Urban Political Podcast copertina

Urban Political Podcast

Urban Political Podcast

Di: Ross Beveridge Markus Kip Mais Jafari Nitin Bathla Julio Paulos Nicolas Goez Talja Blokland
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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 and produced by: Ross Beveridge (University of Glasgow) Markus Kip (Georg-Simmel-Center for Metropolitan Studies - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Mais Jafari (Technische Universität Dortmund) Nitin Bathla (ETH-Zürich) Julio Paulos (Université de Lausanne) Nicolas Goez (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar) Talja Blokland (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Hanna Hilbrandt (Universität Zürich) 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 Scienza Scienze sociali
  • 112 - Remaindered Life and the Architecture of Migration
    Aug 7 2026
    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 dominant political and economic orders. This episode brings together two scholars whose work has grappled with these questions in profound ways. At the same time, the humanitarian incorporation of displaced populations into conditions of permanent temporariness is not outside history. Refugee camps and other spaces of displacement are complex built environments with their own material, social, and political histories. Using Remaindered Life and Architecture of Migration as heuristics, our guests explore the political imaginaries animated by these influential books and reflect on their relevance to the current conjuncture. In doing so, they situate contemporary forms of displacement, disposability, and humanitarian governance within the enduring palimpsest of colonial pasts.
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    1 ora e 3 min
  • 111 - Bonus Episode: Geopolitical Ecology (Cities and Geopolitics IV)
    Jul 15 2026
    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 discussion explores how geopolitical projects are materialised through ecological relations and how ecological crises, in turn, reshape political orders across scales. The episode reflects on the growing entanglement of environmental change, security, infrastructure, and global inequality, while considering what a geopolitical ecology perspective can contribute to understanding a rapidly urbanising and warming planet consumed by wars and blockades. The speakers discuss the intellectual origins of geopolitical ecology, its relationship to political ecology and critical geopolitics, and its potential to illuminate emerging struggles over territory, sovereignty, and planetary futures in the twenty-first century.
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    39 min
  • 110 - Take Back the City: Grassroots Struggles, Housing Justice, and Decolonial Futures in Belfast
    Jun 25 2026
    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, the episode reflects on how alternative forms of urban citizenship and solidarity are being built across communities in Belfast. Themes including mutual aid, Meitheal, collective stewardship, counter-mapping, solidarity sovereignty, spatial agency, and the kind economy are explored as practical and political frameworks for imagining more equitable urban futures. The discussion also situates Belfast within wider transnational struggles, drawing connections with anti-colonial and grassroots movements in places such as Palestine, South Africa, the Amazon, and other cities shaped by segregation, displacement, and structural violence.
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    56 min
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