Urban Political

88 - In Conversation with Heather Dorries (The Urban Lives of Property Series V)
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/88-88-InConversationwithHeatherDorries

In this episode of The Urban Lives of Property, Markus Kip and Hanna Hilbrandt speak with Heather Dorries, about the intersections of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in urban property regimes. Drawing on Dorries’ recent publications and her wider expertise on property, Indigeneity, and urbanism the episode centers the ways in which planning practices contribute to Indigenous dispossession while also serving as a site of resistance and assertions of sovereignty. We foreground three themes: First, the conversation addresses planning’s complicity in processes of dispossession, examining how legal frameworks and land sales have historically undermined Indigenous political authority. This discussion delves into Dorries research on Brantford on how nuisance bylaws work as mechanisms (...)

#land,ownership,Canada,Indigenous,property,planning,dispossession
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1901429-m-a14f0580a724e3f221f54a8b2662e805.m4a?source=feed

87 - Infrastructures of Urban Citizenship
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/87-87-infrastructures-of-urban-citizenship

This talk focuses on the role of public services in delineating the boundaries of belonging and possibilities of participation in cities. Drawing on the notion of ’infrastructural citizenship’, it asks how non-citizens navigate access to urban circulations and how rights and responsibilities are negotiated at these interfaces. Based on ethnographic, participatory and design research conducted with migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, Lebanon and Germany, it concentrates in particular on the physical and social infrastructures supporting the circulation of food and waste. The talk will outline the various ways in which migrants use infrastructural engagement to craft novel forms of belonging at the local level, contributing to our understanding of participation and (...)

#UK,Germany,Lebanon,Citizenship,Refugees,Infrastructure
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1875864-m-061cdbb96f1c3b0b31ac4a6279925fc7.m4a?source=feed

86 - Book Review: Concrete City
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/86-86-concrete-city

Concrete City: Material Flows and Urbanization in West Africa delivers a theoretically informed, ethnographic exploration of the African urban world through the life of concrete. Emblematic of frenetic urban and capitalistic development, this material is pervasive, shaping contemporary urban landscapes and societies and their links to the global world. It stands and circulates at the heart of major financial investments, political forces and environmental debates. At the same time, it epitomises values of modernity and success, redefining social practices, forms of dwelling and living, and popular imaginaries. The book invites the reader to follow bags of cement from production plant to construction site, along the 1000-kilometre urban corridor that links Abidjan to Accra, Lomé, (...)

#Concrete,Material,Africa
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1854065-m-0ed1f607ef85b8cb76b29be8f4dc2eff.m4a?source=feed

85 - Authoritarian Urbanism in Eurasia
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/85-authoritarian-urbanism-in-eurasia

This episode is part of our Think&Drink Series in collaboration with the Georg-Simmel-Centre for Urban Studies working with the Humboldt University Berlin. Today’s speaker is Andrei Semenov, an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. Authoritarian urbanism has recently become a buzzword applied to different settings and situations. Andrei attempts to clarify the conceptual foundations of this term by using a combination of political science and urban sociology analytical frameworks. He shows that the authoritarian part refers to the dictators’ response to two key challenges to their rule: elite factionalism and mass uprisings. While a wide set of strategies is available to dictators, the (...)

#Eurasia,Authoritarian,Russia,Uzbekistan,Kazakhstan
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1829069-m-903edb9ea11840c3d95245693c8b525b.m4a?source=feed

84 - How Cities Can Transform Democracy
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/84-how-cities-can-transform-democracy

This is the first seminar in the series ’Where is Urban Politics?’ a hybrid seminar series hosted by the University of Groningen, in the academic year 2024-2025. This talk by Ross Beveridge and Philippe Koch provides a novel way of thinking about the relationship between democracy and the urban based on two main arguments. First, across the globe claims for and forms of urban collective self-rule signal that the city retains democratic significance in a very specific sense: as an object of practice and thought the city is a source and stake of the urban demos. Second, urbanisation unsettles seemingly fixed boundaries between the state and society and thus opens the possibility of weaving together a new democratic fabric encompassing both. There is a democratic politics of (...)

#City,Transformation,Democracy,Urban,Politics
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1785034-m-be4669cb1555a5ca46571120f9c1e019.m4a?source=feed

83 - Book Presentation: Dithering for the Common Good
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/83-book-presentation-dithering-for-the-common-good

This is a new episode from our Think&Drink series in collaboration with the Georg-Simmel-Centre for Urban Studies and the Humboldt University Berlin. Co-operative urban development is the buzzword of the moment. It stands for the pursuit of a fairer city that is orientated towards the common good. In new partnerships - public-civic partnerships - actors from politics and administration work together with actors from civil society. Contradictory practices of urban design lead to misunderstandings, controversies and uncertainties in these co-operations. In this book, the authors explore the processes of two extraordinary experiments in cooperative urban development in Berlin: the Haus der Statistik and the Rathausblock Kreuzberg. To this end, they invite the actors involved to (...)

