City Road Podcast: Recent Episodes
Stories about cities and urban life
Informed stories about cities and urban life. Listen live on the Community Radio Network. Podcast on iTunes.
Australian Murray Cox is best known for creating Inside Airbnb, a data-driven advocacy project about Airbnb's impact on residential communities. On a recent trip to the University of Sydney - his alma mater - Murray talks to City Road host Bill Code about activism and tech, and his recent work exploring Airbnb's impact on the global south with Brazilian researcher Aline Cruvinel, and how the recent World Cup is impacting housing.
In this episode of City Reads, host Jacqueline Tyrrell chats with Amanda Tattersall and Kurt Iveson about their recently published book 'People Power in Cities', which identifies and examines five 'people power' strategies considered through the lens of individual case studies from around the world - from Austin Texas, to Hong Kong, Sydney, Cape Town and Barcelona. Amanda and Kurt chat to us about 'playing by the rules', 'mobilising', 'organising', 'prefiguring', and 'running for office' in the context of these case studies, and the broader 'people power ecology' they sit within.
A group of Australian researchers have recently put out a paper detailing how soaring housing costs are taking a toll on solar uptake and effectively slowing our push to net zero. There are also growing concerns that the huge uptake in household batteries - incentivised by government - is deepening inequities in the housing and energy markets. What’s the solution? Well, did someone say nationalising our rooftops? Dr Song Shi from University Technology Sydney joins host Bill Code on City Road.
What is the regenerative capacity of Country and how can First Nations knowledge be applied to achieve meaningful design outcomes and recover degraded landscapes?In this engaging live recording, we hear from experts Jess Herder, Principal, Thirriwirri, Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning; Peter Cooley, CEO, IndigiGrow; Koolyn Gordon, Housing manager, Bridge Housing; and Daryl Wells, Open Spaces Manager, Muru Mittigar.The panel discuss collaborative design outcomes in social and affordable housing projects; the fragility of the Eastern Suburbs Banksia Scrub along our coastline and the importance of planting native plants which use less water and contribute to ecological wellbeing and regeneration; and the need to integrate meaningful consultation with First Nations people and groups in planning and design processes, drawing on First Nations expertise and knowledge.This recording from the 2025 Festival of Regenerative Urbanism was held by the Henry Halloran Urban and Regional Research Initiative.
How are ancient Indigenous stories and knowledge told through art? What is a Dhomala and what does it represent in Indigenous histories? How are Indigenous artists creating their own forms of monuments in settler colonial societies?This first City Reads episode, which is part of the City Road podcast, is themed around Indigenous public art and placemaking in the broader context of colonial and Indigenous histories.In this episode, host Jacqueline Tyrrell speaks with internationally renowned artist and curator Brook Andrew and art historian and researcher Jessica Neath about their recently published book Marramarra: Indigenous Artists making History Visible. Marramarra is a powerful collection of Indigenous artworks, stories and poems from across the planet. We find out how Indigenous artists are finding pathways to visibility and healing through a broad range of artistic mediums, along with some deeper insights into global narratives from Indigenous perspectives. Listen out for more City Reads episodes in the coming months!
A renewable energy transition is top of the list when it comes to Australia's race to net zero carbon emissions. But take the temperature around Australia, and not everyone is on board. Bill Code speaks with Associate Professor Bec Colvin about the importance of taking different concerns seriously and the narrative of regional communities 'standing up' to the powerful actors sweeping in with unwanted change from the outside.Is there really a rift between the city and the country on this issue as is often made out? And what does the latest research have to tell us about renewables and farming communities, coal producing regions, regional Indigenous groups and 'just transitions'?Bill Code speaks with Associate Professor Bec Colvin from the Australian National University's Crawford School of Public Policy.
Executive Chair, Mecone;Mehnaaz Hossain, Editor, Honi Soit, The University of Sydney.Photo: Wedge-Tail Pictures
How do we regenerate civics , in an era of AI, Social Media and Post Truth? Is civil participation going through as big an upheaval as other areas of life? And what do the Brisbane Olympics have to do with a renowned board game?Originally hailed for democratising access to information, the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and pervasive social media platforms are increasingly associated with a fragmentation of public discourse and distrust of ‘mainstream’ politics. In this panel, NSW Housing Minister Rose Jackson, QUT's Professor Marcus Foth, Christine El-Khoury of newDemocracy Foundation and Dr Justine Humphry of the University of Sydney discuss the implications of new technologies for civic engagement and urban life.This recording from the 2025 Festival of Regenerative Urbanism was held by the Henry Halloran Urban and Regional Research Initiative and chaired by Dr Luke Hespanhol. Photo: Luke Hespanhol
The rapid growth of data centres in Australia and the role of AI in contributing to their proliferation is a hot topic in both planning and 'mainstream' debate. The Australian Energy Market Operator reports energy use by data centres in FY 2025 was around 2% of National Energy Market use, predicted to rise to around 6% by 2029/30Dr Bronwyn Cumbo of UTS's Transdisciplinary School and Johanna Lim from the US Studies Centre join host Bill Code to talk about some of the environmental, social and strategic considerations around planning for data centres, the so-called 'nerve centres' of our digital economy.An earlier version of this podcast claimed a widely-reported 5% figure was cited in a recent report from Mandala Partners. This was incorrect and has been changed.Photo: Jacqueline Tyrrell
Is the growing trend in e-bike and e-scooter use the key to reducing congestion on our roads - or a menace for unsuspecting pedestrians, drivers, and riders themselves? Reports of accidents are filling the airwaves as experts question how governments can best manage the rapid growth in sales of electric bikes and scooters. So, how best to regulate the confusing landscape of e-micromobility? City Road's Bill Code welcomes Dr Yuting Zhang of the University of Sydney and president of Better Streets, cycling advocate Sara Stace.
Australia is in the midst of a housing crisis. But amidst the political and media debate about the fixes to our housing woes, public housing has slipped from view. There's concern that funding commitments are a far cry from the broad based approach to public rental housing which has supported so many Australians in the past, including Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. So where does Australia go from here? Join Rebecca Pinkstone, Chief Executive of Homes NSW, Alistair Sisson of Macquarie University, City of Sydney Councillor Sylvie Ellsmore, plus public housing tenants Norrie May-Welby and Karyn Brown at this Festival of Urbanism event recorded in late 2024. Photo: Wedge-Tail Pictures
What is ‘public’ about our urban and regional transport systems - and how public should they be? Are our leaders actually serving public interests and values around public transport? Should a stick in the ground really count as a bus stop? And what the heck is a 'beg button'? In this episode of City Road a rich panel of speakers delve into the big questions surrounding public transport at the recent Festival of Urbanism, including Dr Ian Woodcock, Emma Bacon, Neill Miller, David Babineau, Dr Rebecca Clements and Dr Crystal Legacy. Photo: Andrew Thomas/Flickr
With housing the hot topic this election, a panel of experts at the recent Festival of Urbanism battled to convince a live audience that the private market could (or could not) solve Australia's housing crisis. This debate features:- The Hon Doug Cameron, Former Senator- Sharath Mahendran, Urban Planner and creator of YouTube channel Building Beautifully- Emily Sims, Uralla Shire Council- Stephanie Barker, Executive Director, Strategy and Engagement, Willowtree Planning- Luke Cass, editor, Honi Soit Newspaper 2023- Emeritus Professor Peter Phibbs, Henry Halloran Research Trust, the University of Sydney CommentaryThis debate also features commentary from Michael Koziol, Sydney editor, The Sydney Morning Herald and is chaired by Professor Nicole Gurran, Director, Henry Halloran Research Trust.Thanks for listening.See you next time on City Road.Host: Bill CodeEditor: Mikayla McGuirk-Scolaro
Welcome back to City Road. In this episode, we reflect on 2024's Festival of 'Public' Urbanism and its panel discussion on how the public life of great cities takes place in our cultural buildings and civic spaces – from libraries to museums, town halls, streets, parks and playgrounds. This special Denis Winston memorial lecture, delivered by Dr Caroline Butler-Bowdon, State Librarian and award-winning author and curator, celebrates our crucial public infrastructure as the cornerstone of public and democratic life. The keynote address is followed by an eminent panel conversation between Dr Rob Stokes, former Minister for Planning and Public Spaces, and Professor Jennifer Barrett, Professor in Museum Studies and Pro-Vice Chancellor Indigenous at the University of Sydney. The annual Festival of Urbanism is brought to you by the Henry Halloran Research Trust with the assistance of the University of Sydney School of Architecture Design and Planning. Thanks for listening. See you next time on City Road. Host: Bill CodeEditor: Mikayla McGuirk-Scolaro
This final episode of the Infrastructure Governance Incubator series focuses on a plenary discussion centred around the findings of the ‘Infrastructure Governance Incubator’ - a multidisciplinary collaborative research project across three universities – which took place at the State of Australasian Cities conference in December 2023.This discussion sought to contribute to a renewed research agenda for Australasian infrastructure governance, considering the current state of governance challenges and potential future directions. It draws on findings from the Incubator’s case study of the Western Sydney Parkland City in New South Wales, Australia, across multiple critical issues discussed across this podcast series: planning on unceded First Nations land, accountability and social legitimacy, collaborative governance and integration, and power and politics.Panel members:A/Prof. Tooran Alizadeh, Dr. Rebecca Clements, A/Prof. Glen Searle, A/prof Dallas Rogers, Elle Davidson (University of Sydney), Crystal Legacy (University of Melbourne), Liton Kamruzzaman (Monash University).Discussant: Jago Dodson (RMIT)This podcast series is sponsored by the Infrastructure Governance Incubator, a three-year (2020-2023) collaborative research platform—funded by the Henry Halloran Research Trust—across three universities (The University of Sydney, The University of Melbourne and Monash University) and in partnership with Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) NSW & Victoria.Audio recording and editing by Mikayla McGuirk-Scolaro.
Infrastructure planning is intrinsically political – but are there significant differences between how we expect infrastructure planning to occur and the reality of how it plays out? Are our current approaches to the relationship between planning and power working?In this fifth episode, we build on learnings from Victoria and consider the politics behind infrastructure decisions with Dr James Murphy, drawing on the latest book, ‘The Making and Unmaking of East-West Link’. We consider the roles of electoral strategy, the making of political rationale, and community resistance to ask how we might better unpack the way we think about infrastructure politics.Informed by: Murphy, J. C. (2022). The making and unmaking of East-West Link. Melbourne Univ. Publishing.Host: Dallas Rogers (University of Sydney)Guest: James Murphy, Crystal Legacy (University of Melbourne)This podcast series is sponsored by the Infrastructure Governance Incubator, a three-year (2020-2023) collaborative research platform—funded by the Henry Halloran Research Trust—across three universities (The University of Sydney, The University of Melbourne, and Monash University), and in partnership with Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) NSW & Victoria.Audio recording and editing by Mikayla McGuirk-Scolaro and Dallas Rogers.
The evidence shows that increasing new housing production alone won’t solve the affordability crisis. At this special event, the NSW Minister for Housing and Homelessness, the Hon. Rose Jackson MLC and a panel of experts from industry, academia, and community sectors, will outline strategies for unlocking affordable supply, from social housing to the ‘missing middle’. KEYNOTE ADDRESSThe Hon. Rose Jackson MLC, Minister for Housing, Homelessness, Mental Health, Youth, the North Coast, and WaterPANELKatie Stevenson, Executive Director Property Council of Australia NSWMark Degotardi, Chief Executive Officer, Community Housing Industry Association NSWDr Catherine Gilbert, the University of SydneyEmma Greenhalgh, CEO National Shelter CHAIRED BYProfessor Nicole Gurran, Director, Henry Halloran Research Trust
Water security is one of the most contested issues facing urban and regional communities across Australia. For growing inland cities like Canberra, conventional assumptions and approaches to water supply, catchment management, and urban planning must be reimagined in the context of climate change. This special event hosted in partnership with the Planning Institute of Australia examines the increasingly complex debates surrounding water security and asks whether and how inland cities can ever achieve true urban resilience. This event is co-hosted with the Planning Institute of Australia.SPEAKERSProfessor Barbara Norman, Foundation Chair of Urban and Regional Planning and Director of Canberra Urban and Regional Futures (CURF), the University of CanberraDanielle Francis, Manager Policy and Strategy, Water Services AustraliaDr Jason Alexandra, Research Fellow, Transformational Climate Adaptation and Water, ANU Institute for Climate, Energy & Disaster Solutions, ANU Institute for Water Futures.Dr Danswell Starrs, Water Science, Monitoring and Modelling Manager at ACT GovernmentCHAIRED BYDr Maxine Cooper FPIA, FEIANZ, Adjunct Prof UC, Chair ACT & Region Catchment Management Coordination Group, Chair Landcare ACT, and Deputy Chair National Landcare Network.
We know we must end sprawl and densify our cities, but are tall towers the answer? Can the skyscraper solve our affordable housing problem? Does high density necessarily mean high-rise, and do such developments stack up environmentally – or do they exacerbate issues such as urban heat? What are the wider benefits or disbenefits of hyper-density in terms of urban design, street making, community cohesion or accessibility? Join Saving Sydney author Dr Elizabeth Farrelly and a panel of experts for a robust discussion on whether Sydney should ‘go up or go out’, and whether this is even the right question.PANELDr Fiona Foo, Cardiologist Professor Cathy Sherry, Law School and Smart Green Cities, Macquarie UniversityTim Sneesby, Manager Strategic Planning, Waverley Council Professor Michael Chapman, Chair of Architecture and Design, University of Western Sydney CHAIRED BYDr Elizabeth Farrelly, author, journalist and Henry Halloran Research Trust Writer in Residence
How are Australia’s Indigenous and settler histories recognised and confronted in cultural heritage conservation and urban planning practice, alongside wider struggles for native title, land rights, and spatial justice? Join this conversation with a panel of experts across Indigenous history, archaeology, heritage conservation, urban planning and design. SPEAKERSProfessor Bronwyn Carlson, Head of Department of Indigenous Studies, Macquarie UniversityStephen Gapps, Senior Associate Historian, Artefact Heritage ServicesSeth Dias, PHD Candidate at the USYD school of Architecture, Design and PlanningInnez HauaJess Herder, Senior Associate, ThirriwirriCHAIRED BYProfessor Michael Mossman, Associate Dean Indigenous Strategy and Services, the University of Sydney
In recent years a new movement known as ‘YIMBY’ (‘Yes In My Backyard’) has emerged. ‘YIMBIES’ argue that planning and regulatory barriers serving local ‘NIMBY’ (‘Not In My Backyard’ property owners) block new and higher density housing, causing affordability pressures across the market. By contrast, many so called ‘NIMBIES’ reject the proposition that ‘supply’ is the only solution to high cost housing. In this session, housing advocates and experts debate the proposition that supply side barriers are to blame for Australia’s housing crisis and recommend strategies to fix the housing system.SPEAKERSEamon Waterford, CEO, Committee for Sydney Max Holleran, Lecturer in Social Policy, the University of Melbourne Melissa Neighbour, Principal Planner, Sky PlanningMichael Koziol, Sydney editor, The Sydney Morning HeraldCHAIRED BYProfessor Nicole Gurran, Director Henry Halloran Research Trust, the University of Sydney
Episode 3: Innovating urban governance: the Creative BureaucratDoes creativity have a place in City Hall? The idea that bureaucracy should or can be creative certainly runs counter to common ideas we have of city government. But recently, that has begun to change. Innovation in city governance is being recast as ‘creative problem solving’. Drawing on stories from city governments around the world, in this third episode of ‘Innovating Cities’, Tom Baker and Pauline McGuirk discuss what it takes to build creative capacity within bureaucracies.Tom Baker is Associate Professor in the School of Environment, University of Auckland. His research focuses on how public policies are made and implemented, addressing social, institutional, ideological and spatial dimensions.Pauline McGuirk is Senior Professor of urban geography and Director of the Australian Centre for Culture, Environment, Society and Space, University of Wollongong. Her work revolves around critical studies of urban governance, its changing geographies, material practices and politics, and the differential implications for urban places, communities, subjectivities and power.For more information about our podcast series, including transcripts, go to: https://uow.info/innovating-cities Find out more about our research project Innovating urban governance: practices for enhanced urban futures at: https://www.uow.edu.au/the-arts-social-sciences-humanities/research/access/research/rce/ Special guests Anne-Marie Croce, Program Lead, Customer Experience Transformation and Innovation, City of TorontoBrad Badelt, Director of Sustainability, City of Vancouver, CityStudio Vancouver. James Corless, Executive Director, Sacramento Area Council of GovernmentsEliza Erickson, former Director of Innovation and Strategy, Office of Innovation and Technology, City of PhiladelphiaJames Wagner, Chief Financial Officer, Office of Performance, Strategy and Innovation, City of TulsaArna Ýr Sævarsdóttir, Service and Digital Transformation Manager, Department of Services & Innovation, City of ReykjavikMichele D’Alena, Director, Civic Imagination Office, City of BolognaKris Carter, former Co-Chair, Boston Mayor's Office of New Urban MechanicsTerrance Smith, Former Director of the Innovation Unit, City of MobileThis podcast episode was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant ARCDP200100176 Innovating urban governance: practices for enhanced urban futures, a joint project by the University of Wollongong, the University of Sydney and the University of Auckland. Audio recording and editing by Jennifer Macey. Additional editing by Emily Perkins. Coordination by Laura Goh. Special thanks to Brian Dwyer.
