Urban Political Podcast: Recent Episodes
Ross Beveridge & Markus Kip
The Urban Political delves into contemporary urban issues with activists, scholars and policy-makers from around the world. Providing informed views, state of the art knowledge and unusual insights, the podcast aims to advance our understanding of urban environments and how we might make them more just and democratic. The Urban Political provides a new forum for reflection on bridging urban activism and scholarship, where regular features offer snapshots of pressing issues and new publications, allowing multiple voices of scholars and activists to enter into a transnational debate directly.
Hosted by Ross Beveridge (Urban Studies Department of the University of Glasgow) and Markus Kip (Georg-Simmel-Center for Metropolitan Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin) Communications: Philipp Weitze (Georg-Simmel-Center for Metropolitan Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin)
Powered in partnership with the Georg-Simmel-Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
Music credits: "Something Elated" by Broke For Free, CC BY 3.0 US
If you would like to produce an episode with us or have comments, please get in touch!
Follow us on Twitter: @political_urban Instagram: @urban_political Featured on wisspod: https://wissenschaftspodcasts.de/podcasts/urban-political/
Email: urbanpolitical@protonmail.com
Social mix has become a central planning discourse worldwide to address urban inequalities and segregation as key urban problems of the 21st century. Far from being benevolent, the discourse of social mix and its related implementations are subjected to a fundamental critique highlighting racist underpinnings and consequences in targeted neighborhoods. The conversation draws on insights from Canada, Chile, Germany, and the US. Kudos for this important discussion to guest editor Julie Chamberlain!
In this first episode of the Urban Concept series, Louis Volont (MIT, Boston) and Thijs Lijster (University of Groningen) discuss with Talja Blokland (Humboldt University, Berlin) the concepts of community and commons and consider implications for urban research and action. The series introduces key urban concepts and reflects on their relevance in the fields of theory, research and politics.
Listen to urban researchers sharing their insights on the situation in Ukrainian cities at war, from Kyiv, Kharkiv to Mariupol. Our guests discuss Putin's identity politics and the way his propaganda hits a wall in the context of the shelling of Ukrainian cities. Countering the images of an opposition of "Ukrainian vs Russian" inhabitants as a backdrop to the war, the discussants offer a different perspective on how ethnicity and language have played out prior to the war. At the same time, they take on predominant Western European understandings of politics and economics of Ukraine and draw a picture of a complex society that becomes more united in the context of a common enemy.
What do graffiti and street art do? This is the key question of the intriguing podcast conversation among Emma Arnold, Jeff Ross, and John Lennon. While we learn about the unruly and disruptive features of graffiti in urban space, our guests also trouble its effects by asking questions about its relation to gentrification, racialized capitalism and right-wing media strategy. Highlighting geographical variation, the conversation covers the political regulation of graffiti and street art in the US, Scandinavia, Cairo, and Beirut.
On the 26th of September over million Berliners voted to expropriate and return to public ownership over 200,000 homes in the city. Deutsche Wohnen und Co Enteignen targeted a number of large real estate companies in Berlin that had control of what had previously been social housing stock. The referendum is not legally binding, requiring the support of the governing parties in the Berlin parliament, who are now tasked with legislating on the issue. The composition of the governing coalition has yet to be determined, although it is clear that the Social Democrats will lead, having emerged as the largest party in the elections on the same as the referendum.
This podcast examines the background to this historic victory and considers the implications for housing politics in Berlin and beyond. We remind ourselves what the campaign was about, we look at what happened, what might happen next and the likely challenges in store. We also consider the wider implications of the Berlin case.
We are very happy to welcome back two guests from previous podcasts on the subject, Joanna Kusiak and Andrej Holm.
In this episode we give you exclusive insights into the RC21 conference 2021 Antwerp. Our guests share their experiences from sessions, keynotes, and discussions on this year's main theme of 'Sensing and Shaping the City'.
