Urban Political Podcast

Ross Beveridge, Markus Kip, Mais Jafari, Nitin Bathla, Julio Paulos, Nicolas Goez, Talja Blokland

The **Urban Political** 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 advance our understanding of urban environments and how we might make them more just and democratic. The **Urban Political** provides a new forum for reflection on bridging urban activism and scholarship, where regular features offer snapshots of pressing issues and new publications, allowing multiple voices of scholars and activists to enter into a transnational debate directly. Hosted and produced by: Ross Beveridge (University of Glasgow) Markus Kip (Georg-Simmel-Center for Metropolitan Studies - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Mais Jafari (Technische Universität Dortmund) Nitin Bathla (ETH-Zürich) Julio Paulos (Université de Lausanne) Nicolas Goez (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar) Talja Blokland (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Hanna Hilbrandt (Universität Zürich) Powered in partnership with the Georg-Simmel-Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Music credits: "Something Elated" by Broke For Free, CC BY 3.0 US If you would like to produce an episode with us or have comments, please get in touch! Follow us on Twitter: @political_urban Instagram: @urban_political Featured on wisspod: https://wissenschaftspodcasts.de/podcasts/urban-political/ Email: urbanpolitical@protonmail.com

  1. 22h ago

    113 - Urban Political Economies and Geopolitical Worldmaking (Cities and Geopolitics V)

    The fifth episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series examines how contemporary geopolitical transformations are increasingly mediated through urban political economies. From industrial policy and strategic investment to financial flows, real estate speculation, and technological development, cities have become central arenas through which geopolitical rivalries are organised, negotiated, and materialised. This episode explores how urban space is reshaped by shifting configurations of global capital, state strategy, and economic governance. Our guests discuss how municipalities, regions, and urban institutions are drawn into broader geopolitical projects through infrastructure investment, development corridors, energy transitions, and competing visions of economic security and growth. In doing so, the conversation highlights how cities are not simply passive recipients of geopolitical change, but active participants in the production of new economic and political orders. At the same time, the episode foregrounds the relationship between political economy and worldmaking. Beyond questions of investment and governance, it considers how urban transformations generate competing imaginaries of the future: visions of technological modernisation, green transition, national development, logistical integration, or alternative forms of urban life and solidarity. These processes are explored not only as material reorganisations of urban space, but also as struggles over how urban futures are imagined, governed, and inhabited. Moving between global economic strategies and situated urban experiences, the episode invites listeners to rethink cities as key sites where geopolitical economies and urban futures are simultaneously produced. In tracing the intersections between finance, governance, infrastructure, and imagination, the conversation foregrounds the contested processes through which contemporary worlds are being made and remade.

    113 - Urban Political Economies and Geopolitical Worldmaking (Cities and Geopolitics V)

  2. Aug 7

    112 - Remaindered Life and the Architecture of Migration

    Amid endless wars, authoritarianism, neocolonialism, and displacement, millions are being uprooted, while pervasive uncertainty grips millions more. As the world is remade through what some have described as neo-illiberalism, the very façade of humanitarianism, and indeed the boundaries of who counts as human, is beginning to unravel. Contemporary capitalism, imperialism, and colonial power produce vast populations whose lives are treated as disposable, surplus, or expendable. Yet the social worlds, forms of care, survival practices, and creative capacities of these populations continually exceed such imposed disposability. To understand the present conjuncture, we must attend to the “life-times” of migrants, informal workers, slum dwellers, and other populations rendered surplus by dominant political and economic orders. This episode brings together two scholars whose work has grappled with these questions in profound ways. At the same time, the humanitarian incorporation of displaced populations into conditions of permanent temporariness is not outside history. Refugee camps and other spaces of displacement are complex built environments with their own material, social, and political histories. Using Remaindered Life and Architecture of Migration as heuristics, our guests explore the political imaginaries animated by these influential books and reflect on their relevance to the current conjuncture. In doing so, they situate contemporary forms of displacement, disposability, and humanitarian governance within the enduring palimpsest of colonial pasts.

