Urban Political Podcast

Episode 75 – Book Review Roundtable: Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology

March 27, 2024 10:11 - 1 hour - 49.4 MB

Lively Cities departs from conventions of urban studies to argue that cities are lived achievements forged by a multitude of entities—human and nonhuman—that make up the material politics of city making. Generating fresh conversations between posthumanism, postcolonialism, and political economy, Barua reveals how these actors shape, integrate, subsume, and relate to urban space in fascinating ways. This podcast is produced in collaboration with the Urban Geography Journal.

In Conversation with Jean-David Gerber (The Urban Lives of Property Series III)

February 29, 2024 08:53 - 1 hour - 61.5 MB

This episode of the Urban Lives of Property Series expands discussions geographically and conceptually: Our guest in this episode, Jean-David Gerber, helps us think property from Switzerland and other places. Starting off with the observation that there is no single understanding of property, Jean-David argues that it is important for any consideration to be context-specific and to realize that property is not the same as propriété or Eigentum. Jean-David elaborates on his approach to propert...

the Far Right and the City

February 09, 2024 09:13 - 53 minutes - 43.3 MB

In this discussion, members of the Terra-R (Territorialisations of the Radical Right) network examine the developments of the radical right in Germany beyond simplistic urban-rural and East-West attributions, and outline the current and future challenges for academia and civil society alike.

Rent Strike Series Episode 3

February 01, 2024 04:35 - 27 minutes - 22.1 MB

This is episode three of the Rent Strike Series, focusing on the Veritas Tenants Association’s ongoing multibuilding rent strike in San Francisco to demand a say in the terms of sale of their buildings. In November 2023, the Prado Group assumed ownership of 20 Veritas-owned buildings, while on January 18, 2024, Ballast Investments and their partner Brookfield Properties took over the remaining 75 buildings in the largest-ever sale of rent-stabilized units in San Francisco. Meanwhile, the rent...

Episode 71 – Book Review Roundtable: Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology

January 20, 2024 09:17 - 1 hour - 49.4 MB

Lively Cities departs from conventions of urban studies to argue that cities are lived achievements forged by a multitude of entities—human and nonhuman—that make up the material politics of city making. Generating fresh conversations between posthumanism, postcolonialism, and political economy, Barua reveals how these actors shape, integrate, subsume, and relate to urban space in fascinating ways. This podcast is produced in collaboration with the Urban Geography Journal.

Cosmopolitan Solidarity

January 12, 2024 16:25 - 1 hour - 50.3 MB

To live in the age of precarity is a tolling, everyday struggle. It erodes one's strength to carry on, live another day, and keep the hope for a modicum of prosperity due to come in some vague future. And when things get unbearably harsh, when the hegemony of neoliberalism has individualised the problems and told those who sustain life by the skin of their teeth to keep their head above the surface without having an eye for care from the retreating state that sees no obligation towards the le...

Property Rights Versus Tenants in Poland

November 30, 2023 10:10 - 26 minutes - 21.1 MB

Unregulated restitution of property to prewar owners (or rather their legal successors) remains a major source of conflict over housing in Poland, most notably in Warsaw. This episode features Beata Siemieniako, a Warsaw lawyer and urban activist who has been supporting tenants in their struggle against ruthless developers for years. In her book „Re-privatising Poland. The History of a Great Scam“ (Reprywatyzując Polskę. Historia wielkiego przekrętu, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej 20...

Rent Strike Series Episode 2

September 21, 2023 10:45 - 24 minutes - 20.1 MB

This is episode two of the Rent Strike Series, focusing on the Veritas Tenants Association’s ongoing multibuilding rent strike in San Francisco to demand a say in the terms of sale of their buildings. On August 30, corporate landlord Ballast Investments won the auction for Veritas Investments’ delinquent debt and will take over 75 Veritas-owned buildings. And on September 1 the strike expanded. In this episode, we get an update on these developments and the implications for the strike from Br...

