In January 2022, the Indonesian government approved plans to build Nusantara- a new green and smart capital city on the island of Borneo. Join an interdisciplinary panel of experts, including the architect for the new capital, as they discuss the planning, design, and political agendas behind the new capital and the challenges and opportunities this presents for Southeast Asian urbanism. Panel Bambang Brodjonegoro, Former Minister of National Development Planning, Indonesia (Bappenas). Bambang B...
May 13, 2023•1 hr 18 min
Systematic Literature Review This mini-episode takes a deep dive into the Systematic Literature Review. - What is is? - Where did it come from? - And can this methodology from science work in a social science research environment? This mini-episode is a part of a series of conversations about transforming infrastructure governance. Our shared futures and community well-being are shaped by urban infrastructure such as for transport, green space, water, social, and digital services. While many pub...
May 08, 2023•17 min
Join us for a series of conversations about transforming infrastructure governance. Our shared futures and community well-being are shaped by urban infrastructure such as for transport, green space, water, social, and digital services. While many public discussions revolve around which infrastructure projects should be prioritised, there is growing recognition that questions of governance are critical to achieving the social, ecological, and place-based transformations we need to address the cli...
May 08, 2023•27 min
In this special Urban Studies Journal book review episode we’re talking with Professor Adam Morton from the discipline of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, Professor Alison Young from Social and Political Sciences and the Deputy-Director of the Centre for Cities at the University of Melbourne and Dr Tanzil Shafique, lecturer of Urban Design at University of Sheffield, about Professor AbdouMaliq Simone’s new book, The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture, published by Duke...
Apr 13, 2023•43 min
From horse-drawn carriages to automobiles and mass transit, new transport technologies have historically transformed and disrupted cities. Today, autonomous vehicles and other forms of smart transport technology are predicted to remake transport networks and contribute to a new round of urban expansion. Are Australian cities preparing for a driverless future? This session explores how autonomous vehicles may impact Australian cities and how governments are preparing to address the potential chal...
Mar 18, 2023•1 hr 13 min
Despite existing technological capabilities, deeply entrenched barriers to sustainable and equitable transitions often fall to questions of urban governance. Festival of Urbanism Panel Chair: Associate Professor Tooran Alizadeh Haruka Miki-Imoto, Operations Officer for the World Bank in Japan Professor Tim Bunnell from the National University of Singapore James O’Keefe, the Director of the Roads to Home Program in the NSW Department of Planning and Environment Dr Aidan While, University of Sheff...
Mar 18, 2023•49 min
We have an exciting new project with a fantastic new partner coming very soon! You can have a sneaky listen now 🤓
Mar 17, 2023•1 min
Climate-change threatens peri-urban agriculture and food security. This session explores innovative social practices that secure food futures: in Sydney an evolving system connecting urban organic waste to peri-urban agriculture, and in Bologna Italy cooperatives in emerging food solidarity economies. Each case demonstrates how trusting relationships ensure local food futures in urban places. Panel Dr Abby Mellick Lopes, University of Technology Sydney Gabriele Morelli, University of Milan-Bicoc...
Dec 13, 2022•54 min
Cities and regions across the world have experienced profound disruption from the rise of digital platforms across all areas of urban life. From housing, to transport, shopping, and the way we work, global firms such as ‘Airbnb’ and ‘Uber’ typically evade local (place based) policy and regulatory settings. However, their impacts have large socio-spatial footprints which need to be understood and factored into future urban policy and planning. Understood within the wider prism of technological in...
Dec 13, 2022•53 min
Many of the built environment’s peak industry associations recognise the need for rapid decarbonisation and have publicly stated their commitment. But what does it mean in reality? What are the barriers that we need to urgently address? How do we support innovation and accommodate rapid technological advances through our planning system? What opportunities should we leverage now and what preparation do we need for future changes? This Panel will focus on the practicalities and challenges facing ...
Dec 13, 2022•1 hr 16 min
This new book considers how Australians have provided water and sewerage for growing, sprawling urban centres. In this land of drought and flooding rains, we may need to rethink water use strategies, including embracing centuries of Aboriginal knowledge, seeing water as a resource to be conserved, rather than wasted or exploited. Panel Dr. Margaret Cook is an environmental historian who specialises in the history of ‘natural’ disasters in Australia, especially floods. The history of floods in th...
