The Super Urban Podcast

Super Urban Lab
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SUP – The Super Urban Podcast is a conversation about cities and how they’re designed; how we imagine them and how we could re-imagine them. Cities are the most complex things ever constructed and they are also our everyday, barely noticed environment. We’re here for a talk about cities from as many perspectives as possible. Each episode will focus on a specific theme, blending diverse viewpoints and engaging with broader contexts like history, economics, politics, and current social issues. The Super Urban Podcast is hosted by Ian Nazareth, Graham Crist and Christine Phillips.

  1. Singapore with Tat Haur Lee

    3D AGO

    Singapore with Tat Haur Lee

    In this episode of the Super Urban Podcast, we turn our attention to Singapore — a city often described through the language of efficiency, optimisation, and control. A compact island state at the crossroads of trade routes and cultures, Singapore is frequently held up as a model of urban governance: clean, dense, green, orderly, and relentlessly planned.  Yet beneath this carefully calibrated surface lies a far more intricate everyday urbanism. Corridors become living rooms. Void decks host weddings and wakes. Kopitiams anchor daily rituals across generations. In a city where nearly 80 percent of residents live in public housing, the spaces between buildings carry as much meaning as the buildings themselves.

    59 min

  2. 12/11/2025

    City as Provocation with Paul Van Herk

    Today we’re speaking to Paul van Herk – urban design and architect in Melbourne, and someone with a perfect mix of humour and frustration towards our city for a conversation on the Super Urban podcast.  As his own website says: Paul is an urban designer, architect and writer who articulates the intentions, instruments and outcomes of contemporary urban development. His research and design projects produce cut-through cultural and political insights, direct public discourses and new spatial opportunities for complex urban sites.  Paul applies skills and knowledge from extensive international experience in architecture, urban design, public art and academia. His industry roles have included Project Architect at McBride Charles Ryan, Urban Designer at MVRDV and Senior Urban Designer at Snøhetta. In 2018, he was a Research Fellow at Strelka Institute and has been Associate at Monash Art Projects since 2021. He is an experienced educator, teaching innovative spatial analysis, design and communications techniques at postgraduate and undergraduate level since 2015. In 2022 he was a founding director of EXCX, a collaborative practice designing playful public installations for local and state government authorities seeking to reactivate public spaces following the pandemic.

    1h 6m
  3. Australian Cities: Adelaide with Ian McDougall

    10/30/2025

    Australian Cities: Adelaide with Ian McDougall

    In this episode of the Super Urban Podcast, we focus on Adelaide. A city of clarity. Streets framed by gardens. Squares laid out with foresight. A river threading quietly through civic life.  Unlike other Australian settlements born from convicts or ports, Adelaide was conceived as a civic experiment — a city designed to reflect ideals, not just occupation. Colonel William Light imagined a place that was orderly, hygienic, and morally structured, yet flexible enough to grow with its people.  Families of Scots, Cornish, and German Lutherans brought non-conformist values — a commitment to education, hard work, and collaborative progress — embedding these ideals into the city’s very fabric.

    1h 1m
  4. Australian Cities: Gadigal Country/Sydney with Elizabeth Farrelly

    10/03/2025

    Australian Cities: Gadigal Country/Sydney with Elizabeth Farrelly

    In this episode of the Super Urban Podcast, we focus on Sydney— the metropolis on the edge of the Pacific. When we mention Sydney, we can’t escape the picturesque: the glint of the harbour, or of the coast, Potts Point, Surry hills or Elizabeth Bay - Utzon’s spellbinding Opera House crowning the foreshore like a sculpture of civic ambition, or harry Seidler’s – Australia square and MLC centre. And now even Barangaroo. But beneath this lineage is perhaps a city of stark contradictions—dense yet dispersed, prosperous yet precarious, planned yet chaotic. From colonial foundations to climate pressures, from housing and affordability crises to cultural tensions, we ask—what kind of city is Sydney really? And more importantly, what kind of city does it want to become?

