A mini-series on Cities and Geopolitics by Urban Political Podcast
in collaboration with the Second Cold War Observatory and Urban Geography Journal
The third episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series explores the spatial and operational logics of circulation, examining how the movement of goods, capital, data, and people is organised, accelerated, and contested across urban and regional space. Our guests discuss how circulation has become a central terrain of geopolitical strategy, focusing on a range of infrastructures, from economic corridors and port expansions to special economic zones, rail networks, and digital logistics platforms. The episode highlights how circulatory systems are not only designed to facilitate flows, but also to direct, channel, and control them, reconfiguring territories, reshaping urban hierarchies, and producing new forms of inclusion and exclusion.
The conversation traces how the control of corridors and logistical infrastructures materialises geopolitical ambitions in highly uneven ways, often generating fragmentation, dispossession, and environmental transformation along their routes. Cities emerge here not simply as nodes within global networks, but as sites where the frictions of circulation are negotiated, where congestion, labour struggles, infrastructural bottlenecks, and regulatory regimes reveal the limits and contradictions of seamless flow. At the same time, the episode attends to the lived and situated dimensions of logistics, showing how everyday practices rework infrastructural spaces.
This episode invites listeners to rethink geopolitics through the lens of movement and mobility, highlighting how the governance of flows has become central to the organisation of global power, and how urban space is continuously remade through the infrastructures, and frictions of circulation.
This episode was edited and posted by Anne Goßler
Additional Links
Cyuzuzo, L. (2026). Shifting sands and ecological uncertainties: An urban political ecology of dredging in Mombasa. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486261420090
Silver, J. and Nsubuga, S., 2026. ‘Everything is being disturbed’: unsettling the spaces of global infrastructure along the Northern Corridor. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
Das, P., Mittal, G., & Sarma, J. (2024). Entangled exclusions: Borders, frontiers and urban geopolitics from northeast India. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, sjtg.12575. https://doi.org/10.1111/sjtg.12575
Dean, K., Sarma, J., & Rippa, A. (2022). Infrastructures and b/ordering: How Chinese projects are ordering China–Myanmar border spaces. Territory, Politics, Governance, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2022.2108892
Sarma, J. (2021). The edge of Kaladan: A ‘spectacular’ road through ‘nowhere’ on the India-Myanmar borderlands. In L. Heslop & G. Murton (Eds.), Highways and Hierarchies (1st ed., pp. 125–154). Amsterdam University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9789048552511.006
Sarma, J., Faxon, H. O., & Roberts, K. B. (2022). Remaking and Living with Resource Frontiers: Insights from Myanmar and Beyond. Geopolitics, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2022.2041220 Wiig, A. and Silver, J., 2019. Turbulent presents, precarious futures: Urbanization and the deployment of global infrastructure. Regional Studies, 53(6), pp.912-923.
Guests:
Jon Silver
Jon Silver is deputy director at the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. He is currently leading a European Research Council funded project, GlobalCORRIDOR, investigating the role of new infrastructure corridors in shaping the urbanisation process and inequality through comparative investigations.
His work has taken him to a range of cities across global Norths and Souths, working on postcolonial modes of theorising, paying attention to the ways in which finance, urban politics, everyday interactions and visions of futurity come to shape the infrastructural terrain.
Jasnea Sarma
Jasnea Sarma is a feminist geographer and ethnographer, and teaches Political Geography and critical geopolitics at the University of Zurich. Her research focuses on the politics of borders and how they become spaces of war & conflict, extractive economies, and resource and infrastructural frontiers, and, more recently, sites of toxic pollution and ecological degradation.
Jasnea has long conducted fieldwork across Asia, having lived and worked across many countries, from Northeast India (where she is from) to China, Taiwan, Singapore, and Burma/Myanmar. She edits the journal Geopolitics and previously edited the independent blog on Burma/Myanmar studies, Tea Circle.
Theo Greene
Louis Cyuzuzo is an early-career scholar who holds a joint Ph.D. in policy management, Development, and Urban Planning from the Universities of Manchester and Melbourne.
His research focused on the development of Mombasa Port in Kenya, and examined how its ongoing redevelopment intersects with various geopolitical agendas and domestic political realities, while foregrounding urban and socioenvironmental implications of the port’s development in Mombasa.
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.