After discussing expropriation efforts in Berlin recently, this episode will widen the discussion of housing commons to perspectives, differences, and potentials in Europe and the US.
‘How can academic research be of service to envisioning alternative planning agendas that reflect the realities of the so-called Global South?’ is the central question that our guest host Inhji Jon stresses in this episode.
Green cities and green infrastructure have become common planning practices. But why is nature good and how does green matter? Do all people have equal access to nature, or are some left out of contemporary climate planning?
After Andrej Holm delved into the history of 'Mietendeckel', the rent cap legislation in Berlin, in the previous episode on contemporary housing struggles in Berlin, in this episode Joanna Kusiak explores grassroots activism of 'Deutsche Wohnen & Co enteignen' (Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co).
This episode, we discuss the social and political consequences of last week's rent cap ("Mietendeckel") ruling of the German Federal Constitutional Court with Andrej Holm. We explore the history of the Mietendeckel, rising rents, and growing housing activism in Berlin that led to the legislation in the first place. We debate the effects the rent cap had on rents, the housing market and what it meant for people living and renting in the city. Andrej discusses the implications that the ruling has for the left-wing coalition in Berlin, for urban activism, and transformative approaches.
This podcast explores how the pandemic is changing density around the world and generating forms of politics. With a diverse group of scholars and practitioners from around the world, the podcast addresses the following specific questions/ themes:
How should density be conceived and why is it important to understanding cities (and the pandemic)?
What is the pandemic doing to different forms of density?
Is the pandemic changing the ‘where’ of density?
Is the pandemic changing how we understand density? Do we now need to think about density in a different light or can we use the debates and concepts we’ve used in the past?
The podcast is moderated by:
Colin McFarlane is Professor of Urban Geography at Durham University, UK. His work focusses on the politics of urban life, particularly in relation to density, infrastructure, and equality.
Our Guests are:
Hung-Ying Chen is a Post Doctoral Research Associate at Durham University (UK). Trained as an urban planner and urban economic geographer, she is researching the political and cultural economy of land value capture and the sensorial geographies of urban density and precarious politics
Roger Keil is a Professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies and Urban Change, York University in Toronto. He researches global suburbanization, urban political ecology, cities and infectious disease, and regional governance.
Lucía Cerrada Morato is the High Density Development Project Manager at Tower Hamlets Council, London. Trained as an architect and urban designer, she is currently completing a PhD at the Bartlett School of Planning.
Margot Rubin is a senior researcher and faculty member in the University of the Witwatersrand (South African Research Chair in Spatial Analysis and City Planning) in Johannesburg.
The transatlantic slave trade had a lasting impact not only on the development of big ports like Liverpool, London, Nantes or Bordeaux, but also in cities that far less frequently associated with slavery. In this episode, four researcher-activists from Bremen and Lancaster speak about how slavery is not just a bygone period of cruel practices far away. Our guests reveal the involvement of these places within the geographies of slavery and emphasize the "absent presence" or "present absence" of enslavism in contemporary Bremen and Lancaster. As a challenge placed in front of urban studies, tracing the historical and geographical links of slavery is discussed as a transdisciplinary and activist endeavor and a vital element of a growing contemporary anti-racist movement. Alan, Geraldine, Maimuna and Sabine reflect on the decolonial engagements and methodologies in their respective cities and chart an outlook to deepen collaboration.
Emerging film-makers and urban researchers Nitin Bathla, Sandra Jasper, and Tino Buchholz speak about their avenues into film-production, why film amounts to a vital medium for urban research, and what it would mean to enhance its role in urban studies. This episode is also full of urban film inspirations and recommendations!
Amidst the rapidly unfolding ecological crisis, current research is witnessing ever new financial strategies that aim at making money from urban climate risks. In this episode Hanna Hilbrandt invites Emma Colven, Zac Taylor, Sarah Knuth, and Sage Ponder, to discuss the financial and socio-material limits to the viability of urban financialization in the context of climate change. When climate disasters increasingly destroy financial assets and erode returns, how much longer will it take until some financial strategies become unviable? What are the multiple mechanisms finance and state actors use to push these limits into the future and continue to profit from climate change? Which places are indispensable to finance? And what happens when financial strategies become unviable (if that happens at all)?
