Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's

the 12th of February. I love cities. There is nothing like them for energy, for excitement,

for indulgence, for all manner of great rewards, whether you're visiting, which is what

I'm mostly concerned about, or indeed, living in them. But I'm fascinated with the idea of what

makes a great city. There is one person who knows much more about this subject than I,

and probably anybody else ever will. He is Professor David

Gilbert, Professor of Urban and Historical Geography at the Royal Holloway Centre for the Geo-Humanities.

So, cities, do you love them as much as I do? I think I do, Simon. I think there's something

about the energy of cities. There's something about the way that so much of human life is pulled together there. I was reading something earlier on about Uruk, about the first real, proper city. And just this kind of sense that 6,000 years ago, suddenly people were literally

inventing a new way of being human that we've seen. I mean, we're on a trip at the moment in

Patagonia and we've seen some very examples of people that live very simply, that people were

very much in touch with the environment, very dependent on the environment.

Suddenly you have places where all sorts of new kinds of activities can take place, where you have power structures,

where you have, in some ways, even something as fundamental as organized religion or the organization of economies depends

on these places, depends on these things. And I think for many of us, cities are what makes

us human, or cities are central to what modern humans have become. So what are the ingredients for a great city?

And by the way, I should tell you that I've got a quick fire round coming up later where I'm going to name 30 cities and you have to tell me whether they're great or not.

But what are the ingredients?

That's tough.

I think a great city has diversity.

So the great cities of the world are very often about where people have migrated to, but they're more than that.

I think very often they're about their connections to other places.

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