6 Years of the Urban Political Podcast
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 Hanna Hilbrandt. We ask them to look back 6 years – to 2019 – and consider what has changed in the urban political landscape, what urban research and practice needs to do to grasp the contemporary moment.
Finally, the third question is asking what they think, in reality, might change in the coming years.
Thanks for your support as a listener!
Here are the links to the favourite episodes of our guests:
Colin: https://urbanpolitical.online/episode-41-housing-struggles-in-berlin-part-i-rent-cap/
Hanna: https://urbanpolitical.online/80-spatial-planning-in-israel-palestine-and-the-gaza-war/
Roger: https://urbanpolitical.online/97-in-loving-memory-of-mark-saunders/
And these are our editoral members’ favourites:
Ross: https://urbanpolitical.online/episode-2-reclaiming-the-tourist-city-part-1/
Mathilde: https://urbanpolitical.online/96-digital-cities-and-democracy/
Nitin: https://urbanpolitical.online/95-the-urban-crisis-at-night-urban-polycrisis-series/
Leah: https://urbanpolitical.online/episode-67-rent-strike-series-part-1/
Anne: https://urbanpolitical.online/85-authoritarian-urbanism-in-eurasia/
Guests:
Colin McFarlane
Colin McFarlane is Professor of Urban Geography at Durham University. His work focusses on the experience and politics of urban life. This includes an interest in urban knowledge, learning, densities, fragments, and infrastructure, especially sanitation. He is author of Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife (Verso, 2023), Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds (University of California Press, 2021), and Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage (Wiley, 2011), and Principal Investigator on the DenCity project.
Julie-Anne Boudreau
Julie-Anne is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Geography of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). She is Director of PATIO lab, a space for participatory mapping and forensic architecture in Mexico City (https://www.patiolab.org/), and Co-Director of the Humanity’s Urban Future program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR). Her research focuses on political action, juvenile geographies, and repair. Her forthcoming book is titled City of Repair. A Street Epistemology of the Future City, under contract with UC Press.
Roger Keil
Roger Keil is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at York University in Toronto and a Fellow of CIFAR’s Humanity’s Urban Future program. He researches global suburbanization, urban political ecology, cities and infectious disease, infrastructure, and regional governance. He is the author of Pandemic Urbanism (Polity, 2023, with S. Harris Ali & Creighton Connolly) and Suburban Planet (Polity, 2018). He has recently edited two volumes on Peripheral Centralities (with Nick Phelps and Paul Maginn, 2025) and previously The Globalizing Cities Reader (Routledge, 2017, with Xuefei Ren), After Suburbia (UTP, 2022 with Fulong Wu) and Turning Up the Heat: Urban political ecology for a climate emergency (MUP, 2023, with Maria Kaika, Tait Mandler & Yannis Tzaninis, 2023).
Hanna Hilbrandt
Hanna Hilbrandt serves as a Professor in Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Zurich’s (UZH) Geography Department. In addition to researching urban climate finance and governance, Hanna’s work explores spaces of mundane transgression, planning conflict, and housing marginality. Her book Housing in the Margins (Wiley 2021) explores informal dwelling practices in the context of Berlin’s increasingly tight housing market.
Markus Kip
After studying philosophy and theology in Munich and San Salvador, he continued with sociology in Berlin and New York, and obtained his PhD in Sociology from York University in Toronto in 2016. He is the author of “The Ends of Union Solidarity: Undocumented Labor and German Trade Unions” (2017) and co-editor of “Urban Commons: Moving beyond State and Market” (2015).
Together with Ross Beveridge, he is the co-founder of the Urban Political Podcast.
Hosts:
Ross Beveridge
Ross is a Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow working in the field of urban politics and governance. His most recent book is How Cities Can Transform Democracy, co-authored with Philippe Koch (ZHAW Zurich) and published with Polity Press in 2022.
He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Geography Compass and is co-founder and editor of the Urban Political Podcast.
Mathilde Lind Gustavussen
Mathilde is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on housing, displacement, and tenant organizing in California. She joined the Urban Political Podcast in 2023.
Nitin Bathla
Nitin Bathla is a transdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of urbanization, the environment, society, and the arts. He holds a Doctorate in Urban Studies from ETH Zurich and is currently jointly affiliated with ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich. He is the author of the award-winning book Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methods for Urban and Landscape Studies and the critically acclaimed documentary Not Just Roads. Nitin serves as an editor for the journal Urban Geography and the Urban Political Podcast, and sits on the editorial boards of the Journal of Urban Political Ecology and Shared Habitats. His current research focuses on the political ecology of nocturnal urbanization and public illumination in Switzerland.