The Urban Political podcast delves into contemporary urban issues with activists, scholars and policy-makers from around the world. Providing informed views, state-of-the-art knowledge, and unusual insights, the podcast aims to decolonize knowledge-production, advance our understanding of urban environments, and reflect on how we might make them more just and democratic.
Founded in 2019, the editorial collective of the podcast has been growing over the years and produced more than 60 episodes by May 2023 with more than 100 guests and contributors. The podcast is available on a wide range of streaming platforms and has enjoyed reception by a large international audience with more than 53.000 plays according to IBA statistics (May 2023). In May 2023 the project launched this website and started to produce transcripts of new episodes to ensure greater accessibility and opportunities to delve deeper into the content.
The Urban Political gratefully acknowledges financial and logistical support by the Georg-Simmel-Center of the Humboldt University, Berlin. The website has been designed by Santiago Orrego.
Please subcribe, follow us, and get in touch with feedback, pitches for new episodes, or declarations of interest to become involved in the collective!
Editorial Collective
Ross Beveridge
Ross is a Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow working in the field of urban politics and governance. His most recent book is How Cities Can Transform Democracy, co-authored with Philippe Koch (ZHAW Zurich) and published with Polity Press in 2022. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal Geography Compass and is co-founder and editor of the Urban Political Podcast.
Markus Kip
Markus listens to many podcasts and founded the UPP with Ross as something to listen to himself. A failed musician, he was familiar enough with punkrock to set up the first episodes and has been enjoying doing it as a wonderful means to talk to fascinating people. A critical urban scholar trained in sociology and former homeless community organizer, Markus lives in Berlin, hangs out at the Georg-Simmel-Center of the Humboldt University and currently works as a postdoc at the collaborative research center “Structural Change of Property” at the University of Jena (academic website).
Hanna Hilbrandt
Hanna Hilbrandt serves as a Professor in Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Zurich’s (UZH) Geography Department. In addition to researching urban climate finance and governance, Hanna’s work explores spaces of mundane transgression, planning conflict, and housing marginality. Her book Housing in the Margins (Wiley 2021) explores informal dwelling practices in the context of Berlin’s increasingly tight housing market.
Mathilde Lind Gustavussen
Mathilde is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on housing, displacement, and tenant organizing in California. She joined the Urban Political Podcast in 2023.
Nitin Bathla
Nitin (born 1986) is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich, where he coordinates the doctoral program at the Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies. He lectures on urban studies, and political ecology, and his current research focuses on agrarian questions under the planetary age. In his academic practice, Nitin actively combines research with artistic practices of filmmaking, and socially engaged art. His 2020 film Not Just Roads with Klearjos E. Papanicolaou premiered at several important film festivals and won the SAH Film Award 2022.
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. His current project focuses on the British electricity system and the energy crisis.
Gareth is the co-editor (with Güldem Özatağan & Ayda Eraydin) of a recent special issue for Urban Studies on ‘Authoritarian Neoliberal Urbanism’.
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.
Mais Jafari
Mais is a landscape architect, urban planner, and author with international experience and research in the MENA region and Germany. She is currently a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Landscape Ecology and Landscape Planning, TU Dortmund University. She coordinated several international research projects, most recently the EU-Horizon 2020 project proGIreg (2018-2023) at the City of Dortmund. Her research focus on Nature-based solutions, transformation of public space, climate change and environmental planning, social innovation and the co-creation of green spaces.
Anne Gossler
Anne Gossler is an undergraduate student at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She is currently studying European Ethnology (Urban Anthropology) and languages in her 5th semester. She assists the podcast by editing the episodes, creating transcripts and maintaining our social media platforms.
Jo Kosowska
Jo Kosowska is a student at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where they pursue a master’s degree in Art and Visual History. They help out with editing the Urban Political Podcast, creating episode transcripts and managing its social media presence.
Friends of the Podcast
Talja Blokland
Talja Blokland is an urban sociologist who has worked at Yale University, the University of Manchester and various Dutch universities. Since 2009, she has held the chair of Urban and Regional Sociology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her publications include Urban Bonds (Polity 2003), Creating the Unequal City (edited with C. Giustozzi, D. Krüger and H. Schilling, Ashgate 2016), Community as Urban Practice (Polity 2017), and various articles on race and ethnicity in the city, poor neighbourhoods, urban violence, gentrification, urban middle classes and neighbourhood relations and everyday interactions.
Roger Keil
Roger Keil is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus at York University in Toronto and a Fellow of CIFAR’s Humanity’s Urban Future program. He researches global suburbanization, urban political ecology, cities and infectious disease, infrastructure, and regional governance. He is the author of Pandemic Urbanism (Polity, 2023, with S. Harris Ali & Creighton Connolly) and Suburban Planet (Polity, 2018). He has recently edited two volumes on Peripheral Centralities (with Nick Phelps and Paul Maginn, 2025) and previously The Globalizing Cities Reader (Routledge, 2017, with Xuefei Ren), After Suburbia (UTP, 2022 with Fulong Wu) and Turning Up the Heat: Urban political ecology for a climate emergency (MUP, 2023, with Maria Kaika, Tait Mandler & Yannis Tzaninis, 2023).
Colin McFarlane
Colin McFarlane is Professor of Urban Geography at Durham University. His work focusses on the experience and politics of urban life. This includes an interest in urban knowledge, learning, densities, fragments, and infrastructure, especially sanitation. He is author of Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife (Verso, 2023), Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds (University of California Press, 2021), and Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage (Wiley, 2011), and Principal Investigator on the DenCity project.
Partnerships
Imprint
Markus Kip & Ross Beveridge
c/o Georg-Simmel-Zentrum für Metropolenforschung
Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Straße 40-41
10117 Berlin
Music credits: “Something Elated” by Broke For Free, CC BY 3.0 US