also involves other countries like the EU. all end up in negotiations. So which meant that many of the tariffs that they were initially thought so they were proposed, they were paused. And I imagine that this was generated by the by the lobbying groups within the US that at some point thought that this this is this is it's gone too far and actually it's not beneficial for us because at the end of the day, as we have mentioned before US producers are going to be massively massively shocked because the tariffs that affect their components also affect the competitiveness everywhere, right?

SPEAKER_05 44:34

So at some point And it's not like the US is a country that's trying to develop and bring people out of agricultural poverty into cities to work. Like they're already there doing jobs that are probably the cities are pushing back, aren't they?

SPEAKER_03 44:46

I mean I I was reading that um several of the cities are now suing the federal administration for the impact that the tariffs tariffs have.

SPEAKER_05 44:54

We probably better wrap up I mean I'm sure there's more we could go on and talk about but we are running out of time. Okay. It's been fantastic to have you on here. Thank you so much for joining us. I think your expert is going to be needed more in the future as well.

SPEAKER_00 45:09

And I'm I'm very happy to come back and talk more. Thank you.

SPEAKER_05 45:19

Okay so we are delighted to welcome here three guests today um to speak about planning and particularly the relationship between planning nature and biodiversity. So we have Hugh Ellis who is um visiting here as a visiting professor in the School of Geography and Planning. He has a PhD also from Sheffield from a while back and he's Director of Policy for the Town and Country Planning Association. So he's here working on um I think your title is Professor of Utopian Studies is that right? I really want it to be perhaps it's not but one day in the future to to talk about utopianism and other things while you're here. But uh we also have um Kira Chapman Dr. Kira Chapman who is a research fellow a writer and academic a research fellow currently in Oxford in the Faculty of English but also working here with colleagues in geography and planning including Professor Malcolm Tate who's our other guest who is a professor of planning here in the school. So we'll get into some of the connections between the work you're doing in a moment but I'll hand over to Beth to start.

SPEAKER_03 46:23

Yeah. So I mean planning seems to mean everything to everyone at the moment and there's a huge number of expectations on planning. So you only need to scan the news a bit to see that planning is going to solve all kinds of problems. It's going to drive growth it's going to create new houses we're going to have amazing transport projects, new science and technology corridors, AI zones, there are new towns that are going to be built. So this is like a real cornerstone of Labour's policy. This has obviously had some very mixed reception. So as we're recording this we've heard news from the spring statement that planning is apparently going to be one of the things that's going to lead to increased GDP but at the same time these reforms have been really widely criticised for many reasons reducing people's input at local level into the democratic decisions that affect them that elected local officials are perhaps being sidelined in favour of narrow technocratic planning expertise and that there's this real increasing role of the private sector. So you've all got a huge amount of expertise as we've just heard from Tom what is your take on this are these planning reforms, are these changes taking us in the right direction and would we expect them from a Labour government? Malcolm I'm going to start with you.

SPEAKER_04 47:35

I think it's a really good question. What we've seen I think is that the government's planning reforms are actually an extension and intensification of what's been going on before. We've had probably 20 years of deregulatory planning reform this idea that planning is a block to growth that it gets in the way of infrastructure projects and development and we've had a series of planning reforms over that over that time. Everything from allowing more housing to be built without going through the full planning permission process. We've had all sorts of housing targets coming through and what we're seeing now is just an intensification of that and a political connecting it to a a project of government more centrally which I think comes with deep dangers and deep problems. Partly because I don't think it will work in the way in which it's intended to and I think that it will also cause problems electorally for the government. I think part of the issue is that there is a real narrative to unleash growth where wherever it is and that people, communities, nature gets in the way of that progress and growth. So a lot of the reforms that we're seeing at the moment are about trying to cut down the amount of community input into planning decisions. And that will leave a lot of communities facing up to a lot of development potentially potentially without the right infrastructure and then a lot of unhappiness around that.

SPEAKER_03 49:05

And I mean as you say there's this sense that planning is being positioned as the problem is getting in the way of investment.

SPEAKER_07 49:12

It's getting in the way of growth but Hugh you've written very passionately about this in your blogs and I heard you talking about it today as well that actually planning is is the solution not the problem and I think I quote you from earlier today we are dismantling the solution necessary to tackle the problem yeah well we are and and there is a kind of tragic nature to it isn't there really which is that you know government want we everybody wants more housing we want energy transformation we need a zero carbon future but the blaming planning particularly planing blaming democracy and the environment really sets up in opposition to things that you need to harness as as a solution to this planning wasn't a problem it was generating enough consents it was approving enough development and particularly in the lower demand areas in the northeast you know where you could get a gigabatter battery factory approved in sort of less than a month you know there was a sort of sense that people did want that growth the the the government's policy now is to impose from on high and that isn't going to work on communities. Not least because of course what the a lot of what the private sector delivers in housing terms is terrible in terms of quality.

