Name: 【TED】Alison Killing: What happens when a city runs out of room for its dead (What happens when a city runs out of room for its dead | Alison Killing)
Uploaded: 2017-12-15T13:52:36.000Z
Duration: 8 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

So, I have an overlooked but potentially lucrative

the return on burial plots has outperformed the UK property market

There are private cemeteries being set up with plots for sale to investors,

And they're projected to achieve about 40 percent growth.

The biggest advantage is that this is a market with continuous demand.

and there are companies out there that really are offering this investment,

but my interest in it is quite different.

I've been looking at approaches to death and dying

and at how they've shaped our cities and the buildings within them.

So in the summer, I did my first exhibition

that many of us find quite uncomfortable to talk about,

the exhibition was designed to be quite playful,

so that people would literally engage with it.

So one of our exhibits was an interactive map of London

which showed just how much of the real estate in the city

the name of the piece of real estate -- the building or the cemetery --

they're all of the hospitals and hospices

and mortuaries and cemeteries in the city.

We wanted to show that, even though death and burial are things

they're all around us, and they're important parts of our cities.

So about half a million people die in the UK each year,

and of those, around a quarter will want to be buried.

But the UK, like many Western European countries,

And the Greater London Authority has been aware of this for a while,

and the main causes are population growth,

the fact that existing cemeteries are almost full.

There's a custom in the UK that graves are considered to be occupied forever,

and there's also development pressure -- people want to use that same land

They were like, well, maybe we can reuse those graves after 50 years.

Or maybe we can bury people, like, four deep,

so that four people can be buried in the same plot,

and we can make more efficient use of the land that way,

and in that way, hopefully London will still have space to bury people

But, traditionally, cemeteries haven't been taken care of

In fact, the surprising thing is that there's no legal obligation

on anyone in the UK to provide burial space.

Traditionally, it's been done by private and religious organizations,

like churches and mosques and synagogues.

But there's also occasionally been a for-profit group

And, you know, they look at the small size of a burial plot

and it looks like there's serious money to be made.

So, actually, if you want to go out and start your own cemetery,

and they had a farmhouse and a load of fields next to it,

They first thought about making a caravan park,

Then they hit on the idea of making a cemetery

they could increase the value of their land

from about 95,000 pounds to over one million pounds.

But just to come back to this idea of making profit from cemeteries,

The thing is that the high cost of those burial plots

but that cost reflects the fact that you need to maintain the burial plot --

like, someone has to cut the grass for the next 50 years.

That means it's very difficult to make money from cemeteries.

And it's the reason that normally they're run by the council

But anyway, the council granted these people permission,

and they're now trying to build their cemetery.

So just to explain to you kind of how this works:

then I have to apply for planning permission first.

So if I want to build a new office building for a client

or, you know, if I have a shop and I want to convert it into an office,

and I submit them to the council for permission.

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【TED】Alison Killing: What happens when a city runs out of room for its dead (What happens when a city runs out of room for its dead | Alison Killing)

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