    112 - Remaindered Life and the Architecture of Migration

  3. Jul 15

    111 - Bonus Episode: Geopolitical Ecology (Cities and Geopolitics IV)

    What happens when we bring questions of power, territory, infrastructure, and ecological transformation into the same conversation? In this bonus episode of the Cities and Geopolitics miniseries, Nitin Bathla is joined by Malini Ranganathan and Garrett Graddy-Lovelace to explore the emerging field of geopolitical ecology. Moving beyond conventional understandings of geopolitics as a matter of states, borders, and great-power competition, the conversation examines how ecological processes, environmental governance, agrarian transformations, and everyday struggles over land, water, energy, and food have become central to contemporary geopolitical contestations. Drawing on examples ranging from agricultural frontiers and resource extraction to environmental justice movements, the discussion explores how geopolitical projects are materialised through ecological relations and how ecological crises, in turn, reshape political orders across scales. The episode reflects on the growing entanglement of environmental change, security, infrastructure, and global inequality, while considering what a geopolitical ecology perspective can contribute to understanding a rapidly urbanising and warming planet consumed by wars and blockades. The speakers discuss the intellectual origins of geopolitical ecology, its relationship to political ecology and critical geopolitics, and its potential to illuminate emerging struggles over territory, sovereignty, and planetary futures in the twenty-first century.

    111 - Bonus Episode: Geopolitical Ecology (Cities and Geopolitics IV)

  4. Jun 25

    110 - Take Back the City: Grassroots Struggles, Housing Justice, and Decolonial Futures in Belfast

    This podcast episode explores the political production of urban space in Belfast through the lenses of housing justice, grassroots organising, insurgent planning, and collective rights to the city. Developed as part of the Change Stories Project, the discussion draws on the experiences of the Take Back the City campaign and the work of Participation and the Practice of Rights (PPR), the discussion interrogates dominant narratives that frame Belfast primarily as a “divided city” defined by sectarian conflict. Instead, the conversation examines how colonial logics of spatial control, segregation, land governance, and infrastructural inequality continue to shape contemporary urban life, housing precarity, and exclusion. Bringing together organisers, campaigners, and community activists, the episode reflects on how alternative forms of urban citizenship and solidarity are being built across communities in Belfast. Themes including mutual aid, Meitheal, collective stewardship, counter-mapping, solidarity sovereignty, spatial agency, and the kind economy are explored as practical and political frameworks for imagining more equitable urban futures. The discussion also situates Belfast within wider transnational struggles, drawing connections with anti-colonial and grassroots movements in places such as Palestine, South Africa, the Amazon, and other cities shaped by segregation, displacement, and structural violence.

    110 - Take Back the City: Grassroots Struggles, Housing Justice, and Decolonial Futures in Belfast

  5. Jun 10

    109 - Corridors, Logistics, and Circulation (Cities and Geopolitics III)

    The third episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series explores the spatial and operational logics of circulation, examining how the movement of goods, capital, data, and people is organised, accelerated, and contested across urban and regional space. Our guests discuss how circulation has become a central terrain of geopolitical strategy, focusing on a range of infrastructures, from economic corridors and port expansions to special economic zones, rail networks, and digital logistics platforms. The episode highlights how circulatory systems are not only designed to facilitate flows, but also to direct, channel, and control them, reconfiguring territories, reshaping urban hierarchies, and producing new forms of inclusion and exclusion. The conversation traces how the control of corridors and logistical infrastructures materialises geopolitical ambitions in highly uneven ways, often generating fragmentation, dispossession, and environmental transformation along their routes. Cities emerge here not simply as nodes within global networks, but as sites where the frictions of circulation are negotiated, where congestion, labour struggles, infrastructural bottlenecks, and regulatory regimes reveal the limits and contradictions of seamless flow. At the same time, the episode attends to the lived and situated dimensions of logistics, showing how everyday practices rework infrastructural spaces. This episode invites listeners to rethink geopolitics through the lens of movement and mobility, highlighting how the governance of flows has become central to the organisation of global power, and how urban space is continuously remade through the infrastructures, and frictions of circulation.

    109 - Corridors, Logistics, and Circulation (Cities and Geopolitics III)

  6. May 25

    108 – Infrastructures of Power (Cities and Geopolitics II)

    The second episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series turns to the material architectures through which geopolitical power is organised and exercised. From energy grids and digital networks to ports, logistics hubs, and semiconductor infrastructures, contemporary geopolitical rivalries are increasingly mediated through complex, often invisible, urban systems. This episode explores how infrastructures are not merely technical backdrops to global politics, but strategic assets and active instruments of power. Our guests examine how infrastructures are designed, financed, and governed in ways that embed geopolitical priorities, whether through the securitisation of supply chains, the territorialisation of digital systems, or the reconfiguration of energy networks in the context of climate transitions and resource competition. At the same time, the conversation highlights how these large-scale infrastructural transformations are grounded in specific urban contexts. It considers how cities become key sites where global ambitions materialise in concrete forms, such as data centres, ports, corridors, and grids, and how these infrastructures reshape urban space, governance, and everyday life. In doing so, the episode foregrounds the uneven geographies of infrastructural development, asking who benefits, who is marginalised, and how these systems are contested on the ground. Moving between planetary strategies and situated urban experiences, our guests invite listeners to rethink infrastructure not as neutral or purely functional, but as deeply political, contested, and central to the making of contemporary geopolitics.

