A mini-series on Cities and Geopolitics by Urban Political Podcast in collaboration with the Second Cold War Observatory and Urban Geography Journal
The fifth episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series examines how contemporary geopolitical transformations are increasingly mediated through urban political economies. From industrial policy and strategic investment to financial flows, real estate speculation, and technological development, cities have become central arenas through which geopolitical rivalries are organised, negotiated, and materialised.
This episode explores how urban space is reshaped by shifting configurations of global capital, state strategy, and economic governance. Our guests discuss how municipalities, regions, and urban institutions are drawn into broader geopolitical projects through infrastructure investment, development corridors, energy transitions, and competing visions of economic security and growth. In doing so, the conversation highlights how cities are not simply passive recipients of geopolitical change, but active participants in the production of new economic and political orders.
At the same time, the episode foregrounds the relationship between political economy and worldmaking. Beyond questions of investment and governance, it considers how urban transformations generate competing imaginaries of the future: visions of technological modernisation, green transition, national development, logistical integration, or alternative forms of urban life and solidarity. These processes are explored not only as material reorganisations of urban space, but also as struggles over how urban futures are imagined, governed, and inhabited.
Moving between global economic strategies and situated urban experiences, the episode invites listeners to rethink cities as key sites where geopolitical economies and urban futures are simultaneously produced. In tracing the intersections between finance, governance, infrastructure, and imagination, the conversation foregrounds the contested processes through which contemporary worlds are being made and remade.
This episode was edited and posted by Anne Goßler.
Additional links:
Catching China-Europe trains: local agency and Global China in the Polish borderland, Eurasian Geography, https://doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2025.2530491
Wei, Q., & Zhang, Y. (2024). Vertical expansion in the making: Planning against deindustrialization by promoting “Industry’s Going Upstairs” in Shenzhen. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 56(5), 1447-1461. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X241226889 Zhang, Y., & Wei, Q. (2026). Selective scaling through ideational alignment: governing micro-regeneration in Shenzhen. Urban Geography, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2026.2656264
Guests:
Wojciech Kębłowski
Wojciech Kębłowski is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong and Guest Professor at Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
His research and photography explore the intersection of urban political economy, transport and mobility, global China and the Belt and Road Initiative.
Sirma Altun
Sirma Altun is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Politics and Economics at Ankara University. She received her PhD from the Department of Political Economy at the University of Sydney in 2021. Her PhD thesis, titled The Production of Space in Hong Kong and Taipei: Socio-Spatial Struggles over Global City Formation, received the Institute of Australian Geographers Award for Dissertation Excellence. Her research interests include the political economy of China, spatial political economy and international political economy with a specific focus on green and digital transformations. Sirma Altun is a research associate of the Second Cold War Observatory.
Yong Zhang
Yong Zhang is an Assistant Professor of Urban Studies at the College of Integrative Studies, Singapore Management University.
He uses critical urban theory to examine how cities are governed in China and increasingly Southeast Asia, specifically looking at how policy changes reshape social spaces and urban life.
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.