Authoritarian Urbanism Series
Today it seems fairly obvious to say that urban government has become more authoritarian – there is vastly increased levels of surveillance, violent and militarised policing of dissent and the targeting of migrant, queer and ethnic minority communities. Building on the previous episode on ‘authoritarian populism’, the panel discussion focuses on the ‘authoritarian practices’ of urban governments. We discuss issues of scale i.e. the relationship between central and municipal government and global capital flows drawing on research on Turkey, Mexico, India, Russia and Eastern Europe. We cover overtly draconian practices such as violent crackdowns on protestors and the more subtle ‘sabotaging’ of accountability for key sections of capital – developers, big tech – and national infrastructure and whether this takes us beyond the era of neoliberal urban governance. The episode is hosted by Gareth Fearn with guests Ebru Kurt Özman, Alke Jenns, Nitin Bathla and Sven Daniel Wolfe. This episode is second in a three-part series which cover different aspects of ‘authoritarian neoliberal urbanism’, based on a special issue in the Urban Studies Journal edited by Guldem Ozatagan, Gareth Fearn and Ayda Eraydin.
Guests:
Ebru Kurt-Özman
Ebru Kurt-Özman is an urban geographer currently based in Istanbul, with a PhD from the University of Amsterdam. Her research explores how entrepreneurial and authoritarian state strategies shape urban governance and transformation processes, particularly in Istanbul’s large scale (‘mega’) regeneration projects and Turkey more broadly. Using an ethnographic approach and in-depth fieldwork combined with critical policy analysis, she examines how spatial justice and local resistance are negotiated in practice. Her work contributes to international debates on state-market relations, urban transformation, and authoritarian governance. Ebru’s recent publications include articles in Urban Studies, Cities, and Regional Science Policy & Practice.
Ebru’s Urban Studies special issue paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00420980251345701
Further papers on urban governance in Istanbul: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2024.105144
Sven Daniel Wolfe
Sven Daniel Wolfe is Assistant Professor of Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Neuchâtel, and Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow in the Spatial Development and Urban Policy group at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland. He works on the everyday geopolitics of the Russian war against Ukraine, as well as the (geo)politics, (un)sustainability, and sociocultural implications of mega-events.
He is also a vice-president the Swiss Association of Geography, co-founder of the City Collaboratory urban studies research network, and the author of More Than Sport: Soft Power and Potemkinism in the 2018 Men’s Football World Cup in Russia (LIT Verlag 2021) and The Hard Edge of Soft Power: Mega-Events, Geopolitics, and Making Nations Great Again (Palgrave 2025).
Alke Jenss
Alke Jenss is Head of the Research Cluster Contested Governance at the Arnold Bergstraesser Institute Freiburg (ABI). She also teaches at Freiburg University. Her research is located at the intersection of political economy, decolonial approaches and urban geography and has analysed state-crime collusion, insecurity and austerity in Latin American cities and infrastructure conflicts.
Among other texts, she has published on how logistics reshape authoritarian practices in urban spaces [academic.oup.com], how regional development programs have reproduced conflictive relations in cities [tandfonline.com], and how states organize ‘security’ highly selectively [books.google.de]. She is currently leading a project on Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace and Conflict Studies.
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.
Host:
Gareth Fearn
Gareth Fearn is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK.
His research analyses energy, housing and planning by combining approaches from Political Economy and Geography.
He is the co-editor (with Güldem Özatağan & Ayda Eraydin) of a recent special issue for Urban Studies on ‘Authoritarian Neoliberal Urbanism’.
His current project focuses on the British electricity system and the energy crisis.
A full list of his papers, writing and podcasts are available at: https://garethfearn.com/