What does a sustainable urban future look like? Social anthropologist Felix Ringel has spent years studying the urban communities of post-industrial cities in Germany – communities who have first needed to regain a sense of future, before then looking at what work might be necessary to make those futures a reality. Hope is useful, but we need determination too. In this episode, Felix tells us about passionate youth councils, imaginative planning, and how local people turned an entire apartment block into a work of collective art – before the bulldozers arrived.

Read the episode transcript here.

Produced for Durham Book Festival with support from Durham University. Presented and directed by Lucie McNeil. Find out more about the project here.