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Hello and welcome to the programme.

Suburbia, where the suburbs met Utopia, a line from the Pet Shop Boys,

singing in their unique, dry, gentle irony some years ago.

Yes, suburbs have taken knocks and sneers.

They've been sometimes more, sometimes less fashionable over

the years, but they've mostly been seen as places to live from which you can commute to a big

city to work. But has the pandemic given new economic life to suburbs, to commuter towns,

to the outer ring of the cities? Places no longer just for living but working to.

We're going to ask if there's evidence of rebalancing in favour of suburbs,

given that it feels rather as though there is.

I would love to invest more in this town because it really is an up-and-coming store

and you hear a lot of other towns doing it.

But this one has actually

blown me away in such a short space of time, the way how many local independent businesses

have flocked here. If the pandemic has changed things, this could be an important redrawing of

the economic map of the country because for a while now, economists have been thinking

of big cities as the vehicle for

delivering the work of advanced economies, the knowledge economy, the creative economy,

the ideopolis, as it has been called, the hubs where you work, with spokes where you go and

sleep. The economist model is built on the argument that if you cluster people together,

you create a massive furnace of innovation. Agglomeration is the buzzword, the idea that

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