Épisodes

  • 84 - How Cities Can Transform Democracy

    84 - How Cities Can Transform Democracy
    Feb 12 2025
    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 urbanisation that shifts perspectives from institutions to practices, from jurisdictional scales to spaces of collective urban life. Seeing democracy like a city, we argue, foregrounds a way to re-locate democracy in the everyday lives of urbanites and to unlock the transformative potential of an urban democracy. This talk draws on recent work including the book "How Cities Can Transform Democracy" (2023) and the article "Seeing Democracy like a City" (2023).
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    41 min
  • 83 - Book Presentation: Dithering for the Common Good

    83 - Book Presentation: Dithering for the Common Good
    Jan 27 2025
    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 procrastinate. When hesitation becomes a method, ambivalences support cooperation, uncertainties replace conflicts and controversies between the partners become visible. The book presents concise theses on cooperative urban development, a glossary of misunderstandings and methodological reflections on the artistic-ethnographic research method and its embedding in urban anthropological discourses. For all those who are involved in co-operative urban development or want to accompany it with research. For a just city of the many.
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    45 min
  • 82 - Book Review Roundtable: Infrastructural Times

    82 - Book Review Roundtable: Infrastructural Times
    Dec 22 2024
    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 worlds.
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    59 min
  • 81 - Urban Political x Think & Drink: Maroš Krivy.

    81 - Urban Political x Think & Drink: Maroš Krivy.
    Dec 4 2024
    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 making indeterminacy into a desirable feature of cities. Engaging a range of ideas and strategies including terrain vague and temporary urbanism, this talk examines the role of urban experts in giving a positive meaning to ‘non-design’ as a feature of post-industrial change. Maroš Krivy draws evidence from late 20th century Barcelona and early 21st century Berlin: while the Catalan architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales called on his colleagues to appreciate the intrinsic value of terrain vagues even as he played a key role in Barcelona’s Olympic-led redevelopment, the Berlin collective Urban Catalyst advocated giving unused sites over to creative entrepreneurs as an alternative to the conservative policy of critical reconstruction. This talk presents findings from Maroš Krivys ongoing project investigating a series of situated intellectual histories of how progressive urban experts in Europe and North America accommodated late capital.
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    28 min
  • 80 - Spatial Planning in Israel/Palestine and the Gaza War

    80 - Spatial Planning in Israel/Palestine and the Gaza War
    Oct 31 2024
    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 future.
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    1 h et 29 min
  • 79 - Not in my Gayborhood!

    79 - Not in my Gayborhood!
    Aug 29 2024
    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.
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    34 min
  • 78 - Book Review: Waste and the City

    78 - Book Review: Waste and the City
    Jul 17 2024
    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 narrowly-defined policy discussion to a question of democratic right to public life and health. In doing so, the book shows that sanitation is an urbanizing force whose importance extends beyond hygiene to the very foundation of urban social life.
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    1 h et 17 min
  • Episode 77 - Post-Socialist Infrastructure

    Episode 77 - Post-Socialist Infrastructure
    Jun 19 2024
    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.
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    49 min