It’s very easy (or at least, it is if you’re me) to fall into the trap of seeing cities as physical things – a matter of streets and buildings and transport infrastructure.
But they’re about more than that: they’re also about the people inside them, and the things that they create.
So this week, in a break from our usual schedule, we’ve decided to get cultured. To that end, we talk to Shain Shapiro, director of the consultancy Sound Diplomacy, and founder of the Music Cities Convention. He tells us what makes a music city, and why live performance matters to city life. (You can read some of Shain’s articles for us here.)
That’s “sound”. For “vision”, we talk to festival producer and arts professional Sara Doctors, about how the people who re-built Britain’s towns after the Second World War wanted to put public art at the heart of every community – and why it never quite came off. The segment includes discussion of “Madonna’s Tits”, the local name for a pair of Thomas Heatherwicks you can find in the unlikely location of a roundabout in Barking.
(Some full disclosure here: Sara, as well as being incredibly knowledgeable about the arts, is also, er, my wife. At one point she mentions a giant cat statue in Barcelona’s the Rambla de Raval. It’s the one at the top of this page, it was designed by Colombian figurative artist by Fernando Botero, and we met him on our honeymoon.)
In our new “your city” segment we hear from Canadian listener Victoria, who tells us what she loves about Toronto, and what she’s rather less keen on. She’s on Twitter here. If you’d like to contribute to this segment in future, get in touch by email.
Last but not least, our map of the week is Katie Kowalsky’s pop art map of the world (above) on which Barbara and I have, shall we say, differing views.
If you want to subscribe to the podcast (which you obviously do), you can find us on Acast or iTunes, or put this RSS into the podcast app of your choice. Or you can find more episodes right here.
Enjoy.