SPEAKER_05 50:17

We also we we had the advantage of hearing you speak uh earlier today and one of the things you raised and I think you've also again raised this in a blog uh which is that we don't have any sense from this agenda this planning reform agenda this house building agenda of what the places will actually look like of qualitatively what kind of cities and towns we we want to create what will they look and feel like I just wonder like how do you see these reforms that are being talked about by the government now as altering the urban landscape? Do we have any sense of what it might mean for cities and towns?

SPEAKER_07 50:48

Well you can take it at face value in which case we'll all be living on top of data centres, won't we? In high density development with no water. You know, in a climate crisis with no water. I think that what's it seems to us certainly what's tragic about part of the tragedy of it is that people are approaching this from a GDP growth point of view. We think that's sort of self-defeating anyway but but not from a moral point of view of what healthy homes and neighbourhoods will be like for people. So you know get asked this question what's a child's perspective of an urban area in 2050 going to look like under these conditions? And the answer is the government's got absolutely no damn idea whatsoever what that experience is going to be. And that is extraordinary. So there is no urban policy there is no sustainable development goals there is no idea or plan beyond facilitating private capital. And that's extraordinary to me because most of the history of planning has been trying to solve the problems created from unrestricted capital investment and trying to guide it and regulate it into ways which actually create some social value. So although they might get a GDB hit who knows I don't think they will because it's a false prospectus to blame planning regulation for growth in the end what kind of place is is left completely uncertain. And we will have to fight and struggle really hard to get things like health and well-being at the heart of that agenda.

SPEAKER_05 52:03

I mean just picking up on this question of well-being and and the nature of spaces one of the issues which particularly Malcolm and Kira you've been working on is around nature and biodiversity. And this is obviously a hugely contested issue at the moment we've heard you know in the past about bat tunnels in relation to HS2. We've heard from colleagues here as well who are working on things around hedgehog pathways through cities and all of this is is massively under threat and you have both argued in a recent report that the UK is actually one of the most the world's most biodiversity depleted countries. So there's a huge problem here around the ability of the planning system to protect nature. Kira, what exactly is going on here? Lots of people are mobilizing it's it's obviously a big priority why isn't there more positive change we think that there are several things going wrong here.

SPEAKER_01 52:54

The first is the planning system seems to have a sort of virtualism about it. So there's a lot of attention on the design of policy on things like biodiversity net gain which is a policy that's supposed to protect nature but there's not much attention to the built environment outcomes on the ground. So our research last summer was all about going to actual housing estates and looking at what was there on the ground and comparing it to what developers had promised to deliver in the planning conditions for those places. We entered this research thinking that there would be a gap between the planning conditions and what was being delivered but we were shocked by the magnitude of what we found. We found that only 53% of what had been conditioned was actually in place on the ground and when we took street trees out of the equation that fell to just a third. So only a third of what has been promised for nature is present on the ground and this is going to be a big problem for the for the delivery of policies like biodiversity net gain looking into the future. And the issue is simply that there is no planning enforcement looking at this.

SPEAKER_03 54:05

Can I just ask a follow-up there? Because I was looking at the graph in your report and it's sort of tracking what percentage of absence there are of these different kinds of features that are designed to help different species. So it was like a hundred percent absent invertebrate boxes, eighty-three percent missing hedgehog highways, 75% missing bat boxes. And one of the questions I was just wondering was is there actually also a speciesism here insofar as there is a prioritization amongst the public or amongst government of which kinds of nature matter? Like you talked about trees so but there's also this sort of sense that bats are less deserving than perhaps spiders. Invertebrates definitely invertebrates are very low down but you know obviously we also need them.

SPEAKER_01 54:54

I mean we do have this wider social problem around charismatic species versus uncharismatic ones and you always find your invertebrates which are the absolute basis of the food chain tend to get kind of tend to lose out in that in terms of the things that we were looking at uh because we were tracing them from planning conditions these are policy-based interventions on behalf of protected species so things like bats or badgers have specific legislation um about protecting them uh from the harms of development and the planning conditions tend to reflect that legislation I mean this feeds nicely into the work you're doing on a new project which Malcolm you're leading called Planning for Nature with a number of colleagues here funded by the ESRC.

