News
King Charles III Coronation
06 May 2023
This week on the Lisa Burke Show, Ambassador Fleur Thomas, Dr Christian Barkei and Louise Benjamin talk about celebrations for King Charles III’s coronation today in Luxembourg. Prof Marcus Hesse also joins us to speak about Luxembourg’s enormous urban planning complexity.
Ambassador Fleur Thomas, Dr Christian Barkei and Louise Benjamin talk about celebrations for King Charles III’s coronation today in Luxembourg. Prof Marcus Hesse joins us to speak about Luxembourg’s enormous urban planning complexity.
Today is King Charles III’s Coronation and there will be celebrations all over the world. Here in Luxembourg, St. George’s International School will host the centre-point of celebrations as about 700 people gather to enjoy the day with live-screen TV, many organisations celebrating British fare. There will be plenty of food on offer including food from Ghana and other Commonwealth countries.
Ambassador Fleur Thomas talks about accompanying the Grand Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg to the airport as they made their way to London for the ceremony. Dr. Barkei, as host for the event, emphasises the pride St. George’s has in this capacity. Louise Benjamin is out-going President of the British-Luxembourg Society, who will be one of the organisations present. This organisation is open for anyone to join.
The Complexity of Luxembourg’s Growth in Urban Planning
My second topic of the day is less celebratory – how to plan for future growth of Luxembourg from an urban planning point of view. Prof. Marcus Hesse is Professor of Urban Studies at the University of Luxembourg, working there since 2008. He talks, very diplomatically, about the difficult issues Luxembourg has in terms of urban planning as Luxembourg continues to grow.
Prof. Hesse’s research team look at the development of Luxembourg as a small, but global, financial centre. There is a new ‘spatial revolution’ as it becomes a services-led urbanisation. Perhaps one, of many issues, is that we have an ‘extraverted economy’ and an ‘introverted governance’. Prof. Hesse’s message is really rather bleak. There seem to be no clear answers in how to manage Luxembourg’s growth. As he says, it’s a very complex issue, but he also advises politicians to think carefully about how to implement. Perhaps one of the most striking observations is that all of this research is done in Luxembourg, but it’s very unclear if politicians or town planners take heed at all.
