Episode Details

Daniel grew up reading Orwell and Frank McCourt, absorbing the idea that city centres are synonymous with poverty. Then he moved to Jerusalem and watched thirty-seven-storey luxury towers rise around him. This episode unpacks the disconnect: where did the "inner city equals poverty" literary trope come from, was it ever universally true, and what does Jerusalem's building boom tell us about a pattern that's reversing in real time? We trace the industrial-era mechanisms that created the slums of Dickens' London, the postwar policies that hollowed out American downtowns, and the current global reversal that's putting million-dollar penthouses in city centres from London to Jerusalem.