The Future of Sustainable cities ...

By 2050, two out of every three people are likely to be living in cities, according to the UN. Sustainable urban planning is therefore essential to the future of humanity. But how easy is it to create the dream city?

"Mega badass engineer" Roma Agrawal hosts this discussion, covering the hot topic of The 15 Minute City and the question of how to bring joy back into our environments. Roma's guests are former Greenpeace MD and sustainable developer Jonathan Smales, alongside Roma's own sister, the architect and planner Pooja Agrawal.

Episode highlights

“We all need to be working together - but also sharing our skills - because these problems are holistic. So it's not even just [the problem of] public sector and local authorities having silo-ed teams. Architects, engineers - all of us are terrible at our siloed ways of institutional working. We must solve these problems in a much more multidisciplinary way.”

“The environmental imperative is the regeneration of nature. One of the reasons for COVID is because we're getting closer and closer to wild places and wild animals that historically we haven't had contact with, as we're eroding their habitat. But quite apart the resilience that healthy nature provides for the biosphere, it provides that for our species too. So the fundamental building block of sustainability is that environmental imperative."

"We need to be 10 times faster, 10 times more efficient, and use 10 times less across the globe."