Why is it so difficult to find a place to call home? By the age of twenty five the journalist Kieran Yates had lived in twenty different houses, from council estates in London to a car showroom in rural Wales. In All The Houses I’ve Ever Lived In she reveals the reality of Britain’s housing crisis, the state’s neglect, and the toll it takes on those forced to move from place to place.In her memoir Undercurrent the writer and poet Natasha Carthew compares the picture-postcard view of her native Cornwall with the reality of growing up there. She explores the impact of rural poverty, political neglect, and the dominance of second-home owners, but also the sheer beauty of the landscape she calls home.Christine Whitehead OBE is a specialist in housing economics and evaluates government policies on home ownership and housing supply. She looks at the unintended consequences of implementing policies, like rent caps and controls on buying housing stock in rural areas, and the impact of Covid on the rental market. The architect Alice Brownfield, Director at Peter Barber Architects, advocates for high density, mixed-use residential schemes for local councils and housing associations. Her practice has been recognised for its work in developing social housing, often on small plots of land, that centres on fostering a sense of community.Producer: Katy HickmanImage: Kiln Place, by Peter Barber Architects just after completion. Image credit: Morley von Sternberg
Kultur & Gesellschaft
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Weekly discussion programme, setting the cultural agenda every Monday
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Folge vom 17.04.2023A place called home
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Folge vom 10.04.2023Ai Weiwei and design valuesThe artist Ai Weiwei has always enjoyed ignoring the boundaries between disciplines, fusing art, architecture, design, collecting and social activism. He’s now taken over the Design Museum in London (from 7th April – 30th July 2023), filling it with his work and collections - from millions of handcrafted porcelain sunflower seeds to Lego pieces and broken teapot spouts dating back to the Song Dynasty. The exhibition, Making Sense, explores what we value - from what we perceive to be precious or worthless, to the tensions between the past and present, as well as work made by hand and machine. The engineer Roma Agrawal invites readers to marvel at the design of many of the small but perfectly formed inventions that have changed the world. In Nuts & Bolts she deconstructs complex feats of engineering to focus on the nail, spring, wheel, lens, magnet, string and pump.The economist Bent Flyvbjerg is also interested in deconstructing things, but he's focused on ambitious multi-million pound projects to find out why the vast majority are significantly over-budget and past their deadline. In How Big Things Get Done he extolls the virtue of 'thinking slow, acting fast', and how megaprojects that are designed with Lego-building in mind are more likely to succeed.Producer: Katy HickmanImage credit: close up of Monet's Water Lilies in Lego, constructed by Ai Wei Wei - photo copyright by Ela Bialkowska OKNO Studio
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Folge vom 03.04.2023Mastering a new skillHow do people learn new skills and become real experts? These were the questions the author Adam Gopnik wanted to answer in his new book, The Real Work – a term magicians use for their accumulated craft. He apprenticed himself to an artist, a dancer, a boxer, and even a driving instructor to see if could get to the bottom of the mystery of mastery, and better himself.Rebecca Struthers is a true master of her profession – horology. In Hands of Time, A Watchmaker's History of Time she reveals the inner cogs and workings of clocks, and explores the ways in which they have helped shape human history. But she also regrets the endangered art of traditional watchmaking and the loss of heritage skills.The neuroscientist Hannah Critchlow explains what’s happening in our brains when we learn new things, especially later in life. And she argues that two heads may be better than one. In her latest book, Joined Up Thinking, she extols the virtues of working and learning together.Producer: Katy HickmanImage Credit: Rebecca Struthers for Hands of Time
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Folge vom 27.03.2023Climate - past, present and futureThe world is now warming faster than at any point in recorded history. Kirsty Wark talks to an historian, scientist and novelist about how to convey the story and impact of climate change.Floods, droughts, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes and solar activity have all shaped the natural history of our world from its formation. In The Earth Transformed the historian Peter Frankopan looks back at how the climate has constantly changed our world, but also at the impact of extreme climatic events on ancient human civilisations – often violent and epic in scale, from regime change to demographic decline. However, since the Industrial Revolution the balance has shifted and anthropogenic impacts on the climate can be seen more clearly. Peter Frankopan tells Kirsty Wark that learning lessons from the past has never been more important in tackling a precarious future.Professor Dame Jane Francis is Director of the British Antarctic Survey. As a geologist by training, she studies fossils to understand the change from greenhouse to icehouse climates in the polar regions over the past 100 million years. Her research enables others to map the huge changes now happening in the Antarctic and the range of possible scenarios for the future. “As I grew up, crisis slid from distant threat to imminent probability, and we tuned it out like static, we adjusted to each emergent normality, and did what we had always done. . . .” One of the narrators of Jessie Greengrass’s novel The High House realises too late the disastrous impact of climate change. In what has become known as the literary genre clifi – climate fiction – Greengrass reveals the physical and emotional challenges the survivors face.Producer: Katy HickmanImage: An iceberg in Antarctica