With rising recognition of the health and environmental benefits of active transport, there are increasing struggles between users of footpaths, roads and curbs. Not only are streets important transportation routes, as demonstrated over the Pandemic period, they have also become recognised as important public spaces for social activities, from dining to market stalls or food production. This session interrogates the emerging struggles over street spaces still dominated by roads and parking. SPEAKERSTegan Mitchell, Manager Major Transport Projects, City of SydneyDr Rebecca Clements, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, the University of SydneyBenjamin Carr, Co-founder, Lug+Carrie e-bike hireCHAIRED BYDr Jennifer Kent, Senior Research Fellow in Urbanism, the University of Sydney
Australia’s legal frameworks for biodiversity conservation and environmental protection are intended to preserve and enhance the nation’s natural and cultural heritage while enabling appropriate forms of urban development and infrastructure. Yet Commonwealth Environmental Protection & Biodiversity Conservation law has been deemed unfit for purpose, while the states pledge ongoing reforms to make land use systems faster and more responsive to enable residential development and major projects. Key issues include certification and offsetting processes for biodiversity or heritage and whether alternative approaches, from avoiding development altogether to better protecting and enhancing conservation outcomes are possible.PANELRachel Walmsley, Head of Policy & Law Reform, Environmental Defenders OfficeRowena Welsh-Jarrett, Indigenous Heritage Expert, Bila GroupAssociate Professor Ed Couzens, Law School, the University of SydneyCHAIRED BYProfessor Rosemary Lyster, Climate and Environmental Law, the University of SydneyHosted in partnership with the Sydney Environment Institute.
Meaningful public accountability in infrastructure governanceThis episode considers the challenges of, and possibilities for, meaningful accountability in infrastructure governance. Public accountability is often publicly demanded or politically signalled, but much more rarely unpacked or discussed in depth. This episode discusses the importance of accountability in infrastructure and planning governance, and its multiple intersecting social understandings. We discuss the importance of scrutinising our current accountability approaches, power relationships, and contextual challenges in order to build more open and collaborative governance. We also hear insights from Roberta Ryan, the Independent Community Commissioner involved with the Western Parkland City. Researchers present: Rebecca Clements, Tooran AlizadehGuest: Roberta RyanThis podcast series is sponsored by the Infrastructure Governance Incubator, a three-year (2020-2023) collaborative research platform—funded by the Henry Halloran Research Trust—across three universities (The University of Sydney, The University of Melbourne, and Monash University), and in partnership with Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) NSW & Victoria. Audio recording and editing by Mikayla Scolaro and Dallas Rogers.
Episode 2: Innovating urban governance: Design ThinkingWhat is design thinking and how might it be useful for city governments? In this second episode of ‘Innovating Cities’, Robyn Dowling and Sophia Maalsen discuss how design thinking is being conceptualised and operationalised in city governance innovation. Drawing from examples internationally and in Australia, they ask what design thinking means to those who use it, what it is used for, and how using design thinking may open up new opportunities to address urban problems. Robyn Dowling is Dean of the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney. Her current research is concerned with the ways in which urban governance and urban life are responding to climate change, technological disruptions and the diffusion of innovation practices.Sophia Maalsen is Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney. She is currently researching the application of computational logics and technologies to “hack housing” and address issues of housing affordability and innovation. Her research is predominantly situated at the intersection of the digital and material across urban spaces, housing and governance.For more information about our podcast series, including transcripts, go to: https://uow.info/innovating-cities Find out more about our research project Innovating urban governance: practices for enhanced urban futures at: https://www.uow.edu.au/the-arts-social-sciences-humanities/research/access/research/rce/ Special guests Eliza Erickson, former Director of Innovation and StrategyOffice of Innovation and Technology, City of PhiladelphiaArna Ýr Sævarsdóttir, Service and Digital Transformation ManagerDepartment of Services & Innovation, City of ReykjavikKris Carter, former Co-ChairBoston Mayor's Office of New Urban MechanicsTerrance Smith, Former Director of the Innovation UnitCity of MobileDuane Elverum, Executive Director and Co-FounderCityStudio VancouverAnne-Marie Croce, Program LeadCustomer Experience Transformation and Innovation, City of TorontoShane Waring, LeadDublin Beta LabThis podcast episode was supported by the Australian Research Council under Grant ARCDP200100176 Innovating urban governance: practices for enhanced urban futures, a joint project by the University of Wollongong, the University of Sydney and the University of Auckland. Audio recording and editing by Jennifer Macey. Additional editing by Emily Perkins. Coordination and additional scripting by Laura Goh.
There is ongoing concern about the localised impacts of globally owned platforms on the ways in which we use our homes and cities. From the housing market and neighbourhood impacts of Airbnb style platforms through to the less visible implications of automated urban systems, this session asks how communities can best understand and harness digitalisation to create positive opportunities, while managing risks.PANELProfessor Simon Marvin, the University of Sydney and the Director of the Urban Institute at Sheffield University Dr Luke Hespanhol, Senior Lecturer in Design, the University of Sydney Cecille Weldon, Proptech Association Australia Dr Allan McCay, Deputy Director of The Sydney Institute of Criminology and Academic Fellow, Law School, the University of SydneyCHAIRED BYDr Sophia Maalsen, Lecturer in Urbanism, the University of Sydney
From preserving heritage to defining flood planning levels or calculating open space requirements, planning processes, and decisions are inherently bound by assumptions and practices from the past. In this inaugural lecture, Dr Robert Stokes, former minister for Planning, Public Spaces, and Cities, will reflect on how these ‘wicked’ assumptions shape contemporary cities and define their future trajectory. Following Dr Stoke’s lecture, an eminent panel of policy and industry leaders will discuss whether and how outdated and detrimental planning assumptions can be contested and overcome.KEYNOTEDr Rob Stokes, Former Minister for Planning, Public Spaces, Cities, Infrastructure, Transport, Education, Environment and HeritagePANELDillon Kombumerri, Principal Architect Government Architect NSW, Department of Planning and Environment Davina Rooney, Chief Executive Officer, Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA) Michelle Cramer, Future Communities Leader, Australia, GHD PANEL CHAIRProfessor Nicole Gurran, Director, Henry Halloran Research Trust
Episode 1: Innovating urban governance: the work of Innovation UnitsIn this first episode in the Innovating Cities Series, Pauline McGuirk and Tom Baker discuss what innovating city governance means and explore one key example of urban governance innovation in practice: innovation units. Drawing from research on innovation units in the United States, Europe and Australia, the team tackles questions around how these innovation units work, what they hope to achieve, and the challenges they encounter in practice. The episode also raises wider questions about the longer termed implications of working in ‘innovation mode’ for urban governance.GuestsPauline McGuirk is Senior Professor of urban geography and Director of the Australian Centre for Culture, Environment, Society and Space, University of Wollongong.Tom Baker is Associate Professor in the School of Environment, University of Auckland.Thanks to our special guests Eliza Erickson (former Director of Innovation and Strategy,Office of Innovation and Technology, City of Philadelphia); James Corless (Executive Director, Sacramento Area Council of Governments); Nico Diaz Amigo (Chief Innovation & Data OfficerOffice of Accountability, Performance, & Innovation, City of Syracuse); and Shane Waring (Lead Dublin Beta Lab).Innovating Cities SeriesAcross the series of episodes the Innovating Urban Governance team will be exploring these questions in conversation with practitioners from around the world about their insights in to the work of innovating city governance and its implications
New Orleans and Australia's Northern Rivers are miles apart but share similarities when it comes to natural disasters. This session shines a light on the difficult questions confronting communities as they seek to rebuild more resilient settlements in the wake of devastating natural disasters. Drawing on the experiences of flood urbanist Professor Elizabeth Mossop, and community leader Dan Etheridge, both of whom were at the front line of the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina response and rebuilding process, this special event asks what lessons can be learned from that experience and what planning, design, governance, and financial frameworks are needed to help other communities affected by catastrophic disaster and ongoing climate risk.PANELProfessor Elizabeth Mossop, Dean of School of Design, Architecture and Building, University Technology Sydney Dan Etheridge, Director Living Lab, Northern Rivers Jamie Simmonds, Principal Consultant, Water TechnologyCHAIRED BYNicole Gurran, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, Director, Henry Halloran Research Trust, the University of Sydney
From fragmentation to integration: Building collaborative governance Different types of infrastructure need to work together to build and support great places and communities. Most of us can recognise the kinds of siloed and fragmented planning we see around us, but what do we mean when we make demands for, or promises of, “integrated governance”? This episode looks at the diverse challenges of trying to understand and enact integrated infrastructure governance within our highly fractured systems, including how government scales and institutions collaborate. We also hear insights about recent attempts at government integration from Joanna Kubota at the Western Parkland Councils (now called The Parks), an alliance of eight local governments involved in planning the Western Parkland City.Researchers present: Glen Searle and Crystal LegacyGuest: Joanna Kubota (Western Parkland Councils)ProductionThis podcast series is sponsored by the Infrastructure Governance Incubator, a three-year (2020-2023) collaborative research platform—funded by the Henry Halloran Research Trust—across three universities (The University of Sydney, The University of Melbourne, and Monash University), and in partnership with Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) NSW & Victoria.Audio recording and editing by Mikayla Scolaro and Dallas Rogers.
We're talking with Professor Kate Fullagar about her new book on Bennelong and Phillip. Grab the book here: https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/Bennelong-and-Phillip/Kate-Fullagar/9781761108174This book provides the first joint biography of Bennelong and Governor Arthur Phillip, two pivotal figures in Australian history – the colonised and coloniser – and a bold and innovative new portrait of both.Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians, Phillip the colony’s first governor, and Bennelong the Yiyura leader. The pair have come to represent the conflict that flared and has never settled.Fullagar’s account is also the first full biography of Bennelong of any kind and it challenges many misconceptions, among them that he became alienated from his people and that Phillip was a paragon of Enlightenment benevolence. It tells the story of the men’s marriages, including Bennelong’s best-known wife, Barangaroo, and Phillip’s unusual domestic arrangements, and places the period in the context of the Aboriginal world and the demands of empire.To present this history afresh, Bennelong & Phillip relates events in reverse, moving beyond the limitations of typical Western ways of writing about the past, which have long privileged the coloniser over the colonised. Bennelong’s world was hardly linear at all, and in Fullagar’s approach his and Phillip’s histories now share an equally unfamiliar framing.Kate Fullagar is professor of history at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, in the Australian Catholic University, and co-editor of the journal History Australia. Her book The Warrior, The Voyager and the Artist won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction at the 2021 NSW Premier’s Awards.
Jamie Peck talks with Gareth Bryant and Sophie Webber about their new book Climate Finance: Taking a Position on Climate Futures. Responding to climate change is commonly understood as a financial challenge: What are the expected costs of the impacts of climate change? How much money is needed to reduce emissions to a safe level and to help people live in a changing climate? Who should pay? While these questions reflect the big issues of climate politics - about historical responsibility, unequal exposure and the terms of possible futures - they do not tell us a lot about the relationships between and contestations over climate change and finance capitalism. This book develops an expansive definition of climate finance and a critical framework for analysing its political economy. Drawing from a wide-range of case studies, the authors highlight the diversity, scale and contradictions of climate finance entanglements - from funding renewable energy, putting a price on carbon, responsible investing and financialising resilience.Sophie is an ARC DECRA Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Geography in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney.Gareth Bryant is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the University of Sydney. He works as a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Economy and as economist-in-residence with the Sydney Policy Lab.This interview is a part of the 2023 Festival of Urbanism Book Club Podcast series
Dallas Rogers talks with Stephen Gapps about his new book, Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance — The Bathurst War, 1822–1824‘In May 1824, what can only be described as a period of all-out, total gudyarra (‘war’ in the Wiradyuri language) had begun west of the Blue Mountains. Relations between Wiradyuri people and the colonists in the country around Bathurst had completely broken down, and the number of raids and killings occurring across isolated stock stations in the district had intensified.’ In Gudyarra, Stephen Gapps – award-winning author of The Sydney Wars – unearths what led to this furious and bloody war, beginning with the occupation of Wiradyuri lands by Europeans following Governor Macquarie’s push to expand the colony west over the Blue Mountains to generate wealth from sheep and cattle. Gudyarra traces the co-ordinated resistance warfare by the Wiradyuri under the leadership of Windradyne, and others such as Blucher and Jingler, that occurred in a vast area across the central west of New South Wales. Detailing the drastic counterattacks by the colonists and the punitive expeditions led by armed parties of colonists and convicts that often ended in massacres of Wiradyuri women and children, Gapps provides an important new historical account of the fierce Wiradyuri resistance.Stephen Gapps has a long-standing interest in public history and the history of early colonial Sydney. In 2011 he won the NSW Premiers History Prize for Regional and Community history with my book Cabrogal to Fairfield – A history of a multicultural community. Since then he has held a position as a curator at the Australian National Maritime Museum. In 2014 he developed the exhibition War at Sea – The Navy in WWI and in 2015 curated the highly successful Black Armada – Australian support for Indonesian independence 1945-1949. In 2018 he worked on concept development of the new permanent displays at the museum that explore deep time and Australian maritime history. In 2017 he was awarded the NSW State Library Merewether Fellowship for a project on Australian resistance warfare for publication in May 2018 called The Sydney Wars – Conflict in the early colony 1788-1817, which became a book project. His most recent book is Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance — The Bathurst War, 1822–1824.This interview is a part of the 2023 Festival of Urbanism Book Club Podcast series
Adam David Morton, Professor of Political Economy in the Discipline of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, talks with Mark Steven about his new book, Class War: A Literary History.
This book is a thrilling and vivid work of history, Class War weaves together literature and politics to chart the making and unmaking of social class through revolutionary combat. In a narrative that spans the globe and more than two centuries of history, Mark Steven traces the history of class war from the Haitian Revolution to Black Lives Matter. Surveying the literature of revolution, from the poetry of Shelley and Byron to the novels of Émile Zola and Jack London, exploring the writings of Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Assata Shakur, Class War reveals the interplay between military action and the politics of class, showing how solidarity flourishes in times of conflict. Written with verve and ranging across diverse historical settings, Class War traverses industrial battles, guerrilla insurgencies, and anticolonial resistance, as well as large-scale combat operations waged against capitalism’s regimes and its interstate system. In our age of economic crisis, ecological catastrophe, and planetary unrest, Steven tells the stories of those whose actions will help guide future militants toward a revolutionary horizon.
Mark Steven is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. He is the author of Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism (2017) and Splatter Capital (2017).
This interview is a part of the 2023 Festival of Urbanism Book Club Podcast series
Joe Penny, Lecturer in Global Urbanism at the UCL Urban Laboratory in London, talks with Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago about his alternative history of capitalist urbanization through the lens of the commons.
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.
Álvaro Sevilla Buitrago is Associate Professor of Planning History and Theory, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (http://multipliciudades.org/). Blending critical spatial theory and urban history, his research traces the role of planning in the genealogy of capitalist territorial formations, understanding it as a device for the dispossession and reconfiguration of autonomous modes of social reproduction.
This interview is a part of the 2023 Festival of Urbanism Book Club Podcast series
Dallas talks with A/Prof Dinesh Wadiwel about his new book on the industrial production of animals for food, and where cities fit into this process.
This book provides the first systematic application of Marx’s value theory to animal labour within the context of capitalist food systems. Dinesh applies Marx’s value theory which builds on and adapts recent work in animal studies, posthumanities, critical race theory and feminist theory to provide new insights into human-animal relations under capitalism. He explores animals as labour, and the implications for the interaction of human and animal labour forces. The book presents animal-sourced food as a means of subsistence and social reproduction for human populations, and it elaborates on animal resistance and its role within capitalist production. Building on Karl Marx’s value theory, Dinesh argues that factory farms and industrial fisheries are not merely an example of unchecked human supremacism. Nor a result of the victory of market forces. But a combination of both. In Animals and Capital Dinesh untangles this contemporary handshake between hierarchical anthropocentrism and capitalism.
Dinesh is an Associate Professor in human rights and socio-legal studies, with a background in social and political theory. He is an expert in human animal studies, and disability rights. He has a background working within civil society organisations, including in anti-poverty and disability rights roles.
This interview is a part of the 2023 Festival of Urbanism Book Club Podcast series
How is infrastructure entangled with the legacies and ongoing processes of settler-coloniality? How might we give more meaningful attention to planning for Country and with Indigenous sovereignties?Cities in so-called Australia are built on unceded First Nations land. We talk about what this means for the way we understand and do infrastructure planning, and the responsibilities of planning professions. Asking these types of questions unsettles many governance assumptions, and prompts infrastructure professions to question ‘who gets to decide?’, ‘whose knowledge is prioritised?’, and ‘who benefits?’.
Guests Elle Davidson, Aboriginal Planning Lecturer, Balanggarra woman from the East Kimberley and descendant of Captain William Bligh
Associate Professor Tooran Alizadeh, Research lead of the Henry Halloran Trust Infrastructure Governance Incubator at the University of Sydney
Dr Rebecca Clements, Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Henry Halloran Trust Infrastructure Governance Incubator at the University of Sydney
This discussion was informed by the research conducted as part of the Infrastructure Governance Incubator. This is a multi-university, multidisciplinary research platform funded by the Henry Halloran Trust, hosted by the University of Sydney in partnership with Monash University, the University of Melbourne, and Planning Institute of Australia (NSW and Victorian branches).
Interview with Anne Lacaton & Jean-Philippe Vassal, 2021 Pritzker Prize Laureates and the Rothwell Program Co-Chairs at the University of Sydney’s School of Architecture, Design and Planning.
Architecture is about freedom, generosity, pleasure. Large spaces generate an essential feeling of escape and freedom. Large spaces facilitate appropriation, foster relationships within spaces, to allow for pleasurable situations, to encourage relations between people and promote social life. Enlarging does not mean wasting. Enlarging does not mean costing more. It means inventing space for uses and going beyond the norms and standards which reduce the living space.
