Tag: North America
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Episode 72 – Rent Strike Series Part 3
This is episode three of the Rent Strike Series, focusing on the Veritas Tenants Association’s ongoing multibuilding rent strike in San Francisco to demand a say in the terms of sale of their buildings. In November 2023, the Prado Group assumed ownership of 20 Veritas-owned buildings, while on January 18, 2024, Ballast Investments and their partner…
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Episode 69 – Rent Strike Series Part 2
This is episode two of the Rent Strike Series, focusing on the Veritas Tenants Association’s ongoing multibuilding rent strike in San Francisco to demand a say in the terms of sale of their buildings. On August 30, corporate landlord Ballast Investments won the auction for Veritas Investments’ delinquent debt and will take over 75 Veritas-owned…
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Episode 62 – In Conversation with Nick Blomley (The Urban Lives of Property Series I)
This podcast series explores the “life of property” in urban theory and practice. In conversations with scholars who have led the way in property debates, it aims is to advance conceptual and theoretical groundwork on this notion that fundamentally shapes everyday urban lives and political discussion about the city. Within the social sciences and critical…
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Episode 61 – Are Community Land Trusts Transformative?
Community land trusts are proliferating across the globe, promoted as a potential solution to the ever-worsening affordable housing crisis. CLTs provide a mechanism for decommodification, collective ownership, and community control; however, those ideals are hard to operationalize, and many CLTs function more as traditional affordable housing providers than as urban commons. This episode discusses the…
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Episode 52 – Book Review Roundtable: Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds
Cities are becoming increasingly fragmented materially, socially, and spatially. Fragments of the City examines the fragments themselves, what they are and how they come to matter in the experience, politics, and expression of cities. How does the city appear when we look at it through its fragments? For those living on the economic margins, the…
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Episode 51 – Racism and Social Mix
Social mix has become a central planning discourse worldwide to address urban inequalities and segregation as key urban problems of the 21st century. Far from being benevolent, the discourse of social mix and its related implementations are subjected to a fundamental critique highlighting racist underpinnings and consequences in targeted neighborhoods. The conversation draws on insights…
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Episode 48 – Troubling Graffiti and Street Art
What do graffiti and street art do? This is the key question of the intriguing podcast conversation among Emma Arnold, Jeff Ross, and John Lennon. While we learn about the unruly and disruptive features of graffiti in urban space, our guests also trouble its effects by asking questions about its relation to gentrification, racialized capitalism…
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Episode 45 – Housing Commons & Collectives: European & US Perspectives
After discussing expropriation efforts in Berlin recently, this episode will widen the discussion of housing commons to perspectives, differences, and potentials in Europe and the US. Housing was and remains one of the crucial social issues of our time. From Friedrich Engels discussion of the housing question to the idea of ‘commons’ gaining more traction…
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Episode 43 – Green Cities and Contemporary Climate Planning: Politics and Practices
Green cities and green infrastructure have become common planning practices. But why is nature good and how does green matter? Do all people have equal access to nature, or are some left out of contemporary climate planning? Furthermore, what impact will COVID 19 and climate crisis have on future green city planning? These and other…
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Episode 40 – The urban politics of density in and beyond the pandemic
This podcast explores how the pandemic is changing density around the world and generating forms of politics. With a diverse group of scholars and practitioners from around the world, the podcast addresses the following specific questions/ themes: How should density be conceived and why is it important to understanding cities (and the pandemic)? What is…
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Episode 39 – The Urban Hinterlands of Slavery
The transatlantic slave trade had a lasting impact not only on the development of big ports like Liverpool, London, Nantes or Bordeaux, but also in cities that far less frequently associated with slavery. In this episode, four researcher-activists from Bremen and Lancaster speak about how slavery is not just a bygone period of cruel practices…
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Episode 37 – Urban Climate Finance at the edge of viability?
Amidst the rapidly unfolding ecological crisis, current research is witnessing ever new financial strategies that aim at making money from urban climate risks. In this episode Hanna Hilbrandt invites Emma Colven, Zac Taylor, Sarah Knuth, and Sage Ponder, to discuss the financial and socio-material limits to the viability of urban financialization in the context of climate change. When climate disasters increasingly…
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Episode 32 – Murray Bookchin, Municipalism, Popular Democracy and Left Politics
In this podcast we discuss the work of Murray Bookchin, relating it to the experiences and debates around municipalism and wider left political practices and theory. With our guests (Blair, Hilary and Kate) we focus the discussion on the recent edited collection of Bookchin’s work: The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct…
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Episode 31 – Multiple Crises and Radical Urban Research (AfterCorona #13)
Starting off from her latest agenda-setting article “What does it mean to be a radical urban scholar-activist, or activist scholar today?” published earlier this year in the relaunch issue of the journal CITY – analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action. It was published before the pandemic shock and the current wave of Black Lives…
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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 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 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,…