SPEAKER_05 55:40

I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about this clash between nature and planning and what perpetuates it and some of the questions that you're looking to address in that project.

SPEAKER_04 55:49

I think it's one of those things where there are a lot of confused narratives about how planning deals with nature. You look at government minister statements and they are berating the planning system for requiring bat tunnels and new mitigation and spiders and so on. And yet they're also saying that there's a win-win for nature outer part of their reforms and that what they're doing will benefit both development and growth and also nature. And I think what's under really not being thought about here is that the modes by which this development is being produced will not re be a win-win. It will be a win for speculative development it will be a win for profit seeking from land and property but it won't be a win for nature because as we showed in the Lost Nature report the the actual delivery of conservation is really difficult. It requires time it requires effort it requires a a lot of resources and it requires good planning. And that's not what's being seen in the types of reforms we're seeing we're seeing speeding up we're seeing fixes that really won't make a difference.

SPEAKER_03 57:00

So this kind of goes to the heart of what we were talking about to begin with. You know I think I've heard you say Kira that government didn't get the memo that GDP wasn't a good metric and that we're selling nature to save it. And this links with some of the features that we've had on other episodes about this kind of value extraction from nature. So I was just wondering who's benefiting from this value extraction? Where's it going? And who's actually keeping hold of that knowledge, that value is it even staying in the UK?

SPEAKER_01 57:28

I think one of the things that we're seeing is a kind of a fragmentation of extraction. So a multiplication of the places within the planning system where you can kind of go in and get some money out of the process. So along with the obvious things landowners making money from development developers making money from land use change i.e producing housing we have new niches so we have a load of consultants who are going in producing knowledge commodities reports and surveys and they are kind of charging for those and we also have new forms of rent extraction so with biodiversity net gain for instance when it's delivered on site what happens is the public open space of a housing estate isn't adopted by the local council it instead passes to an estate management company. And that estate management company charges residents for maintaining that space so for tree pruning lawn mowing hedge trimming all of those things residents will pay out of their own pockets and this raises a potential conflict between people and nature on these estates which we're really worried about but it's also a new form of rent extraction that's going on in this system.

SPEAKER_03 58:41

It's a kind of double bind isn't it because on the one hand you could sort of think well let's sort of instrumentalize nature to put an economic value on it so that it could then be protected and play at that game in order to try and save it. On the other hand there's a whole pushback against kind of trying to associate that sort of value with nature which should be valued in its own right. You know a bat is a bat not just because it might save a certain amount of money for I don't know for the NHS if people's mental health is improved by seeing bats flying around at night.

SPEAKER_01 59:09

Yeah I mean absolutely and this this lies at the core of it a lot of the new nature policies are about natural capital which is selling nature in order to save it. Now that um is a controversial philosophical idea and it's also a controversial idea at an emotional level because you find that people when they're facing the field behind their house being developed the things that they are attached to are that particular tree that particular patch of daffodils that particular robin they are not going to be consoled by the idea that there will be another tree somewhere else possibly a mile and a half down the road or another robin somewhere else. They want their robin and I think this kind of goes to the heart of a real philosophical tension and moral tension about what we mean by attachment to nature and the difference between ordinary people's attachment to nature and say the perspective of a planner or possibly a professional ecologist.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:06

I think that point about morality leads us really neatly to bringing you back in here, Hugh, because obviously the critique is very strong here. We need new planning horizons, we need different ways of thinking about this. So there are a couple of different things that I know you're working on. For you Hugh you're as we said at the beginning a professor of utopian planning right what does that mean? And actually I haven't made that title up for you but No, it's on the website on the website School of Geography and Planning website you're visiting Professor of Utopian Studies or planning. I think the first ever you heard it here first people Hugh look this question of morality philosophy you know is this what's underpinning a utopian approach to planning?

