Dallas and Shanthi discuss Shanthi’s fresh take on 21st-century migratory experiences and temporality from her innovative study of young Asian migrants’ lives in Australia’s cities and regions. The book shows how migration has reshaped lived experiences of time and place for middle-class young people moving between Asia and the West for work, study and lifestyle opportunities. Through a new conceptual framework of ‘chronomobilities,’ which looks at ‘time-regimes’ and ‘time-logics’, Robertson dem...
Sep 09, 2021•22 min
Dallas and Catriona talk Second City, which puts on display the diverse literary talents that make Sydney’s western suburbs such a fertile region for writers. Beginning with Felicity Castagna’s warning about the dangers of cultural labelling, this collection of essays takes resistance against conformity and uncritical consensus as one of its central themes. From Aleesha Paz’s call to recognise the revolutionary act of public knitting, to Sheila Ngoc Pham on the importance of education in crossin...
Sep 09, 2021•19 min
We speak to tenants, tenant advocates and academics about renting during COVID-19. "The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a hopefully once in a lifetime opportunity to fix the structural and systemic problems of housing that have always been here in Australia." Dr Alistair Sisson "It's very easy to think that a housing crisis is an individual persons problem and I think what's really interesting and important about COVID is that it's drawn into sharp relief the fact that a housing crisis is a commu...
Nov 25, 2020•47 min
You might have heard about the 'structural adjustment' program, but what about the Green Structural Adjustment of the World Bank’s Resilient City program? We're talking with Sophie Webber and Patrick Bigger about what they call Green Structural Adjustment. Within environmental and development finance practices, cities across the Global South are facing a costly infrastructural crisis stemming from rapid urbanisation and climate change. This threatens to further entrench poverty and precarity for...
Oct 09, 2020•24 min
The world of night-time waste collectors, night shift nurses, office cleaners, rough sleepers and security guards rarely makes international headlines. Understanding what happens in cities after dark is crucial to global sustainable development, but will also help create a fairer society that values the night-time economy. The world of night-time waste collectors, night shift nurses, office cleaners, rough sleepers and security guards rarely makes international headlines. Yet the night-time is c...
Jul 13, 2020•27 min
Transport is connected to social justice, freedom and equality in the city. Transit networks are objects of intense political contestation and are key terrains of struggle in cities around the world. As sites of disruption, they signal the interrelated crises of urban poverty, social reproduction, security, racism, democracy, and climate. As sites of collectivity, they express the powers of being, acting, and moving in common. We're talking to Theresa Enright about transit as a critical infrastr...
Jul 12, 2020•27 min
COVID-19 is altering city experiences and spaces. As cities respond, the contours of post-pandemic cities are also being altered, for better or worse. This podcast brings together a group of leading Sydney-based urbanists to start a conversation about what cities will look like post-COVID, and how pathways towards a just urban recovery might be fostered. “We’ve been thinking about the imperative for innovation; how that’s reshaping how cities are being governed. And all of that got thrown into a...
Jul 09, 2020•32 min
Welcome to City Road's 50th episode! To celebrate we've invited the very first guest of the show, Professor Nicole Gurran, back to talk about how we started City Road, our first episode on Airbnb and Cities, and Nicole's current work on Informal Housing. We also talk about some fun facts about City Road and the broader work that is coming out of the Urban Housing Lab at the University of Sydney. So here is a fun fact; did you know that Elizabeth Farrelly launched City Road at the 2017 Festival o...
Jul 03, 2020•23 min
Who owns London? In recent decades, London has fallen into the hands of the super-rich. It is today the essential “World City” for High-Net-Worth Individuals and Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals. Compared to New York or Tokyo, the two cities that bear the closest comparison, it has the largest number of wealthy people per head of population. Taken as a whole, London is the epicentre of the world’s finance markets, an elite cultural hub, and a place to hide one’s wealth. "It's about how money has...
May 25, 2020•30 min
Doomsday peppers consider the COVID-19 pandemic a 'mid-level' event that they are well-prepared for. We're talking with Bradley Garrett about Doomsday peppers, underground bunkers and COVID-19. Doomsday prepping is the practice of anticipating and adapting to an imagined impending crisis, ranging from low level crises to extinction-level events "The inability to know which disaster is being prepared for, or at what scale, coupled with the perceived inevitability of catastrophe, has created the p...
