Urban Political

112 - Remaindered Life and the Architecture of Migration
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/112-112-remaindered-life-and-the-architecture-of-migration

Amid endless wars, authoritarianism, neocolonialism, and displacement, millions are being uprooted, while pervasive uncertainty grips millions more. As the world is remade through what some have described as neo-illiberalism, the very façade of humanitarianism, and indeed the boundaries of who counts as human, is beginning to unravel. Contemporary capitalism, imperialism, and colonial power produce vast populations whose lives are treated as disposable, surplus, or expendable. Yet the social worlds, forms of care, survival practices, and creative capacities of these populations continually exceed such imposed disposability. To understand the present conjuncture, we must attend to the “life-times” of migrants, informal workers, slum dwellers, and other populations rendered surplus by (…)

#remaindered,Migration,Architecture,Displacement
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2565203-m-242ec5f032d7d0664b7b098c83d5f9f1.m4a?source=feed

111 - Bonus Episode: Geopolitical Ecology (Cities and Geopolitics IV)
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/111-bonus-episode-geopolitical-ecology-cities-and-geopolitics

What happens when we bring questions of power, territory, infrastructure, and ecological transformation into the same conversation? In this bonus episode of the Cities and Geopolitics miniseries, Nitin Bathla is joined by Malini Ranganathan and Garrett Graddy-Lovelace to explore the emerging field of geopolitical ecology. Moving beyond conventional understandings of geopolitics as a matter of states, borders, and great-power competition, the conversation examines how ecological processes, environmental governance, agrarian transformations, and everyday struggles over land, water, energy, and food have become central to contemporary geopolitical contestations. Drawing on examples ranging from agricultural frontiers and resource extraction to environmental justice movements, the (…)

#Ecology,Geopolitics,Transformation,Power,Infrastructure,Territory
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2546643-m-d4b88dce5adfbba9108ab281034d5107.m4a?source=feed

110 - Take Back the City: Grassroots Struggles, Housing Justice, and Decolonial Futures in Belfast
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/110-take-back-the-city-grassroots-struggles-housing-justice-a

This podcast episode explores the political production of urban space in Belfast through the lenses of housing justice, grassroots organising, insurgent planning, and collective rights to the city. Developed as part of the Change Stories Project, the discussion draws on the experiences of the Take Back the City campaign and the work of Participation and the Practice of Rights (PPR), the discussion interrogates dominant narratives that frame Belfast primarily as a “divided city” defined by sectarian conflict. Instead, the conversation examines how colonial logics of spatial control, segregation, land governance, and infrastructural inequality continue to shape contemporary urban life, housing precarity, and exclusion. Bringing together organisers, campaigners, and community activists, (…)

#Housing,Belfast,Grassroots,Activism
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2530185-m-cde3d22dc05b260a272f5f38384d83a3.m4a?source=feed

109 - Corridors, Logistics, and Circulation (Cities and Geopolitics III)
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/109-corridors-logistics-and-circulation-cities-and-geopolitic

The third episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series explores the spatial and operational logics of circulation, examining how the movement of goods, capital, data, and people is organised, accelerated, and contested across urban and regional space. Our guests discuss how circulation has become a central terrain of geopolitical strategy, focusing on a range of infrastructures, from economic corridors and port expansions to special economic zones, rail networks, and digital logistics platforms. The episode highlights how circulatory systems are not only designed to facilitate flows, but also to direct, channel, and control them, reconfiguring territories, reshaping urban hierarchies, and producing new forms of inclusion and exclusion. The conversation traces how the control of (…)

#Corridors,Logistics,Infrastructures,Borders,Territories
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2516811-m-d46133984e911d9d8d8ab1fbb77ef33a.m4a?source=feed

108 – Infrastructures of Power (Cities and Geopolitics II)
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/108-infrastructures-of-power-cities-and-geopolitics-ii

The second episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series turns to the material architectures through which geopolitical power is organised and exercised. From energy grids and digital networks to ports, logistics hubs, and semiconductor infrastructures, contemporary geopolitical rivalries are increasingly mediated through complex, often invisible, urban systems. This episode explores how infrastructures are not merely technical backdrops to global politics, but strategic assets and active instruments of power. Our guests examine how infrastructures are designed, financed, and governed in ways that embed geopolitical priorities, whether through the securitisation of supply chains, the territorialisation of digital systems, or the reconfiguration of energy networks in the context of (…)