Book Review Roundtable: Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning

September 01, 2023 06:50 - 1 hour - 57.8 MB

Against the Commons underscores how urbanization shapes the social fabric of places and territories, lending awareness to the impact of planning and design initiatives on working-class communities and popular strata. Projecting history into the future, it outlines an alternative vision for a postcapitalist urban planning, one in which the structure of collective spaces is defined by the people who inhabit them.

Rent Strike Series Episode 1

August 25, 2023 10:11 - 48 minutes - 39 MB

The first in an ongoing series hosted by Mathilde Gustavussen

Book Review Roundtable: How Cities Can Transform Democracy

August 01, 2023 07:00 - 59 minutes - 48.4 MB

We live in an urban age. It is well known that urbanization is changing landscapes, built environments, social infrastructures and everyday lives across the globe. But urbanization is also changing the ways we understand and practise politics. What implications does this have for democracy? This incisive book argues that urbanization undermines the established certainties of nation-state politics and calls for a profound rethinking of democracy. A novel way of seeing democracy like a city is...

Book Review Roundtable: Migrants and Machine Politics

July 01, 2023 13:17 - 1 hour - 50.1 MB

As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, millions of people have migrated from the countryside to urban slums, which now house one billion people worldwide. The transformative potential of urbanization hinges on whether and how poor migrants are integrated into city politics. Popular and scholarly accounts paint migrant slums as exhausted by dispossession, subdued by local dons, bought off by wily politicians, or polarized by ethnic appeals. Migrants and Machine Politics shows how slum resident...

In Conversation with Vera Smirnova (The Urban Lives of Property Series II)

June 19, 2023 10:25 - 1 hour - 62.5 MB

In this second part of the series Urban Lives of Property, Hanna and Markus talk to Vera Smirnova, a human and political geographer to discuss property and territory from a Russian perspective. Smirnova’s genealogical account moves from the Czarist period to this day, illuminating also the current Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Smirnova offers a tour de force through Russia’s moving history of the last 150 years, addressing practices of serfdom, enclosures in the early 20th century, land co...

Russian Academia and Urban Activism in Times of War: Insights from St. Petersburg

May 22, 2023 12:00 - 1 hour - 89.9 MB

Meet urban scholar Oleg Pachenkov who left Russia few weeks after the invasion of Ukraine. Markus speaks with him about his personal and professional trajectory as a critical scholar bringing him to Berlin. The conversation covers the breakdown of the public sphere in Russia within weeks after the start of the war in Ukraine and Oleg's personal confrontation with a repressive system ready to crack down on critical voices. Self-censorship, Aesopian language and the retreat to the private spher...

In Conversation with Nick Blomley (The Urban Lives of Property Series I)

April 02, 2023 08:30 - 1 hour - 64.3 MB

This podcast series explores the "life of property" in urban theory and practice. In conversations with scholars who have led the way in property debates, it aims is to advance conceptual and theoretical groundwork on this notion that fundamentally shapes everyday urban lives and political discussion about the city. Within the social sciences and critical urban research property has lived a mostly implicit and underexamined life for several decades. Over the last years, it has become more ce...

Are Community Land Trusts Transformative?

March 17, 2023 14:48 - 1 hour - 49 MB

Community land trusts are proliferating across the globe, promoted as a potential solution to the ever-worsening affordable housing crisis. CLTs provide a mechanism for decommodification, collective ownership, and community control; however, those ideals are hard to operationalize, and many CLTs function more as traditional affordable housing providers than as urban commons. This episode discusses the causes of this tension as well as regional differences and issues of funding and scale frame...

On Peripheralisation

February 09, 2023 17:21 - 1 hour - 77.2 MB

How do “peripheries” form? And how does urbanization generate processes of peripheralization? Today, urban research is increasingly confronted with processes of extended urbanization that unfold far beyond cities and agglomerations: novel patterns of urbanization are crystallizing in agricultural areas and in remote landscapes, challenging inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded and dense settlement type. While certain territories of extended urbanisation experience growth, others are...

