In this Urban Political Special, Elisabet Van Wymeersch, Stijn Oosterlynck, Claudia Seldin, Roger Keil, Luce Beeckmans, and Manuel B. Aalbers are talking about their experiences at the RC21 conference 2021 – the annual conference of the International Sociological Association Research Committee 21 on Urban and Regional Development. Our guests share their insights and key findings on the various conference discussions such as ‘Sound and the City’, ‘Fascism – Urbanism | Aesthtics’, ‘The Urban Gover...
Jul 20, 2021•58 min•Ep. 46
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. Housing was and remains one of the crucial social issues of our time. From Friedrich Engels discussion of the housing question to the idea of ‘commons’ gaining more traction in urban activism and research, we delve into recent developments in collective housing experiments, activism, policy models, and the role of ...
Jul 02, 2021•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 45
‘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. Since Western-centric planning approaches imposes norms on places and times where they are inappropriate, we need to explore the possibilities of city making and planning which recognize the value of informal and transient structures of the lives the people have that make up ...
Jun 18, 2021•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 44
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? Furthermore, what impact will COVID 19 and climate crisis have on future green city planning? These and other questions are discussed in our episode "Green Cities and Contemporary Climate Planning: Practices and Policies." In this episode, Mais Jafari talks with Hillary Ange...
Jun 03, 2021•52 min•Ep. 43
On April 15, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court overturned Berlin’s rent cap. This immediately led to a massive spontaneous protest with 15,000 people voicing their concerns and proclaiming their right to the city. Moreover, within a week after the court’s decision the number of signatures for the grassroots campaign ‘Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen’ increased tremendously to an overall number of 130,000 signatures by Berlin residents. In this episode Joanna Kusiak talks us through the tr...
May 04, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 42
Interview with Andrej Holm From Friedrich Engel's series 'Zur Wohnungsfrage‘ to the decision of Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court on the #Berlin #RentCap last week: housing was and remains one of the crucial social issues of our time. Together with Andrej Holm, we discuss the social and political consequences of the Court's decision that the Berlin state government had no right to impose a rent cap in the German capital. Therefore, we explore the history of #Mietendeckel, rising rents, and ...
Apr 24, 2021•52 min•Ep. 41
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 understand de...
Mar 30, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 40
Decolonizing Engagements in Bremen and Lancaster 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 emphasiz...
Mar 08, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 39
with Nitin Bathla, Sandra Jasper, and Tino Buchholz 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! Guests: Nitin Bathla is an architect, artist, and educator currently pursuing Doctoral Studies at ETH Zurich. His work f...
Jan 29, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 38
Hanna Hilbrandt in conversation with Emma Colven, Zac Taylor, Sarah Knuth, and Sage Ponder 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...
Jan 12, 2021•1 hr 18 min•Ep. 37
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 with n...
Dec 19, 2020•1 hr 36 min•Ep. 36
Reflections from Delhi, Karachi, Lagos, and Manila 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...
Dec 04, 2020•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 35
A conversation with Gianpaolo Baiocchi 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 r...
Nov 02, 2020•58 min•Ep. 34
International perspectives: cases of Dortmund (Germany), San Francisco (USA) and Isfahan (Iran) 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, beach...
Sep 14, 2020•51 min•Ep. 33
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 the boo...
Jul 05, 2020•1 hr 17 min•Ep. 32
Margit Mayer on Tipping Points and Scholarly Politics of Mobilization 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 ...
Jun 28, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 31
protests and movements in the time of the pandemic 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...
Jun 17, 2020•1 hr 41 min•Ep. 30
Neoliberal urbanism and the rise of Jan Gehl 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. ...
Jun 10, 2020•1 hr 21 min•Ep. 29
Margaret Kohn on Solidarism, Scales, and the State 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 refl...
Jun 02, 2020•47 min•Ep. 28
Experiential approaches, risk and discomfort 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 Researche...
May 29, 2020•32 min•Ep. 27
Comparing Urban Responses to the Pandemic and their Implications Reflecting on how shocks are applied as tools to further political agendas, Creighton Connolly, S. Harris Ali, and Roger Keil consider the implications for racialized inequalities and the Global South-North divide. Two months after the first conversation with out guests, at a moment when the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic, Creighton, Harris, and Roger analyze how cities have responded in different ways and what kind o...
