Round these parts, we talk a lot about roads and trains and houses and parks – all the things you need to make a city, y’know, work.
But on this week’s podcast, we’re talking about something even more fundamental for the maintenance of urban life: something we take for granted so much, we tend to forget about it altogether. This week, we’re talking about water.
On it, you can hear Linda Tirado, the American writer and activist who spent much of January talking to the people occupying a federal wildlife reserve in Oregon. The siege, she tells us, is actually the harbinger of water wars that could one day grip the American West. (She wrote of her adventures for the Daily Beast.)
We also talk to Karim Elgendy, an Egyptian-born architect and sustainability consultant, about the crisis looming in the Middle East. The cities of the Gulf, he explains, are burning oil to desalinate water to extract more oil. He covered this topic for CityMetric back in July.
Lastly, for our map of the week (look, maps make great audio, okay?), we go to the other end of the spectrum, and look at Jeffrey Linn’s beautiful maps of how Seattle, Portland and Los Angeles will look when the polar ice caps melt.
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