From the story of Jonas Salk, who left the city of Pittsburgh for a medieval Italian town to create the space to think which led to the invention of the polio vaccine to the novelist JG Ballard depicting urban high rise living and the work of biologist EO Wilson who has explored the human biophilic urge to be in contact with natural living things - this talk looks at the links between our health and our environment.

Des Fitzgerald is a sociologist of science and medicine at Cardiff University and a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn academic research into radio programmes.