    108 – Infrastructures of Power (Cities and Geopolitics II)

  7. May 12

    107 - Tenant Politics and Urban Political Economy

    Within the last years four books have been published exploring the political economy of the private rental sector, with a focus on inequality and resistance. This episode would bring together all four authors (see below) to explore the political economy forces driving the growth of the private rental sector and associated forms of housing injustice (e.g. unaffordability, evictions), the analytical approaches that can best draw out what is at stake in all this (especially from a political perspective), and how this all relates to the renaissance of tenant organizing across many countries in the Global North. By bringing together four of the most prominent authors/activists in this area, the episode aims to capture a crucial moment in the articulation of the emerging politics of the private rental sector. The four books all share a critical urban political economy orientation, drawing on concepts such as financialization and rent. They are all also all interested in ‘residents as agents’, and the practices and organizational forms through which movements seek to create ‘tenants as subject’. The episode would not focus on any of the four books as such, but rather discuss the cross-cutting themes. As the books reflect a variety of different cities/countries, this discussion has the potential to gain a wide listenership and to inform tenant organizing and scholar activism.

    107 - Tenant Politics and Urban Political Economy

  8. Apr 27

    106 - Cities and Geopolitics I

    In an era of intensifying geopolitical rivalries, the terrains of global power are increasingly being reconfigured through the infrastructure, economies, and everyday rhythms of urbanisation. From semiconductor supply chains and energy transitions to port expansions, data centres, and housing markets, urban space has become a critical arena through which geopolitical strategies are organised, exercised, and contested. This mini-series starts from the premise that geopolitics is not simply something that happens to cities, but something that is actively produced through them. Cities and Geopolitics brings together a set of conversations that explore how contemporary geopolitical transformations unfold across urban space. The series traces the material and spatial logics of power: how infrastructure become strategic assets, how logistics and circulation reorganise territories, and how investment, governance, and technological systems reposition cities within shifting global orders. In doing so, it highlights cities as key nodes where global rivalries are translated into concrete forms, such as roads, ports, grids, and digital systems that shape both planetary connections and urban everyday life. At the same time, the series attends to the uneven and lived dimensions of these transformations. It asks how geopolitical dynamics are encountered in everyday urban contexts, such as: how they are negotiated by residents, mediated by local institutions, and contested through situated practices. By moving between large-scale infrastructural shifts and the textures of daily life, the series develops a grounded understanding of how global power operates across scales. The episodes in this five-part mini-series are organised around themes such as infrastructure of power, corridors and circulation, urban political economies, and everyday geopolitics. The series offers a distinctly urban lens on contemporary geopolitics, inviting listeners to rethink the geographies of global power by foregrounding urbanisation not as a passive backdrop, but as active sites where geopolitical futures are being made, contested, and transformed. In the first episode of this mini-series our guests, Kevin Ward and Seth Schindler explore what it is to think of cities and geopolitics in the current conjuncture, often described as a “Second Cold War” and how is it differs from earlier geopolitical conjunctures.

    106 - Cities and Geopolitics I
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
3 Ratings

About

The **Urban Political** 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 advance our understanding of urban environments and how we might make them more just and democratic. The **Urban Political** provides a new forum for reflection on bridging urban activism and scholarship, where regular features offer snapshots of pressing issues and new publications, allowing multiple voices of scholars and activists to enter into a transnational debate directly. Hosted and produced by: Ross Beveridge (University of Glasgow) Markus Kip (Georg-Simmel-Center for Metropolitan Studies - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Mais Jafari (Technische Universität Dortmund) Nitin Bathla (ETH-Zürich) Julio Paulos (Université de Lausanne) Nicolas Goez (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar) Talja Blokland (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Hanna Hilbrandt (Universität Zürich) Powered in partnership with the Georg-Simmel-Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Music credits: "Something Elated" by Broke For Free, CC BY 3.0 US If you would like to produce an episode with us or have comments, please get in touch! Follow us on Twitter: @political_urban Instagram: @urban_political Featured on wisspod: https://wissenschaftspodcasts.de/podcasts/urban-political/ Email: urbanpolitical@protonmail.com

Information

  • Creator
    Ross Beveridge, Markus Kip, Mais Jafari, Nitin Bathla, Julio Paulos, Nicolas Goez, Talja Blokland
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2026
  • Episodes
    113
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    Urban Political Podcast

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