A mini-series on Cities and Geopolitics by Urban Political Podcast
in collaboration with the Second Cold War Observatory and Urban Geography Journal
The sixth and final episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series explores how geopolitical power is encountered, reproduced, and contested through everyday urban life. Moving beyond an understanding of geopolitics centred exclusively on states, borders, and diplomatic strategy, our guests examine how global conflicts and political imaginaries enter homes, streets, workplaces, neighbourhoods, and digital spaces. The conversation considers how ordinary practices, ranging from commuting, shopping, and consuming media to caring, protesting, and negotiating identity, connect intimate urban life to wider geopolitical formations.
The episode highlights how geopolitical distinctions are materialised through mundane infrastructures and encounters. Housing markets, migration bureaucracies, policing, schools, monuments, religious spaces, social media platforms, and commodity networks shape who can move, settle, belong, and appear in the city. Geopolitics is therefore not only imposed from above but also lived affectively through fear, aspiration, suspicion, solidarity, memory, and attachment. Cities emerge as spaces in which distant wars, borders, colonial histories, and nationalist projects become proximate, entering everyday relations and producing uneven forms of visibility, vulnerability, and belonging. At the same time, the conversation attends to the capacity of everyday practices to unsettle dominant geopolitical scripts. Migrant networks, neighbourhood solidarities, commemorative practices, cultural production, and ordinary acts of care can rework the categories and divisions through which geopolitical power operates. This episode invites listeners to understand the everyday not as a scale beneath geopolitics, but as one of the principal sites through which geopolitical worlds are assembled, inhabited, contested, and transformed.
This episode was co-hosted by Leah Bonvin and was edited and posted by Anne Goßler.
Additional Links
Smeds, E., Verlinghieri, E., Kocsis, J., Connolly, J.J., Polgár, A., Manaugh, K., Waygood, E.O.D., Castañeda, P. and Wargent, M., 2023. ‘Seeing like a citizen’: Rethinking city street transformations through the lens of epistemic justice: Edited by Emilia Smeds and Ersilia Verlinghieri. Planning Theory & Practice, 24(5), pp.697-729.
Smith, S., 2012. Intimate geopolitics: Religion, marriage, and reproductive bodies in Leh, Ladakh. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(6), pp.1511-1528.
Moramudali, U. and Panduwawala, T., 2022. Evolution of Chinese lending to Sri Lanka since the mid-2000s: Separating myth from reality (No. 08/2022). Briefing Paper.
Guests:
Joanna Kocsis
Joanna Kocsis is a community-engaged activist scholar whose work examines the contemporary transformations of urban space that result from the economic and social restructuring of communities impoverished by globalization. Joanna experiments with affect focused and arts-based methods to explore how creative practice can be used in research, policymaking and civil society organizing to build socially just and sustainable cities. Her theory-building work on affect in planning connects the ontological principals of anti-oppressive, post-structuralist, feminist and decolonial perspectives to the material practice of research, examining how creative practice produces space for knowledge creation by historically excluded communities, to advance social justice and sustainability projects.
Sara Smith
Sara Smith is a Professor of Geography and Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is an anticolonial feminist political geographer interested in the relationship between territory, time, and embodied life. Her research seeks to understand how politics and geopolitics are constituted through intimate acts of love, friendship, and birth, and how the politics of time shape how we theorize the past and future.
Her work in Ladakh, India has previously been on marriage and family planning, and, with Mabel Gergan, a project on how Ladakhi college students think about themselves, belonging, and the future. She also pursues these issues as they emerge in the US and global context, through writing on US politics, demography, and theorizations of climate change. Sara is a co-founder of the Desirable Futures Collective, the FLOCK collective, and, with Danielle Purifoy, the Landback Abolition Project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a collaborative venture in which we study our own institution to build an archive for a just future. Sara is the incoming President of the American Association of Geographers. She is author of Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Marriage, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold and Political Geography: a Critical Introduction.
Umesh Moramudali
Umesh Moramudali is an economist and a researcher, specializing in international finance, political economy and China’s role in global finance. He is currently reading for his PhD in Development Policy and Management at the Global Development Institute (GDI), University of Manchester under the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) scholarship.
His research focuses on Chinese loans, public finance, public debt, middle income transition and the political economy of global finance. He has conducted extensive research work on Chinese lending to Sri Lanka, and myth of Chinese debt trap, China – Global South relations and international finance. His research was published in prestigious International Affairs Journal, Asian Perspective Journal, Asian Journal of Political Science, Routlage, and China- Africa Research Initiative (CARI) at the John Hopkins University.
Hosts:
Leah Bonvin
Leah is a PhD student in social geography at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Her research focuses on the intersection of everyday life and major urban transformations.
Her scientific practice combines fieldwork methods with audio documentary. She recently produced Muraz après le feu, a podcast examining the aftermath of a traumatic event in her community.
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.