Bringing together research from Jakarta, Miami and Puerto Rico, amongst other cities, we discuss risk management practices that mine value from rising waters, wildfires, or hurricanes, and open up new markets on the back of urban decay. Thinking through wider questions about disaster capitalism, we delve into the inherent challenges to that system. Talking across multiple research sites, we discuss geographical differences in state interventions ranging from forced evictions to fiscal policies. In conclusion, we reflect on contestations on the ground and possibilities for urban research to support these struggles.
Throughout the global south, many urban regions have become massive. In the familiar renditions of this notion, urban regions, mushrooming in population and spatial footprints, teeter close to chaos, environmental disaster, and ungovernability. Populations are being reshuffled, moved from one area to the other, something which an extensive landscape of built projects that never really worked has allowed as buildings are repurposed for other uses as they also take advantage of contiguities with new developments—sub-cities, new industrial zones and logistical centres. The sheer heterogeneity of developments at all scales, from thousands of small developers to large real estate corporations have equipped regions with a large volume of warehouses, housing estates, mega residential developments, industrial zones, commercial centres, and small enterprise districts that either never got off the ground, only partially fulfilled the intended functions or rates of occupancy, or quickly fell apart.
When these “projects” are coupled with large swathes of squatter settlements, temporary migrant housing, and the conversion of older residential neighbourhoods into mass boarding houses, it is possible to grasp the extensiveness of a circulating population that anchors residency across multiple tenuous residencies, remains completely unanchored in serial short terms occupancies, or is continuously displaced as a function of different instantiations of urban renewal, the migration of employment opportunities, or an increasingly opportunistic-cantered sensibility of residents themselves. Yet, massiveness may be the very thing that provides a kind of “safety net.” All kinds of discrepant environments become momentary bastions of largely improvised collectivity, where people try to make some functional use of each other without any pretence of long-term commitments. Momentary, sporadic, and makeshift become the defining metaphors of many collective formations.
In this episode, Maliq invites the four participants to reflect on Delhi (Nitin), Karachi (Sobia), Lagos (Taibat), and Manila (Kristian) by addressing these questions: 1. What is it particularly about your cities which seems at times too complex, too all over the place, too difficult to understand with the tool boxes that we have? 2. You have all been involved in attempting to do things in your cities—either in terms of advocacy, community planning, public policy, project development. Can you talk about what you have learned through this process, and how this new learning might be translated into action? 3. In terms of the urban challenges as you understand them, and the complexities of the regions you inhabit, what do you think constitutes viable political experiments, particularly those addressed to issues of spatial justice, economic precarity, and social marginalization?
Gianpaolo Baiocchi offers us an historical overview of what he terms Radical Cities in Latin America and draws out some lessons from the past 30 years. Comparing these experiences to municipal politics in Europe and elsewhere, he highlights the distinctive features and charts the ups and downs of these urban movements. Massive suburbanization, metropolitan fragmentation and reactionary backlashes in Brazil and elsewhere have been posing key challenges for reconfiguring a municipalist politics in this part of the world. Taking cues from our recent podcast roundtable on Murray Bookchin's work, Gianpaolo discusses radical misunderstandings around the notion of sovereignty and argues why a transformative urban politics needs to uphold a critical understanding and practice of popular sovereignty. The episode finishes with Gianpaolo's reflection on how he relates his position as a university researcher in New York City with current activist and political engagements.
