Category: Places
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Episode 26 – Spatialities of Shock (AfterCorona #8)
Reflecting on how shocks are applied as tools to further political agendas, Creighton Connolly, S. Harris Ali, and Roger Keil consider the implications for racialized inequalities and the Global South-North divide. Two months after the first conversation with out guests, at a moment when the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic, Creighton, Harris, and Roger…
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Episode 25 – Migration and Labour Struggles (AfterCorona #7)
How is the pandemic affecting conditions of labour and migrant workers? How are Unions and other organisations reacting? In this wide-ranging and forensic discussion with Michelle Buckley (Toronto), Rajan Pandey (Bangalore) and Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay (Mohali) tell us about on-going struggles around mobility and labour in Canada and India. We hear about how the Indian state…
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Episode 24 – Dark Clouds over Informal Settlements II: Responses to the Pandemic (AfterCorona #6)
Reporting from Kenya and South Africa with Jethron Ayumba Akallah and Marie Huchzermeyer provide us with a detailed account of the coronavirus-pandemic in their context, the conditions within the informal settlements, the state approaches and the responses by civic organizations. Marie and Jethron share their perspective on the opportunities and threats of this situation and…
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Episode 23 – Dark Clouds over Informal Settlements I: Politics of Land and Infrastructure
This episode explores contemporary politics around land and infrastructure in informal settlements in Kenya and South Africa with Jethron Ayumba Akallah and Marie Huchzermeyer. This is the first part of the episode on informal settlements and provides the context for the second part which focuses on the situation of the unfolding coronavirus pandemic, state responses…
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Episode 22 – Post-growth, Post-Covid? (AfterCorona #5)
In the episode we speak to Viola Schulze Dieckhoff (Technical University of Dortmund, Germany) and Christian Lamker (University of Groningen, the Netherlands) about the paradigm of post-growth and its relation to cities. In particular we discussed the roots of this concept and movement in academia and beyond, what it means in terms of planning, living…
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Episode 21 – Blaming Density (AfterCorona #4)
Is density really the key variable to explain the dynamics of the pandemic? Colin McFarlane takes a critical look at accounts that blame urban density for the drama that is unfolding in many cities. McFarlane discusses how racalized divisions are exacerbated in this situation and how new inequalities are produced. Considering Arundhati Roy’s metaphor of…
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Episode 20 – Urban Logics of Action (AfterCorona #3)
Drawing on insights from her latest book “Global Urban Politics”, Julie-Anne Boudreau puts the current response to the coronavirus in Mexico City and Montreal in a larger frame of understanding. She elaborates on the difference between urban and state logics of action and its importance to grasping the divergent situations. As a point of hope,…
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Episode 19 – Inequalities of the Lockdown (AfterCorona #2)
Drawing on her understanding of community as an urban practice and her recent research on social and educational inequalities in Berlin, Talja Blokland underlines how the lockdown exacerbates inequalities in view of labor, education, and social capital. She presents her argument why digital media cannot replace the vital functions that social interactions in physical space…
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Episode 18 – The New Municipalism (part 2)
In the second part of the New Municipalism series, Ross talks to Barcelona-based scholar-activist Laura Roth. She talks about the Spanish experience, particularly in relation to Barcelona en Comú, the movement party, which has been in minority government since 2014. Laura talked about a range of issues, including the importance of feminism to new municipalism,…
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Episode 16 – The Urbanization of COVID-19
Three prominent urban researchers with a focus on infectious diseases explain why political responses to the current coronavirus outbreak require an understanding of urban dynamics. Looking back at the last coronavirus pandemic, the SARS outbreak in 2002/3, they highlight what affected cities have learned from that experience for handling the ongoing crisis. Exploring the political…
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Episode 14 – Chile Despertó! Social Uprisings in Santiago
Chile despertó – Chile woke up – is a key slogan oft he ongoing uprisings in Chile that began in the capital Santiago in October 2019. Since then, heavy confrontations happened with the regime of president Piñera. For the first time since the dictatorship that ended in 1990, the army was deployed and curfews were…
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Episode 13 – The New Municipalism (part 1)
What is “New Municipalism”? In this first of a new series Ross seeks clarification from scholar-activists Bertie Russell and Matt Thompson who give us a conceptual and historical take on this new urban movement, offering reflections on UK examples like Preston. The interview was recorded at the end of August 2019 at the Royal Geographers…
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Episode 10 – On Metrolingualism
In a city, the idea of “standard language” falls apart. Linguistic researchers explain how urban space becomes a vital part of our ability to communicate in multilingual contexts. Think about “spatial repertoires” as the basis for communication. A market in Berlin-Kreuzberg, one of our guests’ research site, is the backdrop to illustrate how Turkish, Kurdish,…
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Episode 9 – Be Water! Urban Protests in Hong Kong
Activist-scholar Sampson Wong offers captivating insights on the current wave of protests that has galvanized Hong Kong since June. Sampson explains what is at stake, how the political dimension has gained predominance over economic concerns of the population, and why the protesters have become radicalized over the past few months. If you want to find…
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Episode 8 – Heritage vs. Gentrification
Among critical scholars and urban activists, the care for heritage of an urban area is often associated with strategies to commercialize, to touristify the area and ultimately to pave the ground for gentrification. Neighborhood development based on its heritage all too often is geared towards creating a unique selling point of the area to attract…
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Episode 7- When Social Housing was Big
Post-war mass housing is at a crossroads in Western Europe. Demolition, densification, adaptation, or conservation? Two experts help us sort it out. Maren Harnack proposes what it requires to take advantage of the existing settlements from that period. And Miles Glendinning draws lessons of what we may learn from the experience of mass social housing…
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Episode 6 – Reviewing Suburban Planet
Roger Keil’s new book, ‘Suburban Planet’, is a major contribution to (re)thinking the urban age in terms its peripheries rather than its centres. He seeks to provide us with a way of coming to terms with the process of suburbanization and the diversity of suburban forms. But does he succeed? And what are the political…
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Episode 5 – Take Your Eyes Off the City Center!
We are living on a suburban planet, if you ask Roger. He even wrote a book with that title. In the interview, he elaborates on the political implications of that condition. Situating his work on global suburbanisms in relation to the L.A. School and the debate around planetary urbanization, he flexes his intellectual muscles to…