#Infrastructures,Geopolitics,Power
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2503706-m-29d9f8effac173a02f1b977242e25ae5.m4a?source=feed

107 - Tenant Politics and Urban Political Economy
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/107-tenant-politics-and-urban-political-economy

Within the last years four books have been published exploring the political economy of the private rental sector, with a focus on inequality and resistance. This episode would bring together all four authors (see below) to explore the political economy forces driving the growth of the private rental sector and associated forms of housing injustice (e.g. unaffordability, evictions), the analytical approaches that can best draw out what is at stake in all this (especially from a political perspective), and how this all relates to the renaissance of tenant organizing across many countries in the Global North. By bringing together four of the most prominent authors/activists in this area, the episode aims to capture a crucial moment in the articulation of the emerging politics of the (…)

#Housing,Tenants,Rent
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2487994-m-55e4b1c6f85d564c1fa395d21e18d6d4.m4a?source=feed

106 - Cities and Geopolitics I
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/106-cities-and-geopolitics-i

In an era of intensifying geopolitical rivalries, the terrains of global power are increasingly being reconfigured through the infrastructure, economies, and everyday rhythms of urbanisation. From semiconductor supply chains and energy transitions to port expansions, data centres, and housing markets, urban space has become a critical arena through which geopolitical strategies are organised, exercised, and contested. This mini-series starts from the premise that geopolitics is not simply something that happens to cities, but something that is actively produced through them. Cities and Geopolitics brings together a set of conversations that explore how contemporary geopolitical transformations unfold across urban space. The series traces the material and spatial logics of power: how (…)

#geopolitics,contemporary,transformations,rivalry
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2471431-m-f46326e239ae3ceeab311270b272dac0.m4a?source=feed

105 -Transforming Local Statehood II: Progressive Possibilities?
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/105-transforming-local-statehood-ii-progressive-possibilities

While the first episode on the transformations of the local state focussed on current authoritarian takeover in different European contexts, this episode will zoom into the progressive possibilities of local state transformations. The episode discusses institutional changes within the local state, the role of other political actors and geographical scales as well as the limitations of localist solutions.

The episode is moderated by Matthias Naumann and Gala Nettelbladt, with contributions from Anil Sindhwani, Anke Strüver and Enikö Zöller.

#Local,Statehood
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2397208-m-430d6aee68161f07240b74887a62fd9a.m4a?source=feed

104 - Transforming Local Statehood I: Towards Authoritarian Takeover?
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/104-transforming-local-statehood-i

Across Europe, local states are in a dire predicament, experiencing the consequences of austerity cuts, shortage of staff as well as a lack of trust in (local) government. Overlapping crises such as climate change, military conflicts and displacement, precarious provisions of public services, the production of so-called left-behind spaces and the rise of the far right pose severe challenges to its institutions – on various scales and across a wide range of sectors. This situation has sparked seemingly paradoxical developments. In some contexts, it has evoked the loss of legitimacy of democratic institutions and authoritarian takeover, while in other cases the local state is becoming an arena for progressive statecraft tailored at social justice and sustainability. Much is being (...)

#Authoritarian,Local,State,Transformation,Taxation
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2358598-m-cfb395ad9f96199d52006cb1e35b3261.m4a?source=feed

103 – Beyond Neoliberal Urbanism?
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/103-beyond-neoliberal-urbanism

Are we seeing the emergence of a new conjuncture for urbanism? The final part of our mini series asks whether authoritarian neoliberalism has created the conditions for a more illiberal and distinct type of urban governance . Authoritarianism is not new to neoliberalism – the Pinochet regime, Thatcherism in the UK – these were evidently authoritarian and neoliberal, and given crises and stagnation it is no surprise to see these tendencies re-animated. But is something more also happening? The high point of neoliberal hegemony was associated with the development of technocratic, often obscure, market systems as well as notions of ‘sustainable development and even at times ‘participation’ and ‘consensus’ even if these were highly circumscribed. When we look at some new urban projects today, (...)