SPEAKER_07 1:00:49

Yeah it absolutely is and and and where this comes from initially certainly in in in my limited journey is that if you get involved in the technocratic bit of planning um which we've sort of you know what we're talking about predominantly when we talk about planning reform it's just really bloody dull right so when my midlife crisis occurred which it did brilliantly in my sort of Oh I'm still going through mine well done. Yeah well I've I've moved to an end of life crisis now so I don't quite sure but that mid-of-life crisis was was sort of defined by why you asked the question inevitably in life why and at that point I went back and sort of tried to reread what had inspired the sort of planning movement. And you end up in the English Civil War then you end up with Ruskin and you end up with Morris and I went my God this was about changing the world this was about people who took a very strong moral position about progressive values around social justice around the spiritual value of nature and that point about how people relate to their own place. So for me you know my mental health is acutely dependent on my local environment and when people say oh these bloody people are objectors they're irrational they're irrational yeah we are because our environment and the landscape of our environment means something to us we cannot be monetary we're not irrational just because we have an emotional attachment irrationality and emotion that that's not the same thing right no it's not but you know what I mean that's the label we're given by people that say well you don't really fit in that knowledge in the knowledge of planning but where that takes you is to a different understanding of the future the original idea behind this was how can we more how can we have a moral imagination about the future? How can we imagine difference? And the whole tradition of utopianism is just about how you can create and conceive of and think about reaching for those ideal conditions to let people thrive. It's a really messy and diverse tradition and it's a very inclusive tradition it's full on Edwardian woke so I'm absolutely signed up to that in every Edwardian woke oh my god you're coining all the terms you're talking about people in the movement who in 1890s were pioneering gay rights clothing reform and started the first vegetarian second secondary school at Lechwood. You know I mean this was this was about a different way of living peaceful and this is very important peacefully in the context of war which is pretty relevant now sustainably in the context of the planet fairly and collectively and collaboratively based on cooperative economics a different economic so when people say oh you're nonsense what is this nonsense utopianism is defined by its practicality it simply means the ideal place.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:16

The reach for the ideal is the driving force behind all decent progressive human politics are you kind of romanticising the past to any extent because I mean the ideal was not necessarily in the past and yet some of the utopians that you're referring to are historic examples of things that we have now lost right?

SPEAKER_07 1:03:37

Very importantly we have lost the art of moral imagination. So part of the thesis behind this work is that over the it used to be a mainstream part of our culture and thinking really until the 1970s. Post that we stopped doing it. It had two parts thinking about the future and also occasionally carrying out experiments, building the odd place and then learning from it. But but the reason it's so important now is that what else do we have in terms of a positive hopeful future because I'm not going to go out to communities and say the only I'm gonna build a housing estate on you and you should be grateful for it. There's so many people in desperate need in so many places you tell me what hopeful agenda we put in front of them if it's not drawing down that possibility that change can be delivered and it can be practical.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:20

And I think that planning is the heart of that process that without understanding what planning does in terms of creating visions and imaginations of the future then it's lost its way. You read most local plans produced by local planning authorities now you would have no clue what the place would be like in 15 years' time. It's replete with spreadsheets of figures about housing numbers, land availability studies and things like this. No imagination about what the qualities of that place would be, what it would be like to live in it, how it would work, how it would protect nature, how people would engage with it that is a lost start and I think yeah the planning profession needs to wake up and think we really need to get back to that.

SPEAKER_05 1:05:04

But this is presumably a really a really tall order in the sense that planning and we have managed to get by without mentioning the other P word by which I mean populism with planning becomes such a target and focus of of that kind of movement if you like but I mean this kind of reclaiming I mean do you see this in some ways as a response to a populist threat to planning and how do you turn something that is the very increasingly the very target of that populism into something that is perhaps a counterpopulism yeah I think um I I think here we get to kind of something that's crucial at the heart of planning which is that it should deliver a holistic vision of how different things fit together in society.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:46

Now in the kind of current state of society that's something that's often mystified. It's something that's often delivered partially by kind of popular media. So and that's a climate that can breed Certain misrepresentations. You know, for example, the idea that all social ills are the result of immigration. That would be an example of one of these false beliefs, that this lack of a more totalizing vision, the lack of a complete holistic vision of society can bring. And planning, when it's done well, can deliver this like holistic vision that can put some of those myths to bed, I think. And that's it's not just that we're missing a vision of what the built environment can do. We're missing a vision of what society as a whole can do. We're missing a different politics when we neglect to plan in this way.

SPEAKER_03 1:06:39

You're making a really coherent argument, all of you, about why planning matters so much, but not necessarily in the way that we're told it matters by the Labour government. But I just want to come back to this question of what kind of planning we need then for the future. It's 60 years this year of planning studies and urban studies and planning at the University of Sheffield. That's partly why you're also a visiting professor here. And you're going to spend some time this year really rethinking planning education. What does that mean? What do we need to do to make sure that the next generation of planners can fulfil this more holistic view of society?