This episode discusses the impact of COVID-19 on the behavior of people in public spaces in Dortmund (Germany), San Francisco (USA) and Isfahan (Iran). My guests, Teresa Sprague and Ghazal Farjami, and I (Mais Jafari) explain how people in these societies perceive and react to social distancing, mask wearing, and other measures in a variety of public space typologies such as city streets, parks, beaches, plazas and indoor spaces like shopping malls and restaurants and other social centers. Finally, we share our views from our own observation and scholarly background on what the new normality in these three cities will look like in the post COVID-19 world and what the major shifts in planning, especially at the design and use of urban spaces will be.
In this podcast we discuss the work of Murray Bookchin, relating it to the experiences and debates around municipalism and wider left political practices and theory. With our guests (Blair, Hilary and Kate) we focus the discussion on the recent edited collection of Bookchin's work: The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso), edited by Debbie Bookchin and Blair Taylor.
Reflecting, but going beyond, the broad range of topics addressed by Bookchin in the book, we cover a lot of ground, such as the role of the state in left politics, sources of transformative change, 'reason', 'knowledge' and politics, popular democracy, the new municipalism in Barcelona and municipal socialism in 1980s London.
Blair Taylor Program director of the Institute for Social Ecology, a popular education center for ecological scholarship and advocacy founded in 1974. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the New School for Social Research, and has written on U.S. social movements, contemporary far-right politics, political ecology, and the history of the left. His work has been featured in Les Temps Modernes, American Studies, and City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. He is co-editor of the Murray Bookchin anthology The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso, 2014). He lives outside Seattle, Washington, and is active with West Sound Democratic Socialists of America.
Hilary Wainwright Co-editor, Red Pepper: www.redpepper.org.uk (if you don't yet subscribe why not look at the RED PEPPER PAY-AS-YOU-FEEL SUBSCRIPTION? go to the website and click 'subscribe' for an unmissable offer) Fellow, Transnational Institute:www.tni.org
Starting off from her latest agenda-setting article "What does it mean to be a radical urban scholar-activist, or activist scholar today?" published earlier this year in the relaunch issue of the journal _CITY – analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action_. It was published before the pandemic shock and the current wave of Black Lives Matter protests took off. In our conversation, Margit will thus discuss with us her notion of three tipping points in light of these pressing concerns but also highlight the opportunities for political change and how the anti-racist protests have created a collective agency whose vibrancy compares to the movements of the 1960s. In this situation, urban researchs are called not only to scholarly rigor but also to a politics of mobilization.
Margit Mayer has been professor for comparative and North American politics at Freie Universität Berlin, as of 2014 she is Senior Fellow at the Center for Metropolitan Studies at Technical University Berlin. Her research focuses on comparative, urban and social politics as well as social movements. She has published on various aspects of contemporary urban politics, urban theory, (welfare) state restructuring, social movements, and migrant (support) organizing. She co-authored _Nonprofits in the Transformation of Employment Policies_ (2004), co-edited _Urban Movements in a Globalising World_ (2000), _Cities for People not for Profit_ (2012), _Neoliberal Urbanism and Its Contestations_ (2012). and _Urban Uprisings: Challenging the Neoliberal City in Europe_ (2016).
Article Reference: Mayer, Margit, 2020. "What does it mean to be a (radical) urban scholar-activist, or activist scholar, today?". _City_ 24 (1/2): 1-17.
This episode delves deep into the ongoing revolutionary movements in Algeria and Lebanon. Ratiba Hadj-Moussa and Rana Sukarieh provide us with a rich and inspiring account of developments, offering social-economic background to the events of the last two years, outlining the main contours of the political struggles in the two countries and drawing comparative insights. In particular we gain: a clear sense of the geographies of the movements, the solidarities and tensions within them, the crucial place of women activists and gender as a focal point, and how the state is reacting to these diverse demands for justice and democracy. We also consider how Covid-19 has shaped developments.