“TRANSFORMATION IS THE OPPORTUNITY OF DOING MORE AND BETTER WITH WHAT IS ALREADY EXISTING. THE DEMOLISHING IS A DECISION OF EASINESS AND SHORT TERM. IT IS A WASTE OF MANY THINGS—A WASTE OF ENERGY, A WASTE OF MATERIAL, AND A WASTE OF HISTORY. MOREOVER, IT HAS A VERY NEGATIVE SOCIAL IMPACT. FOR US, IT IS AN ACT OF VIOLENCE.” Anne Lacaton & Jean-Philippe Vassal
Some claim the pandemic has ushered in a "post work" era when the concepts of work, workplace, and commute are being remade. Digital technologies, artificial intelligence, co-creation and multi-locational work sites are creating new spaces for work and encouraging the merging of work and non-work spaces like never before. These changes are also hastening the development of unequal labour landscapes across our cities. This panel explores the impact of the "post-work" condition on how we work in, move through, and engage in the city.This event has been co-organised with the Australasian Cities Research Network.PanelDr. Jim Stanford is an economist and Director of the Centre for Future Work. Jim founded the Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute in 2016. He has served for over 20 years as Economist and Director of Policy with Unifor, Canada’s largest private-sector trade union. He divides his time between Vancouver, B.C., and Sydney Australia.Jason Lindsay is the founding partner of the successful Petridish Shared Office Space that celebrated its five year’s mark in 2021. With a career working in film and television in the United Stated and New Zealand Jason is now heavily invested in helping start-ups design products through his “Inventors’ Lab.”Charlotte Lockhart is the founder of the 4 Day Week Global campaign she works promoting internationally the benefits of a productivity-focused and reduced-hour workplace. She is also on the board of the Wellbeing Research Centre at Oxford University.Katharine McKinnon is a professor and the director of the Centre for Sustainable Communities at the University of Canberra. Katharine is also the chair of Community Economies Institute Australia. Katharine has extensively published on topics of community wellbeing and development and economies of care.Marcus Spiller is the founding partner at the SGS Economics and Planning with a core passion is social justice. Marcus is past National President of the Planning Institute of Australia. He has served on the Commonwealth Government’s National Housing Supply Council. He is a Ministerial appointee to the Housing Supply Expert Panel for South East Queensland and sits on the Ministerial Advisory Committee on planning mechanisms for affordable housing in Victoria.Etienne Nel is Professor and heads the School of Geography at the University of Otago, New Zealand. He has more than 30 years of experience in researching economic and urban history and development. Eteinne extensively teaches on Economic Geography in the Post-World War II era.Ashraful Alam coordinates the Master of Planning Programme at the University of Otago. He teaches Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work. Ash is the committee member of the Australasian Cities Research Network ACRN.
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.PanelBambang Brodjonegoro, Former Minister of National Development Planning, Indonesia (Bappenas). Bambang Brodjonegoro has devoted his knowledge and experience to Indonesia in various roles. In his career in government, he has served as Minister of Finance (2014 - 2016), Minister of National Development Planning (PPN) / Head of the National Development Planning Agency (Bappenas) (2016 - 2019), and Minister of Research and Technology / Head of Research and Innovation Agency National (2019 - 2021).Eka Permanasari, Associate Professor of Urban Design, Monash University Indonesia. Eka is an Associate Professor in Urban Design at Monash Indonesia. Her research deals with the political insinuation in architecture and urban design. She has led several strategic national projects for the Jakarta Government, such as the Jakarta Giant Sea Wall, the integration of Jakarta MRT and LRT lines and Jakarta TOD urban renewal projects, as well as the development of child-friendly community centre namely Ruang Publik terpadu Ramah Anak (abbreviated as RPTRA) in Jakarta.Sibarani Sofian, Founder and Director of URBAN+ (architect for Nusantara) and Adjunct Associate Professor, Monash University Indonesia. Sibarani is Founder and Director of URBAN+ practice that he started in 2017, together with several key urban and design experts, to assist clients and cities in creating compelling urban projects. He also teaches at Monash University Indonesia in the Master in Urban Design. With a wealth of experience and networks of key players in urban developments in Indonesia, Sibarani and his URBAN+ team are spearheading strategic infrastructure-driven planning (ie.TOD, Aerotropolis, Port City) and other master planning communities or mixed use projects with the aim of develop better built environments. His firm URBAN+ is in charge of designing Jakarta's new capital.Dr Jemma Purdey, ReelOzInd! Fellow, Australia-Indonesia Centre and Adjunct Fellow, Deakin University. Jemma Purdey is a fellow at the Australia-Indonesia Centre, Monash University. Her research interests include politics, and human rights in Indonesia and Australia’s relationship with Indonesia. Purdey is Chair of the board that publishes the magazine Inside Indonesia and co-host of the podcast Talking Indonesia and founding Director of ReelOzInd! Australia Indonesia Short Film Competition & Festival.
Systematic Literature ReviewThis 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 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 climate crisis.In this series, we shine a light on some of the key challenges and opportunities for transforming the way we think about and do infrastructure governance, such as:- Who should be involved in decision making?- How can we better collaborate with communities?- How do we address planning on unceded Indigenous land?GuestsDr Liton Kamruzzaman, Associate Professor in Urban Planning & Design within Monash Art Design & Architecture (MADA).Dr Rebecca Clements, Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Henry Halloran Trust Infrastructure Governance Incubator at the University of Sydney.ProductionThis podcast series is sponsored by the Infrastructure Governance Incubator, a three-year (2020-2023) collaborative research platform—funded by the Henry Halloran Research Trust—across three universities (The University of Sydney, The University of Melbourne, and Monash University), and in partnership with Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) NSW & Victoria. Audio recording and editing by Mikayla Scolaro and Dallas Rogers.
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 climate crisis.In this series, we shine a light on some of the key challenges and opportunities for transforming the way we think about and do infrastructure governance, such as:- Who should be involved in decision making?- How can we better collaborate with communities?- How do we address planning on unceded Indigenous land?Episode 1: Transformation of what?This first episode sets out some of the big questions and challenges for thinking about how to transform infrastructure governance.It looks at the research agenda informing the work of the Infrastructure Governance Incubator. The discussion includes findings from a systematic literature review of the topic, which reveals a need for more research focused on reckoning with settler coloniality and planning on unceded First Nations land, the societal end goals of infrastructure, and how we understand, and do, governance integration to better link strategic planning with actual infrastructure delivery.These questions not only challenge our understandings of what infrastructure is meant to achieve and how we deliver it, but who is involved in setting agendas and priorities.GuestsAssociate Professor Tooran Alizadeh, Research lead of the Henry Halloran Trust Infrastructure Governance Incubator at the University of SydneyDr Rebecca Clements, Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Henry Halloran Trust Infrastructure Governance Incubator at the University of SydneyProductionThis podcast series is sponsored by the Infrastructure Governance Incubator, a three-year (2020-2023) collaborative research platform—funded by the Henry Halloran Research Trust—across three universities (The University of Sydney, The University of Melbourne, and Monash University), and in partnership with Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) NSW & Victoria. Audio recording and editing by Mikayla Scolaro and Dallas Rogers.
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.The book review is on the Urban Studies website:https://www.urbanstudiesonline.com/resources/resource/book-review-forum-podcast-the-surrounds/
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 challenges and opportunities.Festival of Urbanism PanelDr Allison Stewart is the Deputy CEO of Infrastructure Victoria (IV). She is a mega-project leader and strategist and led IV’s automated and zero emission vehicle infrastructure research.Mr Damon Rao is a Senior Transport Planner in the City of Melbourne. He has been leading the City’s e-scooter pilot program.Prof Graham Currie is a renowned international public transport research leader and policy advisor. He is researching the long-term impacts of autonomous vehicles on cities.Dr Crystal Legacy is an Associate Professor in Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne. She has researched widely on the governance of disruptive transport technologies.DiscussantDr Liton Kamruzzaman is an Associate Professor in Urban Planning and Design at Monash University. His research focuses on the nexus of transport and land use planning.
Despite existing technological capabilities, deeply entrenched barriers to sustainable and equitable transitions often fall to questions of urban governance.Festival of Urbanism PanelChair: Associate Professor Tooran Alizadeh Haruka Miki-Imoto, Operations Officer for the World Bank in JapanProfessor Tim Bunnell from the National University of SingaporeJames O’Keefe, the Director of the Roads to Home Program in the NSW Department of Planning and EnvironmentDr Aidan While, University of Sheffield, Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield.
We have an exciting new project with a fantastic new partner coming very soon! You can have a sneaky listen now 🤓
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.PanelDr Abby Mellick Lopes, University of Technology Sydney Gabriele Morelli, University of Milan-Bicocca Dr Michelle Zeibots, University of Technology Sydney Dr Stephen Healy, Western Sydney UniversityChaired byDr Adrienne Keane, University of SydneyAssociate Professor Abby Mellick Lopes is a design studies scholar engaged in interdisciplinary, design-led social research and the Director of Postgraduate Design Studies at UTS. Her research practice brings design into relation with a vast range of disciplines that includes cultural studies, geography, urban studies and sociology. Gabriele Morelli is a PhD Student in Urban Studies at the University of Milan-Bicocca and currently a visiting fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society (Western Sydney University). His ongoing research project is on the transformative potential of Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) initiatives in a Southern European urban context: the city of Bologna. He has also been active in several grassroots organizations, cooperatives and collectives in Bologna. Michelle Zeibots is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering at UTS and transport planner, specialising in the analysis of sustainable urban passenger transport systems. She is also a farmer located in the Lithgow Region in Central NSW where she produces organically grown garlic using regenerative agricultural farming methods that contribute to the circular economy. Stephen Healy is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Western Sydney’s Institute for Culture and Society. His research has concentrated on the relationship between economy, subjectivity and the enactment of new econo-socialities exploring various topics: health care reform policy, cooperative and regional development, and the solidarity economy movement. Adrienne Keane is a Senior Lecturer, researcher and urban planner. Her primary research interest is in the area of statutory land use planning particularly the consequences of policies in nature conservation. Adrienne is a graduate of the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning having completed a Master in Urban and Regional Planning and a PhD. Current research falls under the umbrella of protecting natural values in cities.
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 innovation and emerging forms of digital automation across the urban sector, this session engages critically with notions of the ‘smart city’. Will the future city be dictated by ‘techno-capitalist’ firms or are ‘smart’ and socially accountable forms of urban governance still possible?PanelDr Niels Van Doorn, Amsterdam University Dr Sarah Barns, Urban Strategist & ResearcherDr Justine Humphry, University of Sydney Rory Brown, Smart Places at Transport for NSW Chaired byDr Sophia Maalsen, University of SydneyNiels van Doorn is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture in the Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam, and the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded Platform Labor research project (2018-2023). His research asks how digital platforms are reshaping how people work, earn a living, and care for each other in urban environments. Niels holds PhD in Communication Science (2010) from the University of Amsterdam. Dr. Sarah Barns brings two decades of experience navigating and shaping the impacts of digital transformation for cities and communities. She is author ofPlatform Urbanism: Negotiating Platform Ecosystems in Connected Cities (Palgrave, 2020) and a practitioner, researcher and strategist in place-based media and urban digital governance. Currently a Co-Director of urban media practice Esem Projects, Sarah is also an Industry Fellow at the QUT Design Lab and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Melbourne Centre for Cities.Dr Justine Humphry is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures in the Department of Media and Communications at the University of Sydney. Justine researches the cultures and politics of digital media and emerging technologies with a focus on the social consequences of mobile, smart and data-driven technologies. Her recent research addresses the materialisation of smart cities and the datafication of urban life with a focus on the mediation of home and urban space through smart street furniture, smart voice assistants and robotics. Rory Brown is the A/Executive Director Smart Places at Transport for NSW. In this role he leads the NSW Government to deliver great places and outcomes for people using connected technologies and data solutions, working collaboratively across all tiers of government, with the research and academia sector and industry. He was also the architect of the flagship Smart Western City Program to co-create the Western Parkland City as a future-focused, digitally enabled city. Sophia Maalsen is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. Her research is predominantly situated at the intersection of the digital and material across urban spaces and governance, housing, and feminism, with particular interest in the digital mediation and reconfiguration of relationships across these spaces.
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 those working towards zero carbon outcomes through the planning system, and the opportunities they see to advance this ambition.This event has been co-organised with the Planning Institute of AustraliaPanelPeter Murrell, Senior Sustainability Advisor, Infrastructure, Strategy & Planning, VPAEuan Williamson, Environmentally Sustainable Development Advisor, City of YarraNatasha Palich, Executive Officer, Council Alliance for a Sustainable Built Environment (MAV)Ellen Witte, Principal & Partner SGS Economics and PlanningModeratorJane Keddie, Director Hansen Partnership & Vice-President PIA Victoria.Co-organised with the Planning Institute of Australia
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.PanelDr. Margaret Cook is an environmental historian who specialises in the history of ‘natural’ disasters in Australia, especially floods. The history of floods in the Brisbane River catchment was the subject of her PhD (UQ 2018) and is now a book, A River with a City Problem: A History of Brisbane Floods (UQ Press, 2019).Lionel Frost is an associate professor in the Department of Economics, and Head of the Monash Business School (Peninsula Campus). He is author of several books and articles on Australian and US urban history and Pacific Rim history, including contributions to the Cambridge History of Australia (2013), Cambridge World History (2015), and Cambridge Economic History of Australia (2015). He is current president of the Economic History Society of Australia and New Zealand.Dr. Ruth Morgan is an environmental historian, whose prize-winning work on the histories of water and climate has been generously funded by the Australian Research Council and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She is a lead author in Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report.Martin Shanahan is Professor of Economic and Business History at the University of South Australia and Elof Hansson Visiting Professor in International Business and Trade at Gothenburg University, Sweden. A recipient of the Butlin Prize in Economic History, he has also written on wealth and income distribution, international cartels, and water markets.ModeratorMs Claire Smith, Department of Management, Monash Business School
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 Levinson is a built environment professional in Sydney and a voracious reader of all things urban. Matt has a lifelong passion for cities, culture and social change, and now leads corporate affairs and communication for the city’s peak advocacy and urban policy think tank, the Committee for Sydney.
Professor Nicole Gurran is an urban planner, and as you'll learn in this conversation a keen reader of speculative fiction.
The panel opens by talking about The City We Became, a speculative fiction novel by N. K. Jemisin.
Your host is Dr Rebecca Clements. — City Road and The Henry Halloran Trust partnered to bring you this Festival of Urbanism podcast series.
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, Australia’s largest cities – Sydney and Melbourne – witnessed population loss last year, while many regional areas have experienced an influx of new residents. Some analysts view this shift as a temporary, pandemic driven phenomenon which has only exacerbated the regional housing crisis, but others see rich and dynamic opportunities for sustainable growth beyond metropolitan Australia. 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.
The Henry Halloran Research Trust would like to acknowledge the support of the Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) in hosting this panel event.
Panel Aunty Edna Stewart, Wiradjuri Elder Andrew Boyd Barber, Urban Planner Dr Julie Rudner, La Trobe University
Keynote address Nicole Gurran, Professor, Urban and Regional Planning, Director Henry Halloran Research Trust, the University of Sydney
Chaired by Michael Keys, Regional Growth NSW Development Corporation
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 is needed to bring about a more inclusive and sustainable future.
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 is needed to bring about a more inclusive and sustainable future.
Panel Jenny Leong, Greens Member, NSW Parliament Rebecca Pinkstone, Bridge Housing Leo Patterson Ross, NSW Tenants Union Carrie Hamilton, Housing Action Network John Engeler, Shelter NSW Ben Spies-Butcher, Macquarie University
Chaired by Nicole Gurran, Professor, Urban and Regional Planning, Director Henry Halloran Research Trust, the University of Sydney
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 enveloped the metropolis and surrounds to the urban exodus sparked by two years of global pandemic, from “faulty towers” to ongoing concerns about unbridled development – we must now ask: is it still possible to save the Sydney we love from rampant gentrification, environmental degradation, and climate catastrophe?
In this event inspired by Elizabeth Farrelly’s acclaimed book ‘Killing Sydney’ (Picador, 2021), we challenged creative thinkers, activists, and scholars from a range of disciplines to share their top-of-the-list solutions for saving our city. Convened by prominent columnist, architectural critic and author Dr Farrelly, we invite you to join this frank and fearless conversation about Sydney’s future.
Panel Michael Rodrigues, Investment NSW Kerri Glasscock, Sydney Fringe Festival Prof Chris Gibson, University of Wollongong Dr Lyndal Hugo, Urban food entrepreneur Prof Philip Thalis, Architect Prof Michelle Leishman, Macquarie University Dr Elizabeth Farrelly, Writer and Journalist
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 residents’ experience of home and stigmatize renters.
As cities sprawl skywards and private renting expands, this compelling geographic analysis of property identifies high-rise development’s overlooked hand in social segregation and urban fragmentation, and raises bold questions about the condominium’s prospects.
Author Dr Megan Nethercote is an ARC DECRA Fellow and Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Urban Research. Within the Centre for Urban Research she co-leads the Housing Research Program and, for the Urban Futures ECP, she co-convenes the Housing@RMIT network. In 2017, Megan was awarded a Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellowship and a Malcolm Moore Industry Research Award.
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 innovative book for younger readers is packed with city facts, loads of flaps to lift, and unfolding pages to see inside buildings and under the streets. Children aged 5+ can learn about skyscrapers, subway systems and stinky sewers. Discover where people live and peek behind closed doors to see what’s going on in houses and apartments, or why not find out about what goes on underneath the streets you walk on every day?
Dr Alexandra Crosby is an internationally recognised scholar and visual communicator with an interest in expanding design practice. Her current body of research is focused on more-than-human design and recombinant ecologies in urban environments. Here, she explores the relationships between plants and people, revealing the systems and ecologies that will be critical to overcoming the impacts of climate change on our cities. Key projects include Mapping Edges, a transdisciplinary research studio in partnership with Associate Professor Ilaria Vanni Accarigi that uses permaculture design principles to create sustainable systems within urban environments. Repair Design, a collaboration with UTS researcher Dr Jesse Adams Stein, is another major piece of work that embeds repair practices and designing for zero waste at the core of traditional design disciplines.
Dr Jesse Adams Stein is a Senior Lecturer and ARC DECRA Fellow at the UTS School of Design. She is an interdisciplinary design researcher specialising in the relationship between technology, work and material culture. Her research shifts between historical and contemporary contexts and focuses on the quieter and less fashionable aspects of design: industrial craft, manufacturing, repair, skill loss and the human experience of economic restructuring and deindustrialisation. Stein was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Research Fellowship (DECRA), commenced July 2021, and is currently investigating the project “Makers, Manufacturers & Designers: Connecting Histories”, a project that brings together design histories with manufacturing, production and technical education, in the Australian context.
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, painted with white ochre, an unmistakable image of the colonisers. Was this an Indigenous rendering of contact? A work of history?