Inside the Woman Life Freedom Movement in Iran

January 30, 2023 12:06 - 1 hour - 50.4 MB

Listen to this gripping account from the current „Woman Life Freedom“ movement in Iran and its impact on cities and its inhabitants. The movement was sparked by the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini in the custody of the Islamic regime’s „morality police“ in September 2022. After several weeks of uprising, the media coverage in Western countries has become more silent due in part to the extremely repressive acts of the government in which several people have been killed and many imprisoned. The reg...

Forums of Discussion: sub\urban - journal for critical urban research

January 12, 2023 17:22 - 1 hour - 51.9 MB

Having just celebrated the 10th anniversary of the important German-language journal for critical urban research, Ross speaks with sub\urban editorial members Gala Nettelbladt and Nina Gribat about why it is important to publish urban research in German, the challenge of organizing a horizontal editorial collective, of realizing an open access publication strategy, and of relating to political struggles of the current moment - among many other topics. First part of a series of episodes on fo...

Book Review Roundtable: Art & Climate Change

November 25, 2022 09:05 - 48 minutes - 39.5 MB

The book provides an overview of ecologically conscious contemporary art that responds to today’s environmental crisis, from species extinction to climate change. Art and Climate Change collects a wide range of artistic responses to our current ecological emergency. When the future of life on Earth is threatened, creative production for its own sake is not enough. Through contemporary artworks, artists are calling for an active, collective engagement with the planet in order to illuminate som...

Urbanization: A Contested Concept (Urban Concepts Series)

October 05, 2022 05:10 - 56 minutes - 46 MB

Urbanization has become central in recent political discourses, as well as a contested concept in experts' spheres. This podcast of the Urban Political delves into the phenomenon of urbanization and traces back how the idea of "expanding cities" is causing disagreement in urban studies and leading researchers to raise questions that have haunted the discipline since the times of Georg Simmel. In this episode, Nicolas Goez, one of our new members of the editorial board at Urban Political, talk...

Dispatch from RC21 Conference 2022 – Ordinary cities in exceptional times

September 12, 2022 17:23 - 54 minutes - 44.7 MB

The RC21 Conference 2022, “Ordinary cities in exceptional times,” was held in Athens from August, 24 to 26. A large group of participants from all over the world gathered for was the first in-person conference of the RC21 network since the start of the pandemic. However, the pandemic continued to dominate the conference with a number of participants being unable to travel to Athens due to the uncertain visa regimes. On the opening day of the conference, the participants gathered in the histor...

Dispatch from INURA Conference 2022 in Luxemburg

July 27, 2022 08:35 - 52 minutes - 42.7 MB

The 30th annual INURA Conference entitled "Small State Big Transitions” was held in Luxembourg from June 25 to 28. Over 60 participants gathered at the conference to learn about the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and to celebrate the 30 years INURA. This year’s conference was organised by the Urban Studies Group at the Department of Geography and Spatial Planning at the University of Luxembourg. With a population of just over 600,000, Luxembourg is a small, multilingual, sovereign state. But the...

Landscapes of Care and Control

July 13, 2022 22:29 - 1 hour - 59.2 MB

This episode looks at urban landscapes of care and control that emerged during the pandemic in Santiago de Chile (Chile), Bogotá (Colombia) and Berlin (Germany). It is a comparative conversation on the urban impasse of state interventions and everyday logics under COVID19 in each of these cities and discusses the following questions: 1. How, if at all, has the pandemic affected state interventions in health in these cities? What new discourses and routines have been announced? 2. How, if at a...

Book Review Roundtable: Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds

June 01, 2022 05:30 - 1 hour - 70.1 MB

In this episode moderated by Nitin Bathla, the author Colin McFarlane discusses his recent book Fragments of the City with the critics Theresa Enright, Tatiana Thieme, and Kevin Ward. In analyzing the main arguments of the book, Theresa discusses the role of aesthetics in imagining, sensing, and learning the urban fragments, and the ambivalence of density in how it enables and disables certain kinds of politics. She questions Colin about the distinctiveness of art as a means to engage and pol...

