A mini-series in collaboration with the Second Cold War Observatory and Urban Geography Journal
The second episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series turns to the material architectures through which geopolitical power is organised and exercised. From energy grids and digital networks to ports, logistics hubs, and semiconductor infrastructures, contemporary geopolitical rivalries are increasingly mediated through complex, often invisible, urban systems.
This episode explores how infrastructures are not merely technical backdrops to global politics, but strategic assets and active instruments of power. Our guests examine how infrastructures are designed, financed, and governed in ways that embed geopolitical priorities, whether through the securitisation of supply chains, the territorialisation of digital systems, or the reconfiguration of energy networks in the context of climate transitions and resource competition.
At the same time, the conversation highlights how these large-scale infrastructural transformations are grounded in specific urban contexts. It considers how cities become key sites where global ambitions materialise in concrete forms, such as data centres, ports, corridors, and grids, and how these infrastructures reshape urban space, governance, and everyday life. In doing so, the episode foregrounds the uneven geographies of infrastructural development, asking who benefits, who is marginalised, and how these systems are contested on the ground.
Moving between planetary strategies and situated urban experiences, ourguests invite listeners to rethink infrastructure not as neutral or purely functional, but as deeply political, contested, and central to the making of contemporary geopolitics.
This episode was edited and posted by Anne Goßler
Additional Links
Graham, S. and Marvin, S., 2022. Splintering urbanism at 20 and the “infrastructural turn”. Journal of Urban Technology, 29(1), pp.169-175.
Marvin, S. and Zhang, J., 2025. Cognitively enabled urbanisms: A critical commentary on the emerging governance of the mind. Urban Studies, p.00420980261417144.
Kollar, Justin, and Andrew Stokols. 2025. “Geopolitical Ecologies of Cloud Capitalism: Territorial Restructuring and the Making of National Computing Power in the U.S. and China.” Environment & Planning A 58 (1): 38–58.
Kollar, Justin. 2025. “Techno-Statecraft and Industrial Strategy: Semiconductor Development in Arizona.” Contemporary Social Science 20 (2–3): 287–306.
Kollar, Justin. 2025. “Fallowing the Fields, Feeding the Fabs: Territorial Restructuring and the Political-Industrial Ecology of High-Tech Taiwan.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 9 (2): 751–76.
Luque-Ayala, A. and Marvin, S., 2020. Urban operating systems: Producing the computational city. MIT Press.
Guests:
Simon Marvin
Simon Marvin is a Professor in the Urban Institute at Sheffield University and in the School of Architecture Design and Planning at Sydney University. Simon worked at Newcastle, Salford, and Durham Universities before joining Sheffield in 2015 and Sydney in 2020. Overall, his work analyses the changing relations between infrastructure and the urban condition and explores social, economic and material interrelationships across diverse technologies in different urban contexts.The key outputs have significantly influenced architecture, human geography, technology studies, environmental studies and urban planning research. His latest authored book with Andres Luque-Ayala, “Urban Operating Systems: Producing the Computational City”, was published by MIT Press in 2020 as a freely available open-access publication. His recent work focuses on interior climate control, urban AI and robotics, and the urbanisation of neurotechnology.
Justin Kollar
Justin Kollar, PhD, is an American planner and incoming Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore. His research focuses on the territorial politics of semiconductor factories and AI data centers, showing how these massive projects transform land markets and energy systems.
Kollar tracks how geopolitical competition takes material form in cities across U.S. and Asia by examining the links between high-tech industrial policy, AI land and resource use, finance and fossil capital.
Emily Conrad
Emily Conrad is a PhD candidate in international politics at Fudan University in Shanghai, focusing her research on US-China relations at the subnational level. She attended Wofford College in her hometown of Spartanburg, South Carolina, where she graduated summa cum laude with a triple major in economics, German and Spanish and the distinction of Phi Beta Kappa. She completed her master’s degree from Peking University in Beijing, where she was a Yenching Academy fellow. A former journalist, she is the author of The Faithless? The Untold Story of the Electoral College.
Hosts:
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/
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.