#neoliberal,urbanism,governance
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2336049-m-286ad74f9741277fd5e45826c155530d.m4a?source=feed

102 - Authoritarian Practices in Urban Government
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/102-authoritarian-practices-in-urban-government

Today it seems fairly obvious to say that urban government has become more authoritarian – there is vastly increased levels of surveillance, violent and militarised policing of dissent and the targeting of migrant, queer and ethnic minority communities. Building on the previous episode on ‘authoritarian populism’, the panel discussion focuses on the ‘authoritarian practices’ of urban governments. We discuss issues of scale i.e. the relationship between central and municipal government and global capital flows drawing on research on Turkey, Mexico, India, Russia and Eastern Europe. We cover overtly draconian practices such as violent crackdowns on protestors and the more subtle ‘sabotaging’ of accountability for key sections of capital – developers, big tech – and national infrastructure and (...)

#Authoritarian,Surveillance,Policing,Populism,Governance
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2309052-m-c77b363e1504d05c8bb2095095150b08.m4a?source=feed

101 – Authoritarian Populism and the City
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/101-authoritarian-populism-and-the-city

Across the world, a rightward populist turn is reshaping politics, everyday life, and the spaces we inhabit. This series examines the rise of authoritarian urbanism born from the convergence of state power, militarised violence, infrastructure-led development, and racialised and religious nationalism. As neoliberalism faces a crisis of legitimacy, these forces work to consolidate control and drive new waves of urbanisation that deepen social polarisation. Alongside these authoritarian transformations, we trace the everyday democratic practices—subtle acts, collective refusals, and imaginative alternatives—that contest authoritarian rule and open space for different urban futures. Through conversations with researchers, activists, and practitioners, the series takes stock of this (...)

#Authoritarian,Governance,Brazil,North_America,Europe
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2255331-m-512fff43518b7205766f15652ac85133.m4a?source=feed

100 – Looking Back, Looking Forward
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/100-looking-back-looking-forward

This episode is our 100th! We are delighted that we have reached this landmark and thank all our listeners and contributors since we started the Urban Political in 2019. To mark the occasion of this 100th podcast we have produced a special issue containing two parts, in which we look backwards and forwards on all things Urban and Political.

In the first part, Markus Kip and Ross Beveridge talk to Mathilde Gustavussen about the origins of the podcast, why they set up the podcast, how things have changed since the beginning and what their favourite episodes are. In the second part of the episode, Ross, Markus and Nitin Bathla talk to four of our most regular and brilliant guests: Roger Keil, Colin McFarlane, Julie-Anne Boudreau, Colin MacFarlane and Urban Political collective member (...)

#authoritarian
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2231342-m-7c3cf4e831c96cd49c89642dd1105755.m4a?source=feed

99 - The Impossible Possibility of ’Home’
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/99-the-impossible-possibility-of-home

What does it mean to be at ’home’, when ’home’ is the expression of structural forms of violence, at the intersection of anthropocentrism, patriarchy, heteronormativity and racial capitalism? As the COVID-19 pandemic showed, home can be read as a juncture where many of the inequalities of our time come and are held together structurally; yet, at the same time, home maintains an attractive lure to itself, as a place one is called to defend or to work toward, in order to be freed from subjections that seem to render home impossible in the first place. In this talk, the aim is to stay close to this only apparent contradiction, which Michele would like to name the “impossible possibility of home.” With this notion, he interprets the unjust and violent foundations of home not as opposite to, (...)

#home,politics,homelessness,belonging,security,care
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2198211-m-f25f9a889d5e917ab45a7e49c7c590f8.m4a?source=feed

98 - (Re)Politicising Housing
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/98-re-politicising-housing

This is our second episode in collaboration with the ‘Where is Urban Politics?’ hybrid seminar series hosted by the University of Groningen in the Netherlands between 2024-2026. This episode ponders urgent issues on (re)politicizing housing across Europe. The first speaker is Josh Ryan-Collins, who talks about the financialisation of housing, drivers, outcomes and options for reform from a United Kingdom perspective. Following his talk, Dirk Benzemer responses from his research perspective. Josh ponders on the current housing affordability and wealth inequality crisis. He argues that supply side reforms, which means increasing the amount of housing, will not be sufficient to ameliorate the housing crisis. Beyond this, he sees crucial responses needed in breaking the powerful feedback (...)

