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92 – Radically Legal Politics and Housing Expropriation in Berlin
Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen 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…
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91 – The Suburban Frontier
Middle-Class Construction in Dar es Salaam 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…
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90 – Looking Back at Eight Years of Municipalist Government in Barcelona: The movement-party Barcelona en Comú
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…
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89 – Book Presentation: Turkish Muslim Women in Berlin
Navigating Boundaries in the City This is another episode of our Think&Drink Series in collaboration with the Georg-Simmel-Centre for Urban Studies working with the Humboldt University Berlin. 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…
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88 – In Conversation with Heather Dorries (The Urban Lives of Property Series V)
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…
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87 – Infrastructures of Urban Citizenship
This is another episode of our Think&Drink Series in collaboration with the Georg-Simmel-Centre for Urban Studies working with the Humboldt University Berlin. 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…
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86 – Book Review: Concrete City
Material Flows and Urbanization in West Africa 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…
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85 – Authoritarian Urbanism in Eurasia
This is another episode of our Think&Drink Series in collaboration with the Georg-Simmel-Centre for Urban Studies working with the Humboldt University Berlin. 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…
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84 – How Cities Can Transform Democracy
Rediscovering Urban Politics 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…
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83 – Book Presentation: Dithering for the Common Good
Productive Misunderstandings in Cooperative Urban Development 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…
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82 – Book Review Roundtable: Infrastructural Times: Temporality and the Making of Global Urban Worlds
Book Link: https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/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…
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81 – Urban Political x Think & Drink: Maroš Krivy.
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…
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80 – Spatial Planning in Israel/Palestine 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…
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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 bookis a lively and generous study of gay neighborhoods in Washington DC, highlighting the evolving dynamics of LGBTQ spaces in urban settings. Drawing…
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78 – Book Review: Waste and the City
Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife 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…
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Episode 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…
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Episodio 76 – En conversación con Clara Salazar (The Urban Lives of Property Series IV)
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…
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Episode 75 – Book Review Roundtable: Lively Cities: Reconfiguring Urban Ecology
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…
