How To Be Hopeful Season 1 Episode 9- Our Future Cities Will Be Forests Too

Welcome to my podcast about hope. This week is about hope in relation to architecture, and the future of urban environments.

I spoke with the amazing Peter Culley (Spatial Affairs Bureau), an architect/urbanist/naturalist based in UK and US. We chatted about architecture in connection to  stories, poetry, peace, calm, and beauty. We discussed the soul of buildings, and Peter’s wonderful idea of replacing the conventional “urban overlay” with a “forest overlay”- so our cities are full of trees and mud and insects. Peter shares the incredible story of the project in Memphis he was involved with, transforming an abandoned Sears building, and the importance of not tearing everything down but working with what exists, because :” It takes 100 years for a place to get its soul back if you remove everything and start again”. We talked about the effect of COVID and how the “shock of quiet, the shock of calm, the shock of birdsong” reminds us that “the world beyond humans is absolutely fine”  and that “It takes something as serious as this situation to allow radical changes to happen”

 

Peter and his company the Spatial Affairs Bureau can be found on twitter and insta @spatialaffairs

Or via their website www.spatialaffairsbureau.com  

 

More soon!

Love Bernadette

My book "How To Be Hopeful" published by Elliot and Thompson is due out September 2020. This podcast series is a chance for me to chat again to some of the people who I interviewed for the book, as well as some people who I didn't have the chance to. I hope you enjoy it. 

You can find me here www.bernadetterussell.com

twitter @betterussell insta @bernadetterussell 

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