#affordability,inequality,housing_crisis,housing
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2168471-m-8aba79613088ec8cec30cbd4bb513420.m4a?source=feed

97 - In Loving Memory of Mark Saunders
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/97-in-loving-memory-of-mark-saunders

We dedicate this episode to the extraordinary urban filmmaker and tireless social-justice advocate, Mark Saunders, who passed away recently at the age of 68. Mark’s powerful contributions to documentary filmmaking, particularly through Despite TV, gave voice to the marginalized and illuminated urgent political and social issues across the globe. His unwavering commitment to storytelling, empathy, and justice left an indelible mark on everyone who knew him—and his legacy will continue to inspire activists, filmmakers, and listeners alike.

#Filmmaker,Saunders,British
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2142087-m-007bc3affe21186e43accd6c4bd77e3a.m4a?source=feed

96 - Digital Cities and Democracy
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/96-digital-cities-and-democracy

In this episode Ross Beveridge, co-founder of our Podcast, and guests discuss the topic of digital cities and democracy. Digitalisation is transforming cities, urbanization and urban life – but how is it changing urban politics? What issues of justice and democracy are at stake in the advance of digital technologies? What are the power implications of the unending rise of corporate digital platforms, like Amazon? How are social media platforms reconfiguring the ways we live in cities and the ways we conduct politics? And what does the future hold? Ross discusses these questions with 4 scholars who have recently published important books in this field: Myria Georgiou, who is a Professor of Media and Communications and Head of the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. (...)

#Digital,Democracy,DigitalCities,Data,SocialMedia
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2115706-m-51e424749d49d5de42506e5c7ef8b630.m4a?source=feed

95 - The Urban Crisis at Night: Engaging the Polycrisis after Dark
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/95-the-urban-crisis-at-night-engaging-the-polycrisis-after-da

To what extent does the current polycrisis intensify in urban settings during nighttime hours? Night lives are already characterized by precarity, urban inequalities, deeply seeded health and wellbeing concerns and a life ’in the shadows’. In this Polycrisis series episode, Michele Acuto, Andreina Seijas and Alessio Kolioulis take us on a “walking roundtable”, recorded on the road after dark in London. The speakers discuss how nighttime perspectives shape how we encounter the urban polycrisis. They reflect on how night studies, and practice, prompt embedded thinking on the intersections of urban health, climate, economics and conflict with the experiences of dwelling, living and working in the city after dark. Crisis talk is being challenged through night talk, while the everyday (...)

#polycrisis,dark,night,walking,workers
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2062646-m-a06a19998541f007104c83dd26c6af38.m4a?source=feed

94 - Urban Racial Politics in Cartagena, Colombia
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/94-urban-racial-politics-in-cartagena-colombia

This episode will be conducted in Spanish, in line with the podcast’s aim to de-center urban knowledge production by showcasing distinctive urban perspectives, and linguistic viewpoints. We are thrilled to introduce you to the second episode of our series on Urban Polycrisis! Join us for an episode in Spanish exploring the complex urban racial politics of Cartagena, Colombia. In this conversation with historians Javier Ortiz Cassiani and Orlando Deavila Pertuz, we dive into the city’s colonial past and explore how its racialised legacies shape contemporary urban life. We discuss how conflict, violence, and displacement have shaped racial politics, from Cartagena’s role in the transatlantic slave trade to its recent remaking as a tourist hub. The episode also looks at how (...)

#Colombia,Cartagena,colonial,contemporary,racialised
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2025500-m-1a4468f25089a401c8bffb4828303361.m4a?source=feed

93 - Normative Insurgency: Responses to the Urban Polycrisis from the Global South
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/93-93-normative-insurgency-polycrisis

This new Polycrisis series will explore the complex set of protracted, interconnected, and mutually reinforcing crises that disproportionately affect urban centers and urban populations, ranging from housing, democracy, transit, infrastructure, inequality, conflict, the environment, to health. What relevance do discussions of the “urban polycrisis” have for places in the Global South? This episode of the Urban Political Podcast examines how the urban polycrisis manifests in housing production and urban infrastructure, from an alleged fraying of the social fabric to continually increasing environmental damage and deeply entrenched inequality. Catalina Ortiz (University College London(, Thireshen Govender (UrbanWorks), and Katrin Hofer (ETH Zurich) convey their experiences with the (...)

