Thinking Allowed - 21/10/2009

How do housing estates and suburbs serve or fail to serve their residents? Three out of four British people live in the suburbs, many of which grew as cities and their populations expanded. Laurie Taylor is joined by Paul Barker and Lynsey Hanley to discuss housing estates and suburbs. What form of housing most fulfills people's desires? And will urban planning ever be able to fulfill Aneurin Bevan's dream of social integration? Also on the programme, why modernity makes us forgetful. Does the speed and transience of life today damage our shared and individual memories? The social anthropologist Paul Connerton thinks it does. He discusses his latest book with Laurie Taylor.