13. Help! Somebody save us!

On this week's podcast, we're joined by arguably the biggest political theorist writing about cities today. In 2013, Benjamin Barber published If Mayors Ruled the World, a book in which he argued that nation states are increasingly powerless to deal with the challenges of the 21st century (climate change, migration, terrorism, and so forth). Instead, Barber suggests we should be looking to cities as the building blocks of the global government of the future. I was lucky enough to grab a few minutes with Barber after an event organised by the Centre for Cities last week. He told me more about his theories, and how he's putting them into practice by creating the Global Parliament of Mayors, which will hold its first meeting this September. But, with apologies to the 60 per cent of our readers who aren't based in these islands, but there's really only one topic any of us can focus on right now: the gradual collapse of our government, opposition, economy, global status, and very possibly the United Kingdom itself. So that is what we're starting with this week. Barbara and I are joined by our colleague Stephanie Boland to talk about the Brexit vote, and debate why some cities turned out to be so much more pro-European than others.