Racism and Social Mix

May 08, 2022 14:08 - 1 hour - 60.1 MB

Social mix has become a central planning discourse worldwide to address urban inequalities and segregation as key urban problems of the 21st century. Far from being benevolent, the discourse of social mix and its related implementations are subjected to a fundamental critique highlighting racist underpinnings and consequences in targeted neighborhoods. The conversation draws on insights from Canada, Chile, Germany, and the US. Kudos for this important discussion to guest editor Julie Chamberl...

Community and Commons (Urban Concepts)

March 31, 2022 10:38 - 1 hour - 56.9 MB

In this first episode of the Urban Concept series, Louis Volont (MIT, Boston) and Thijs Lijster (University of Groningen) discuss with Talja Blokland (Humboldt University, Berlin) the concepts of community and commons and consider implications for urban research and action. The series introduces key urban concepts and reflects on their relevance in the fields of theory, research and politics.

Ukrainian Cities at War

March 02, 2022 17:36 - 1 hour - 61.8 MB

Listen to urban researchers sharing their insights on the situation in Ukrainian cities at war, from Kyiv, Kharkiv to Mariupol. Our guests discuss Putin's identity politics and the way his propaganda hits a wall in the context of the shelling of Ukrainian cities. Countering the images of an opposition of "Ukrainian vs Russian" inhabitants as a backdrop to the war, the discussants offer a different perspective on how ethnicity and language have played out prior to the war. At the same time, th...

Troubling Graffiti and Street Art

January 24, 2022 09:25 - 1 hour - 60 MB

What do graffiti and street art do? This is the key question of the intriguing podcast conversation among Emma Arnold, Jeff Ross, and John Lennon. While we learn about the unruly and disruptive features of graffiti in urban space, our guests also trouble its effects by asking questions about its relation to gentrification, racialized capitalism and right-wing media strategy. Highlighting geographical variation, the conversation covers the political regulation of graffiti and street art in the...

Housing Expropriation Referendum in Berlin: How it was won and what comes next?

October 01, 2021 09:35 - 40 minutes - 32.9 MB

On the 26th of September over million Berliners voted to expropriate and return to public ownership over 200,000 homes in the city. Deutsche Wohnen und Co Enteignen targeted a number of large real estate companies in Berlin that had control of what had previously been social housing stock. The referendum is not legally binding, requiring the support of the governing parties in the Berlin parliament, who are now tasked with legislating on the issue. The composition of the governing coalition h...

Urban Political Special: RC21 Conference Antwerp

July 20, 2021 09:20 - 57 minutes - 47.2 MB

In this episode we give you exclusive insights into the RC21 conference 2021 Antwerp. Our guests share their experiences from sessions, keynotes, and discussions on this year's main theme of 'Sensing and Shaping the City'.

Housing Commons & Collectives: European & US Perspectives

July 02, 2021 07:45 - 1 hour - 72.1 MB

After discussing expropriation efforts in Berlin recently, this episode will widen the discussion of housing commons to perspectives, differences, and potentials in Europe and the US.

Decolonize/Decenter: Planning in the South

June 18, 2021 09:10 - 1 hour - 65.3 MB

‘How can academic research be of service to envisioning alternative planning agendas that reflect the realities of the so-called Global South?’ is the central question that our guest host Inhji Jon stresses in this episode.

Green Cities and Contemporary Climate Planning: Politics and Practices

June 03, 2021 15:10 - 51 minutes - 42 MB

Green cities and green infrastructure have become common planning practices. But why is nature good and how does green matter? Do all people have equal access to nature, or are some left out of contemporary climate planning?