Guests: Ratiba Hadj-Moussa is professor of Sociology at York University, Toronto. Her areas of specialization are the sociology of culture and political sociology. Her interests range from common cultural artefacts to art (cinema) and visual culture in general. My work is anchored within the scope of three major fields: 1. Mediascapes, principally new media, in relation to politics and shared spaces as they are constituted and evolve in non-Western contexts; 2. Marginalized forms of protest and new forms of the political; 3, Public Memory and its relations to alternatives and official memories. Her recent publications include La télévision par satellite au Maghreb et ses publics. Espace de résistance, espaces critiques (PUG-2015, English version Cambridge Scholars Publishing,2018). She is the editor of Terrains difficiles, Sujets sensibles, faire de la recherche au Maghreb et sur le Moyen-Orient (Du Croquant, 2019), and the co-editor of Protests and Generations, Legacies and Emergences in the Middle East , North African and the Mediterranean (Brill, 2017) ; Suffering , Arts and Aesthetics (2014), and of Les Mondes méditerranéens . L’émeute au coeur du politique (2013).
Rana Sukarieh is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at York University, Toronto, Canada. Her dissertation focuses on the (dis)continuity of political solidarity with the Palestinian Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and the process of transcending activists’ differences in order to build sustained solidarity. Rana's research interests are in the areas of transnational social movements, social movements and political economy in the Middle East, critical qualitative research, and post-colonial studies. She is a recipient of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council award (SSHRC), of Ontario Graduate Studies (OGS), and the Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security award at York University. She is currently teaching at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.
Nina Stener Jørgensen and Maroš Krivý offer us the broader picture of the contemporary urbanist discourse of liveability and Jan Gehl's rise to prominence. In a tour de force, they walk us through Gehl's original work within the Danish welfare state of the 1960s, his indebtedness to the contributions of his wife Ingrid, his rise to stardom following Al Gore's liveability agenda, and why his success throws a shadow even on people like Richard Florida. The political responses to the Covid-19 situation show no significant disruption with the liveability discourse but possibly allow for a new round of implementations in public space. The presented critique situates the liveability approach in the context of neoliberal urbanism that posits equality while simultaneously remaining blind, if not covering up structural inequalities and social conflicts. In effect, the current Black Lives Matter protests against anti-Black racism confront this paradigm with the question: Liveability for whom?
Guests:
Maroš Krivý is Associate Professor and Director of Urban Studies at the Faculty of Architecture, Estonian Academy of Arts. He was previously a Research Associate in the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge. His work, situated at the intersections of urban geography and architectural history, has been published in journals such as _IJURR, Planning Theory, Architectural Histories, The Journal of Architecture, Footprint_ and _Avery Review_. Maroš contributed to a number of edited collections, including _Neoliberalism on the Ground_ (University of Pittbusrgh Press, 2020) and _Second World Postmodernisms_ (Bloomsbury, 2019).
Nina Stener Jørgensen is a PhD student at the Faculty of Architecture, Estonian Academy of Arts, working on a thesis that investigates the intersection of Participation, Cybernetics and Urbanism in 1960’s western architectural discourse.
On the basis of the book _The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth_, we discuss with Margaret Kohn her resuscitation of the early 20th century solidarist ideas and the links to the Lefebvrian notion of the right to the city. We challenge her on the question of scale and the role of the state in solidarist thinking, how all of this may enlighten the response to the Covid-19 moment, and recommend that you listen to her smart and thoughtful reflections.
Margaret Kohn is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. She received her MA and PhD from Cornell University. Her most recent book _The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth_ was published by Oxford University Press (2016). It won the David Easton Award for Best Book in Political Theory and the Judd Award for Best Book in Urban and Local Politics. She is the author of _Radical Space: Building the House of the People_ (Cornell University Press 2003), and _Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space_ (Routledge 2004) and _Political Theories of Decolonization_ (with Keally McBride, Oxford University Press, 2011). She has been a Fulbright Fellow and a Braudel Senior Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. She has also served as Acting Director of the Centre for Ethics and Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, Scarborough.
