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
In Conversation with Vera Smirnova (The Urban Lives of Property Series II)
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/64-smirnova
In this second part of the series Urban Lives of Property, Hanna and Markus talk to Vera Smirnova, a human and political geographer to discuss property and territory from a Russian perspective. Smirnova’s genealogical account moves from the Czarist period to this day, illuminating also the current Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Smirnova offers a tour de force through Russia’s moving history of the last 150 years, addressing practices of serfdom, enclosures in the early 20th century, land collectivization following the Russian revolution and waves of privatization after 1991. Throughout this period the institution of property is shown to be fuzzy, insecure, and informal, a legacy that continues to this day as evidenced in current urban planning legislation and extra-legal practices of (...)
#urban,political,Russia,property,territory,land_commune,collectivization,privatization,postcolonial,postsocialist
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1137181-m-e9edbca4913feeaaad63a765f6bf6034.m4a?source=feed
Russian Academia and Urban Activism in Times of War: Insights from St. Petersburg
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/63-russia_academia_activism_war
Meet urban scholar Oleg Pachenkov who left Russia few weeks after the invasion of Ukraine. Oleg talks about his personal and professional trajectory as a critical scholar bringing him to Berlin. The conversation covers the breakdown of the public sphere within weeks after the war and Oleg’s personal confrontation with a repressive system ready to crack down on critical voices. Self-censorship, Aesopian language and the retreat to the private sphere are aspects that now characterize dynamics of discussion in the attempt to cope with the authoritarian reality in the country. Oleg talk to us about the institutionalization of Urban Studies and the discrepancy between those parts who have arranged themselves within the regime, and those that didn’t, between those actors who have stayed in (...)
#urban,political,Russia,academia,activism,authoritarianism,war
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1107534-m-d17cdc1c43d8b43b2821024c8440e6dd.m4a?source=feed
In Conversation with Nick Blomley (The Urban Lives of Property Series I)
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/62-property_conversation_blomley
This podcast series explores the “life of property” in urban theory and practice. In conversations with scholars who have led the way in property debates, it aims is to advance conceptual and theoretical groundwork on this notion that fundamentally shapes everyday urban lives and political discussion about the city.
Within the social sciences and critical urban research property has lived a mostly implicit and underexamined life for several decades. Over the last years, it has become more central to conceptual, theoretical, and empirical work. Taking up this (renewed) interest in the concept, the series employs property as an entry point into critical urban debates about appropriation, dispossession and expropriation. The series seeks to situate the notion of property within urban (...)
#urban,politics,property,territory,common,private,law,space
►https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1053543-m-bef63a2abdbea44b0bd152fe2074aee8.m4a?source=feed
In Conversation with Nick Blomley (The Urban Lives of Property Series I)
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/62-new-episode
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►https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1053543-m-bef63a2abdbea44b0bd152fe2074aee8.m4a?source=feed
]]>Are Community Land Trusts Transformative?
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/61-new-episode
Community land trusts are proliferating across the globe, promoted as a potential solution to the ever-worsening affordable housing crisis. CLTs provide a mechanism for decommodification, collective ownership, and community control; however, those ideals are hard to operationalize, and many CLTs function more as traditional affordable housing providers than as urban commons. This episode discusses the causes of this tension as well as regional differences and issues of funding and scale framed around the question: are CLTs transformative?
The moderator of this podcast is Mathilde Lind Gustavussen. She is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on housing, displacement, and tenant activism in Los Angeles.
The panel of guests consists of:
Nele (...)
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1048216-m-f1f3926bb5b9df2e53d8b1e45be4da1b.m4a?source=feed
]]>On Peripheralisation
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/60-peripherialisation
How do “peripheries” form? And how does urbanization generate processes of peripheralization? Today, urban research is increasingly confronted with processes of extended urbanization that unfold far beyond cities and agglomerations: novel patterns of urbanization are crystallizing in agricultural areas and in remote landscapes, challenging inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded and dense settlement type. While certain territories of extended urbanisation experience growth, others are affected by peripheralisation, experiencing deep socio-economic and ecological restructuring, marginalisation and inequality, and the re-articulation of power and privilege. These observations advocate for a radical reconceptualization of the experience of periphery at various spatial scales.
In (...)
#Perpherialisation,Peripherialization,Extended_Urbanization
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1015757-m-5a975988c66da0f0bc0507bc849f9910.m4a?source=feed
Inside the Women Life Freedom Movement in Iran
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/59-women_life_freedom
Listen to this gripping account from the current „Women Life Freedom“ movement in Iran and its impact on cities and its inhabitants. The movement was sparked by the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini in the custody of the Islamic regime’s „morality police“ in September 2022. After several weeks of uprising, the media coverage in Western countries has become more silent due in part to the extremely repressive acts of the government in which several people have been killed and many imprisoned. The regime has also made a deliberate attempt to control communication chanels including the control or shut-down of the internet, making it more difficult for news about events to leave the country. The movement, however, is still very alive as you will hear in this episode.
In this audio recording, (...)