Each piece of history has a message and context that depends on who wrote it and when. Australian history has swirled and contorted over the years: the history wars have embroiled historians, politicians and public commentators alike, while debates over historical fiction have been as divisive. History isn’t just about understanding what happened and why. It also reflects the persuasions, politics and prejudices of its authors. Each iteration of Australia’s national story reveals not only the past in question, but also the guiding concerns and perceptions of each generation of history makers.
Making Australian History is bold and inclusive: it catalogues and contextualises changing readings of the past, it examines the increasingly problematic role of historians as national storytellers, and it incorporates the stories of people.
Author Anna Clark is an award winning historian, author and public commentator. She has a PhD in History from the University of Melbourne and currently holds a prestigious Australian Research Council Future Fellowship at the Australian Centre for Public History at UTS. Anna is an internationally recognised scholar in Australian history, history education and the role of history in everyday life.
She has written influential books such as The History Wars (with Stuart Macintyre), which won the NSW Premier’s Prize and Queensland Premier’s Prize for History, History’s Children (about students’ attitudes to Australian history), and Private Lives, Public History, as well as two history books for children (Convicted!—listed as a Children’s Book Council of Australia notable book—and Explored!).
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 theaters, and re-created on vacations. In both the American West and the Tasman World, landscape photography fed into settler belonging and produced new ways of thinking about territory and history. During this key period of settler revolution, a generation of photographers came to associate “nature” with remoteness, antiquity, and emptiness, a perspective that disguised the realities of Indigenous presence and reinforced colonial fantasies of environmental abundance. This book lifts the work of these photographers out of their provincial contexts and repositions it within a new comparative frame.
Author Jarrod Hore is an environmental historian of settler colonial landscapes, nature writing, and geology, and is currently postdoctoral fellow with the New Earth Histories Research Program, University of New South Wales, Sydney. His work on wilderness photography, early environmentalism, and the Romantic tradition in the antipodes has been published in Australian Historical Studies and History Australia. His first book, Visions of Nature: How Landscape Photography Shaped Settler Colonialism is published by University of California Press.
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 integrity, Patrick travels to Jesustown, the former mission town in remote Australia where his grandfather infamously brokered 'peace' between the Indigenous custodians of the area and the white constabulary. He hasn't been back there since he was a teenager when a terrible confrontation with his grandfather made him vow never to return.
Of course nothing is as it seems or as Patrick wants it to be. Unable to lay his own son to rest, Patrick must re-examine the legacy of his renowned grandfather and face the repercussions of his actions on subsequent generations. Will what he finds bring him redemption or add to the vault of family secrets and terrible guilt he keeps uncovering?
Author For more than a decade Paul Daley has focused his non-fiction on the yawning gaps in the story of Australia's national birth and identity, and on the imperative of refocusing on the Indigenous historical experience. In Jesustown, he explores poignantly and with gentle humour an Australian foundation myth that omits too much bitter truth about frontier violence against proudly resistant Indigenous people - the massacres and violent dispossession, and the hoarding of their cultural property including the shameful white theft of ancestral human remains. A two-time Walkley award-winning columnist for Guardian Australia who regularly writes on Indigenous affairs, he is also a short story writer, essayist and playwright. His most recent book is the political novel, Challenge. His non-fiction books have been shortlisted for the Prime Minister's History Prize, the Manning Clark House Awards, the Nib and the ACT Book of the Year.
2022 Festival of Urbanism and City Road Podcast Bookclub Join us for a series of fascinating conversations about some of the most interesting books about cities and urban life.
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, planner, architect and expert on healthy cities at the Harvard Graduate School of Design will lead the international discussion, followed by an address by Hon Dr Rob Stokes, Minister for Planning and Public Spaces introduced Mark Scott AO, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney.
Chair: Dr Ann Forsyth, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Speakers:
Irene Figueroa Ortiz, Senior Project Manager, New York City Department of Transportation
Glenn Grimshaw, Senior Research Officer, Australian Embassy, Washington DC
Sam Assefa, Former Director Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development
The Hon Dr Rob Stokes Minister for Planning and Public Spaces
Professor Mark Scott, Vice Chancellor the University of Sydney
Professor Nicole Gurran, University of Sydney (Session chair)
http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2021-events/2021/9/22/planning-for-recovery-leading-urbanists-in-conversation
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 practice.
Chair: A/Professor Dallas Rogers, University of Sydney
Panel includes:
Han Aulby, Centre for Public Integrity
Sue Weatherley MPIA, Georges River Council
A/Professor Crystal Legacy, University of Melbourne
Michael West, Michael West Media
http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2021-events/2021/9/22/endangered-governance-public-trust-urban-decisions-and-ethical-practice
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 journalism, and the public sector.
Chair: Professor Nicole Gurran, University of Sydney
Panel includes:
Professor Emeritus, Peter Phibbs, University of Sydney
Tina Perinotto, Managing Editor, The Fifth Estate
Dr Erin Brady, ACT Department of Environment, Planning and Sustainable Development
Eliza Owen, CoreLogic
http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2021-events/2021/8/3/endangered-discourse-improving-the-quality-of-public-debate-on-urban-and-housing-policy
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
Shannon Burt, Byron Shire Council
Lena Nahlous, Executive Director, Diversity Arts Australia
Prof Jioji Ravulo, University of Sydney
http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2021-events/2021/9/23/endangered-communities-and-resurgent-urbanism
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 Engagement and Planning
http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2021-events/2021/9/20/endangered-country-indigenous-perspectives-on-planning-and-development
Image credit: ‘Yanhambabirra Burambabirra Yalbailinya’ (Come, Share and Learn), 2020 by Luke Penrith for the One Sydney, Many People Strategy.
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 of cities themselves to study why and how we live together, now and into the future.
Killing Sydney is part-lovesong, part-warning: little by little, our politics are becoming debased and our environment degraded. The tipping point is close. Can the home we love survive?
Author Dr Elizabeth Farrelly trained in architecture and philosophy, practiced in Auckland, London and Bristol, holds a PhD in urbanism from the University of Sydney, and is a former Associate Professor (Practice) at the University of NSW Graduate School of Urbanism. Born in Dunedin, New Zealand, she has made Sydney her home since the late 1980s. The author of several books, including Three Houses – a 1993 monograph on renowned architect Glenn Murcutt and Blubberland; the dangers of happiness (2007) – she is a Walkley-shortlisted journalist, critic and essayist and served as a Councillor for the City of Sydney from 1991 to 1995. Her portrait by Mirra Whale was a finalist in the 2015 Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and she is currently building a passive off-grid dwelling in rural NSW.
Join us for a series of fascinating conversations about some of the most interesting books about cities and urban life.
Host Fenella Kernebone, Head of Programming, Sydney Ideas at the University of Sydney
Interviewed by Kurt Iveson, Associate Professor, School of Geosciences, University of Sydney
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 James), Benevolence is a compelling story of first contact. Born around 1813, Muraging is among the earliest Darug generations to experience the impact of British colonisation – a time of cataclysmic change and violence, but also remarkable survival and resistance.
At an early age Muraging is given over to the Parramatta Native School by her Darug father. Fleeing the school in pursuit of love, she embarks on a journey of discovery and a search for a safe place to make her home. Spanning the years 1816–35, Benevolence is set around the Dyarubbin/Hawkesbury River area, the home of the Darug people, in Parramatta and Sydney.
Join us for a series of fascinating conversations about some of the most interesting books about cities and urban life.
Author Julie’s career as a playwright began when she wrote and directed plays in remote Australian Northern Territory Aboriginal communities. She is now a novelist and award-winning poet. Julie is a Burruberongal woman of Darug Aboriginal Nation. She is co-recipient of the Oodgeroo Noonuccal Poetry Prize, 2016 and winner of the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, 2019.
Host Fenella Kernebone, Head of Programming, Sydney Ideas at the University of Sydney
Interviewed by Preston Peachey, a Wiradjuri and Malyangapa man. Preston is a creative living on Bediagal Country and works for local government on Gadigal Country.
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 odd, the hidden and the enigmatic – precisely those details whose existence is most threatened by development – is an act of preservation in its own right, a testament to what she calls ‘the radical potential of taking notice’.
Vanessa’s work combines a low-fi DIY approach with an awareness of the tradition of philosophical urban investigation. Her unique style of map illustration was developed through the making of zines and artworks, collaging detailed line drawings with text from typewriters and Letraset.
We round out our conversation with a drip into Vanessa’s latest book, Gentle and Fierce. Having spent her life in city environments, Vanessa’s experiences with animals have largely been through encounters in urban settings, representations in art and the media, and as decorative ornaments or kitsch.
Join us for a series of fascinating conversations about some of the most interesting books about cities and urban life.
Author Dr Vanessa Berry is a Sydney writer and artist who works with history, memory and archives. She is the author of the memoir Ninety9, the ‘autobiographical almanac’ Strawberry Hills Forever and Mirror Sydney, an essayistic atlas exploring the city’s marginal places and undercurrents, and which won the 2018 Mascara Review’s Avant-garde Award for nonfiction. Vanessa’s latest book is Gentle and Fierce.
Host Fenella Kernebone, Head of Programming, Sydney Ideas at the University of Sydney
Interviewed by Dallas Rogers, Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney.
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 control, neighbourhood effects, territorial stigmatisation, and ethnoracial segregation.
With important contributions to ongoing debates in sociology, geography, urban planning, and public policy, this book engages closely with struggles for land rights and housing justice to offer numerous insights for scholarship and political action to guard against the spread of an urbanism rooted in vested interest.
Join us for a series of fascinating conversations about some of the most interesting books about cities and urban life.
Author Dr Tom Slater is Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
Host Fenella Kernebone, Head of Programming, Sydney Ideas at the University of Sydney
Interviewed by Dallas Rogers, Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney.
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 Evening Redness of the West, based on the real spaces and historical occurrences of a group of filibusterers, or mercenaries, based in the United States that engage in racialised acts of scalping Native Americans licensed by the state in Mexico between the 1840s and 1850s. How are these conditions of settler-colonialism to be approached in the novel and what meaning do they convey about past and present experiences of violent dispossession of land, life and territory?
By advancing an approach to world literature covering literary studies, geographical studies and political economy, Adam Morton argues that Blood Meridian should be considered a quintessential novel of the racial and historical geography of the frontier economy and its spatial expansion within the uneven conditions of capitalist development.
Blood Meridian can therefore be understood as both a novel about the constitution of the frontier economy and Indigenous defiance, resistance and survival.
Join us for a series of fascinating conversations about some of the most interesting books about cities and urban life.
Reader Bio Adam David Morton is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney.
Host Fenella Kernebone, Head of Programming, Sydney Ideas at the University of Sydney
Interviewed by Dallas Rogers, Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney.
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 demonstrates how migratory pathways can profoundly affect the temporalities of everyday life, from the timelines of career trajectories to the tempos of urban living.
Drawing on extensive ethnographic material, Robertson deepens our understanding of the multifaceted relationship between migration, place and time.
Shanthi and Dallas also talk about Exit West in this conversation, a book by Mohsin Hamid. Shanthi calls Hamid’s book ‘almost speculative fiction’, that follows a young couple who escape civil unrest in their unnamed city through magical doors that begin to appear, allowing people to move instantly to different cities around the world.
Exit West follows these characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Shanthi says this book is ‘only lightly speculative’ and can be read as a powerful commentary on contemporary migration and borders.
And if you like this discussion, Dallas also talked with Shanthi on ABC Radio National’s The Philosopher’s Zone, see Chronomobilities.
Join us for a series of fascinating conversations about some of the most interesting books about cities and urban life.
Author Bio Dr Shanthi Robertson is an Associate Professor at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and an Institute Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University.
Host Fenella Kernebone, Head of Programming, Sydney Ideas at the University of Sydney
Interviewed by Dallas Rogers, Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney.
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 crossing social and ethnic boundaries, to May Ngo’s cosmopolitan take on the significance of the shopping mall, the collection offers complex and humane insights into the dynamic relationships between class, culture, family, and love. Brought to you by City Road and The Henry Halloran Trust as a 2021 Festival of Urbanism podcast series.
Eda Gunaydin’s ‘Second City’, from which this collection takes its title, is both a political autobiography and an elegy for a Parramatta lost to gentrification and redevelopment. Zohra Aly and Raaza Jamshed confront the prejudices which oppose Muslim identity in the suburbs, the one in the building of a mosque, the other in the naming of her child. Rawah Arja’s comic essay depicts the complexity of the Lebanese-Australian family, Amanda Tink explores reading Alan Marshall as a child and as an adult, while Martyn Reyes combines the experience of a hike in the Dharawal National Park and an earlier trek in Bangkong Kahoy Valley in the Philippines.
Finally, Yumna Kassab’s essay on Jorge Luis Borges reminds us that Western Sydney writing can be represented by no single form, opinion, style, poetics, or state of mind.
Join us for a series of fascinating conversations about some of the most interesting books about cities and urban life.
Editor Bio Catriona Menzies-Pike is a Sydney writer, editor and former academic. She is the editor of the Sydney Review of Books and holds a doctorate in English literature.
Host Fenella Kernebone, Head of Programming, Sydney Ideas at the University of Sydney
Interviewed by Dallas Rogers, Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney.
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 community problem and not just an individual problem." Dr Emma Power
Guests
Academics: - Dr Emma Power, Western Sydney University - Dr Alistair Sisson, University of New South Wales - Dr Andrew Clarke, University of Queensland - Dr Chris Martin, University of New South Wales
Public and Private Renters: - Catherine - Henry - Sammy - Ella - Caitie
Tenant Advocates: - Leo Patterson Ross, Tenants Union of NSW - Jemima Mowbray, Tenants Union of NSW
This episode was produced as a part of a University of Technology student placement at City Road by guest producers:
- Sam Dover
- Ursula Aczel
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 millions of people.
The cost of achieving urban resilience across the world dwarfs available public finance, however, from both development banks and governments themselves. Meanwhile, vast amounts of money on capital markets are searching for profitable investment opportunities. The World Bank is attempting to channel return-seeking investment into urban infrastructure in response to these challenges.
To harness this private finance, though, cities must be reformatted in investment-friendly ways. In a recent article, Sophie and Patrick chart the emergence of this discourse and associated practices within the World Bank. They call this rescaled and climate-inflected program of leveraged investments coupled with technical assistance Green Structural Adjustment.
Drawing on policy documents, reports, and interviews with key staff, they examine programs that include Green Structural Adjustment to show how it aims to restructure local governments to capture new financial flows. Green Structural Adjustment reduces adaptation to a question of infrastructure finance and government capacity building, reinscribing both causes and effects of uneven development while creating spatial fixes for over-accumulated Northern capital in the Global South.
Guests Dr Sophie Webber is a human geographer, who conducts research about the political economies of climate change and international development assistance, principally in South East Asia and the Pacific region. In particular, Sophie studies how 'truth' (knowledge claims and expertise), 'capital' (financial flows and investments), and policy packages structure relations between the minority and majority worlds. Methodologically, this research requires relational fieldwork, examining how climatological and developmental crises and problems are interpreted, storied, and managed, both by local and governmental authorities, as well as by distant international experts such as the World Bank.
Dr Patrick Bigger is a lecturer in the critical geographies group within LEC. His research examines the ways in which financial actors and their logics and practices are being brought to bear on diverse, but interrelated, environmental crises. Conceptually, his interests include the relationships between environmental-financial products and environmental regulations/regulators; how environmental-financial products fit into broader trends in finance; and how environmental finance values (including, but beyond price) the nature it is attempting to protect. His work focuses primarily on climate change mitigation and adaptation, but also touches on associated environmental problems, particularly biodiversity loss through land use changes.
Publication Green Structural Adjustment in the World Bank’s Resilient City https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1749023
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 critical to building a fairer and more sustainable future for our cities. To do so, we urgently need to think more strategically about what happens after hours in Australian cities. The night-time is a critical space for addressing some of today’s most pressing sustainability challenges. For example, internationally, energy use peaks during evening hours.
Then there is the an estimated 154 million people – about two per cent of the world’s population – who are homeless and face precarious situations at night when seeking food, shelter and transport in socially and environmentally hostile climates.
In Australia it is has been estimated that around nine per cent of employees works in the night-time economy. Many are on low pay and work in unhealthy conditions, juggling multiple jobs. They also face longer and more difficult journeys to work, or to access services, than their daytime colleagues.
More than two per cent of Australian households live in ‘food deserts’ concentrated in low-income and outer suburbs, like Western Sydney and Wyndham in Greater Melbourne, where access to affordable, healthy food options is limited or non-existent. At night, these conditions worsen as basic services like transport, retail and healthcare stop or shut and affordability plummets.
Guest Producer
Kate Murray is a communications professional and knowledge broker focused on research translation. She has a Bachelor of Communication from Griffith University and a long multimedia career of content creation, ghostwriting and journalism. She is a natural organiser and community leader with a passion for collaboration challenges such as those found in interdisciplinary, international, or inter-organisational projects.
Kate joined Connected Cities Lab as Coordinator in 2018, building on a career within the University of Melbourne that includes a role as Communication Officer with the Networked Society Institute. Kate works closely with the Lab Director to develop and coordinate research projects, activities and engagement that align with the Lab strategic objectives. She is also responsible for overseeing the daily administrative functions of the Lab and providing support and advice to a range of research projects and the wider Lab research community.
Guest
Michele Acuto is director of the Connected Cities Lab, Professor in Urban Politics and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning. He is an expert in international urban development.
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 infrastructure of oppression and resistance and as a key platform for political and social change. Drawing on transit-oriented mobilizations in several North American cities, Theresa talks about how transit is tied to claims of spatial justice, and how practices of commoning are realizing new ways to design, operate, and transform mobility systems.
Guest
Dr. Enright’s research examines urban and regional politics with a focus on infrastructure and mobility. She has written about conflicts over urban transit in Toronto, London, and Paris. Her most recent work considers cultural dimensions of transportation through an analysis of the art, architecture, and design of urban rail networks. Dr. Enright is the author of The Making of Grand Paris: Metropolitan Urbanism in the Twenty-first Century (MIT 2016) and editor (with Ugo Rossi) of The Urban Political: Ambivalent Spaces of Late Neoliberalism (Palgrave 2017).