Apr 24, 2020•24 min
In this episode we use Eugene McCann's four dialectical tensions to understand the COVID-19 city: i) invisibility and visibility; ii) privilege and privation; iii) selfishness and solidarity; and iv) absence and presence. What’s the role of ‘academic experts’ in the debate about COVID-19 and cites, and how can we separate our expert role from our personal experience of being locked down in our cities and homes? This is a question we’ve certainly been struggling with at City Road, and we think it...
Apr 03, 2020•34 min
Singapore is air-conditioning the inside and outside of buildings. This is about comfort and convenience, but it might also be about human survival. In this talk with Dallas Rogers, Professor Simon Marvin outlines the scope and potential importance of a new agenda around urban climate control and urban weather modification, which he calls the 'new thermal fix' for our cities. “And the challenge is already here, in Australia in many respects; The outside temperature is going to be so high it's no...
Feb 25, 2020•29 min
In this episode we talk to Matthew Mindrup about his new book, which provides an intriguing narrative about the practical and cultural factors motivating the development of the architectural model’s different uses. "Painters make paintings, poets make poetry and musicians make music, but architects do not make architecture." Dr Matthew Mindrup The attractiveness of the architectural model, he argues, is that it, unlike drawings or other two-dimensional representations of buildings, has a “here-n...
Jan 22, 2020•21 min
How do urban planners regulate the sex industries in our cities? The sex industries - from sex work to porn production - are often perceived and therefore regulated as unsuitable businesses for the high streets and residential neighbourhoods of cities. We talk with Associate Professor Paul Maginn about the role the planning system plays in regulating urban sex-scapes, the conservative morality of regulating the sex industries in cities and the perverse urban outcomes when both collide. Paul argu...
Nov 28, 2019•29 min
What can urban alliances and community organising teach us about building political unity across difference in cities? The 'progressive dilemma' is an apparent problem for contemporary left politics and our two guests have very different takes on the issue, and how it relates to urban politics. Our first guest is professor of politics from the UK and the other is a community organiser from Sydney. They discuss the challenges of centre-left politics and urban alliances. "It's a terrible city some...
Nov 08, 2019•16 min
Contemporary global circuits of policy advice are abuzz with 'urban solutions' from a growing industry of 'thought leaders'. These urban experts talk about 'policy solutions' and 'best practice models' and they have a ready supply of policy success stories from around the world. "What I'm really trying to study is this global circuitry of knowledge, a global network, and I'm engaging with cities not as specific field sites, but as entry points into this dynamic, fast-moving landscape." Rachel Bo...
Oct 08, 2019•18 min
What makes up a nation? In the 21st century, nationalist frames are giving way to new interpretations of the global. Dr Jennifer Ferng speaks with Professor Vikram Prakash and Professor Julie Willis about the Encyclopedia of Australian architecture, national identity, and the obstacles to capturing selected moments of history. Prakash and Willis speak about the tensions between the national and the global. They share personal experiences about how they each came to study Australian architecture ...
Sep 17, 2019•38 min
Is modern architecture actually energy efficient? Buildings like the Bauhaus Dessau designed by Walter Gropius required large amounts of heating in the 1920s. The preservation of modern buildings like these often require large amounts of energy consumption, which places them at odds with contemporary ideas around energy efficiency. "We have been conditioned as humans to a certain type of lifestyle that is dependant - heavily dependent - upon the use of fossil fuels." Associate Professor Daniel B...
Sep 17, 2019•25 min
Universities are grappling with creating an inclusive and global curriculum that will serve the needs of 21st century architecture students. In terms of architecture, which theories and buildings from which countries and cities should be included, and what are academics doing to address the histories of Indigenous peoples? "The reason I'm here is only because I basically dedicated 40 years of trying to get rid of the education I had in the past; critique it." Professor Mark Jarzombek Dr Jennifer...
Sep 17, 2019•47 min
Around the world cities are running out of drinking water. Yes, literally running out of water! Cape Town is a well-publicised example. But recently Chennai, and before that São Paulo, all faced the possibility of water not coming out of the taps. So what do cities do to respond to this crisis? How is the crisis materialised differently across cities? For whom is there a water crisis? “For me, it’s almost like, these experiences offer us an insight into what’s happening globally” Dr Nate Milling...
