Austin Williams is the director of the Future Cities Project and author of China’s Urban Revolution
Ella Kissi-Debrah, a nine-year-old who died in February 2013 after suffering an asthma attack, is the first person in the UK to have air pollution cited on their death certificate. Two weeks ago, Ella’s mother finally settled her legal action against the government, which said it was ‘truly sorry’ for Rosamund Adoo-Kissi-Debrah’s loss and that
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Is China in decline? I was born in China in the 90s, and growing up it felt like the future was always going to be brighter. My parents were wealthier, more educated, better travelled than their parents, and it seemed assured that my generation would only have even better life chances. But in the 2020s,
I recently convened an urban studies summer school in a top university in Shanghai and asked the assembled class of architectural master’s students: ‘Who wants to be an architect?’ Not one hand was raised. This was not the typical reticence of Chinese youngsters; this was a class of architectural students who have given up on
Only last week, China was pushing itself forward to be the regional eminence grise in the Middle East, the powerbroker driving renewed Palestine-Israeli peace talks. In August this year, China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi said that Chinese-mediated detente was driving a ‘wave of reconciliation’ in the Middle East. China’s inflated sense of its influence in
It’s been more than six years since the Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people and made many more homeless, yet the survivors – and families of those who died – are still waiting for answers. The Grenfell Inquiry, which launched a few months after the disaster, was meant to hold people to account, to question
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In the last four decades, hundreds of millions of Chinese have moved into cities. Today, two thirds of the country live in urban areas (compared to just one third in 1985), and many of these are hubs with tens of millions of people – mega-cities that many in the West have never heard of before.
Britain’s film and TV industries want to help save the world. That’s hardly news. But one organisation is ensuring the industry focuses its efforts on environmental sustainability: Albert, which also goes by the name of Bafta Albert. You might have seen the logo – a black footprint – at the end of many TV programmes,
