The Death of the City?

Moral Maze

BBC

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.4 • 623 Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2020

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Our normally bustling cities have been eerily quiet for months. It’s reminiscent of the post-apocalyptic horror film, ‘28 Days Later’. The lockdown is proving costly; Westminster Abbey has lost more than £12 million in revenue this year and is set to lay off one in five of its staff. Theatre bosses say they must reopen without social distancing in time for Christmas or face oblivion. Restrictions are beginning to ease but for many cafes, pubs, shops, clubs and restaurants, the pandemic could be terminal. Museums, galleries, churches and office developments will struggle to justify their continued existence; should they be bailed out by the taxpayer? Perhaps each of us has a moral duty to head uptown on a shopping spree, take in a show and dine out? Yet this is about more than jobs and tourism; it raises bigger questions about the value we put on cities. If a ghost town is sad, a dead city is surely a tragedy. Since ancient Athens, cities, for many, have been the cultural jewels in civilisation’s crown, creative cauldrons of multicultural mingling and springboards to success. Others cite London, for example, as a social, cultural and economic drain on the life of our country. They believe that declining big cities give us an opportunity to revive towns, to end the suburban commuter crawl, beef up provincial culture, restore lost industries, embrace home-working and cut carbon emissions. Are big cities an unquestionable moral good, worth preserving in their current state? Or, in the new post-Covid world, is there a better way of organising the way we live? With Richard Burge, Paul Chatterton, Tom Cheesewright and Dr Jonathan Rowson.

Producer: Dan Tierney.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to a program from BBC Radio 4. You can download many more BBC Radio 4 programmes for free.
0:07.7	Find these at BBC.co.com.uk slash radio 4.
0:12.8	Good evening. It seems like only yesterday that working from home was just a thin excuse, the middle-class version of pulling a sickie.
0:20.4	Now the virus has made it a way of
0:22.0	life that's turning our once teeming cities into semi-ghost towns, London in particular. So much
0:27.5	commercial and cultural life closed, or limping along one step ahead of oblivion. Some see this as
0:33.4	an existential crisis, not just for sandwich shops. Cities, they say, are the motors of civilization
0:39.2	and its finest achievement, melting pots of classes and creeds, tolerant and diverse places
0:44.7	where we find opportunity, independence, freedom. Others think the opposite. They reckon the commuter
0:51.0	has been emancipated, that family life has been reinvented, the country
0:54.9	towns and provinces that have been drained by the metropolis for so long revived.
0:59.8	Anywhere people become somewhere people again, cutting carbon emissions in the process.
1:05.5	Are cities good for us, in the widest sense, to be defended and preserved, or is, ghastly phrase, the new normal, a morally better way to live?
1:14.6	That's our moral maze tonight.
1:15.9	Our panel, Melanie Phillips, social commentator at the Times.
1:18.6	Mona Siddiqui, professor of Islamic and inter-religious studies at Edinburgh University.
1:23.1	The historian Tim Stanley and the priest and polemicist, Giles Fraser.
1:27.7	Tim Stanley, you're a kind of tweed and corduroy sort of person, aren't you? Or are you a city boy,
1:33.8	a kind of urban lounge lizard in disguise? I'm somewhere in between. I'm with Alan Partridge,
1:38.6	who warned that if you go to London, you'll either be mugged or not appreciated. And both of those
1:43.3	have happened to me.
1:49.2	In all seriousness, I think this is a debate about where it's best to be a good citizen.
	...

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