CITIZEN JANE: BATTLE FOR THE CITY, BBC4, 10pm
IF we discuss our cities today, we often find ourselves at extremes of the spectrum: either we’re troubled by the poisonous pollution they spill out, or we’re grumbling about boarded-up shops. But in the space between those two points lies a whole world of social decay, wiped-out history, community and activism.
The Citizen Jane of this feature-length documentary is Jane Jacobs, a writer who became a brilliant campaigner against the terrible city planning taking place in post-war New York City.
Jane eventually gathered her thoughts in a powerful book, The Life And Death Of Great American Cities, which stirred huge debate in the 1960s, arguing the planners were wiping out old neighbourhoods and communities so they could park their ugly modernist projects in the empty spaces. I desperately wish she’d been Glaswegian.
MY FAMILY, PARTITION AND ME: INDIA, 1947, BBC1, 9pm
IN this two-part series, Anita Rani brings us the violence and chaos of the 1947 partition of India.
When 200 years of British rule ended, the country was divided into an independent India and the newly created Muslim country of Pakistan. The divide may have looked good on paper, but in reality it was “one of the most catastrophic events of the 20th century”.
The new divide, and the subsequent ethnic cleansing, saw families flee their homes in the “largest forced migration ever recorded”, leaving over a million dead. Some fled to Britain and now the children of those “partition survivors” – a phrase I’d never heard before – are coming back to the old homes they were forced to abandon, and they speak to Rani, whose Sikh family were also forced to flee.
We hear their terrible stories first-hand, and it’s another reminder of how bloody the 20th century was.
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