#Polycrisis,Colombia,South_Africa,Switzerland,London,Global_South
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/2007633-m-efe0da67e259bcf597b91ac3070309c9.m4a?source=feed

92 - Radically Legal Politics and Housing Expropriation in Berlin
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/92-radically-legal-politics-and-housing-expropriation-in-berl

This episode is a talk by Joanna Kusiak at the Think&Drink Colloquium of Georg-Simmel-Centre for Urban Studies at Humboldt University Berlin. It gives insights into her new book Radically Legal: Berlin Constitutes the Future (2024).

Right in the middle of the German constitution, a group of ordinary citizens discovers a forgotten clause that allows them to take 240,000 homes back from multi-billion corporations. In this work of creative non-fiction, scholar-activist and Nine Dots Prize winner Joanna Kusiak tells the story of a grassroots movement that convinced a million Berliners to pop the speculative housing bubble. She offers a vision of urban housing as democratically held commons, legally managed by a radically new institutional model that works through democratic conflicts. (...)

#Housing,Commons,Deutsche_Wohnen_&_Co.,Berlin
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1984077-m-d43d78e919140f16d91ecad62b9810d4.m4a?source=feed

91 - The Suburban Frontier
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/91-the-suburban-frontier

African cities are under construction. Beyond the urban redevelopment schemes and large-scale infrastructure projects reconfiguring central city skylines, urban residents are putting their resources into finding land and building homes on city edges. The Suburban Frontier examines how self-built housing on the urban periphery has become central to middle-class formation and urban transformation in contemporary Tanzania. Drawing on original research in the city of Dar es Salaam, Claire Mercer details how the “suburban frontier” has become the place where Africa’s middle classes are shaped. As the first book-length analysis of Africa’s suburban middle class, The Suburban Frontier offers significant contributions to the study of urban social change in Africa and urbanization in the Global (...)

#suburban,frontier,middle-class
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1964566-m-e6edbe509eabdb762b31f8b67ba081af.m4a?source=feed

90 - Looking Back at Eight Years of Municipalist Government in Barcelona
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/90-looking-back-at-eight-years-of-municipalist-government-in-

In this episode, we reflect on the rise, evolution, and legacy of Barcelona en Comú, the emblematic movement-party that governed the city of Barcelona from 2015 to 2023. Joined by long-time activist and former political advisor Elia Gran, as well as researchers Silke van Dyk and Luzie Gerstenhöfer (University of Jena), the conversation explores the key ambitions, successes, and tensions of this bold experiment in municipalist governance. The episode draws from the sociological research project „Public Politics and the Future of the Commons“ to unpack strategic shifts in areas like housing, municipalization of public services as well as social and economic policies. Together, the guests consider what can be learned from the Comuns’ experience, how the party related to social movements and (...)

#Barcelona,Government,Municipalism,Activism
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1944100-m-876516671f90bcfbc15675d4e5dd4575.m4a?source=feed

89 - Book Presentation : Turkish Muslim Women in Berlin
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/89-BookPresentation:TurkishMuslimWomeninBerlin

Kulkul presents her ethnographic work with Turkish Muslim women in Berlin as evidence that community is not an entity but is produced by instrumentalizing specific forms of identification and boundary-making. In examining the role of community in the case of her participants, Kulkul finds that religion and culture are important not for the values they perpetuate, but for their role in forming and sustaining the community. She looks at the importance of boundaries and especially their reciprocity. Social boundaries are a set of codes of exclusion often used against migrants and refugees, while symbolic boundaries are typically understood as the way one defines one’s own group. Kulkul argues that these two types of boundaries tend to trigger each other and thus be mutually reinforcing. (...)

#Turkish,Women,Boundaries,Religion,Community,Culture,Migrants,Refugees,Guest_Worker
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1922838-m-719efd4d86975750c0c5e6a8f1fd2705.m4a?source=feed

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