4. When cities attack

On this week's podcast, we're talking about why cities can save the world – and how they can ruin your life. In 2013, the American political theorist Benjamin Barber wrote a book arguing that mayors should rule the world, because they're better placed to solve the world's problems than national government. So why, we ask, does the job seem to attract flamboyant characters like London's Boris Johnson and Toronto's Rob Ford?We also discuss the way that, by both accident and design, cities can crush communities as well as create them. Barbara talks to anthropologist Diana Wall, who has been campaigning for a memorial to Seneca Village, the African American community destroyed in the 1850s to make way for Central Park. And I talk to Michael Bird, our occasional Bucharest correspondent, about a nightclub fire that brought down the Romanian government – and about how the city lives under the constant threat of an earthquake. Skylines is the podcast from CityMetric, the New Statesman cities site. It's...

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