What happens when London's housing crisis meets the climate crisis? Journalist Peter Apps discusses the changing demographics of the capital and how the lack of affordable housing has ruptured its social fabric, pushing families and workers out to its edges and "taken away people's ability to stay in a place and to gain some sense of ownership and belonging."

"What has been lost is a sense of permanence and a sense of security that London used to offer to working class and lower-and-middle income people and now doesn’t. It’s a struggle to find somewhere to stay, you probably don’t know the people around you, and that bond of being part of a rooted community isn’t available to people anymore. The key driver is housing."

When you add climate change to the mix, not only does this worsen inequality between those who can afford to install air conditioning and those who can't – it endangers lives. "London has flooded before. It went through the Blitz. The thing that gets us through disasters is community," says Apps. "The lack of a spiritual sense of home will make it harder to be resilient."

Apps shares what he discovered while writing his latest book, Homesick: How London Broke Housing and How to Fix It, which recounts the changes to London over the past 40 years and looks 40 years ahead. Apps speaks to Christine Murray about the three big threats London is facing in addition to housing crises: Wildfire, flooding and overheating.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You've heard of co-design and of course, community engagement, but what about participatory building? That's when people are invited on site to help build, fostering teamwork, imparting skills and empowering a neighbourhood. Working in collaboration with charity Global Generation, Dr Jan Kattein has been building community spaces with volunteers aged 6 to 76 on site – and redefining the role of the architect in shaping places.

On these sites, the process – not the final project – is the core purpose. That's a different kind of design challenge. And these are no ordinary construction sites – Global Generation has a mission to connect youth with nature, so they have used traditional techniques with natural materials such as cordwood, and volunteers have been busy making bricks, shakes and rammed earth walls, while youth apprentices have also been training on site.

“For two years, we’ve been making bricks out of clay… we’ve been making wooden shakes out of Sweet Chestnut… we’ve been building with earth…” says Kattein. “It’s a very inclusive process. All ages can participate,” says Kattein.

Kattein talks about the shifting role of the architect in participatory processes, the need to reduce carbon and embrace natural materials and the transformative power of construction: The moment when a child drags their parent to a building and says, "Mum, I helped build that part of the wall."

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Get on a crowded train, and your brain may not like it. With strangers around you, cortisol levels shoot up to prepare you for fight or flight, stimulating the liver to produce and release glucose into your blood stream, just in case. Unless you run screaming from the train, your blood sugar levels won’t go down for a few hours – just in time for you to take the train again.

“You’re dosing yourself with almost pure glucose twice a day for your working life,” says Nick Tyler, a professor who investigates the ways in which people interact with the built environment. Tyler believes we need to design the built environment not solely for the conscious mind, but for brain and the body impacts taking place out of sight. As Chadwick Professor of Civil Engineering, Tyler works with a transdisciplinary team to study what that means for design – collaborating with psychologists, neuroscientists, architects and others to research the health and safety impacts of the built environment.

Learn about his immense laboratory in East London, PEARL, and his large-scale experiments with bus stops, zebra crossings, urban parks, supermarkets and e-scooters that have revealed safety gaps and failings.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.