Listen to the latest Urban Radar podcast
The latest Urban Radar podcast WRITING THE CITY - A conversation with Gabriella Bennett about "How to Build A City" is available on Buzzsprout.
In this three-part feature, we take a look at different ways of writing the city and how cities are brought into view through journalism and fiction. Recorded live at the Off the Shelf festival in Sheffield in 2026, we talk with three writers - Gabriella Bennett, Saima Mir and Sufiyaan Salam about home, belonging, identity and wider questions of representational justice. Across the talks, key themes include how different forms of writing approximate the 'truth', how journalism and fiction give us space and time to understand cities beyond academia and what the connections are between writing the city and the right to the city.
In Part One, Beth and Tom interview journalist and author Gabriella Bennett about her new book How to Build a City: Journeys into the Urban Future, part long-form journalism, part travel-log exploring how cities are confronting the big issues of our time. Bennett takes us from growing-up in Glenrothes, to Ukraine, the North Pole, and even Mars. The conversation reconsiders ‘home’ as something which is constantly evolving, which is not fixed but can be designed ‘in’ and ‘out’ through architecture and planning, and is shaped by war, climate crisis, and societal injustices.
Listen to Parts Two and Three here:
Sufiyaan Salam, "Wimmy Road Boyz"
Guest:
Gabriella Bennett is a Scottish based journalist who specialises in housing and architecture. She writes two weekly columns for The Times and The Sunday Times and her work has appeared in numerous national papers. Her first book, The Art of Coorie, was a Waterstones Bestseller.