May 21, 2020•1 hr•Ep. 26
Experiences in India and Canada How is the pandemic affecting conditions of labour and migrant workers? How are Unions and other organisations reacting? In this wide-ranging and forensic discussion with Michelle Buckley (Toronto), Rajan Pandey (Bangalore) and Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay (Mohali) tell us about on-going struggles around mobility and labour in Canada and India. We hear about how the Indian state is seeking to unravel regulation and working rights under the guise of enabling the economy...
May 16, 2020•43 min•Ep. 25
Insights from Kenya and South Africa with J.A. Akallah and M. Huchzermeyer Reporting from Kenya and South Africa with Jethron Ayumba Akallah and Marie Huchzermeyer provide us with a detailed account of the coronavirus-pandemic in their context, the conditions within the informal settlements, the state approaches and the responses by civic organizations. Marie and Jethron share their perspective on the opportunities and threats of this situation and the lessons they have learned so far as public ...
May 05, 2020•54 min•Ep. 24
Kenya and South Africa with J.A. Akallah and M. Huchzermeyer This episode explores contemporary politics around land and infrastructure in informal settlements in Kenya and South Africa with Jethron Ayumba Akallah and Marie Huchzermeyer. This is the first part of the episode on informal settlements and provides the context for the second part which focuses on the situation of the unfolding coronavirus pandemic, state responses and urban logics of action. Guests: Dr. Jethron Ayumbah Akallah is a ...
May 03, 2020•27 min•Ep. 23
Rethinking Planning with Viola Schulze Dieckhoff and Christian Lamker In the episode we speak to Viola Schulze Dieckhoff (Technical University of Dortmund, Germany) and Christian Lamker (University of Groningen, the Netherlands) about the paradigm of post-growth and its relation to cities. In particular we discussed the roots of this concept and movement in academia and beyond, what it means in terms of planning, living in cities and understanding wealth and its political potential as we deal wi...
Apr 29, 2020•35 min•Ep. 22
Colin McFarlane on politics, opportunities, and research ethics of the crisis Is density really the key variable to explain the dynamics of the pandemic? Colin McFarlane takes a critical look at accounts that blame urban density for the drama that is unfolding in many cities. McFarlane discusses how racalized divisions are exacerbated in this situation and how new inequalities are produced. Considering Arundhati Roy's metaphor of the crisis as a portal into a new world, he points to political op...
Apr 22, 2020•41 min•Ep. 21
Insights from Mexico and Canada with Julie-Anne Boudreau Drawing on insights from her latest book "Global Urban Politics", Julie-Anne Boudreau puts the current response to the coronavirus in Mexico City and Montreal in a larger frame of understanding. She elaborates on the difference between urban and state logics of action and its importance to grasping the divergent situations. As a point of hope, she highlights that there is nothing inevitable about the current crisis developing into forms of...
Apr 18, 2020•40 min•Ep. 20
Labor, Homeschooling, and the Practice of Community Drawing on her understanding of community as an urban practice and her recent research on social and educational inequalities in Berlin, Talja Blokland underlines how the lockdown exacerbates inequalities in view of labor, education, and social capital. She presents her argument why digital media cannot replace the vital functions that social interactions in physical space play for addressing everyday concerns. And rather than celebrating the c...
Apr 08, 2020•40 min•Ep. 19
Laura Roth on Democracy and Feminism In the second part of the New Municipalism series, Ross talks to Barcelona-based scholar-activist Laura Roth. She talks about the Spanish experience, particularly in relation to Barcelona en Comú, the movement party, which has been in minority government since 2014. Laura talked about a range of issues, including the importance of feminism to new municipalism, the vision of state power in this form of politics and the setbacks experienced in Spain in recent y...
Apr 05, 2020•37 min•Ep. 18
Cooperatives, Social Media, and Local Impacts In a moment of self-isolation and physical distancing, digital media promises ongoing civic deliberation and community organizing. Nathan Schneider helps us explore the role of social media for mutual aid and peer production in times of corona. He elaborates on the key decision we face between subscribing to corporate platforms and digital cooperatives that are accountable to local communities. This is the first episode of the series "#AfterCorona: A...
Mar 31, 2020•32 min•Ep. 17
