About this episode

Nicholas Boys Smith discusses the feasibility of building a livable city on the Moon, drawing parallels with earthly settlements.

From the thatched-roofed orbital pub of the King Charles III Space Station — a structure Nicholas Boys Smith gamely declines to call a pastiche — Tom and Calum welcome the campaigner for architectural beauty, founder of Create Streets, and former co-chair, alongside Roger Scruton, of the government’s beauty commission. The opening question is whether you could ever build a city worth living in on the Moon, and his answer is more practical than you would expect: in large part, we already know how. Boys Smith’s case is that human settlements take remarkably similar shapes wherever you go — Stockholm, Marrakesh, Malta, a town in the north of Norway — and only the proportions change. Hot climates produce narrow streets and high walls to dodge a murderous sun, a logic later codified in the Quran; cold ones spread their streets out to chase the light. Once you have breathable air on the Moon, he argues, you would end up with something startlingly close to how we already live, only built from moon rock, rendered and quite possibly painted in pastel pinks and yellows, like a Cornish village in orbit. The same goes for the British Antarctic Territory, which Tom is delighted to point out…

People in this episode

Hosts: Tom Ough, Calum Drysdale

Guest: Nicholas Boys Smith

Topics covered

• architecture
• space colonization
• urban planning
• sustainability
• human settlements

Keywords

• moon city
• urban design
• sustainable materials
• architecture
• human settlements

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Create Streets, government’s beauty commission

Places: Moon, British Antarctic Territory, Cornish village, Stockholm, Marrakesh, Malta, Norway

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