This is a bit of a departure for Skylines: we’ve got a sort of guest host. Joshua Bryant, an environment engineering student at UCL, got in touch to offer me an interview with some experts on slums. And I had an annoying gap in the schedule and, more importantly, the interview was really, really interesting – so I said yes.

As to who is being interviewed: Himanshu Parikh is an Indian engineer and the developer of “slum networking”, a holistic concept for upgrading the forgotten parts of developing world cities where over a billion people live; Priti Parikh is a professor at UCL, as well as Himanshu’s daughter.

They tell Josh about how we can improve the world’s slums, the role played by foreign aid, and why toilets are not in fact everything.

Because this is new territory for us, I’m particularly keen to hear what you think. If you have any strong feelings about the idea of more episodes with guest presenters – or anything else we do or don’t do, come to that – then please do get in touch on Twitter (@jonnelledge) or Facebook (Jonn Elledge Writes).

Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman's cities site, CityMetric. It's hosted by Jonn Elledge

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