A mini-series by Urban Political Podcast
in collaboration with the Second Cold War Observatory and Urban Geography Journal
In an era of intensifying geopolitical rivalries, the terrains of global power are increasingly being reconfigured through the infrastructure, economies, and everyday rhythms of urbanisation. From semiconductor supply chains and energy transitions to port expansions, data centres, and housing markets, urban space has become a critical arena through which geopolitical strategies are organised, exercised, and contested. This mini-series starts from the premise that geopolitics is not simply something that happens to cities, but something that is actively produced through them.
Cities and Geopolitics brings together a set of conversations that explore how contemporary geopolitical transformations unfold across urban space. The series traces the material and spatial logics of power: how infrastructure become strategic assets, how logistics and circulation reorganise territories, and how investment, governance, and technological systems reposition cities within shifting global orders. In doing so, it highlights cities as key nodes where global rivalries are translated into concrete forms, such as roads, ports, grids, and digital systems that shape both planetary connections and urban everyday life.
At the same time, the series attends to the uneven and lived dimensions of these transformations. It asks how geopolitical dynamics are encountered in everyday urban contexts, such as: how they are negotiated by residents, mediated by local institutions, and contested through situated practices. By moving between large-scale infrastructural shifts and the textures of daily life, the series develops a grounded understanding of how global power operates across scales.
The episodes in this five-part mini-series are organised around themes such as infrastructure of power, corridors and circulation, urban political economies, and everyday geopolitics. The series offers a distinctly urban lens on contemporary geopolitics, inviting listeners to rethink the geographies of global power by foregrounding urbanisation not as a passive backdrop, but as active sites where geopolitical futures are being made, contested, and transformed.
In the first episode of this mini-series our guests, Kevin Ward and Seth Schindler explore what it is to think of cities and geopolitics in the current conjuncture, often described as a “Second Cold War” and how is it differs from earlier geopolitical conjunctures.
Guests:
Seth Schindler
Seth Schindler is Professor of Urban Politics and Development at University of Manchester.
He is based in the Global Development Institute, and he also serves as the Deputy Director of the Manchester Urban Institute and is a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
He co-founded the Second Cold War Observatory in 2020 with Jessica DiCarlo, and his current research focuses on the impacts of contemporary geopolitical rivalry on cities and urbanization.
Kevin Ward
Kevin Ward is Professor and Director of the Urban Studies Institute at Georgia State University.
He chief of Urban Geography and editor of the Globalization and Community Book Series at the University of Minnesota Press.
He is published widely across issues of comparative urbanism, local economic development, municipal finance, policy mobilities and urban and regional governance. He continues to be interested in the “local” developmental and growth politics associated with wider geo-political processes.
Host:
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.
Additional Links
Schindler, Seth, et al. “The second cold war: US-China competition for centrality in infrastructure, digital, production, and finance networks.” Geopolitics 29.4 (2024): 1083-1120. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2023.2253432 
Schindler, Seth, and Steve Rolf. “Geostrategic globalization: US–China rivalry, corporate strategy, and the new global economy.” Globalizations 22.6 (2025): 897-914. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2024.2434306
Schindler, Seth, Jessica DiCarlo, and Dinesh Paudel. “The new cold war and the rise of the 21st‐century infrastructure state.” Transactions of the institute of British geographers 47.2 (2022): 331-346. https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tran.12480
Byrne, Jeffrey James. Mecca of revolution: Algeria, decolonization, and the third world order. Oxford University Press, 2016. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/mecca-of-revolution-9780190053772?cc=gb&lang=en&
Friedman, Jeremy. Shadow cold war: The Sino-Soviet competition for the third world. UNC Press Books, 2015. https://uncpress.org/9781469645520/shadow-cold-war/
Lorenzini, Sara. “Global development: A cold war history.” Global development. Princeton University Press, 2019. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691180151/global-development
Roberts, G. “Revolutionary state-making in Dar es: Salaam: African liberation and the global Cold War, 1961-1974. Cambridge University Press.” (2021). https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/revolutionary-statemaking-in-dar-es-salaam/29879C60DFB8D4D5CFAFFEBF5A55C944
Westad, Odd Arne. The global Cold War: Third World interventions and the making of our times. Cambridge University Press, 2005. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/global-cold-war/75870878657DC67E0BC70FA7D2388494