Housing struggles in Berlin: Part II Grassroots Expropriation Activism

May 04, 2021 10:45 - 1 hour - 48.3 MB

After Andrej Holm delved into the history of 'Mietendeckel', the rent cap legislation in Berlin, in the previous episode on contemporary housing struggles in Berlin, in this episode Joanna Kusiak explores grassroots activism of 'Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen' (Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co).

Housing Struggles in Berlin: Part I Rent Cap

April 24, 2021 13:41 - 51 minutes - 41.7 MB

This episode, we discuss the social and political consequences of last week's rent cap ("Mietendeckel") ruling of the German Federal Constitutional Court with Andrej Holm. We explore the history of the Mietendeckel, rising rents, and growing housing activism in Berlin that led to the legislation in the first place. We debate the effects the rent cap had on rents, the housing market and what it meant for people living and renting in the city. Andrej discusses the implications that the ruling h...

The urban politics of density in and beyond the pandemic

March 30, 2021 18:05 - 1 hour - 66.4 MB

This podcast explores how the pandemic is changing density around the world and generating forms of politics. With a diverse group of scholars and practitioners from around the world, the podcast addresses the following specific questions/ themes: How should density be conceived and why is it important to understanding cities (and the pandemic)? What is the pandemic doing to different forms of density? Is the pandemic changing the ‘where’ of density? Is the pandemic changing how we und...

The Urban Hinterlands of Slavery

March 08, 2021 15:15 - 1 hour - 65.8 MB

The transatlantic slave trade had a lasting impact not only on the development of big ports like Liverpool, London, Nantes or Bordeaux, but also in cities that far less frequently associated with slavery. In this episode, four researcher-activists from Bremen and Lancaster speak about how slavery is not just a bygone period of cruel practices far away. Our guests reveal the involvement of these places within the geographies of slavery and emphasize the "absent presence" or "present absence" o...

Film-Making as Urban Research

January 29, 2021 10:25 - 1 hour - 51 MB

Emerging film-makers and urban researchers Nitin Bathla, Sandra Jasper, and Tino Buchholz speak about their avenues into film-production, why film amounts to a vital medium for urban research, and what it would mean to enhance its role in urban studies. This episode is also full of urban film inspirations and recommendations!

Urban Climate Finance at the edge of viability?

January 12, 2021 21:00 - 1 hour - 62.5 MB

Amidst the rapidly unfolding ecological crisis, current research is witnessing ever new financial strategies that aim at making money from urban climate risks. In this episode Hanna Hilbrandt invites Emma Colven, Zac Taylor, Sarah Knuth, and Sage Ponder, to discuss the financial and socio-material limits to the viability of urban financialization in the context of climate change. When climate disasters increasingly destroy financial assets and erode returns, how much longer will it take until...

Mobilization and advocacy in contexts of massive urbanisation - Part 2

December 19, 2020 12:55 - 1 hour - 77.4 MB

Throughout the global south, many urban regions have become massive. In the familiar renditions of this notion, urban regions, mushrooming in population and spatial footprints, teeter close to chaos, environmental disaster, and ungovernability. Populations are being reshuffled, moved from one area to the other, something which an extensive landscape of built projects that never really worked has allowed as buildings are repurposed for other uses as they also take advantage of contiguities w...

Mobilization and Advocacy in Massive Urbanization Contexts - Part I

December 04, 2020 22:50 - 1 hour - 66.9 MB

Throughout the global south, many urban regions have become massive. In the familiar renditions of this notion, urban regions, mushrooming in population and spatial footprints, teeter close to chaos, environmental disaster, and ungovernability. Populations are being reshuffled, moved from one area to the other, something which an extensive landscape of built projects that never really worked has allowed as buildings are repurposed for other uses as they also take advantage of contiguities wit...

Radical Municipal Politics in Latin America since the 1990s

November 02, 2020 12:40 - 57 minutes - 46.8 MB

Gianpaolo Baiocchi offers us an historical overview of what he terms Radical Cities in Latin America and draws out some lessons from the past 30 years. Comparing these experiences to municipal politics in Europe and elsewhere, he highlights the distinctive features and charts the ups and downs of these urban movements. Massive suburbanization, metropolitan fragmentation and reactionary backlashes in Brazil and elsewhere have been posing key challenges for reconfiguring a municipalist politics...