Specialty Focus Areas: Urban-regional planning; metropolitan governance, the politics of infrastructure, urban social movements, critical urban theory.
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 new light by COVID” Professor Pauline McGuirk
We focus on whether COVID-19 reproduces or challenges existing urban inequalities, what innovations in urban governance are shaping recovery pathways, and what types of cities will result from altered planning and policy processes.
“To keep a critical analytical gaze on exactly what decisions are made and keep the pressure on about publicising who benefits, who may not benefit to the same extent, what effect will they have, and that’s long been a project of critical political geography, political urban geography” Professor Pauline McGuirk
Workshop Organisers This episode follows a Zoom conversation on post-pandemic urbanism and the prospects for a just urban recovery, which you can listen to in full conversation below.
The workshop was organised by the following scholars and attended by almost 150 participants.
Pauline McGuirk is Director of the Australian Centre for Culture, Environment, Society and Space (ACCESS) at the University of Wollongong. Her research focuses on how cities are governed and the practices, techniques and politics involved as approaches to urban governance change.
Robyn Dowling is Dean of the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at The University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the character of everyday life in cities, and on the ways urban governance responds to the disruptions of technology and a changing climate.
Sophia Maalsen is an ARC DECRA Fellow at the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. She researches the intersection of the digital, material and the everyday, with particular interest in the digital mediation of housing and cities.
Tom Baker is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His research examines the politics and practice of policy-making and the governance of socio-economic marginality.
Workshop Panelists You can listen to the individual panelist’s talks below.
Chris Gibson on the economy Professor of Human Geography, University of Wollongong
Emma Power on housing Senior Lecturer in the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University
Kurt Iveson on public space Associate Professor in the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney
Jennifer Kent on transport DECRA in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney
Elle Davidson on Indigeneity and urbanism Lecturer in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney
Kristian Ruming on urban planning Associate Professor in Geography, Macquarie University
Chris Pettit on technology and data Professor of Data Science, University of New South Wales
Image: © Wendy Murray ‘Take your city back’
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 of Urbanism?
Guest Professor Nicole Gurran is an urban planner and policy analyst whose research focuses on comparative urban planning systems and approaches to housing and ecological sustainability. She has led and collaborated on a series of research projects on aspects of urban policy, housing, sustainability and planning, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Australian Urban and Housing Research Institute (AHURI), as well as state and local government. Recent research has included AHURI Inquiries on affordable housing supply (2016-17); housing markets, economic productivity, and risk (2014) and planning system performance (2012), as well as an ARC Discovery Project on the impact of urban regulation on housing affordability in Australian cities and regions (2011-2014). Professor Gurran has authored and co-authored numerous publications and books including Urban Planning and the Housing Market: International Perspectives for Policy and Practice with Glen Bramley(Palgrave Macmillan 2017), Politics, Planning and Housing Supply in Australia, England and Hong Kong, with Nick Gallent and Rebecca Chiu (Routledge, July 2016) , and Australian Urban Land Use Planning: Principles, Policy, and Practice (Sydney University Press 2011, 2007).
Paper Hidden homes? Uncovering Sydney’s informal housing market, by Nicole Gurran, Madeleine Pill, and Sophia Maalsen in Urban Studies
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 power, and how money has converted and perverted the mission statement of the city, which is to be a place for all citizens..." Rowland Atkinson
We're talking to Rowland Atkinson about his new book, Alpha City: How London Was Captured by the Super-Rich, which is published by Verso. Rowland presents a history of the property boom economy, going back to the end of Empire. It tells the story of eager developers, sovereign wealth and grasping politicians, all paving the way for the wealthy colonisation of the cityscape.
The consequences of this transformation of the capital for capital is the brutal expulsion of the urban poor, austerity, cuts, demolitions, and a catalogue of social injustices. This Faustian pact has resulted in the sale and destruction of public assets, while the rich turn a blind eye toward criminal money laundering to feather their own nests.
"... enabling and allowing money to destroy [London's] social fabric to create new rounds of development activity that have given little or more benefit what-so-ever to the wider citizenry" Rowland Atkinson
Alpha City moves from gated communities and the mega-houses of the super-rich to the disturbing rise of evictions and displacements from the city. It shows how the consequences of widening inequality have an impact on the urban landscape.
Guest Professor Rowland Atkinson is Chair in Inclusive Societies at the University of Sheffield. Rowland is an urban sociologist with a strong inter-disciplinary element to his work. His interests have tended to focus on the urban/spatial consequences of social divisions. These interests have generated significant research projects on household displacement from gentrification, social exclusion and housing policy interventions and the rise of gated communities. Most recently, his work has focused on the impact of wealth and the wealthy on urban life alongside a strong interest in the public role of social science and the university in community settings.
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 palpable affect of dread that preppers are acting on." Bradley Garret.
Based on three years of detailed ethnographic research, we're talking with Bradley about a recent paper - ahead of his forthcoming book with more case studies - where he traces the activity of a single bunker builder in Kansas in the United States. Following its construction in the Cold War this missile silo was purchased by civilian Larry Hall in 2008.
Hall is an ex-government contractor, property developer and doomsday ‘prepper’. Since purchasing the missile silo, Hall has transformed it into a 15-story inverted tower block, which Hall calls the Survival Condo, but Brad calls a geoscraper. A community of up to 75 individuals can live in this geoscraper for up to five years. Inside, Hall has created a subterranean, sealed, self-sufficient and luxury habitat.
Bradley theorises this type of architecture as the Architecture of Dread, drawing on the work of Søren Kierkegaard’s 1844 The Concept of Dread and Sigmund Freud.
"The ‘objectless anxiety’ at the core of contemporary prepping, in contrast to the specific nuclear anxieties driving survivalism, is a ‘sense of existential dread we experience on many fronts’, without ‘much specification of particular risks’." Bradley Garret, citing Mills and Campbell.
Guest Bradley Garrett is a cultural geographer based at University College Dublin. His new book Bunker: the Architecture of Dread is based on a three-year ethnographic study with people preparing for social, environmental and political collapse. The research was funded by the University of Sydney and will be published in August by Penguin in the UK and Commonwealth and Simon and Schuster in the USA.
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's a question that a lot of academics are struggling with at the moment. Perhaps it's a good time to listen to the experiences of academics as their cities change around them, rather than ask them to speak at us about their urban expertise.
With this in mind, we asked academics from all over the world to open up the voice recorder on their phones and record a 2 minute report from the field about their city.
Over 25 academics from all over the world responded. As you will hear, some of their recordings are not great quality, but their stories certainly are. Many of those who responded to our call are struggling, just like us, to make sense of their experience in the COVID-19 city.
Reporters from the field: - Roger Keil, Professor at York University - Kurt Iveson, Associate Professor at the University of Sydney - Tanja Dreher, Associate Professor at the University of NSW - Carolyn Whitzman, Professor and Bank of Montreal Women’s Studies Scholar at the University of Ottawa - Tooran Alizadeh, Associate Professor at the University of Sydney - Eugene McCann, Professor at Simon Fraser University - Beth Watts, a Senior Research Fellow at Heriot-Watt University - Amanda Kass, PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago - Elle Davidson, Aboriginal Planning Lecturer at the University of Sydney - Creighton Connolly, Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln - Kelly Dombroski, Senior Lecturer at the University of Canterbury - Kate Murray, Connected Cities Lab at the University of Melbourne - Em Dale, at Oxford University - Matt Novacevski, PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne - Mirjam Büdenbender, advisor to the chair of the social-democratic parliamentary group in Berlin - Natalie Osborne, Lecturer at Griffith University - Ash Alam, Lecturer at University of Otago - Cameron Murray, Post-doctoral fellow at the University of Sydney - Deepti Prasad, PhD candidate at the University of Sydney - Madeleine Pill, Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield - Matt Wade, postdoctoral fellow at the National University of Singapore is with Renae Johnson, an independent artist, in Singapore - Susan Caldis, PhD candidate at Macquarie University - Jason Byrne, Professor at the University of Tasmania - Paul Maginn, Associate Professor at the University of Western Australia
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 not safe for humans to be outside; and that's quite clear.” Professor Simon Marvin
Simon’s research interests focus on socio-technical change and the urban condition. He has recently completed large collaborative programmes of work on the politics of urban transitions, urban living labs and the smart cities. His latest book with Andres Luque-Ayala “Urban Operating Systems: Producing the computational city” will be published by MIT press in 2020 as a freely available open access publication. His recent work is focused on the development of interior climate control for humans, animals and plants charting the increasingly strategic role of technologically mediated climates constructed to ensure comfort, convenience and survivability in a period of climate turbulence.
“So the critical question then becomes, if the outside is going to be survivable during increasingly frequent, and more intense, and longer duration periods of extreme heat, we’re going to need to cool the outside down.” Professor Simon Marvin
At Sydney his new work is focused on “Over heating cities” focused on understanding the dynamics, practices and consequences of the outdoor cooling industry that through a range of socio-technical systems provide active cooling through misting, FOG and even air conditioning in order to try to guarantee outdoor comfort and all-year round weather. Simon will work closely with Sydney Urbanism and colleagues in the school and university who specialises in different disciplinary approaches to urban overheating.
“And that’s about survival. It’s no longer about comfort and convenience. That’s actually about whether the human body can actually survive outdoors.” Professor Simon Marvin
Guest Simon Marvin is a fractional Professor in the School of Architecture Design and Planning at Sydney University for 2020/21. He is also The Director of the Urban Institute at Sheffield University. Simon previously worked at Newcastle, Salford, and Durham Universities before joining Sheffield in 2015 and Sydney in 2020.
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-ness” permitting their users to see before them an entire structure, the volumes of its spaces, and its constituent parts in three dimensions, including the size and location of the openings, its materials, and even its methods of construction.
Here is the book blurb from the MIT Press.
The Architectural Model: Histories of the Miniature and the Prototype, the Exemplar and the Muse
Rigorously researched and informed by the latest research, The Architectural Model is written to help orient the reader in the study of this important cultural object, its development, and its continued utility from antiquity up to the present.
For more than five hundred years, architects have employed three-dimensional models as tools to test, refine, and illustrate their ideas. But, as Matthew Mindrup shows, the uses of physical architectural models extend beyond mere representation. An architectural model can also simulate, instruct, inspire, and generate architectural designs. It can be, among other things, sign, souvenir, toy, funerary object, didactic tool, medium, or muse. In this book, Mindrup surveys the history of architectural models by investigating their uses, both theoretical and practical.
Tracing the architectural model's development from antiquity to the present, Mindrup also offers an interpretive framework for understanding each of its applications in the context of time and place. He first examines models meant to portray extant, fantastic, or proposed structures, describing their use in ancient funerary or dedicatory practices, in which models are endowed with magical power; as a medium for architectural reverie and inspiration; and as prototypes for twentieth-century experimental designs.
Mindrup then considers models that exemplify certain architectural uses, exploring the influence of Leon Battista Alberti's dictum that models be simple, lest they distract from the architect's ideas; analyzing the model as a generative tool; and investigating allegorical, analogical, and anagogical interpretations of models.
Mindrup's histories show how the model can be a surrogate for the architectural structure itself, or for the experience of its formal, tactile, and sensory complexity; and beyond that, that the manipulation, play, experimentation, and dreaming enabled by models allow us to imagine architecture in new ways.
Guest An architect by training, Matthew completed a Ph.D. in Architecture and Design at Virginia Tech University on the physical and metaphysical coalition of two architectural models assembled by Kurt Schwitters in the early 1920s. Dr. Mindrup's ongoing research in the history and theory of architectural design locates and projects the implications that materials have in the design process. Dr. Mindrup has presented some of this research at conferences and published others in The Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), Interstices, Wolkenkuckucksheim and his edited volume The Material Imagination: Reveries on Architecture and Matter (Routledge, 2015). In August of 2019, Matthew will welcome the publication of his new book: The Architectural Model: Histories of the Miniature and the Prototype, the Exemplar and the Muse (MIT Press, 2019)
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 argues we need to take the sex-scapes of our cities seriously.
"So people say, 'so what do you do?' I say, oh, I study aspects of the sex industry!" Associate Professor Paul Maginn
In his edited book, (Sub)Urban Sexscapes, Paul and his co-authors discuss the regulation of the commercial sex industry.(Sub)urban Sexscapes highlights the mainstreaming of commercial sex premises (e.g., sex shops, brothels, strip clubs and queer spaces) and products (e.g., sex toys, erotic literature and pornography); both which are now commonplace in night time economy spaces, the high street, suburban shopping centres and the home. They argue the aesthetics of commercial and alternative sexual practices (e.g., BDSM and pornography) permeate the (sub)urban landscape.
"I'm interested in the production, regulation and consumption of the sex industries; and that ranges from everything from adult stores through to online pornography". Associate Professor Paul Maginn
We talk to Paul about the role of sex, sexuality and commercialised sex in contributing to the general character of our cities. We cover morality and planning rules, and Paul argues policy-makers need to be realistic about presence of the sex industry.
Guest Associate Professor Paul Maginn is Programme Co-ordinator of the Masters in Urban and Regional Planning at The University of Western Australia. He is the co-editor/contributor of (Sub)Urban Sexscapes: Geographies and Regulation of the Sex Industry which won the 2016 Planning Institute of Australia (National) Award for Cutting Edge Research and Teaching. His research on the sex industry has examined male sex work in Ireland/Northern Ireland, the suburbanisation of adult retailing, and, most recently he has been analysing online porn consumption in Australia, the gender attitudes of male porn consumers, and porn expos as a form of sexualised leisure. You can find Paul’s podcast – Suburbanista Podcast – on soundcloud, and him on Twitter at @Planographer and @SuburbanistaPod.
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 sometimes, and it's a beautiful city, and there are interesting people in it that matter, who deserve the kind of city people want to live in. I think we need a core of people who are committed to that city, who are willing to transform it." Chantelle Ogilvie-Ellis
They talk about the possibilities for political renewal in political practices that build relationships across diverse urban geographies and political difference in cities, and in cultivating a belonging to place that is still open to and attentive of diversity.
Guests Chantelle Ogilvie-Ellis is a community organiser with the Sydney Alliance, who spends her days meeting and working with a huge variety of people and communities right across Sydney. She, and the Sydney Alliance, are building a coalition of people willing to fight for a fair and sustainable city. You can read about the Sydney Alliance here.
Chantelle shares her experience organising across Sydney with Adrian Pabst, Professor of Politics and the University of Kent. Adrian is a key thinker in the UKs Blue Labour movement and author of the recently-released book Story of Our Country: Labor's Vision for Australia.
The Democratic Experiment Series This episode is a part of a series called The Democratic Experiment and hosted by Rosie Hancock. Rosie researches social movements, community organising, and grassroots urban political coalitions. She is convenor of the Religion and Global Ethics program and is the Managing Editor of Solidarity: Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics. She holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Auckland, an MA in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Sydney, and completed her PhD on Islamic Environmental Activism at the University of Sydney in 2015. Rosie is an Editorial Board Member of The Sociological Review, and the co-convener of the Sociology of Religion Thematic Group for The Australian Sociology Association.
The Democratic Experiment series is a partnership between City Road and The Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney. The Sydney Policy Lab exists to break down the barriers between researchers, policymakers, campaigners and the community at large. At the Sydney Policy Lab people of all backgrounds are coming together to strengthen our democracy, reduce spiralling inequality and help to empower communities to shape their own future.
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 Bok
Rachel Bok calls this 'superlative urbanism'; a practice whereby urban solutions experts have created an industry out of selling city managers a range of urban fixes. And while we're talking about urban fixes, you really should read Rachel's paper on the idea of the 'fix' called By our metaphors you shall know us’: The ‘fix’ of geographical political economy. Rachel says the celebratory policy narratives about innovation and progress often stand in stark contrast to the lack of urban policy innovation on the ground.
"I see 'best practice' as a legitimising technique. You use it to mean a certain organisational benchmark. You have to say 'best practice' otherwise people... inside your organisation, people outside your organisation are not going to listen.
We handed the City Road audio field kit over to Sophie Webber, who is reporting from in the field in this episode. She's talking with Rachel in Washington DC about her global, multi-sited ethnography on the global urban solutions industry.
The global urban solutions industry "have also become rather inoculated; immunised to the language of 'best practice', which is why to them it is something that is everyday, it's commonplace, but it does really have much currency anymore". Rachel Bok
Rachel's undertaking a range of internships with businesses involved in the global circuitry of urban solutions for her PhD. We track Rachel down in Washington DC to talk about her global, multi-sited ethnography.
Guest Rachel Bok is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests sit at the intersections of global urban governance, critical urban theory, and political economy. Her current research examines the globalisation of the urban “solutions” industry and its emergent norms and forms of superlative urbanism.
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 and India’s architecture as well as how their roles in universities have come to shape their trajectories as academics and intellectual leaders.
Guests Vikram Prakash is the Director of Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Programs in the Office of the Dean, College of Built Environments, University of Washington and founding board member of GAHTC – the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative. He is a fellow podcast host himself – in fact, he hosts ArchitectureTalk in the US – a bi-weekly podcast with curated conversations on contemporary architecture and architectural thinking. His books among others include Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India and A Global History of Architecture (with Francis DK Ching & Mark Jarzombek).
Julie Willis is Dean of Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the Melbourne School of Design. She is an authority on the history of Australian architecture 1890-1950 and has undertaken significant projects researching modern hospital architecture in Australia. She has also examined the importance of public buildings in community, civic and national identities; architecture during wartime and its subsequent impact on practice and production; and equity and diversity in the Australian architectural profession. Her current research includes writing a new short history of Australian architecture; the transmission of architectural knowledge through professional networks in architecture.
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 Barber
Dr Jennifer Ferng speaks with Associate Professor Daniel Barber from the University of Pennsylvania about the modernist principles behind the Bauhaus, its legacy, and how energy efficiency has changed how architects deal with renovations and regulations around cultural heritage. Innovations in heating systems often lagged behind the aesthetic principles that determined buildings like the Bauhaus Dessau. The performance of modernist structures remains incompatible with what we view now as contemporary standards of energy conservation. Architects must sometimes choose between preservation strategies and contemporary methods that reduce energy consumption.