Robin Chang and Meg Holden discuss how the Covid-19 situation has disrupted teaching and learning practices in urban research, deepening existing and exposing new inequalities. They consider in particular the short and long term implications of on-going restrictions for experiential learning, what this means for urban research methods, drawing on concepts like discomfort and positing a notion of an ethics of experience.
Robin A. Chang is PhD Researcher and Instructor in the School of Spatial Planning at the Technical University of Dortmund in Dortmund, Germany. Her comparative research investigates temporary and adaptive uses through a complexity lens on urban and industrial lands in Germany and the Netherlands. As a Canadian based in Germany, she also combines her research and teaching interests with cross-cultural experiences in British Columbia and Metro Vancouver, her original home and professional planning context.
Meg Holden is Director of the Urban Studies Program and Professor of Urban Studies and Geography at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. Her work focuses on pragmatic approaches to sustainable urban planning, policy and everday life.
Key literature:
Esteve Corbera, Isabelle Anguelovski, Jordi Honey-Rosés & Isabel Ruiz- Mallén (2020): Academia in the Time of COVID-19: Towards an Ethics of Care, Planning Theory & Practice, DOI: 10.1080/14649357.2020.1757891
Holden, Meg; Chang, Robin; and Gunderson, Rebecca (2019): Resilience and Pedagogy. Learning From International Field Studies in Urban Resilience in Canada and Germany. In Cities and the Environment (CATE) 12 (1). Available online at https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cate/vol12/iss1/2, checked on 3/19/2019.
Mezirow, J. 1991. Transformative Dimensions of Adult Learning. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Reflecting on how shocks are applied as tools to further political agendas, Creighton Connolly, S. Harris Ali, and Roger Keil consider the implications for racialized inequalities and the Global South-North divide. Two months after the first conversation with out guests, at a moment when the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic, Creighton, Harris, and Roger analyze how cities have responded in different ways and what kind of lasting effects we should expect in our urban lives.
Guests:
Creighton Connolly is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies and the Global South in the School of Geography, University of Lincoln, UK. He researches urban political ecology, urban-environmental governance and processes of urbanization and urban redevelopment in Southeast Asia, with a focus on Malaysia and Singapore. He is editor of ‘Post-Politics and Civil Society in Asian Cities’ (Routledge 2019), and has published in a range of leading urban studies and geography journals. Previously, he worked as a researcher in the Asian Urbanisms research cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.
S. Harris Ali is a Professor of Sociology, York University in Toronto. He researches issues in environmental sociology, environmental health and disasters including the social and political dimensions of infectious disease outbreaks. He is currently conducting research on the role of community-based initiatives in the Ebola response in Africa.
Roger Keil is a Professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University in Toronto. He researches global suburbanization, urban political ecology, cities and infectious disease, and regional governance. Keil is the author of "Suburban Planet" (Polity 2018) and editor of "Suburban Constellations" (Jovis 2013). A co-founder of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA), he was the inaugural director of the CITY Institute at York University and former co-editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
How is the pandemic affecting conditions of labour and migrant workers? How are Unions and other organisations reacting? In this wide-ranging and forensic discussion with Michelle Buckley (Toronto), Rajan Pandey (Bangalore) and Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay (Mohali) tell us about on-going struggles around mobility and labour in Canada and India. We hear about how the Indian state is seeking to unravel regulation and working rights under the guise of enabling the economy to deal with the crisis and how the situation is deepening inequalities and conflicts around ethnicity and religion. We also discuss how labour organisations in Canada are gearing up for the struggles to come and consider what 'resistance' means.
Guests:
Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay (Assistant Professor, Humanities & Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali) is a historical anthropologist of the Present. My earlier and ongoing research projects explore themes in informality, infrastructure technologies and governmentality studies in late-colonial and postcolonial India. I am particularly invested in studying the materiality of mass politics as India transitioned from imperial sovereignty to popular sovereignty. I am also interested in the genealogies of Marxism and Fascism infested in popular consciousness in South Asia.