COVID-19 and its impact on public life and use of public space

September 14, 2020 13:14 - 51 minutes - 41 MB

This episode discusses the impact of COVID-19 on the behavior of people in public spaces in Dortmund (Germany), San Francisco (USA) and Isfahan (Iran). My guests, Teresa Sprague and Ghazal Farjami, and I (Mais Jafari) explain how people in these societies perceive and react to social distancing, mask wearing, and other measures in a variety of public space typologies such as city streets, parks, beaches, plazas and indoor spaces like shopping malls and restaurants and other social centers. F...

Murray Bookchin, Municipalism, Popular Democracy and Left Politics

July 05, 2020 15:06 - 1 hour - 61.6 MB

In this podcast we discuss the work of Murray Bookchin, relating it to the experiences and debates around municipalism and wider left political practices and theory. With our guests (Blair, Hilary and Kate) we focus the discussion on the recent edited collection of Bookchin's work: The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso), edited by Debbie Bookchin and Blair Taylor. Reflecting, but going beyond, the broad range of topics addressed by Bookchin in t...

Multiple Crises and Radical Urban Research (AfterCorona #13)

June 28, 2020 15:04 - 1 hour - 51.2 MB

Starting off from her latest agenda-setting article "What does it mean to be a radical urban scholar-activist, or activist scholar today?" published earlier this year in the relaunch issue of the journal _CITY – analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action_. It was published before the pandemic shock and the current wave of Black Lives Matter protests took off. In our conversation, Margit will thus discuss with us her notion of three tipping points in light of these pressing conc...

The Revolutionary Movements in Algeria and Lebanon (AfterCorona #12)

June 17, 2020 08:53 - 1 hour - 81.3 MB

This episode delves deep into the ongoing revolutionary movements in Algeria and Lebanon. Ratiba Hadj-Moussa and Rana Sukarieh provide us with a rich and inspiring account of developments, offering social-economic background to the events of the last two years, outlining the main contours of the political struggles in the two countries and drawing comparative insights. In particular we gain: a clear sense of the geographies of the movements, the solidarities and tensions within them, the cruc...

Genealogies of Liveability (AfterCorona #11)

June 10, 2020 15:38 - 1 hour - 65.4 MB

Nina Stener Jørgensen and Maroš Krivý offer us the broader picture of the contemporary urbanist discourse of liveability and Jan Gehl's rise to prominence. In a tour de force, they walk us through Gehl's original work within the Danish welfare state of the 1960s, his indebtedness to the contributions of his wife Ingrid, his rise to stardom following Al Gore's liveability agenda, and why his success throws a shadow even on people like Richard Florida. The political responses to the Covid-19 si...

Urban Commonwealth (AfterCorona #10)

June 02, 2020 15:55 - 47 minutes - 38.1 MB

On the basis of the book _The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth_, we discuss with Margaret Kohn her resuscitation of the early 20th century solidarist ideas and the links to the Lefebvrian notion of the right to the city. We challenge her on the question of scale and the role of the state in solidarist thinking, how all of this may enlighten the response to the Covid-19 moment, and recommend that you listen to her smart and thoughtful reflections. **Margaret Kohn** is a professor of ...

Teaching and Learning in Urban Research (AfterCorona #9)

May 29, 2020 13:49 - 31 minutes - 26.2 MB

Robin Chang and Meg Holden discuss how the Covid-19 situation has disrupted teaching and learning practices in urban research, deepening existing and exposing new inequalities. They consider in particular the short and long term implications of on-going restrictions for experiential learning, what this means for urban research methods, drawing on concepts like discomfort and positing a notion of an ethics of experience. Robin A. Chang is PhD Researcher and Instructor in the School of Spatia...

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