SPEAKER_07 1:07:15

Well, I mean, uh I will leave it to the academics to be definitive about it. But what we've been talking about is creating a generation of people who don't feel thwarted, who who feel confident, who feel creative, who feel playful about the future and are able to engage with it actually critically with what we didn't talk about with a sense of humour, which is absolutely important about thinking about the future.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:38

We can do that here.

SPEAKER_07 1:07:39

We can do that here. And in a sense, at the moment the debate is very narrow, it's very instrumental, it's all about what you know, essentially what the private sector needs from a professional planner. I want to say how much I don't care about that. It's no part of the solution. What the solution is is creating these opportunities for people to think freely, which is an extraordinary idea, isn't it? To think freely about the future and engage.

SPEAKER_03 1:08:03

What are you doing? It's a very, very strange idea.

SPEAKER_07 1:08:05

But but unless we can do that, profession's finished. I mean, I think we're all clear about that. That's just put it on the record. Planning is a discipline, which which which Britain had quite a significant role in, but not you know, not the only role, but a significant role is finished in this country unless we can recreate its social purpose. That is the art of that's why utopianism is so important. What we want at the end of it is for people to come into the profession and go, we're going to change the world. And when we go out into the so-called commercial world, they recognise that that is going to be their moral anchor so that they avoid critically the mid and end of life crisis in their careers. And are always clear, are always clear that change is possible. It's always possible. There is always an angle. You work with what you've got, how you work with communities, how you listen to people, how you deal with the messiness of life, and how you interact with that in a way that gives people some kind of hopefulness. Because if you don't give them the hopefulness, you breathe fascism. That's a historic lesson, it's a current lesson.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:04

I think that's probably a good note on which to I mean it was a very positive note, but then you mentioned the fascism. But you know, we have to see things real quick.

SPEAKER_07 1:09:09

So we've always edit that out. If only we could edit the fascism out.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:13

That would be great, wouldn't it? Just like a little snip.

SPEAKER_05 1:09:16

Um, there are so many more things we could ask you and talk about, and I suspect it would we would like to get all of you back on at some point, and I hope we have an opportunity. But um it's been fantastic talking to you. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much. Thank you. Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_03 1:09:34

So, Tom, we recorded that a couple of weeks ago when Hugh Ellis was visiting us, and today I was reading that piece by George Mombio in The Guardian. Did you see it? On the um planning and infrastructure bill. And he kind of describes that, and I quote, as the worst assault on England's ecosystems in living memory, erasing decades of environmental protection. Um, and I mean he was particularly critical of this fact that developers can pay a levy to then effectively be allowed to destroy habitats. And I think that's why this key message that we can't just save nature by selling it is so important when you take the roles of developers. I was really struck by this utopian kind of discussion we've been having, um, and particularly how pragmatic we need to be uh when we think about utopia um and reimagining like what does sustainable inhabitation look like for communities in the future.

SPEAKER_05 1:10:23

Yeah, I mean I think that's one thing I really took away from it was this idea that utopian thinking has a real practical value in and of itself. And we tend to hear about utopianism mostly, I think, at the moment, in the context of techno-utopianism or or its opposite. So the sense that utopianism has to be attached to some exciting new development in technology or something that we haven't known about before that gives some new hope or some new vision, where actually there's just the act of thinking in a utopian way as part of the process of envisaging human existence, right? That's what he's talking about. And that is central to what planning has always been and should be, actually.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:59

I mean, I think the other thing that struck me was just how um how much planning matters. You know, we've been talking in previous episodes of all of these different urban infrastructure failures, and planning is the one thing that can kind of bring these together. I was kind of thinking about Lord of the Rings just to bring in another analogy that planning is the one ring that binds them all, but we don't want some sort of top-down, control-centred Sauron vision of how planning can fix these issues. It is really a much more distributed fellowship of how do we connect water, how do we connect housing, how do we connect questions around energy infrastructure and climate and transport. And planning is the tool, and that came through really strongly. So we need a holistic vision, a fellowship of urban planning in order to kind of build the sustainable communities we want.

SPEAKER_05 1:11:46

And if that's not a good advert to come and study planning here at the University of Sheffield, I don't know what it is.

SPEAKER_03 1:11:50

So thank you for joining us. Um, a reminder of how to feedback. Um, you can just email us on urban radar hyphengroup at sheffield.ac.uk. Uh, you can follow us on LinkedIn, Blue Sky, and Instagram.