#Co-operative,Urban,public-civic_partnerships,Berlin
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1766554-m-98764dd38c533cc58b201309b6a97289.m4a?source=feed

82 - Book Review Roundtable: Infrastructural Times
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/82-infrastructural-times

Whether waiting for the train or planning the future city, infrastructure orders—and depends on—multiple urban temporalities. This agenda-setting volume disrupts conventional notions of time through a robust examination of the relations between temporality, infrastructure, and urban society. Conceptually rich and empirically detailed, its interdisciplinary dialogue encompasses infrastructural systems including transportation, energy, and water to bridge often-siloed technical, political-economic and lived perspectives. With global coverage of diverse cities and regions from Berlin to Jayapura, this book is an essential provocation to re-evaluate urban theory, politics, and practice and better account for the temporal complexities that shape our infrastructured (...)

#Infrastructure,Future,Time,Temporality,Global,Urban,Jayapura,Berlin
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1728537-m-636d716716be8c3fc21427d8402da833.m4a?source=feed

81 - Urban Political x Think & Drink : Maroš Krivy.
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/81-urban-political-x-think-drink-maros-krivy

Valuing indeterminacy: Terrain vague, temporary use and the production of urban expertise in Barcelona and Berlin. This is the first episode of a new series from Urban Political. In collaboration with the Georg Simmel Center for Urban Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, this series will feature speakers from the center’s Think & Drink Colloquium. The colloquium invites international speakers from across urban studies to present their work and offers an informal setting for exchange between students, faculty, and the general public. Much ink has been spilled in urban studies on the dynamics of abandoned industrial sites, rubble areas and other indeterminate landscapes teeming with biodiversity, artists and (post-)capitalist potential. What is less explored are the histories of (...)

▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1702707-m-c4a1109c80becade320a29fee6922be7.m4a?source=feed

80 - Spatial Planning in Israel/Palestine and the Gaza War
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/80-spatial-planning-in-israelpalestine-and-the-gaza-war

In this episode, we explore the role of land policies and spatial planning in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Our two guests, Oren Yiftachel and Orwa Switat, discuss the historical context of the conflict, focusing on how settler colonialism and land regimes have shaped hierarchical types of citizenship and exacerbated tensions. The conversation looks at the impact of the recent war in Gaza on planning and development policies, especially in relation to Bedouin communities in the Naqab/Negev and their responses. This episode concludes by exploring prospects for peace, the potential for redevelopment in Gaza and the broader Palestine-Israel region, and the role of the movement “Land for All” and international society in shaping the (...)

#Israel,Palestine,Planning,Gaza_War
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1653518-m-7ea66aa5664f57ee2260f52278450523.m4a?source=feed

79 - Not in my Gayborhood!
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/79-not-in-my-gayborhood

In this episode, we are discussing Theodore Greene’s latest book, Not in my Gayborhood! Gay neighborhoods and the rise of the vicarious citizen, published by Columbia University Press in July 2024. This book is a lively and generous study of gay neighborhoods in Washington DC, highlighting the evolving dynamics of LGBTQ spaces in urban settings.

▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1579184-m-54a42279099122e9e28ca6c634235e0f.m4a?source=feed

78 - Book Review: Waste and the City
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/78-bookreview-waste-and-the-city

In an age of pandemics the relationship between the health of the city and good sanitation has never been more important. Waste and the City is a call to action on one of modern urban life’s most neglected issues: sanitation infrastructure. The Covid-19 pandemic has laid bare the devastating consequences of unequal access to sanitation in cities across the globe. At this critical moment in global public health, Colin McFarlane makes the urgent case for Sanitation for All. The book outlines the worldwide sanitation crisis and offers a vision for a renewed, equitable investment in sanitation that democratises and socialises the modern city. Adopting Henri Lefebvre’s concept of ’the right to the city’, it uses the notion of ’citylife’ to reframe the discourse on sanitation from a (...)

#waste,sanitation,public_toilets,access,hygiene,city
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1536450-m-96b49139a61f68bedfec63c5057c7f8a.m4a?source=feed

Episode 77 - Post-Socialist Infrastructure
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/77-post-socialist-infrastructure

In this episode we talk about garages, trams and trolleybuses! Our guests for this episode, Tauri Tuvikene and Wladimir Sgibnev, help us think about post-socialist mobility in terms of continuities and ruptures. Using examples from Estonia, East Germany, and the former Soviet Union, they question the future of mobility, highlight the importance of studying mundane infrastructural issues as social subjects, and explain how we could also make policies and knowledge travel westward. Tauri Tuvikene (PhD in Geography, UCL, 2015) is a professor of urban studies at the School of Humanities, Tallinn University. His research covers comparative urbanism in relation to post-socialist cities and comparative methods, as well as the study of practices and regulations of urban mobility (including (...)

▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1506840-m-9743bca462ce7107b22bd7fe05167bc1.m4a?source=feed

Episodio 76 - En conversación con Clara Salazar (The Urban Lives of Property Series IV)
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/76-clara_salazar

In this inaugural Spanish-language episode of the Urban Political Podcast, Clara Salazar delves into the history and concept of the ejidos—collective forms of land ownership introduced by the Mexican Revolution in 1917. Following this, the state began redistributing land to impoverished farmers under the condition that they organize themselves into collectives. Ejidal land, which was typically rural land, could not be sold. The significance of the ejidos persists to this day, although this form of collective ownwerhips has been the subject of numerous struggles and controversies. In 1992, the rights to ejidal lands were liberalized to permit their sale. Concurrently, the rights associated with private property were strengthened, providing powerful private owners with nearly unmatched (...)

#urban,politics,land,property,Mexico,ejidos,asentamientos_autogestionados,propriedad,urbano
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1437613-m-c1f3d6e7c59c95b8df0b9bccd49d0df1.m4a?source=feed

Episode 75 – Book Review Roundtable: Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/72-livelycities

Lively Cities departs from conventions of urban studies to argue that cities are lived achievements forged by a multitude of entities—human and nonhuman—that make up the material politics of city making. Generating fresh conversations between posthumanism, postcolonialism, and political economy, Barua reveals how these actors shape, integrate, subsume, and relate to urban space in fascinating ways. This podcast is produced in collaboration with the Urban Geography Journal.

►https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1344834-m-5214df37e80af33fac1d3dc6944da9f7.m4a?source=feed

In Conversation with Jean-David Gerber (The Urban Lives of Property Series III)
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/74-urban_lives_property_gerber

This episode of the Urban Lives of Property Series expands discussions geographically and conceptually: Our guest in this episode, Jean-David Gerber, helps us think property from Switzerland and other places. Starting off with the observation that there is no single understanding of property, Jean-David argues that it is important for any consideration to be context-specific and to realize that property is not the same as propriété or Eigentum. Jean-David elaborates on his approach to property on the basis of the Institutional Resource Regime framework that he has been working on with colleagues for many years. Based on his fieldwork in Ghana, Senegal and Switzerland, he discusses the application of the framework aimed to consider the combined effects of public policies and property (...)

#urban,political,commons,land_policy,institutional_resource_regime,property,planning,Switzerland,Ghana
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1366764-m-ddaece119792d58d22f0fece8ce9b1fc.m4a?source=feed

the Far Right and the City
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/75-far_right_and_city

In this discussion, members of the Terra-R (Territorialisations of the Radical Right) network examine the developments of the radical right in Germany beyond simplistic urban-rural and East-West attributions, and outline the current and future challenges for academia and civil society alike.

#urban,political,far-right,germany,democracy
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1366766-m-7f56ef655379fe669ae46980cd340e37.m4a?source=feed

Rent Strike Series Episode 3
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/73-rent-strike-series-part-3

This is episode three of the Rent Strike Series, focusing on the Veritas Tenants Association’s ongoing multibuilding rent strike in San Francisco to demand a say in the terms of sale of their buildings. In November 2023, the Prado Group assumed ownership of 20 Veritas-owned buildings, while on January 18, 2024, Ballast Investments and their partner Brookfield Properties took over the remaining 75 buildings in the largest-ever sale of rent-stabilized units in San Francisco. Meanwhile, the rent strike has expanded to six buildings, and some of the strikers have secured concessions through collective bargaining, including a 75 percent reduction in rent over 12 months, cancellation of a scheduled rent increase, and dismissal of eviction lawsuits. In this episode, we get an update on these (...)

▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1357307-m-f5df4f83a07694479c81c8fa85bede9c.m4a?source=feed

Episode 71 – Book Review Roundtable: Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/72-new-episode

Lively Cities departs from conventions of urban studies to argue that cities are lived achievements forged by a multitude of entities—human and nonhuman—that make up the material politics of city making. Generating fresh conversations between posthumanism, postcolonialism, and political economy, Barua reveals how these actors shape, integrate, subsume, and relate to urban space in fascinating ways. This podcast is produced in collaboration with the Urban Geography Journal.