Nov 22, 2022•1 hr 17 min
We’ve got a treat for you today, a conversation about speculative fiction and cities with a fantastic panel. Our panel includes award-winning author and critic James Bradley. James is the author of books such as Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist and Clade, the first two books of The Change Trilogy for young adults, The Silent Invasion and The Buried Ark, a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus, and The Penguin Book of the Ocean. His latest novel, Ghost Species, was published in 2020. Matt Levi...
Nov 01, 2022•37 min
Fifty years after former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s short-lived attempts to foster decentralisation, this event, held in Albury, one of Whitlam’s flagship National Growth Centres, examines the prospects for future growth in regional Australia. With a diverse panel of regional leaders and experts, the discussion will canvas opportunities and risks confronting communities beyond the major cities and the priorities for contemporary government intervention. For the first time in four decades, Au...
Oct 26, 2022•51 min
Australia’s housing system is in crisis, and recent policy interventions have ranged from ineffective to counterproductive. From the deepening divide between home owners and renters, to unsustainable patterns of residential development and escalating climate risk – Australia’s housing policy framework needs an urgent reset. With new national and state housing initiatives on the table, this panel will debate whether it is possible to ‘renovate’ Australia’s housing system or whether radical change...
Oct 26, 2022•54 min
In this event inspired by Elizabeth Farrelly’s acclaimed book ‘Killing Sydney’, we challenged creative thinkers, activists, and scholars from a range of disciplines to share their top-of-the-list solutions. Convened by prominent columnist, architectural critic and author Dr Farrelly, we invite you to join this frank and fearless conversation about Sydney’s future. Has Sydney reached her tipping point? Following a series of existential threats – from the devasting summer 2020 fires and smog which...
Oct 26, 2022•53 min
Dallas talks with Megan about high-rise legal architecture make vertical urban growth possible, but do we really understand the social implications of restructuring city land ownership in this way? Geographer and architect Megan Nethercote enters the condo tower to explore the hidden social and territorial dynamics of private vertical communities. Informed by residents’ accounts of Australian high-rise living, this book shows how legal and physical architectures fuse in ways that jeopardize resi...
Sep 23, 2022•30 min
What do authors think about when they’re writing a book about cities for kids? And why are books about cities and urban life important for kids? Dallas chats with kids book illustrator James Gulliver Hancock and Alexandra Crosby and Jesse Stein from UTS about kids, books and cities. We cover a lot of ground, from what it’s like to be an author to being a reader, parent and urbanist. Guests James Gulliver Hancock stylishly illustrated the popular book How Cities Work 1 (How Things Work). This inn...
Sep 16, 2022•31 min
Dallas is talking with Anna Clark about her bold and expansive history that traces the changing and contested project of Australia’s national story. You will think about this country differently after reading this book. A few years ago Anna Clark saw a series of paintings on a sandstone cliff face in the Northern Territory. There were characteristic crosshatched images of fat barramundi and turtles, as well as sprayed handprints and several human figures with spears. Next to them was a long gun,...
Sep 14, 2022•31 min
Dallas talks with Jarrod Hore about Visions of Nature, which revives the work of late nineteenth-century landscape photographers who shaped the environmental attitudes of settlers in the colonies of the Tasman World and in California. Despite having little association with one another, these photographers developed remarkably similar visions of nature. They rode a wave of interest in wilderness imagery and made pictures that were hung in settler drawing rooms, perused in albums, projected in the...
Sep 13, 2022•32 min
Dallas talks with Paul Daley about this his multi-generational saga about Australian frontier violence and cultural theft, and the myths that stand between us and history's unpalatable truths. Morally bereft popular historian Patrick Renmark flees London in disgrace after the accidental death of his infant son. With one card left to play, he reluctantly takes a commission to write the biography of his legendary pioneering adventurer-anthropologist grandfather. With no enthusiasm and even less in...
Sep 09, 2022•28 min
A 2021 Festival of Urbanism panel discussion. Leading urbanists from North America to Australia discuss the lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic for future city planning and urban life. Hear from Sam Assefa, former Seattle Planning Director and at the frontline of that city’s COVID-19 experience; Irene Figueroa Ortiz, New York City urban designer and transport planner; and Glenn Grimshaw urban planner, researcher and adviser based in the Australian Embassy, Washington DC. Professor Ann Forsyth, pl...
