Tag: Urbanization
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Episodio 76 – En conversación con Clara Salazar (The Urban Lives of Property Series IV)
In this inaugural Spanish-language episode of the Urban Political Podcast, Clara Salazar delves into the history and concept of the ejidos—collective forms of land ownership introduced by the Mexican Revolution in 1917. Following this, the state began redistributing land to impoverished farmers under the condition that they organize themselves into collectives. Ejidal land, which was…
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Episode 60 – On Peripheralisation
How do “peripheries” form? And how does urbanization generate processes of peripheralization? Today, urban research is increasingly confronted with processes of extended urbanization that unfold far beyond cities and agglomerations: novel patterns of urbanization are crystallizing in agricultural areas and in remote landscapes, challenging inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded and dense settlement…
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Episode 56 – Urbanization: A Contested Concept (Urban Concepts Series)
Urbanization has become central in recent political discourses, as well as a contested concept in experts’ spheres. This podcast of the Urban Political delves into the phenomenon of urbanization and traces back how the idea of “expanding cities” is causing disagreement in urban studies and leading researchers to raise questions that have haunted the discipline…
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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 36 – Mobilization and advocacy in contexts of massive urbanisation – Part 2
Throughout the global south, many urban regions have become massive. In the familiar renditions of this notion, urban regions, mushrooming in population and spatial footprints, teeter close to chaos, environmental disaster, and ungovernability. Populations are being reshuffled, moved from one area to the other, something which an extensive landscape of built projects that never really…
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Episode 35 – Mobilization and Advocacy in Massive Urbanization Contexts – Part I
Throughout the global south, many urban regions have become massive. In the familiar renditions of this notion, urban regions, mushrooming in population and spatial footprints, teeter close to chaos, environmental disaster, and ungovernability. Populations are being reshuffled, moved from one area to the other, something which an extensive landscape of built projects that never really…
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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 15 – Urban Sustainability as New Financial Fix?
The crisis of 2008 has set into motion a growing influence of finance in municipalities. In particular, financial actors have identified an enormous “investment gap” in cities in the Global South. This trend intersects with a new set of urban development strategies, that present the financial market as a catalyst for sustainable development. Standard setting…
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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…