Old city v new city
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 12 December 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Should we protect historic neighbourhoods from redevelopment when new homes are desperately needed?
Manuela Saragosa looks at two cities at opposite ends of the spectrum. Historian Qin Shao tells of the destruction of her home city of Shanghai over the last 30 years, as entire districts have been demolished to make way for sparkling new high rise buildings. Meanwhile Laura Foote of the campaigning group Yimby Action explains why young residents of San Francisco like her are demanding the construction of many more affordable homes.
So is it possible to strike a balance between the need to conserve and the need to build? Manuela visits one London building recently saved from the developers - the Smithfield market in London's financial district - and asks Chris Costelloe of the Victorian Society where he would draw the line.
Producer: Laurence Knight
(Photo: An old residential building being demolished to make room for skyscrapers in Shanghai; Credit: Johannes Eisele/AFP/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Manuela Saragossa. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Coming up, yes, developer, |
| 0:08.5 | please do build that shiny new high-rise apartment block in my backyard. Why is it the teachers can't |
| 0:14.6 | afford to live in the communities that they serve? Why are people commuting hours and hours a day? |
| 0:19.9 | We have to say as a region, we need a lot more housing. |
| 0:24.2 | But when should we protect the old from the new? |
| 0:27.2 | Shanghai today is unrecognizable. |
| 0:29.9 | Every time when I go back, I find some neighborhoods have disappeared. |
| 0:34.9 | That's all here in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 0:49.7 | It's 7am at Smithfield's market in London City Centre. |
| 0:55.9 | It's a meat market, Europe's largest, |
| 0:58.9 | and traders are just clearing up at the end of their day. |
| 1:00.9 | They've been here since 2 a.m. |
| 1:03.1 | And if you think that's an early start, |
| 1:07.0 | while market sellers have been trading at this site since the 12th century. But the Smithfield Market Building of today dates back to the mid-19th century. |
| 1:13.3 | Hi. Hi. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. I went along at the slightly more civilised hour of 11am |
| 1:20.0 | to meet someone who campaigns for preserving buildings like this one. I'm Chris Costello, director of the |
| 1:25.5 | Victorian Society. We're here in Smithfield Meat Market |
| 1:28.4 | in the heart of London. But the market we actually campaign for is down the road, Smithfield |
| 1:33.0 | General Market, which was built later. But where we're standing now, it's all pretty old here as |
| 1:38.0 | well. I mean, I'm just looking up above us, and there's lots of steel metal structures, lots of |
| 1:43.4 | decoration. Yeah, this is one of the great structures, lots of decoration. |
| 1:47.7 | Yeah, this is one of the great Victorian public buildings of London and still in its original use. |
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