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The Documentary Podcast

City of the Future

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.32.6K Ratings

🗓️ 3 January 2017

⏱️ 27 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How does Houston, Texas, a massive city, deal with the pressures of immigration, an exploding youth population and a widening divide between rich and poor? The answer could be critical to the future success of the USA. Sociologists who have studied the city for decades believe that many US metropolitan areas could look like Houston in 30 years' time. Since the election of Donald Trump, these issues have become even more critical. Catherine Carr travels to the Texas to see how the city’s authorities and inhabitants are coping with the radical changes to Houston’s demographics and meets the pioneers attempting to intentionally build bridges across city divides. Picture: Houston's buildings, Credit: Getty Images

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

In 30 years time experts predict the rest of America will look like Houston, Texas. It's

0:18.8

the fastest growing and most ethnically diverse city in the United States.

0:23.0

I think I'd have to say that I think even within the US it's often a shock for people

0:29.4

who have not been to Houston in the last 15 years.

0:32.5

Margie McHugh is from the Think Tank Migration Policy Institute.

0:36.3

They think they'll arrive at the airport and they they have an address that they can give a

0:40.3

taxi driver and that they'll be at the address within 15 minutes and they don't realize that it

0:45.6

could be well more than an hour. So the city is just so huge and rambling. It truly is just a

0:53.0

ramshackle metropolis at this point.

0:56.4

How are you today? Yeah I'm good thank you. I know you cook but how are you?

1:01.1

Having a great week? Having a good week. Fantastic. We're heading downtown I think.

1:06.4

We're heading downtown you think. That's that's not good that you're thinking.

1:11.1

Houston's very unique in the US context. It was formerly a part of Mexico so it's history even in

1:18.6

the United States is a much shorter one and so it's historically been very comfortable with a

1:25.0

given take of populations, family relationships, economic activity that extended across the border

1:32.4

but really it's mostly in the last 15 or 20 years that it has become the fastest growing city

1:39.3

in the US for the settlement of immigrants and refugees.

1:43.8

By 2050 all of America would look like Houston looks now so it just happened. No one planned

1:51.0

this no one thought would this be a great idea suddenly Houston finds itself at the forefront of

1:56.0

the demographic transformations occurring across all of America. Steven Kleinberg is professor

2:00.5

of sociology at Rice University and has studied the growth of the city over the last 35 years.

2:06.9

The city of Houston covers 600 square miles. You could put inside the city limits simultaneously the

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