Michelle Buckley is an urban and economic geographer in the Department of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough. A former Lecturer at Mansfield College, Oxford and at the School of Environment & Technology at the University of Brighton, UK, her research is broadly concerned with the experiences of mobile workers employed in the construction trades, and with the politics of labour, gender, citizenship, and race that sustain contemporary urbanization, homeownership, and real estate investment.
Rajan Pandey is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Christ (Deemed to be University) Bangalore. He did is PhD on peasant politics and anti land acquisition agitations in post globalization India from Centre for Political Studies, JNU. He also has an experience of around a decade working as a freelance journalist covering politics and elections across India. He has co-authored a book "Battleground UP" on politics in India's most populous state, along with several academic articles and many journalistic pieces. His interests lie in electoral politics, social movements, migration studies, political economy and geographies of work in post colonial settings.
What is "New Municipalism"? In this first of a new series Ross seeks clarification from scholar-activists Bertie Russell and Matt Thompson who give us a conceptual and historical take on this new urban movement, offering reflections on UK examples like Preston.
The interview was recorded at the end of August 2019 at the Royal Geographers Society / Institute of British Geographers Annual Conference Annual Conference in London.
Guests:
Dr Bertie Russell is a research associate at the University of Sheffield's Urban Institute. He has recently worked on the ESRC Jam & Justice project and as part of MISTRA Urban Futures. His research interests include municipalism (with a recent paper in Antipode entitled Beyond the Local Trap: New Municipalism and the Rise of the Fearless Cities and a forthcoming paper in Soundings) and new models of economic democracy (with a recent co-authored policy report published by Common Wealth entitled Public-Common Partnerships: Building New Circuits of Collective Ownership). He is an editorial community member of Minim, and has published recently in Open Democracy, Red Pepper, ROAR, Citymetric, Novara and The Conversation.
Dr Matt Thompson is a Leverhulme Research Fellow at the University of Liverpool’s Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place. As a geographer and recovering urban planner, he is interested in municipalism, cooperative economies, social innovation, urban regeneration and housing. He is the author of Reconstructing Public Housing: Liverpool’s hidden history of collective alternatives (Liverpool University Press 2020), an article in IJURR on Playing with the Rules of the Game and one forthcoming in Progress in Human Geography asking What’s so new about New Municipalism?
Roger Keil's new book, 'Suburban Planet', is a major contribution to (re)thinking the urban age in terms its peripheries rather than its centres. He seeks to provide us with a way of coming to terms with the process of suburbanization and the diversity of suburban forms. But does he succeed? And what are the political implications of his arguments? Listen to our book forum with Theresa Enright (University of Toronto), Berenice Bon (French National Research Institute for Sustainable Development, Paris), Philippe Koch (Zurich University of Applied Sciences) and Roger Keil (York University, Canada).
We are living on a suburban planet, if you ask Roger. He even wrote a book with that title. In the interview, he elaborates on the political implications of that condition. Situating his work on global suburbanisms in relation to the L.A. School and the debate around planetary urbanization, he flexes his intellectual muscles to make us believe that it is the suburbs that Marx and Lefebvre would pay most attention to today. Plus, find out about his surprise as Markus read a book passage back to him. “I must have been high on something when I wrote that.”
Roger Keil is a Professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University in Toronto. He researches global suburbanization, urban political ecology, cities and infectious disease, and regional governance. Keil is the author of "Suburban Planet" (Polity 2018) and editor of "Suburban Constellations" (Jovis 2013). A co-founder of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA), he was the inaugural director of the CITY Institute at York University and former co-editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. Making cities better places in the age of smart urbanism and in the era of anthropocentric climate change remains dependent on how we build new structures for sustainable and adaptive use and how we build equal spaces that defy the capitalist laws of uneven development.
The call to make academic research more socially relevant has become a commonplace. But what does it mean to for academic research to benefit urban activism? What is to be done when the logics of academia obstruct deeper activist engagements?