Guest Daniel A. Barber is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Chair of the Graduate Group in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. He is an architectural historian studying the relationship between the design fields and the emergence of global environmental culture across the 20th century.
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 Ferng speaks with Professor Mark Jarzombek and Professor Jaky Troy about the challenges in creating university curriculum that encompasses the contributions of many countries and peoples. They discuss the importance of first societies and first nations, the role of vernacular examples of architecture, and try to define what the global means for the 21st century. Jarzombek and Troy share some of their experiences from places around the world and explain how they try to bring these sites - archaeological, architectural, and living – to the attention of the public.
"The university sends this strong message of Western scholarship and a kind of dominance of a political and religious ideology that in many ways obviates everything Indigenous". Professor Jaky Troy
Guests Mark Jarzombek is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is one of the founders of the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC). He is a leading advocate of global history and was the first to teach a MOOC on the history of architecture, with thousands of participants worldwide. His most recent book is entitled Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age, published by the University of Minnesota Press.
Professor Jaky Troy is the Director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research at the University of Sydney. Her expertise includes documenting, describing, and reviving Indigenous languages. She is currently working on the indigenous languages of Pakistan. One current project is focused on the history of Aboriginal missions and reserves in eastern Australia and the history of non-institutionalised Aboriginal people. The other is about the practice of ‘corroboree’ by Aboriginal people in the assimilation period of the mid 20th century. She is part of the Ngarigu community from the Snowy Mountains.
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 Millington
We’re talking with Nate Millington about these questions, which emerge from his research in managing water in the midst of changing climate dynamics and profound inequalities in Cape Town and São Paulo.
"It's getting harder and harder for the infrastructures that we have in place to deal with the climate" Dr Nate Millington
Guest Dr Nate Millington is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Studies in the Geography Department at the University of Manchester. His research is focused on the politics of the urban environment in an era of climate crisis, with particular interests in the governance of water and waste. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow with the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town and a visiting researcher at the University of São Paulo, and he has conducted extensive research in São Paulo, Brazil and in South Africa. His current research is dedicated to understanding the relationships between climate crisis, financial capital, and infrastructure in cities marked by intense inequality.
Nate is a managing editor of the Situated Urban Political Ecology webspace and a board member of the AAG Urban Geography Specialty Group.
Twitter: @nate_millington
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] process". Dr Emily Rosenman
Dr Sophie Webber is talking to Dr Emily Rosenman from Penn State University about how social finance investment works, and whether it is actually possibly to reduce poverty while making money. Social finance claims to solve social problems emerging from impoverishment and inequality; while spinning a profit at the same time.
So what is social impact investment? It’s a way for governments to outsource and incentivise the services that are provided to address social disadvantage, such as poverty. Under this model of social service provision, the government draws up a contract with an investor to address a social issue, say, housing poverty, outlines a set of social targets, and if the social program meets these targets, then the investor gets paid.
Guest Dr Emily Rosenman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Penn State University. She is an urban and economic geographer who researches relationships between finance, impoverishment, and urbanization. Her current work focuses on philanthropy and other financial instruments that work to counteract urban sociospatial inequalities reinforced or created through the financialization of urban space.
Rosenman, E. (2019). The geographies of social finance: Poverty regulation through the ‘invisible heart’ of markets. Progress in Human Geography 43(1), 141-162.
Rosenman, E. (2018). Capital and conscience: poverty management and the financialization of good intentions in the San Francisco Bay Area. Urban Geography.
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 invasion, or one-time event, but really something that transforms the nature of that place invaded. And everything that comes with that; social arrangements, economic arrangements and political constitutions." Dr Naama Blatman-Thomas
We're listening in on a conversation between Genevieve Murray, Joel Sherwood-Spring, Libby Porter and Naama Blatman-Thomas. Genevieve and Joel are talking to Libby and Naama about three ideas in their recent International Journal of Urban and Regional Research research article: Property as Land; Property as Object; and Property as Redress. You can find a link to their paper on our website, which is titled, Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities.
"From a policy, governance perspective, planning as a discipline, my discipline, and geography is fully complicit in the colonial project. In fact, it is central to it. It can't happen without it, because it is the form of governance that comes and is imposed on something that was already here, and is used to do all that work of erasure. But of course never do anything to grapple with or unpick the underlying foundation of the will to erasure, and the ongoing persistent attempt by the settler colonial structure... to continue to dispossess." Professor Libby Porter
Professor Libby Porter is a Vice Chancellor's Principal Research Fellow. Her current work is in the areas of critical property studies, urban governance, decolonisation and settler cities, and on children’s sense of space and place.
Dr Naama Blatman-Thomas joined the University of Sydney in 2019 as a lecturer in urban geography Previously, Naama was a visiting academic and adjunct lecturer at James Cook University where she undertook research and teaching at the school of social sciences. Prior to her academic work, Naama worked for many years in human rights organisations in Israel/Palestine.
The Country and Cities Series
We’ve handed the City Road audio field kit over to Genevieve Murray and Joel Sherwood Spring from the Future Method Studio and asked them to hit the road to talk to professional urban designers, architects and urban researchers who are working with Indigenous knowledge systems in their research or practice.
Joel Sherwood-Spring, a Wiradjuri man raised between Redfern and Alice Springs, is a Sydney based Masters of Architecture student and interdisciplinary artist currently focussing on the contested narratives of Sydney’s and Australia’s urban culture and indigenous history in the face of ongoing colonisation. Joel began working with Future Method in 2017.
Genevieve Murray, before establishing Future Method Studio in 2013, worked with Ric Leplastrier, Glenn Murcutt, Mcdonald Wright Architects (London), Hungerford+Edmunds, Rod Simpson and Andrea Wilson. Genevieve has written for Assemble Papers, Architecture AU, and teaches and lectures between UTS and Sydney University on a sessional basis. The studio’s work has been nominated for the Conde Naste Design Innovation Award 2010 and shortlisted for the Design boom competition Design For Death 2013.
Production Miles Herbert and Dallas Rogers are the producers, sound editors and sound designers of the series.
"... 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/urban relations, city to rural migrations and vice versa, and the social and political networks in cities - even what it means to be a citizen.
"You think about the United States or Australian, for instance, how many people are actually on the land? Well, less than 2 percent of the population in both cases. In the United States we have more people in prison than we have on the land." Eric Holt-Giménez
Eric Holt-Giménez talks about la Via Campesina, a global womens rights movement. "Rural and indigenous women have a long history of oppression and struggle," says la Via Campesina. "Feminist struggles have resulted in the recognition of women’s rights as human rights, rights to education and resources and improved social status for some women."
"...because most of the farmers in the world are women, unless we have food sovereignty, we can't insure womens rights. And from the point of view of la Via Campesina, because most of the farmers in the world are women, we can't have food sovereignty until we end all violence against women." Eric Holt-GiménezGuest
Eric Holt-Giménez has been Executive Director of Food First since 2006. He is the editor of the Food First bookFood Movements Unite! Strategies to Transform Our Food Systems; co-author of Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice with Raj Patel and Annie Shattuck; and author of the book Campesino a Campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture and of many academic, magazine and news articles.
Of Basque and Puerto Rican heritage, Eric grew up milking cows and pitching hay in Point Reyes, CA, where he learned that putting food on the table is hard work. After studying rural education and biology at the University of Oregon and Evergreen State College, he traveled through Mexico and Central America, where he was drawn to the simple life of small-scale farmers.
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. Their work operates at the intersection of gender, identity, urban space and advocacy. They bring together planners, policy makers, local government and stakeholders to make tangible the experiences of underrepresented communities in urban space and planning.
XYX Lab is grounded in feminist and queer theory and activated through real-world projects. Equal parts qualitative and quantitative research, they regularly work to collect and analyse data and experiences in order to generate deeper understanding and support our design projects. Their approach is inclusive of all gender and sexual identities. Nicole and her XYX lab team are thinking about how we collect and report urban data in new ways. Through their Free to Be urban design thinking workshops, they allow women from all walks of life to redesign the city in ways that will have real world impacts for women and girls.
Nicole and her team are using digital technologies and citizen research methods to collect and analyse their data. We talk to Nicole about the hyper-sexualisation of our cities. The idea that the hyper-sexualised images that are put on display in our cities effect how women and men act in and experience the city. Nicole suggest we need to gender mainstream our cities, and that gender sensitivity urban design will change our cities for the better.
Guest Nicole Kalms is an Associate Professor in the Department of Design and founding director of the XYX Lab which leads national research in Space, Gender and Communication. In this role, Kalms is leading two significant research projects Urban Exposure: Interactively Mapping the Systems of Sexual Violence in Cites and Women and Girls Only: Understanding the Spaces of Sexual Harassment in Public Transport. These projects are in partnerships with state, national and international stakeholders.
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 experienced by families with young children. For these families, a walkable street has been design with families in mind, and this includes opportunities for care and play. Susannah suggests that a walkable street – a street with spaces of care and play – is a street where pedestrians and cars are held in tension. Thinking about streets in this way forces us to think about the role of cars in our cities, but it also opens up new spaces for, well, being a family.
Then we leave the street and head up into a high-density apartment building in Brisbane with Dr Kate Raynor. We’re talking about high-density living and families. Kate draws out the tension between the use value of the home, or how we live in and make home in a dwelling, and the exchange value of a home, or how we value a dwelling as a commodity in a housing market. Kate’s worried that new apartments are being designed and built for investors and capital gains, rather than for families and family life.
Guests Dr Susannah Clement’s research interests can be best described as taking a material feminist approach to explore the everyday experiences of family life. Her PhD research explored how families living in Wollongong experience and make sense of their everyday walking practices. The aim of the project was to understand how and why families make time (or don’t make time) for walking in their everyday lives. The project aimed to inform work around sustainable transport use, active travel and broader debates in the child and family geography literature about everyday mobilities and family life. Some findings of my research are explored in this blog post: Getting families moving: what makes a pedestrian friendly city for families?
Dr Kate Raynor is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, working on the Transforming Housing project. This is an action research project focused on investigating strategies to increase the amount and quality of affordable housing in Melbourne. The project combines academic research with a strong emphasis on engagement with industry, government and philanthropic partners. Kate’s other research interests include urban consolidation, higher density housing and media analysis. Prior to joining the University of Melbourne she worked in digital communications, providing community engagement support for large-scale infrastructure and development projects.
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 space and place for economic activity to take place in and more as a financial commodity" Professor Rachel Weber
We're talking to Rachel Weber about her book 'From Boom to Bubble', and the role of tax increment financing and corporate mortgage-backed securities in the city of Chicago. Rachel debunks the idea that booms occur only when cities are growing and innovating. Instead, she argues, even in cities experiencing employment and population decline, developers rush to erect new office towers and apartment buildings when they have financial incentives to do so.
Focusing on the main causes of overbuilding during the early 2000s, Rachel documents the case of Chicago’s “Millennial Boom,” showing that the Loop’s expansion was a response to global and local pressures to produce new assets. An influx of cheap cash, made available through the use of complex financial instruments, helped transform what started as a boom grounded in modest occupant demand into a speculative bubble, where pricing and supply had only tenuous connections to the market. Innovative and compelling, From Boom to Bubble is an unprecedented historical, sociological, and geographic look at how property markets change and fail—and how that affects cities.
In Chicago, for example, law firms and corporate headquarters abandoned their historic downtown office buildings for the millions of brand-new square feet that were built elsewhere in the central business district. What causes construction booms like this, and why do they so often leave a glut of vacant space and economic distress in their wake?
Guest Professor Rachel Weber is an urban planner, political economist, and economic geographer who researches the relationship between finance and the built environment. Rachel's focus has been on instruments (tax increment financing, auction rate securities, crowdfunding, mortgage backed securities, tax credits) and infrastructures (school facilities, toll roads, commercial real estate). She is interested in why cities adopt certain instruments and how the use of particular methods of raising capital affects who benefits from and pays for urban infrastructures. In her work she has advanced the concept of financialisation as shorthand for how these tools bring new politics, kinds of knowledge, and risks to bear on policy and development decisions.
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, and we recorded two of them for this series. We ran the two recorded panel discussions as live listening events in front of a studio audience. At each event we played podcast excerpts from some of our favourite podcasts and we talked about them.
We discuss: Oral storytelling and Indigenous methodologies as radio practice; the history of Aboriginal community radio in Sydney; podcasting as an engaged research methodology; podcasting as a research dissemination tool; the politics of representation and voice; working across sound, text and images; podcasting technology and narrative; journalism verses academic ethics; urban sounds as data; and more.
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, and their role in improving their lives and society.
We're talking with Professor Meira Levinson about her teaching and research. Meira's work draws on eight years of teaching in urban public schools in Atlanta and Boston. Educational disadvantage was a reality for many minority or disadvantaged students in these schools. Meira suggests that urban schools in some America cities are suffering from a 'civic empowerment gap', an achievement gap that was targeted by a 2001 government act known as No Child Left Behind.
For Meria, ethics matter! She is commitment to grounding her research in teaching practice and her experience as a public school teacher. In her recent book, Justice in Schools, Meira combines philosophical analysis and school-based case studies to illuminate the complex dimensions of evaluating, achieving, and teaching justice in schools. Academics play a key role, she argues, in rigorous cross-fertilisation of scholarship, policy and practice.
Guest Professor Meira Levinson is a normative political philosopher who writes about civic education, multiculturalism, youth empowerment and educational ethics. Levinson argues that education is the civil rights struggle of our era, and that schools need to do much more than bridge now widely recognised achievement gaps; rather, they need to upend curricula and redefine civic education to address the civic empowerment gap. Real civic education, according to Levinson, teaches students about power, justice and the need for collective action, as well as how they can have a role in improving their own lives and society.
Her most recent books include the co-edited Making Civics Count (Harvard Education Press, 2012) and No Citizen Left Behind (Harvard University Press, 2012). Supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, Levinson’s newest project is on justice in schools and combines philosophical analysis with school-based case studies. Levinson spent eight years teaching in public schools in Atlanta and Boston, has a background in political philosophy, and is a Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
The Democratic Experiment Series This is episode II of The Democratic Experiment series. This series is a partnership between City Road and The Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney. The Sydney Policy Lab exists to break down the barriers between researchers, policymakers, campaigners and the community at large. At the Sydney Policy Lab people of all backgrounds are coming together to strengthen our democracy, reduce spiralling inequality and help to empower communities to shape their own future.
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 Beijing. Some artists took up residence in the old communist compounds that had once housed the collective work units – compounds that were now earmarked for demolition.
You have probably heard of Ai Wei Wei, the controversial Chinese artist who designed the so-called birds nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics. But what you might not know about artists like Ai Wei Wei is they have been reshaping the physical, cultural and perhaps even the political fabric of Beijing. We’re chatting with Dr Christen Cornell to find out how.
Christen says, when we look for examples of urban political activism in China many people search for signs of open protest in Chinese cities. And when we take an interest in the country’s artists, many people look for the political commentary in their artwork. But the role of the artist as a political actor in China involves a more complicated form of urban activism.
Drawing on ideas that were popular in western cities at the time, the Chinese artists renamed the sites they were claiming ‘artists villages’ and ‘art districts’. This was a political move to save these sites and their artistic practice. We talk to Christen about the shape and significance of these urban arts communities, and the impact they had on the physical and cultural life of the city.
Guest Dr Christen Cornell is a Research Associate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Christen is working across issues of cultural policy, housing, urbanism and contemporary Chinese culture.
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 centuries before moving to what Brett calls the new enclosure—or the privatisation of public land in the UK today. In the second episode, Brett draws some connections between the privatisation of public land and addressing the housing problem in the UK. He maps out the winners and losers of The New Enclosure, and here’s a hot tip, if you’re looking to buy or rent a house, you’re unlikely to be a winner.
Here is the book blurb from Verso.
Much has been written about Britain’s trailblazing post-1970s privatisation programme, but the biggest privatisation of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatisation of land. Since Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, and hidden from the public eye, about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass, including some of its most valuable real estate, has passed from public to private hands. Forest land, defence land, health service land and above all else local authority land—for farming and school sports, for recreation and housing—has been sold off en masse. Why? How? And with what social, economic and political consequences?
The New Enclosure provides the first ever study of this profoundly significant phenomenon, situating it as a centrepiece of neoliberalism in Britain and as a successor programme to the original eighteenth-century enclosures. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done.
Guest Professor Brett Christophers’ research ranges widely across the political and cultural economies of Western capitalism, in historical and contemporary perspectives. Particular interests include money, finance and banking; housing and housing policy; urbanization; markets and pricing; accounting, modelling and other calculative practices; competition and intellectual property law; and the cultural industries and the discourse of “creativity”.
PART I - 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 centuries before moving to what Brett calls the new enclosure—or the privatisation of public land in the UK today. In the second episode, Brett draws some connections between the privatisation of public land and addressing the housing problem in the UK. He maps out the winners and losers of The New Enclosure, and here’s a hot tip, if you’re looking to buy or rent a house, you’re unlikely to be a winner.
Here is the book blurb from Verso.
Much has been written about Britain’s trailblazing post-1970s privatisation programme, but the biggest privatisation of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatisation of land. Since Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, and hidden from the public eye, about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass, including some of its most valuable real estate, has passed from public to private hands. Forest land, defence land, health service land and above all else local authority land—for farming and school sports, for recreation and housing—has been sold off en masse. Why? How? And with what social, economic and political consequences?
The New Enclosure provides the first ever study of this profoundly significant phenomenon, situating it as a centrepiece of neoliberalism in Britain and as a successor programme to the original eighteenth-century enclosures. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done.
Guest Professor Brett Christophers’ research ranges widely across the political and cultural economies of Western capitalism, in historical and contemporary perspectives. Particular interests include money, finance and banking; housing and housing policy; urbanization; markets and pricing; accounting, modelling and other calculative practices; competition and intellectual property law; and the cultural industries and the discourse of “creativity”.
In cities around the world, people are channeling their frustration with existing community engagement processes into the creation of urban alliances. These alliances bring together diverse civil society actors in pursuit of social change.
This is the second part of our two-part discussion about democracy and cities. We talk to Amanda Tattersall about how urban alliances work in practice in different cities around the world. We travel to Cape Town in South Africa and Barcelona in Spain, before returning to Sydney, Australia.