►https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1344834-m-5214df37e80af33fac1d3dc6944da9f7.m4a?source=feed

Cosmopolitan Solidarity
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/71-clara_salazar_urban_lives_property

To live in the age of precarity is a tolling, everyday struggle. It erodes one’s strength to carry on, live another day, and keep the hope for a modicum of prosperity due to come in some vague future. And when things get unbearably harsh, when the hegemony of neoliberalism has individualised the problems and told those who sustain life by the skin of their teeth to keep their head above the surface without having an eye for care from the retreating state that sees no obligation towards the lesser-able citizens, and when the politics of fear buffets on the anxiety evoked by the physical proximity of the Other, refugees —the most vulnerable of all living in the city— are scapegoated for all the problems befallen on daily life. Refugees are easy targets. They, on principle, lack most forms (...)

#urban,politics
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1337181-m-43aa6c8737e1e4c9d8aa33cc5475fc09.m4a?source=feed

Property Rights Versus Tenants in Poland
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/70-housing_restitution_poland

Unregulated restitution of property to prewar owners (or rather their legal successors) remains a major source of conflict over housing in Poland, most notably in Warsaw. This episode features Beata Siemieniako, a Warsaw lawyer and urban activist who has been supporting tenants in their struggle against ruthless developers for years. In her book „Re-privatising Poland. The History of a Great Scam“ (Reprywatyzując Polskę. Historia wielkiego przekrętu, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej 2017), she tells the story of conflicting claims to urban property and reflects on the pitfalls of restituting past property orders while neglecting present-day social rights. Florian Peters has talked to her about law, grassroots activism, and the impossibility to achieve justice by trying to turn back (...)

#urban,politics,housing,restitution,property,tenants,Warsaw,Poland
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1296320-m-49bda6bcabd1a9c4b95b71d146882ab6.m4a?source=feed

Rent Strike Series Episode 2
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/69-rent-strike-series-part-2

This is episode two of the Rent Strike Series, focusing on the Veritas Tenants Association’s ongoing multibuilding rent strike in San Francisco to demand a say in the terms of sale of their buildings. On August 30, corporate landlord Ballast Investments won the auction for Veritas Investments’ delinquent debt and will take over 75 Veritas-owned buildings. And on September 1 the strike expanded. In this episode, we get an update on these developments and the implications for the strike from Brad Hirn, lead organizer with the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco.

#urban,political,rent_strike,corporate_landlords,tenants_associations
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1222808-m-b13aebef7435449f4acd6501751ff328.m4a?source=feed

Book Review Roundtable: Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/68-against-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.

#Commons,Commoning,Radical_Planning,Berlin,Enclosure,Agrarian_Question,Milan,New_York,Chicago
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1204327-m-7c57eda7252ce5d46d0d1f7cea9d8acc.m4a?source=feed

Rent Strike Series Episode 1
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/67-new-episode

The first in an ongoing series hosted by Mathilde Gustavussen

▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1198219-m-e0f9e074e516e50ee7134929f6f0172d.m4a?source=feed

Book Review Roundtable: How Cities Can Transform Democracy
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/66-how_cities_can_transform_democracy

We live in an urban age. It is well known that urbanization is changing landscapes, built environments, social infrastructures and everyday lives across the globe. But urbanization is also changing the ways we understand and practise politics. What implications does this have for democracy?

This incisive book argues that urbanization undermines the established certainties of nation-state politics and calls for a profound rethinking of democracy. A novel way of seeing democracy like a city is presented, shifting scholarly and activist perspectives from institutions to practices, from jurisdictional scales to spaces of urban collective life, and from fixed communities to emergent political subjects. Through a discussion of examples from around the world, the book shows that distinctly (...)

#Democracy,Urban_Politics,Zurich,Glasgow,Cities
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1175439-m-12b1c76763cfa4509715cc9050a84ea5.m4a?source=feed

Book Review Roundtable: Migrants and Machine Politics
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/65-migrant_machinepolitics

As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, millions of people have migrated from the countryside to urban slums, which now house one billion people worldwide. The transformative potential of urbanization hinges on whether and how poor migrants are integrated into city politics. Popular and scholarly accounts paint migrant slums as exhausted by dispossession, subdued by local dons, bought off by wily politicians, or polarized by ethnic appeals. Migrants and Machine Politics shows how slum residents in India routinely defy such portrayals, actively constructing and wielding political machine networks to demand important, albeit imperfect, representation and responsiveness within the country’s expanding cities.

Drawing on years of pioneering fieldwork in India’s slums, including ethnographic (...)

#urban_politics,migration,subaltern,squatting
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1150376-m-bea54db6786d80c26a929976c1a9ab9d.m4a?source=feed