#urban,political,women,life,freedom,Iran,movement,Tehran
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/1004056-m-ffc67530772a12ca0dd9695d6cbc0e3b.m4a?source=feed
Forums of Discussion: sub\urban - journal for critical urban research
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/58-forums_of_discussion_sub_urban
Having just celebrated the 10th anniversary of the important German-language journal for critical urban research, Ross speaks with sub\urban editorial members Gala Nettelbladt and Nina Gribat about why it is important to publish urban research in German, the challenge of organizing a horizontal editorial collective, of realizing an open access publication strategy, and of relating to political struggles of the current moment - among many other topics. First part of a series of episodes on forums of discussion and publication outlets in different geographical contexts.
#urban,political,discussion,forum,journal,critical_research,German_language
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/988496-m-5ead59ecf48bbe159c6b987b8bdb4aac.m4a?source=feed
Book Review Roundtable : Art & Climate Change
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/57-bookreview_art_climate_change
The book provides an overview of ecologically conscious contemporary art that responds to today’s environmental crisis, from species extinction to climate change. Art and Climate Change collects a wide range of artistic responses to our current ecological emergency. When the future of life on Earth is threatened, creative production for its own sake is not enough. Through contemporary artworks, artists are calling for an active, collective engagement with the planet in order to illuminate some of the structures that threaten biological survival. Exploring the meeting point of decolonial reparation and ecological restoration, artists are remaking history by drawing on the latest ecological theories, scientific achievements, and indigenous worldviews to engage with the climate crisis. (...)
#urban,political,art,climate_change,anthropocene
▻https://audio.podigee-cdn.net/941127-m-7dd3bea7033c8a4d8ab9789b9c521046.m4a?source=feed
Urbanization: A Contested Concept (Urban Concepts Series)
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/56-planetary_urbanization
Urbanization has become central in recent political discourses, as well as a contested concept in experts’ spheres. This podcast of the Urban Political delves into the phenomenon of urbanization and traces back how the idea of “expanding cities” is causing disagreement in urban studies and leading researchers to raise questions that have haunted the discipline since the times of Georg Simmel. In this episode, Nicolas Goez, one of our new members of the editorial board at Urban Political, talks with Johanna Hoerning and Hillary Angelo about current discussions around urbanization, against the background of the so-called urban age. Join us in this discussion and tune in! #Urbanization #UrbanTheory #Anthroposcene #UrbanStudies (...)
#urban,politics,planetary,urbanization,concepts
▻https://main.podigee-cdn.net/media/podcast_13964_urban_political_pdcst_episode_887306_urbanization_a_
Dispatch from RC21 Conference 2022 – Ordinary cities in exceptional times
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/55-rc21_athens
The RC21 Conference 2022, “Ordinary cities in exceptional times,” was held in Athens from August, 24 to 26. A large group of participants from all over the world gathered for was the first in-person conference of the RC21 network since the start of the pandemic. However, the pandemic continued to dominate the conference with a number of participants being unable to travel to Athens due to the uncertain visa regimes. On the opening day of the conference, the participants gathered in the historical building of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in the Exarchia neighbourhood in downtown Athens. At the reception in the grand courtyard of NTUA, the participants came face-to-face with a group of protestors that raised banners against the state-projects promoting the (...)
#urban,political,conference,RC21,Athens,sociology,Greece,research
▻https://main.podigee-cdn.net/media/podcast_13964_urban_political_pdcst_episode_868732_dispatch_from_r
Dispatch from INURA Conference 2022 in Luxemburg
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/54-inura_luxemburg
The 30th annual INURA Conference entitled "Small State Big Transitions” was held in Luxembourg from June 25 to 28. Over 60 participants gathered at the conference to learn about the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and to celebrate the 30 years INURA. This year’s conference was organised by the Urban Studies Group at the Department of Geography and Spatial Planning at the University of Luxembourg.
With a population of just over 600,000, Luxembourg is a small, multilingual, sovereign state. But these diminutive attributes belie a cosmopolitan space where daily life frequently involves using three languages, and encountering perhaps four, five or six. Exhilarating and bewildering, it speaks to the ’small-but-global’ urbanisation the country has experienced in recent decades. The conference opened (...)
#urban,politics,research,action,inura,conference,luxemburg
▻https://main.podigee-cdn.net/media/podcast_13964_urban_political_pdcst_episode_827926_dispatch_from_i
Landscapes of Care and Control
▻https://urbanpolitical.podigee.io/53-landscape_care_control
This episode looks at urban landscapes of care and control that emerged during the pandemic in Santiago de Chile (Chile), Bogotá (Colombia) and Berlin (Germany). It is a comparative conversation on the urban impasse of state interventions and everyday logics under COVID19 in each of these cities and discusses the following questions: 1. How, if at all, has the pandemic affected state interventions in health in these cities? What new discourses and routines have been announced? 2. How, if at all, has the pandemic worked as a set of interventions in the social infrastructure of these cities? What, now almost 2 years down the road, has changed in the social realities of institutional agents and ordinary citizens that we observe? 3. What lessons can be learnt from the care and control (...)
#urban,politics,care,control,pandemic,covid19,bogota,berlin,santiago_de_chile
▻https://main.podigee-cdn.net/media/podcast_13964_urban_political_pdcst_episode_817196_landscapes_of_c