How To Build A City | Forest City

In this second episode, Joe is joined by Paul Powlesland, the barrister and Rights of Nature campaigner who wrote Forest City’s nature report. Paul founded Lawyers for Nature and is guardian of the River Roding in East London. He explains why speaking for nature doesn’t mean blocking development. It means negotiating a better deal for both humans and nature.

They also cover the time Paul hired a digger on his credit card and, with an 80-year-old East End builder called Mick, restored 250 metres of the Aldersbrook for £1,000. The Environment Agency’s response was to threaten him with prosecution. Paul also tells how he first came to Forest City as a critic after the O2 launch, and why he joined on one condition: if the project ever turns out to be greenwashing, he walks away and says so publicly.

Plus: why big arable fields can hold less wildlife than suburban gardens, how the city was redrawn around ancient woodland, and the 12,000-acre nature reserve that would be England’s largest on land, with wood pasture, beavers and the goal of reaching SSSI standard within 20 years.

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Forest City is a proposal for a new city of nearly a million people on 45,000 acres eight miles east of Cambridge, between Haverhill and Newmarket. In this first episode, Joe is joined by his co-founder Shiv Malik to explain why Cambridge - a city of just 50,000 homes that has produced more Nobel Prizes than the whole of France - can't simply grow outwards, and why building alongside it is the only way to get the reservoirs, hospitals and rail capacity the region already needs.

They also cover how they met (at a pub, on Shiv's birthday, with 200 people spilling onto the street), the night they announced the project to 1,200 people at the O2, and the 100-odd contributors who wrote the feasibility study for free.

Plus: the 366,000 homes East Anglia has to build over the next 30 years whether Forest City happens or not - and what those homes look like if nobody plans for them.

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