This roundtable engages these challenges with four seasoned activist-scholars. Kate and Uli work in academia using different strategies to relate their job with activist engagements. Tomislav and Richard both have a background in urban research and have entered local politics. Tomislav recently entered Zagreb city council as a member of the opposition and Richard became part of the Zurich city government. Discussion ensues among the participants about the prospects of straddling the requirements of research and action.
A controversial and collegial late-night open-air wine-panel in the context of the INURA (International Network for Urban Research and Action) conference in Zagreb in July 2019.
Participants: Richard Wolff is an urban researcher and activist from Switzerland Co-founder of the International Network for Urban Research and Action INURA in 1991. PhD at ETH Zurich in Participatory urban planning, the example of the King's Cross Railway Lands Development in London, 1994 - 1999. Lecturing positions in the US and Switzerland. Since 2013, elected member of the City Government of Zurich, Head of the Department of Civil Engineering and Waste Management
Kate Shaw is a critical urban geographer at the University of Melbourne, interested mainly in the cultures of cities and the political-economic and social processes that shape them. She is currently working on a book titled "The squander and salvage of urban waterfronts," which looks at the redevelopment of the deindustrialised docks and harbours in rich countries, and the wasted opportunities. With Libby Porter she co-edited "Whose Urban Renaissance? An international comparison of urban regeneration strategies."
Dr. Ulrike Hamann is a postdoctoral researcher at the Berlin Institute for empirical integration and migration research (BIM) at Humboldt University in Berlin. She works at the department of Diversity and Social Conflict. She is also an urban activist and co-founder of the neighbourhood initiative Kotti & Co, has been active in several Berlin urban initiatives and networks such as the Rent Referendum (Mietenvolksentscheid), The Urbanize Festival, the Dossier Group and others. Her main interests are at the intersection of housing and migration, racism, solidarity and neighbourhood. She has published on the welcome movement for refugees in Germany, on the housing situation of refugees and is currently leading two research projects on urban settings and the arrival of refugees.
Tomislav Tomašević holds a BA and MA in political science from the University of Zagreb and MPhil in environment, society and development from the University of Cambridge. Tomislav’s research interests are in issues of sustainability and urban commons. He currently works as a Program Director at the Institute for Political Ecology, a newly established think-tank in Croatia, and is now a member of city council of Zagreb under the platform "Zagreb je NAŠ!"
Part 2: Regaining Democratic Control
The second part examines the extent to which democratic control has been exerted in the Checkpoint Charlie case and how development plans have been modified under increased pressure from societal groups. Listen to hear about the possibilities of contesting tourist-centred developments in inner cities and why activists should never automatically trust a leftwing government…
Our studio guest:
Christoph Sommer is completing his PhD in geography at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU Berlin); using Berlin as case, he is exploring how conflict-prone urban tourism is (un-)governed. He is co-founder of the Urban Research Group New Urban Tourism at the Georg Simmel Center for Metropolitan Studies (HU Berlin) and recently co-edited the book Tourism and Everyday Life in the Contemporary City.
Part 1: Heritage Preservation and Urban Development
Much-visited by tourists and generally avoided by Berliners, the site has faced growing conflict over plans to develop a hotel, Hard Rock Cafe and museum. This first part details the historical importance of the empty plots at the former Cold War border crossing and reflects on wider debates about heritage, tourism and urban development.Find out why urban emptiness can have heritage value.
Our studio guest:
Christoph Sommer is completing his PhD in geography at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU Berlin); using Berlin as case, he is exploring how conflict-prone urban tourism is (un-)governed. He is co-founder of the Urban Research Group New Urban Tourism at the Georg Simmel Center for Metropolitan Studies (HU Berlin) and recently co-edited the book Tourism and Everyday Life in the Contemporary City.
Welcome to the Urban Political Podcast! In this brief episode, we introduce ourselves, tell you about the motivation and purpose behind the podcast and what you should expect to hear in our pod in the following months.