The Culture of Cities
The Reith Lectures
BBC
4.2 • 770 Ratings
🗓️ 12 February 1995
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This year's Reith lecturer is Richard Rogers, one of the most influential British architects of our time. He has established himself and his practice at the forefront of today's architecture industry through such high-profile projects as the Pompidou Centre, the headquarters for Lloyds of London, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and the Millennium Dome in London. His series of lectures is entitled 'Sustainable City' and each lecture focuses on architecture's social role and the sustainable urban development of towns and cities through social and environmental responsibility.
In his first lecture, Richard Rogers explores the fundamental dichotomy of the city; that it has the potential to both civilise and brutalise. He argues that the decaying fabric of urban life must be transformed into a sustainable, civilising environment, through the greater emphasis on citizens' participation in city design and planning, if we are to avert catastrophe. By putting communal objectives centre-stage, he says, we can transform the fabric and environment of our cities through greater, genuine, public participation and committed government initiative.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is a podcast from the archives of the BBC Ruth Lectures. |
| 0:04.5 | This lecture in the series Sustainable City, given by Richard Rogers, was originally broadcast in 1995. |
| 0:12.2 | In 1957, the first satellite was launched into space to take its place amongst the stars. |
| 0:18.9 | This signalled the birth of a new global consciousness, |
| 0:22.0 | a dramatic change in our relationship to our planet. It gave us a place from which we could look |
| 0:27.2 | at ourselves. From space, the beauty and the fragility of the Earth's atmosphere, our primordial |
| 0:34.3 | support system are striking. But so too is humanity's systematic plundering of every aspect of our ecosystem. |
| 0:42.5 | From space, we can see the scars of pollution, deforestation, industry and urban sprawl. |
| 0:50.0 | Above us, as I speak, the 400 or so satellites currently in orbit witness and gauge the global impact of a human population that's leapt from 1.5 to 5.5 billion in this century alone. |
| 1:04.4 | Coldly, they confirm the grim realities we all experience in our daily lives as we step out into the city. |
| 1:11.6 | It is a shocking revelation, especially to me as an architect, |
| 1:15.6 | that the world's environmental crisis is being driven by our cities. |
| 1:19.6 | For the first time in history, half the world's population live in cities. |
| 1:24.6 | In 1900, it was only one tenth. In 30 years, it may be as much as three-quarters. |
| 1:32.3 | The urban population of the world is increasing at the rate of a quarter of a million people per day. Think of it as a new London every month. |
| 1:41.3 | The scale and the rate of increase of our consumption of resources and the pollution |
| 1:46.5 | it inflicts is catastrophic. Let me offer you three examples to make the point. First, we take |
| 1:54.3 | only 10% of our energy from directly renewable and non-polluting sources such as sun, wind and water. Yet, in a single year, we burn some one million years' worth of non-renewable fossil fuels, coal, oil, gas. |
| 2:10.6 | And this is producing the bulk of our pollution. |
| 2:14.6 | Secondly, the Intergovernmental Panel on climate change has warned the global |
| 2:21.0 | warming, mainly produced by the burning of fossil fuels, is likely to cause a rise in temperature |
| 2:26.7 | of three degrees centigrade by the end of the next century. Such a temperature increase could melt |
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