Jul 30, 2019•21 min
The financial industry has an image problem; capitalism functions by creating both wealth and poverty. But for financiers, the problem of poverty might just be reimagined as an investment opportunity. "I'm looking at how - the way that finance works in cities is to create a lot of inequalities [and this] is starting to be incorporated back into finance; as people who are in control of capital are looking for both new things to invest in and also looking at a lot of bad PR from this [capitalist] ...
Jul 04, 2019•21 min
Episode 1 of the Country and Cities Series This a truth telling, of sorts, about how urban planning and built environment professions are implicated in the settler colonial process, with Libby Porter and Naama Blatman-Thomas "[Settler colonialism is] a structure of governance and control where white people - European people - arrive to a new territory, a new area, and create a new political entity there; so a new nation state. We're talking about something that is ongoing, that is not a one-time...
Jun 12, 2019•20 min
"... the terrain of struggle for justice is happening in the city and in the countryside, and it's beginning to link." Eric Holt-Giménez In response to the social inequities and ecological damage wrought by the industrial and globalising food system, a growing food movement that champions food and farm justice, sovereignty and democracy is driving social, economic and political change across the globe. This industrial food system not only creates food and farm insecurity, it reformulates rural/u...
Apr 29, 2019•19 min
A gender sensitivity urban design process considers the political, cultural and economic factors that produce gender-based exclusion and discrimination in our cities. We're talking with Associate Professor Nicole Kalms from the Department of Design at Monash University. Nicole is the founding Director of the XYX Lab, a research group looking at the intersection of Space, Gender and Communication. XYX Lab is a team of design researchers exploring gender-sensitive design practices and theory. Thei...
Mar 26, 2019•25 min
We’re travelling up the east coast of Australia with two early career researchers to talk about families and cities. Our first stop is Wollongong, about 70 kilometres south of Sydney with Dr Susannah Clement. Our second stop is Brisbane, about 900 kilometres north of Sydney with Dr Kate Raynor. Susannah has been tagging on with mothers and their children as they walk along the streets of Wollongong. She’s interested in the everyday experiences of family life in the city, and how walking is exper...
Mar 01, 2019•20 min
You've probably heard about residential mortgage-backed securities and the global financial crisis. But did you know corporate mortgage-backed securities were reshaping American cities at the same time? During the Great Recession, the housing bubble took much of the blame for bringing the American economy to its knees, but commercial real estate also experienced its own boom-and-bust. "... somebody would still be interested in the building they were putting up because it was viewed less as a spa...
Jan 16, 2019•23 min
What’s at stake in podcasting the urban? There might be more to this question than you think. Podcasting the Urban is a five-part series where we turn the academic gaze back onto our podcasting practice. We are playing the first episode in the series in the City Road feed. For more details see: https://cityroadpod.org/2018/12/19/podcasting-the-urban-five-part-series/ In 2018 City Road organised four public panel discussions to critically interrogate the idea of academics podcasting the urban, an...
Dec 19, 2018•28 min
Education is one of the key civil rights struggles of our era, and urban schools need to do more to bridge the 'civic empowerment gaps' between students. How and what we teach children will determine how they engage in civic life for the rest of their life. It's time to rethink the role of civic education in our cities. This goes way beyond tweaking the curriculum. It means upending the curriculum altogether. It's about teaching students about power, justice and the need for collective action, a...
Nov 30, 2018•25 min
In the early 1990s, when China’s artists were less able to participate in open debate about the shape of Chinese society, they turned to the production of urban space instead. “If you want to see the political impact of Chinese artists, we can look to the city in order to see that.” Dr Christen Cornell After the 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square, Chinese cities entered a period of radical social and spatial reorganisation. During the process, artists began to move from the countryside into Beiji...
Nov 19, 2018•24 min
PART II - How much public land has been stolen from the British people? The short answer is, a lot! We’re talking to Professor Brett Christophers from Uppsala University about his new book, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain. And it’s a story that we just couldn’t squeeze into one episode, so alas, we’ve given the next two episodes of City Road over to exploring the ideas in the book. In the first episode we talk about the old enclosure acts of the last few...
Nov 14, 2018•22 min
