Ejidos y asentamientos autogestionados en Mexico In this inaugural Spanish-language episode of the Urban Political Podcast, Clara Salazar delves into the history and concept of the ejidos—collective forms of land ownership introduced by the Mexican Revolution in 1917. Following this, the state began redistributing land to impoverished farmers under the condition that they organize themselves into collectives. Ejidal land, which was typically rural land, could not be sold. The significance of the...
Apr 29, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 76
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. Our Guests: Mara Barua...
Mar 27, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 72
Property, Planning and Institutional Power: A view from Switzerland 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 propri...
Feb 29, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 74
With the research network Territorialisations of the Radical Right (Terra-R). Tune in for our new episode on the far-right and the city! 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. The aim of Terra-R is to analytically bring together two different for...
Feb 09, 2024•54 min•Ep. 75
The third in an ongoing series hosted by Mathilde Lind Gustavussen 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 sal...
Feb 01, 2024•27 min•Ep. 73
A talk on Hope, Affection, and Welcoming the 'Other' 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 retre...
Jan 12, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 71
Beata Siemieniako on the restitution of housing and tenants' struggles 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. Hist...
Nov 30, 2023•26 min•Ep. 70
The second in an ongoing series hosted by Mathilde Lind Gustavussen. 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...
Sep 21, 2023•25 min•Ep. 69
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. Host: Nitin Bathla is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Arc...
Sep 01, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep. 68
the Veritas Tenants Association’s (VTA) in San Francisco Episode description: This is the first episode of the Rent Strike Series from Urban Political, a multi-episode series about the Veritas Tenants Association’s (VTA) on-going rent strike against San Francisco’s largest landlord, Veritas Investments, Inc. The episode brings in tenants and organizers from the VTA to discuss organizing against corporate landlords, organizing multibuilding rent strikes, and what happens when corporate landlords ...
Aug 25, 2023•48 min•Ep. 67
Ross Beveridge, Philippe Koch and their critics 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 ...
Aug 01, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 66
Adam Auerbach and his critics 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 Polit...
Jul 01, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 65
Thinking about Appropriation, Dispossession and Expropriation in Theory and Practice 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 yea...
Jun 19, 2023•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 64
Conversation with Oleg Pachenkov 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 th...
May 22, 2023•1 hr 51 min•Ep. 63
Thinking about Appropriation, Dispossession and Expropriation in Theory and Practice 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 u...
Apr 02, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 62
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 framed a...
Mar 17, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 61
A discussion with Shubhra Gururani, Christian Schmid, Michael Lukas, Giulia Torino, Metaxia Markaki, and Faiq Mari 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 bou...
Feb 09, 2023•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 60
Reflections from urban scholar-activists in Tehran Listen to this gripping account from the current „Woman Life Freedom“ movement in Iran and its impact on cities and their 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, in part, due to the extremely repressive acts of the government in which several ...
Jan 30, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 59
Ross speaks with Gala Nettelbladt and Nina Gribat 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 foster discussion around 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 - am...
Jan 12, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 58
Maja & Reuben Fowkes and their Critics 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 wi...
Nov 25, 2022•49 min•Ep. 57
Conversation with Johanna Hoerning and Hillary Angelo 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 memb...
Oct 05, 2022•57 min•Ep. 56
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 historica...
Sep 12, 2022•54 min•Ep. 55
Small State Big Transitions 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, s...
Jul 27, 2022•53 min•Ep. 54
A comparative conversation on the urban impasse of state interventions and everyday logics under COVID19 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: How, if at all, has the pandemic affected state interventio...
Jul 13, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 53
Author Colin McFarlane and his Critics Cities are becoming increasingly fragmented materially, socially, and spatially. Fragments of the City examines the fragments themselves, what they are and how they come to matter in the experience, politics, and expression of cities. How does the city appear when we look at it through its fragments? For those living on the economic margins, the city is often known as a set of fragments. Much of what low-income residents deal with on a daily basis is fragme...
Jun 01, 2022•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 52
Roundtable with Javier Ruiz-Tagle, Julie Chamberlain, Martine August, and Moritz Rinn 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, Germ...
May 08, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Ep. 51
Louis Volont and Thijs Lijster discuss with Talja Blokland 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 key argument revolves around the idea of community as a practice, not an owning, its relationship to the common and the exploration of the urban dimension. The Ur...
Mar 31, 2022•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 50
with Michael Gentile, Tatiana Zhurzhenko and Vlad Mykhnenko 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 langua...
Mar 02, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 49
A conversation with Emma Arnold, Jeff Ross, and John Lennon 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 t...
Jan 24, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 48
Updates from Andrej Holm and Joanna Kusiak 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 ...
Oct 01, 2021•41 min•Ep. 47