"I'm interested in the urban alliances that are going to allow citizens to have a better city. I see them as progressive, because if citizens are going to have more rights, and more resources supporting their lives, that is a progressive outcome." Dr Amanda Tattersall
If you missed the first part of our discussion you might want to catch up on that episode first. We talk to Kurt Iveson about urban alliances that allow citizens to play a proactive role in shaping their cities. Kurt suggested these alliances are an alternative to the reactive modes of engaging people in city making that exist in current urban governance and planning frameworks.
Guest Dr Amanda Tattersall is a scholar and a change maker. She is a Post-Doctoral Fellow on the Organising Cities Project in the School of Geosciences. She is the founder of some of Australia’s most interesting social change organisations, including the Sydney Alliance and GetUp.org.au. She is also the founder and Host of the ChangeMakers podcast, which tells stories about people trying to change the world. Her book, Power in Coalition, was the first international study of alliance building as a strategy for social change.
As an urban geographer, she focuses on questions of how the city can be a subject for democratic politics. She is currently undertaking research on intra and inter city coalition building strategies to identify ways in which networks of urban alliances may help citizens present solutions to wicked global problems like climate change, poverty, inequality and the politics of refuge. Her PhD was in industrial relations, and she has previously worked as a union organiser and was an elected official at Unions NSW. As a teacher, Amanda’s greatest passion is to bring the community in – with stories, guest speakers, practical projects that are strengthened by her extensive network amongst Australia’s not for profit community.
The Democratic Experiment Series This episode is a part of a series called The Democratic Experiment. This series is a partnership between City Road and The Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney. The Sydney Policy Lab exists to break down the barriers between researchers, policymakers, campaigners and the community at large. At the Sydney Policy Lab people of all backgrounds are coming together to strengthen our democracy, reduce spiralling inequality and help to empower communities to shape their own future.
We talk to Saskia Sassen about her work on globalisation and the global city by tracing the key ideas in three of her books.
We start with Saskia's most famous book, 'The Global City', and the idea of intermediation in the global city. We move onto Saskia's historical and, as Saskia suggests, her best book, 'Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages' to discuss the methodological tools of capacities, tipping points and organising logics. We end our discussion with Saskia's latest book, 'Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy' and the ideas of expulsion and the systemic edge in the present.
Guest Professor Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and a Member of its Committee on Global Thought, which she chaired till 2015. She is a student of cities, immigration, and states in the world economy, with inequality, gendering and digitization three key variables running though her work. Born in the Netherlands, she grew up in Argentina and Italy, studied in France, was raised in five languages, and began her professional life in the United States. She is the author of eight books and the editor or co-editor of three books. Together, her authored books are translated in over twenty languages. She has received many awards and honors, among them multiple doctor honoris causa, the 2013 Principe de Asturias Prize in the Social Sciences, election to the Royal Academy of the Sciences of the Netherlands, and made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government.
After the Arab Spring, Occupy and the Umbrella Movement the streets were cleared. But as the dust was settling some more durable democratic experiments emerged. These urban alliances sought to make our cities more equitable places to live.
In this two-part episode on democracy and cities we’re talking about a new type of political movement that is forming in different cities around the world; its called an urban alliance. In this first episode, Associate Professor Kurt Iveson sets up the discussion by telling us why cities are important for democracy.
“There’s a basic demographic thing about, you know, the majority of the world’s population now living in cities… that’s really important, in the sense of, the particular problems of everyday life in cities are now being experienced by millions of people around the planet... questions of water, food, housing, transport…” Associate Professor Kurt Iveson
It’s not only that there are different ways to practise democracy in our cities, but the very fabric of our cities and even the ecologies of our cities can shape how the new urban alliances operate. In other words, the geographies and socialities of the city matter for how democracy is practised.
The story we tell ourselves about democracy is often focused on nation-states and citizenships. But for Kurt, urban alliances and sustained community organising in cities are just as important for democracy as nations. Questions about cities frequently focus on who counts as a democratic subject and how to participate in various political, interest or geographical communities. These types of questions are being creatively re-imagined in cities around the world, and one of these re-imaginings is called an urban alliance.
“At the very basic level, what we’re trying to signal by this term of urban alliance is a kind of political formation that is not just about a particular issue, and is also not just based on a particular identity, but is an alliance that operates – the thing that binds people together is their shared inhabitance of a city”. Associate Professor Kurt Iveson
If you like this discussion you can listen to the second part of this two-part episode about democracy and cities via City Road. In part two, we start with Kurt’s suggestion that urban alliances are not just flash-in-the-pan protests on the latest political bugbear, rather they are a new form of democratic practise. We pick up where Kurt left off with Kurt's collaborator, Dr Amanda Tattersall, who is an urban activist and researcher. Amanda talks about her fieldwork uncovering new urban alliances in Cape Town and Barcelona.
Guest Associate Professor Kurt Iveson is interested in the question of how social justice can be achieved in cities. In this episode, Kurt discusses his current study with collaborator Dr Amanda Tattersall: Organising the 21st Century City: An International Comparison of Urban Alliances as Citizen Engagement. The study is funded by the Henry Hallroan Trust.
This study builds on Kurt’s previous research, which has focused on two main areas. First, he has examined the significance of the urban public realm for citizenship and democracy. Second, he has explored how urban planning might work better to achieve social justice in cities. Kurt is the author of Publics and the City
The Democratic Experiment Series This episode is a part of a series called The Democratic Experiment. This series is a partnership between City Road and The Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney. The Sydney Policy Lab brings people together to identify solutions to the major challenges of our age. At the Sydney Policy Lab people are coming together to strengthen our democracy, seeking to reduce spiralling inequality and helping to empower communities to shape their own future.
In Sydney, changing international migration patterns and the rise of apartment living means people of different cultural backgrounds are regularly interacting with each other inside their high-density buildings. And it’s not without its problems.
In 2016, it was estimated that around 55 per cent of the world's population now lived in cities. By 2030, urban areas are projected to house 60 per cent of the world’s population. While migration and compact city policies are rarely seen as intersecting by policy makers, cultural difference and living in close proximity to each other can compound the tensions that already exist in apartment buildings and society more broadly.
These tensions could be about shoes being left in common areas, or washing hung on balconies, or 'offensive' cooking smells wafting beyond the kitchen walls and down the halls. These tensions are connected to the gradual shift away from migrants from countries such as the UK and the increase in migrants from countries such as China and India.
Today we’re talking to Chris Ho from the University of Technology and Edgar Liu from the University of New South Wales, about how high density living and cultural diversity are changing the way we live in Australian cities. And when it comes to intercultural relations, little attention has been given to what’s happening inside the apartments building of our cities.
Guests Dr Christina Ho is a Senior Lecturer & Discipline Coordinator, Social and Political Sciences, within the Communications program, based in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Chris is interested in: multiculturalism, diversity politics and cosmopolitanism; migration policy and migrant experiences; cultural and national identity formation among migrants; Chinese migration to Australia, including Chinese international students; Muslim diasporas and gender; cultural citizenship and community arts; segregation and schooling; and ethnic concentration and community building in urban areas.
Dr Edgar Liu is a Research Fellow at the Faculty of Built Environment's City Futures Research Centre. He joined the Centre in April 2009 soon after completing his PhD in cultural geography at the University of New South Wales. His research primarily focuses on assessing the effectiveness of public housing estate regeneration in Australia; service integration and Indigenous housing; affordable housing; housing choice decision-making; and concepts of community and place.
We’re talking about extinction, climate change, urban development and urban planning futures. Dr Donna Houston says urban planners need to be more attuned to the ecological realities and rhythms of our cities.
“The longer view, but also the responsibility. So cosmo-ecological is also to put one self into obligation or responsibility; in a way that... Western euro-centric or anthropocentric practices don’t do”. Dr Donna Houston
As urbanists, we need to imagine a different type of future to better plan for multispecies cities. Part of the answer might be to decentre the human from our discussion of cities and urban planning more specifically.
“… to understand that the ecological and cultural processes that are entangled within our relations are really important to our survival. In fact, we won’t really survive if we don’t attend to them”. Dr Donna Houston
Donna’s powerful and unnerving research starts with ecological time, which is important for understanding the way we plan, design and build cities. Donna ends by talking about the role of cosmo-ecological and Indigenous methodologies in urban planning.
Guest Dr Donna Houston is an urban and cultural geographer in the Department of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University. Her research explores the intersections of urban political ecology and environmental justice in the Anthropocene; the biopolitics of climate change; toxic landscapes and bodies; and planning in the 'more-than-human' city. Dr Houston is the Director of the Bachelor of Planning and the Co-Director of the Faculty of Arts Environmental Humanities research stream.
We face an energy governance trilemma: of peak demand for electricity in cities; ensuring prices remain low; and addressing climate change with renewable technologies. And your home is right in the middle of this energy trilemma.
A Smart Electrical Metre fitted to your home might just be the technology that pushes you into a more data-driven, digitally networked and automated energy world. But what do smart metres mean for you, your household and your home?
"So the main benefit of the smart metre is that it can lower your electricity retail bill, and as we all know, we've seen significant increases in electricity prices". Dr Sangeetha Chandra-Shekeran
We’re talking to Dr Sangeetha Chandra-Shekeran and Dr Jathan Sadowski about smart metres, energy governance, tech start-ups and privacy. They discuss the divergence between what smart metres promise electricity consumers and electricity managers, what they currently do, and what new data about electricity usage might allow in the future. These technologies might allow us to better manage energy, but there also other forces at play.
"The smart metre opens up a lot of opportunities for energy companies and particularly this emerging eco-system of energy tech start-ups". Dr Jathan Sadowski
What is clear is that smart metres will create an uneven patchwork of costs and benefits for different actors in the electricity sector – an uneven patchwork that will impact you and me.
Guests Dr Sangeetha Chandra-Shekeran is a Lecturer in the School of Geography and Deputy Director at the Melbourne Sustainable Societies Institute at the University of Melbourne. Sangeetha is an economic geographer with a focus on the political economic dimensions of change in large social and technical systems. Her research studies the challenges of deep decarbonisation and the complexities of the energy sector.
Dr Jathan Sadowski is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Architecture Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. His research investigates how transformative technologies, that are data-driven, networked, and automated, shape societies and cities.
Everyone is talking about design thinking! But what, exactly, is design thinking? And how do these ideas relate to city making?
Design thinking is an increasingly valued skillset across a wide range of industries, with high demand for design-based skills in the workplace. Organisations are increasingly looking to theories of design to improve their businesses and the services and products they offer. But can these ideas also be applied to city making?
Dr Martin Tomitsch is Associate Professor of Design and the Head of Design Lab at the University of Sydney. His research looks at how design thinking can be used to make better cities. Martin talks us through the design thinking process, within which the user-experience is central.
"Design. Think. Make. Break." Martin Tomitsch
In a world in which more than half of the population lives in cities, Martin is looking at new ways to engage with the smart city with design thinking. We’re talking to Martin about his new book Making Cities Smarter - Designing Interactive Urban Applications.
The Sydney Bachelor of Architecture degree has a lively history. It was open to men and women from its first offering in 1918, but the inclusion of women was controversial. In 1972 a student strike shut down the school for two weeks; students demanded the degree be remade.
"In 1926... the University of Sydney put forward Marjorie [Holroyde nee] Hudson, a female student, for the award; and this really set the cat amongst the pigons. And the document we have from the Board of Architects minutes effectively gives every single battle that women had to fight in terms of equality in the profession." Daniel Ryan
You might think that university degrees are fairly static cultural products, that change slowly and in line with the often-lethargic institutions they’re created within. But university degrees perhaps reflect the world back to us, just as much as their purpose is to shape the world around us. In this sense, university degrees are firmly located in society. They’re a cultural product of society. They ebb and flow with the times. They adapt and change to suit the current social and political mood; and they should always be on the frontiers of the latest ideas. But sometimes these ideas need to be challenged.
“When we look at the history of the school - the history of any institution - we can recover the motivations behind the decision that have been taken over time”. Professor Andrew Leach
This episode of City Road is not your usual fare. We're talking with Professor Andrew Leach, Associate Professor Lee Stickells, Daniel Ryan and Catherine Lassen about a book on the history of the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. The book is edited by Andrew and Lee, and our four guests have all written chapters. We’ve pulled four excerpts out of the book to tell you about the secret life of the Architecture Degree at the University of Sydney. And it’s a story that goes in some strange directions.
From the way the 1960s and 70s counter-culture movements and the ideas around free speech, civil rights, feminism, and anti-war dissent radically reshaped what was happening inside the university;
"Architecture schools around the world are also impacted by this broader dissent, they're often part of it." Lee Stickells
To the way the ideas within the academy of architecture more broadly shaped the degree program. Writing about the work of Professor Jennifer Taylor (1935-2015) and her 1972 book Australian Identity: Houses for Sydney 1953-63, Catherine Lassen says;
"In good architecture, absolutely, there's an internalising of the questions, and those things are up for grabs". Catherine Lassen
Imagine building a life size (1:1 scale) model of your urban design right there on the street to communicate and test your design ideas with local communities.
This is exactly what Evelina Ozola and her Fine Young Urbanists colleague Toms Kokins did in Latvia with the tools of tactical urbanism. Evelina wants architects, urbanists and designers to be more proactive in their practice, and to engage more directly with issues concerning the spatial environment and communities in cities.
"We should stand up for what we regard as valuable and vulnerable. To do this effectively, we must develop a broader skillset that includes inventive ways of communicating with governments, developers and organisations, and the general public." Evelina Ozola
Evelina has been rethinking her relationships to radical urban theory through her practice. In this episode, we talk to Evelina about a Fine Young Urbanists tactical urbanism project called Mierīgi! — a project that explores the use of a life-size mock-up as a tool for testing urban design and discussing it with the public.
Guest Evelina Ozola is a practicing architect and urban designer from Riga, Latvia. She has completed architecture studies at Riga Technical University and holds a master’s degree in urbanism from TU Delft in the Netherlands. She has worked at “MADE arhitekti” in Riga and “SVESMI” in Rotterdam, and is co–founder of Fine Young Urbanists, a practice that mainly operates in the field of tactical urbanism. Next to design work, Evelina frequently contributes to online and printed press on issues concerning the built environment. In 2013, she founded FOLD, an online magazine for creative industries in Latvia.
Evelina’s academic work includes working as a lecturer, design studio tutor and leading workshops at RISEBA Faculty of Architecture and Design in Latvia, Umeå School of Architecture and KTF Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. Since 2012, she has served as Programme Director of Riga Technical University International Summer School in Latvia.
Evelina is part of the curatorial team of Together and Apart, the Latvian Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia.
The utopian visions of architects, planners, philosophers and sociologists are important speculative projects. We take a deep dive into the idea of utopia with Professor Danilo Palazzo, who calls on us to become utopians.
“We are all utopians, as soon as we wish for something different and stop playing the part of the faithful performer or watchdog”, argued Henri Lefebvre.
Cities have often been used as the laboratory for the imaginations of better futures. Such thinking recognises that the built and natural environments are complex systems of competing relationships; spanning the social, economic, physical, political, and environmental.
As Robert Fishman pointed out in 1982, these ideal cities “were convenient and attractive intellectual tools that enabled each planner to bring together his many innovations in design, and to show them as part of a coherent whole, a total redefinition of the idea of the city”.
We ask Professor Danilo Palazzo about the role of utopia today. Can we study the past utopias in search of new ways to face the huge environmental, ecological, social, and urban problems of our times? Is there space for Utopia in our university programs?
Professor Danilo Palazzo was born in 1962 in Milano, Italy where he grew up. He completed his Master in Architecture at Politecnico di Milano in 1987 and his PhD in Urban and Regional Planning at Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia in 1993. From 1997 to 2012, he has taught at Politecnico di Milano as Assistant Professor and later as Associate Professor of urbanism, urban planning and urban design. In 2012 he moved to United States as Director of the School of Planning, College of DAAP, University of Cincinnati. His articles have appeared in Landscape and Urban Planning, Landscape Journal, Oikos, Urbanistica, Territorio, among others, and his books include Urban Ecological Design. A Process for Regenerative Places, Island Press, Washington D.C., 2011 (with Frederick Steiner); Urban Design. Un processo di progettazione urbana, Mondadori Università, Milano, 2008; Sulle spalle di Giganti. Le matrici della pianificazione ambientale negli Stati Uniti, Franco Angeli, Milano, 1997. He resides in Cincinnati.
What role does the government play in facilitating displacement through transit-led development?
We often hear about the role of the private sector, private landlords, and the purchasing power of individual real estate buyers in urban renewal, gentrification and displacement debates. The planning of new transit systems and overheating housing markets has renewed interest in understanding the role of government in neighbourhood change, specifically in the context of gentrification and displacement.
“Many people conflate gentrification and displacement.” Professor Karen Chapple
Karen Chapple and her team developed an online “neighbourhood early warning system;” a set of interactive maps that shows the current and future transformations that are underway in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the United States.
“The city is always undergoing a process of renewal in some form.” Associate Professor Kristian Ruming
The neighbourhood early warning system is a part of The Urban Displacement Project, which characterises Bay Area neighbourhoods (via census tracts) according to their experience of gentrification and risk of displacement. The early warning system - which is used by tens of thousands of unique visitors each year - develops a gentrification index that characterises places that historically housed vulnerable populations but have since experienced significant demographic shifts alongside real estate investment.
“I think we should look at world’s best practice, which is almost the opposite of what we do in Australia” Professor Peter Phibbs
We're talking to Professor Karen Chapple, Associate Professor Kristian Ruming and Professor Peter Phibbs about what urban renewal, gentrification and displacement look like in San Francisco with rent control and Sydney without it.
In New York, where anything’s possible, the privatisation of Manhattan's Central Park is even stranger than fiction.
I imagine that few people would choose to travel back in time to visit the run down and quite frankly often dangerous Central Park of 1970s Manhattan. But many people don't realise that a casual and relatively safe stroll through Central Park today has come at significant cost to the park’s maintenance workers.
"My dream is to have the park system privatised and run entirely for profit by corporations". Ron Swanson, fictional Parks Department Director, American Television sitcom Parks and Recreation.