Mar 17, 2022•57 min
Endangered governance: Public trust, urban decisions, and ethical practice A 2021 Festival of Urbanism panel discussion. Clear and transparent ethical frameworks can and should feature much more overtly in decision making across development processes, which are uniquely exposed to risks associated with conflicts of interest, politicisation, compromise, and corruption. This panel explores the realities facing planners and policy makers, and highlights strategies for those committed to ethical pra...
Feb 21, 2022•58 min
Endangered discourse: Improving the quality of public debate on urban and housing policy. A 2021 Festival of Urbanism panel discussion. An informed citizenry, independent analysis, and robust public debate are all essential for good public policy particularly in relation to housing and urban policy. This panel event, which also celebrates the work of the inaugural Director of the Henry Halloran Trust, Peter Phibbs, features perspectives from University and industry research, independent journali...
Jan 20, 2022•46 min
Endangered Communities and Resurgent Urbanism A 2021 Festival of Urbanism panel discussion. With ongoing processes of dispossession, marginalisation, gentrification and exclusion threatening urban and regional communities, what forms of insurgent and resurgent urbanism are emerging and how might urban policy makers and planners support these efforts? Chair: Professor Nicole Gurran, University of Sydney Panel includes: Warren Roberts, Redfern Waterloo Aboriginal Affordable Housing Campaign Shanno...
Dec 17, 2021•43 min
Endangered Country? Indigenous perspectives on planning, and development A 2021 Festival of Urbanism yarn of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experts discussing their perspectives on planning, land management, cultural heritage, economic opportunity and what must be changed. Chair: Elle Davidson, Aboriginal planning lecturer, University of Sydney Panel includes: Chels Marshall, Urban Apostles and Director Flying Fish Blue Christian Hampson, CEO, Yerrabingin Belle Arnold, Consultant, Zion En...
Dec 06, 2021•1 hr 4 min
Kurt Iveson talks with Elizabeth about her blueprint for the future of Sydney in a radically changing world. Columnist Elizabeth Farrelly brings her unique perspective as architectural writer and former city councillor to a burning question for our times: how will we live in the future? Can our communities survive pandemic, environmental disaster, overcrowding, government greed and big business? Using her own adopted city of Sydney, she creates a roadmap for urban living and analyses the history...
Sep 09, 2021•38 min
Preston Peachey reflects on the book Benevolence with author Julie Janson. Julie’s intensely visual prose interweaves historical events with fictionalised characterisation in a story that shatters European stereotypes about life on the colonial frontier. Julie gives voice to an Aboriginal experience of early-settlement. Benevolence is a story about this important era in Australia’s history from an Aboriginal perspective. Told through the fictional characterisation of Darug woman Muraging (Mary J...
Sep 09, 2021•25 min
Dallas chats with Vanessa about her delicately wrought essays and hand-drawn maps, Vanessa describes her encounters with unusual, forgotten or abandoned places in the city in which she was born and raised, using their details to open up repositories of significance, and to create an alternative city, a Mirror Sydney, illuminated by memory and imagination. She writes at a time when Sydney is being disassembled and rebuilt at an alarming rate. Her determined observation of the over-looked and the ...
Sep 09, 2021•26 min
Dallas and Tom discuss Shaking Up the City, which critically examines many of the concepts and categories within mainstream urban studies that serve dubious policy agendas. Through a combination of theory and empirical evidence, Tom Slater “shakes up” mainstream urban studies in a concise and pointed fashion by turning on its head much of the prevailing wisdom in the field. To this end, he explores the themes of data-driven innovation, urban resilience, gentrification, displacement and rent cont...
Sep 09, 2021•37 min
As we reckon with the violent settler-colonial basis of our cities, Dallas talks with Adam Morton about a recent literary economy analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Adam published this reflection recently in the journal Political Geography. It is titled A Geography of Blood Meridian: Primitive accumulation on the frontier of space (see: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629821001463) There is a factual husk to Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian; or The Eve...
Sep 09, 2021•24 min