We’re talking to John Krinsky about his new book with Maud Simonet, Who Cleans the Park? and their research about parks management in New York. John and Maud bring the often-invisible work of the park’s maintenance workers into view. What’s exposed is much more that than an underpaid and unvalued workforce, but a set of questions that go to the heart of urban management today.
In America, hundreds of millions of dollars of both public and private funds are dedicated to the upkeep of public assets like Central Park. Keeping a park in order requires not just money, but labour - the not so glamorous and often invisible jobs that are associated with picking up the garbage, painting benches, maintaining equipment, cleaning toilets, raking leaves and removing homeless people.
“Parks have been absolutely critical to the maintenance and argumentation of real estate value.” Professor John Krinsky.
John talks about how wealthy individuals and corporate actors have directed significant philanthropic funding into the Central Park Conservancy, which holds considerable sway over this public space. He questions the idea that public parks, and the public domain more generally, are best served by allowing the people who have the money to fund and maintain the public domain have their way with these public assets. And what's in it for the wealthy? Well, in the end, the public space rewards the park-side property owners with a financial return on their real estate holdings.
John Krinsky is professor of political science, with an interest in labor and community organising in New York. He specialises in urban politics, the politics of social movements, and the politics of work, welfare and labor. He is a co-editor of the online peer-reviewed journal Metro-politics and a co-editor of the journal Social Movement Studies. He co-coordinates the Politics and Protest Workshop at the CUNY Graduate Centre and is a founding board member of the New York City Community Land Initiative.
Read more in John Krinsky and Maud Simonet's new book, 'Who Cleans the Park?'
Additional Audio: NBC Parks and Recreation: https://www.nbc.com/parks-and-recreation
Australian cities are awash with construction activity. From Collingwood to Kogarah, Marrickville to Newstead, every passing month seems to bring with it a new, sold-off-the-plan high-rise apartment tower. Real estate, it seems, is the true national sport.
Australia now hosts the world’s most active market for securitised home loans and has the world’s second highest, and rising, levels of household debt. There are reportedly more cranes in the east coast capital cities than all of North America. And with the cranes and high-rise towers, come social problems and no respite from affordability crises: overcrowded schools, longer working hours to pay off mortgages, and worsening homelessness. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that in recent polls, densification and housing affordability are among the issues of most concern to Australian voters.
In this City Road episode, Alistair, Dallas and Chris revisit Maurice Daly’s classic 1982 book, Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust. Daly’s insights remain highly relevant to Australian cities today; cities that are marked by poorly planned densification, inflated property markets, land speculation, global capital and housing poverty. They agree with Daly that it is the property and finance system itself, rather than any ruptures to it, that reproduce housing booms, bubbles and busts in our cities.
Alistair Sisson and Dallas Rogers from the University of Sydney talk to these issues by narrating their 2018 Thinking Space essay, which was written with Chris Gibson from the University of Wollongong for the 100th anniversary of the journal Australian Geographer. An abridged version of this audio essay was produced and broadcast by The Conversation for their Essays on Air podcast, but we bring you the full, unabridged audio essay at City Road.
Alistair Sisson is a PhD candidate in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney.
Dallas Rogers is the Program Director of the Master of Urbanism, School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney, and host of City Road.
Chris Gibson is Professor of Human Geography and Executive Director UOW Global Challenges Program at the University of Wollongong.
Essay Credit Alistair Sisson and Dallas Rogers narrate their 2018 Thinking Space essay titled Property speculation, global capital, urban planning and financialisation: Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust redux. The essay was written with Chris Gibson and it was commissioned for the 100th anniversary of the journal Australian Geographer.
Voice Credits Narrator: Dallas Rogers Acknowledgment of Country and old voices: Alistair Sisson Introduction: Cheyne Anderson, Executive Producer of Think: Digital Futures Voice of Maurice Daly: Roderick Chambers, Executive Producer of The Wire Voice of Manual Aalbers: Kevin Suarez, 2SER Newsreader
Audio Credits Strange Dog by Blue Dot Sessions Atlantic State of Mind (A Long Winter) by McGee Gnossienne No3 by Trans Alp Soundscape audio sourced from: freesound.org
Pop-up, Guerrilla, DIY or Tactical Urbanism; whatever the name, temporary urban interventions are increasingly popular in contemporary cities. From community gardens and pop-up cinemas to outdoor art installations and mobile libraries, pop-up urbanism can take many forms. Much of the discussion about pop-up urbanism is celebratory in tone, highlighting the ways in which these transient practices are putting on display alternative lifestyles, reoccupying urban space with new uses, or reinventing daily life from the bottom up. Many claim that pop-up urbanism is a political activity that can be undertaken in pursuit of a more just or sustainable city.
Various levels of government are latching on to the idea of pop-up urbanism, and even borrowing some of the ideas that are associated with the more radical notion of tactical urbanism as they design and plan the city. Some governments even think that pop-up urbanism might be a quick, and cheap, solution to fostering participatory, bottom-up city-making. And the private sector has moved into this space too. But as these perviously guerrilla activities becoming more mainstream and corporate are they losing their way as political projects that seek more socially justice and sustainable cities?
Amelia Thorpe and Lee Stickells move us beyond the celebratory notion of the pop-up city. Lee takes us back to the 60s counter-culture to show that DYI urbanism has a long history. He talks about experimental architecture and his NSW State Library Nancy Keesing Fellowship research, titled Aquarian Green: Building new ways of living in the 1970s counterculture. Amelia discusses the different people, places and relationships that are involved in temporary urban interventions. Taken together, they consider the actual ways in which various pop-up practices might connect to questions of justice and sustainability in the city.
Amelia Thorpe is a Senior Lecturer and Director of Environmental Law Programs at UNSW. Her research is at the intersection of law, urban planning and geography, drawing on degrees in Architecture and City Policy as well as professional experience in the planning, transport and housing departments in Western Australia. Amelia’s current research examines the ways in which understandings of law, ownership and belonging shape – and are in turn shaped by – practices of participation in planning. Prior to joining UNSW in 2012, Amelia was a director at the Environmental Defenders Office, Australia’s largest and oldest public interest environmental law organisation. Amelia studied law at the University of Oxford and at Harvard Law School, and is a member of the New York Bar.
Lee Stickells is Associate Professor in Architecture at the University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning. Lee’s research is characterised by an interest in the potential for architecture to shape other ways of living, particularly its projection as a means to reconsider the terms of social life – of how we live together. It is focused on developing histories that connect experimental architectural and design strategies with environmental, political, technological and social transformations. Lee co-edited The Right to the City (2011) and has contributed to anthologies including The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design (2013), Beyond Utopia (2012),Trash Culture (2010), and Heterotopia and the City (2009). His essays have appeared in journals such as ARQ: Architectural Research Quarterly and Fabrications. Lee is currently an editorial committee member of the journal Architectural Theory Review and a SAHANZ Editorial Board member.
Read more about their work: “Pop-up Justice? Reflecting on Relationships in the Temporary City”, in John Henneberry (Ed), Transience and Permanence in Urban Development (London, Wiley-Blackwell: 2017)
What are the possibilities for community action that hold powerful urban actors to account? Strategic antagonism and the spaces that community alliances are opening up themselves to engage with urban development might hold the answer.
It is not only urban planners and the formal planning system that shape the way residents contribute to the planning of their city. In Sydney, local resident action groups and other urban alliances are working beyond the market-centred urban planning system to achieve their urban development goals. Under market-centred urban planning paradigms, urban development is increasingly valued as an economic process and as a driver of the economy, rather than a social process that might create a more equitable city.
We talk to Cameron McAuliffe about the work of the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe, and the way her ideas are being applied to urban planning in Australia. Talking about research conducted with the host of City Road, Dallas Rogers, Cameron says resident action groups are dissatisfied with contemporary urban planning engagement mechanisms in Sydney. Many groups viewed community participation as tokenistic and an end in itself. This was particularly the case in local government planning where community engagement mechanisms were routinely seen as tick-a-box processes, with contributions from the community simply passing ‘into a void’. Community activists spoke of their frustration with these participatory planning mechanisms and recognised their market-centred nature even if they did not use this term. Yet many continued to participate in order to remain in the politics of urban development. They recognised the limitations of formal participatory planning processes and this led many groups to take their political campaigns outside of the formal urban planning system, in what Cameron describes as a form of strategic antagonism.
Following Mouffe, Cameron argues that participatory planning needs to move beyond consensus-seeking models of planning consultation. He uses Mouffe’s critique of Habermasian communicative theory and consensus politics, and her theory of agonistic pluralism, to outline three ways in which the people of Sydney are working beyond the market-centered urban planning system.
Cameron McAuliffe is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography and Urban Studies in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology and part of the Geography and Urban Studies academic group. Cameron is an urban, social and cultural geography and a member of the Urban Research Program, where his research engages with the regulation of difference and the way cities govern ‘marginal’ bodies. His research includes projects on urban governance and resident action groups; the negotiation of national and religious identities among Iranian migrant communities; policy research on graffiti management; and the geographies of kerbside waste.
This is a story about how the financial industry and governments turned a housing foreclosure crisis for everyday Americans into a financial opportunity for institutional real estate investors. And like all good stories, it involves the management of the new post-GFC housing asset class with digital technologies and algorithms. Say hello to The Automated Landlord.
We talk to Desiree Fields about a new housing asset class that emerged from other side of the GFC in the United States. The period leading up to the GFC saw the banks reducing their lending standards for home loans in the United States. The financial industry bundled up these loans into mortgages backed securities and sold them off to investors around the world. And in a now familiar tale, this eventually lead to the subprime mortgage crisis and the GFC.
When people could no longer afford to pay their mortgages, a lot of these properties wound their way through the process of foreclosure and finally settled on the balance sheets of the banks. The United States government famously bailed out some of the banks by buying up their so-called ‘toxic debt’. But according to Desiree, what emerged on the other side of the GFC was a new housing asset class that was underwritten by two opposing forces.
On the one side, the banks were sitting on a lot of property and financial institutional don’t like to own or manage physical assets, like family homes. On the other side, Americans were having a hard time getting mortgages after the crisis because of tighter mortgage lending standards, and many were turning to renting. This created the ideal conditions for property investors, who thought, “ah ha… we can buy these properties for a low price, we can rent them out to people, who are kind of locked out of the homeownership market”, says Desiree.
But before the institutional investors could bundle these houses up to create the new housing asset class, the government and the financial institutions needed to sell the idea of the single family rental to the public. Today, the management of this new post-GFC housing asset class is increasingly undertaken with digital technologies and algorithms.
Desiree Fields is an urban geographer who theorises the rise of financial markets, actors and imperatives as a contemporary process of global urban change. With a particular focus on housing, Desiree is interested in how the link between real estate and finance is being reconstructed since the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, how residents experience this process, and its implications for housing policy and advocacy.
In Washington, DC, neighbourhood activists attempted to make themselves at home in their city by using the techniques of neighbourhood preservation. What became clear in that process is that those who control the historical narrative about a neighbourhood often have the power to shape its character and identity.
We talk to Cameron Logan, author of Historic Capital: Preservation, Race and Real Estate in Washington, DC., about the fragility of history and the battles over the past in the US. The physical landscape of Washington, DC, has been deeply shaped by grassroots citizen action organisations, especially preservation and restoration groups. These citizens groups sought to address issues of social and spatial justice through neighbourhood preservation. But as with most urban initiatives it produced unforeseen problems, and its benefits flowed disproportionately to those with established cultural and financial resources.
These benefits Cameron calls 'Historic Capital', which is a particular kind of cultural capital that can be turned into real estate wealth. Just like any other social or spatial tension in cities, urban planning rules that preserve old dwellings and neighbourhoods are never apolitical. In Washington, DC, the displacement associated with the battles over preserving the past have displacement logics with a strong racial salience.
Dr Cameron Logan is an urban and architectural historian and the Director of the Postgraduate Program in Heritage Conservation in the School of Architecture, Design, and Planning at the University of Sydney.
What is the secret life of land title registration? The Torrens system of land title registration, developed in South Australia in 1858, is fast becoming the most popular system of land conveyancing and administration around the world.
Sarah Keenan discusses the Torrens system of title registration that was invented for South Australia to assist the project of colonial settlement and land speculation. It was designed to increase efficiency of conveyancing, but title registration fundamentally changes the nature of title to land. The defining principles of Torrens title registration are ‘the mirror, the curtain, and indemnity’. These principles work together to hide the land’s unregistered history, making that history disappear from legal view. However the people who have those histories still exist. The Torrens system of title registration, or versions of it, are today favoured by the World Trade Organisation and World Bank, and are increasingly being adopted around the world in an effort to make land a liquid asset. New forms of title registration are being innovated to assist financial markets in land, for example the Mortgage Electronic Registration System in the US, which played a key role in facilitating the subprime crisis.
Whereas title to land in the common law world was previously conveyed using paper deeds that proved the owner had a history of possessing the land, under the Torrens system title is conveyed through the centralised, singular and increasingly electronic process of registration. The system was designed to make conveying land faster and more efficient, but it also changed the legal concept of land title, making it a discrete, dephysicalised object. Registered title is thus out of sync with land, which has a physicality and history that cannot be wiped away. This lack of synchronisation between land and title has a number of troubling effects.
Dr Sarah Keenan is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London. Sarah is a legal geographer with research interests in critical race and feminist engagements with property.
The New South Wales state government recently passed legislation to remove a group of homeless people camped for several months in Sydney’s central business district.
Located just metres from New South Wales Parliament and some of Australia’s largest banks, the homeless camp was a practical response to a lack of affordable housing and a political activity designed to capture the attention of policy-makers and the general public. The state government’s legislation—which gave the relevant minister power to confiscate property and remove people from Crown land on public safety grounds—sought to end months of disagreement about who should take responsibility, and about what the appropriate responses might be. Was it the job of local government or state government? Should the campers simply be excluded from the central business district of Sydney? Or should there be a response that addresses the root causes of their homelessness?
The events in Sydney are not unique. Melbourne’s Lord Mayor recently attempted to introduce by-laws that would ban people from sleeping on the streets of the central business district. Public protests quickly followed. Elsewhere in the world, governments and civil society organisations are grappling with how to manage the seemingly intractable problem of homelessness, particularly in large cities.
In this episode we talk to Dr Tom Baker, a lecturer at the University of Auckland, about the 'problem' of homelessness. We discuss the factors that have led to the crisis of homelessness. We ask what policy makers and academics can do to address homelessness in the 21st century city.
Can cities experience growing pains? Not the type of growing pains we usually associate with awkward teenagers but the growing pains of population growth.
Australia has one of the fastest growing populations in the world with most of us living in major urban centres. This puts pressure on urban planners, who have to deal with the city’s growth. To add to the pain, state governments do not always have the resources to cope with the development that is needed to keep up with the growth.
Associate Professor Glen Searle is an adjunct at the University of Queensland and the University of Sydney’s Urban Housing Lab. He talks with us about how other big cities have dealt with increasing populations, and what it might take for Australians to have the difficult discussion we need to have about population and economic growth.
How is the history of urban and land use planning connected to US racial discrimination? 'Heavily' according to Sarah Coffin! In 2014, an African American teenager named Michael Brown was shot by police in Ferguson Missouri. Michael Brown's death led to widespread protests across the United States and the rise of the black lives matter movement.
Many of us watching the events unfold on television. We probably made assumptions about Ferguson being one of those typically poor black US neighbourhoods, riddled with violence, crime and drugs – but according to Associate Professor Sarah Coffin nothing could be further from the truth. Sarah takes us back to the Civil War to show how the history of urban and land use planning are connected to racial discrimination in the US.
The 'Smart City' is not an urban planning term, it was dreamed up by large global tech companies. This week we hear from Dr Tooran Alizadeh about smart cities, the digital infrastructure that is required to enable them, and the need for telecommunications planners. This Sydney Business Insights podcast is from our friends over in the University of Sydney’s Business School.
The terms "Car Sharing" and "Smart Homes" conjure up images of driverless cars and automatic coffee machines. But the digital transformation of our lives is a bit more complex than this. In this episode, Robyn Dowling and Sophia Maalsen take a look at the digitisation of our urban lives. Sophia talks about doing digital ethnography and Robyn talks about the politics of digital infrastructure and data.
You could be forgiven for thinking that the Chinese are the only foreign investors buying housing in Sydney and Melbourne. There has certainly been a lot of stories about foreign real estate investment in Australia in the news lately. Often, this news is about Chinese investment in housing.
In this episode of City Road Podcast we talk with University of Sydney PhD scholar Sha Liu, who has been digging into the patchy data to find out just how much foreign investment in Australian housing comes from China, and what makes Australian property so attractive to foreign investors.
There are more than 24 million pets in Australian homes. But our cities are not the easiest places to own a pet. You can’t take your dog on the train in Australia, and if you’re a renter owning a pet, well that can make things really difficult when you try to secure a home.
In this episode of City Rd Podcast we talk with Drs Emma Power from the University of Western Sydney and Jen Kent from Sydney University, about why Australian cities don’t necessarily share Australians’ love of pets.
We talk to Professor Nicole Gurran from Sydney University’s School of Architecture, Design and Planning about the impact of online home-sharing platforms for global cities like Sydney.
Short term rental websites have certainly transformed the way we travel around the world. More than 150 million people have already stayed in an Airbnb home and you can choose from over 3 million homes listed in more than 190 countries. That’s more than the world’s largest hotel chains, such as the Marriott and Hilton.
But by reimagining local residential homes and bedrooms as potential tourist accommodation, Airbnb and others might also be transforming local communities. These global digital tech operators are operating beyond the established tourist quarters of many cities, and in some places, they’re trying to bypass existing urban planning and building management controls.
So not everyone is convinced of the local benefits that these global digital tech operators promote. In fact, there’s increasing opposition to so-called “holiday home-sharing” platforms from local residents and authorities throughout North America, Europe, and Australasia.
There are concerns about the influx of tourists, and along with them, increasing noise, rubbish and traffic congestion. Then there’s the declining business for local tourist operators and a decrease in permanent rental accommodation in major global cities.
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