    57 min
  5. International Cities: Hong Kong with Betty Ng

    08/08/2025

    International Cities: Hong Kong with Betty Ng

    Hong Kong is a city drawn in section—stacked, stepped, suspended. A culture of building that has learned to fold terrain and threshold into one continuous surface. Architecture here is not a discrete object but a system of adjacencies—markets pressed beneath housing blocks, temples nested into retaining walls, gardens hovering above malls. It is a vertical choreography, where the street has been lifted, buried, replicated, and rerouted.  Its history plays out as a sequence of layers, traces, and ruptured chronologies. A British colonial outpost and financial port city, its civic and spatial rituals persist through abrupt political and material shifts. Buildings change function without changing form. Materials wear thin but do not disappear. Cultural continuity emerges less from institutions than from improvised design intelligence—embedded in everyday acts of repair, adaptation, and repetition.  The city’s compacted form stages a kind of cultural compression—where public and private are never fully resolved, and architecture becomes a medium for negotiating cohabitation, tension, and visibility. The threshold is always in flux: a shop spilling into a corridor, a shrine tucked behind a gate, laundry tracing territorial claims across a shared façade.  Situated on the southern rim of the Pearl River Delta—one of the most intensely urbanised geographies on earth—Hong Kong remains an anomaly. Its design culture resists the smoothness of the region’s emerging megacities. It is textured, improvised, and deeply local, even as it performs on a global stage. A peculiar urban literacy thrives here: one born of constrained geographies and abundant cultural nuance.  This same literacy is now under pressure from the slow erasure of civic space, the standardisation of planning codes, and the soft violence of homogenised aesthetics. Does its architecture risk losing cultural intelligence to the logic of compliance? And is there still a culture capable of inhabiting the slippages—between east and west, past and future, resistance and assimilation?  In this episode, we explore how architecture can operate as cultural infrastructure—supporting fragile economies, public life, and creative expression. We do so through the lens of COLLECTIVE, a Hong Kong-based architectural studio deeply engaged with cultural and spatial systems across Asia and beyond. We’re thrilled to welcome Betty Ng to the Super Urban Podcast.

    1h 2m
  6. International Cities: Saigon/Ho Chi Minh with Tu Truong and Triet Le

    07/17/2025

    International Cities: Saigon/Ho Chi Minh with Tu Truong and Triet Le

    Saigon or Ho Chi Minh City is a metropolis of intense fascination for many of us.  A city of close to 10 million which has experienced explosive growth in the 21st century after coming  out of a turbulent 20th century. It was under French colonial occupation as Indo China until 1954 and of course reunited with North Vietnam in 1975, when it was almost instantly renamed Ho Chio Minh city.  It is now a city with a famously intense street life, incredibly fine grained density and is an increasingly favoured international tourist destination, as well as an attractor of foreign business investment. It continues to undergo rapid transformation, with a new underground metro line, and plans for a new airport, new sea port and several more metro lines. The city was one of our main characters in the book Supertight (I did with John Doyle) were we were fascinated with the intimacy and looseness of its urban environment.  We are joined today by two guests, HCMC locals who are currently in Melbourne- one residing, one visiting.   Tu Truong is an architect and urban designer, trained at the University of Architecture in Ho Chi Minh City, and has spent time working at the Ho Chi Min City urban planning department.  She is currently researching the wet markets of Vietnam in particular Saigon, and is visiting Australia for the first time as part of that research.   Triet Le Is an architect and director of the Vietnam based practice 6A. He grew up in Saigon and did his architectural education in Oregon. He now resides in Melbourne while he carries out phD study and builds works in his home city. Triet has even worked as a delivery driver – an experience he has described as giving him a very extensive experience of the city.

    50 min
  7. Australian Cities: Naarm/Melbourne with Gary Presland

    07/09/2025

    Australian Cities: Naarm/Melbourne with Gary Presland

    As we walk around built-up cities of today, it’s easy to forget that nature laid the groundwork long before the first brick was laid. Ancient volcanic eruptions shaped the land and waterways we now build around. These deep-time forces still influence where we place our cities—and how they grow. And as cities grow, natural environments become increasingly altered, sometimes beyond recognition, but nature continues to exert a powerful influence on the shape and size of cities.  In an era of climate crisis, we’re waking up to just how powerful that relationship still is.    Today we’re diving into the deep history of Melbourne—also known as Naarm—with Dr Gary Presland, who quite literally wrote the book on the subject: The Place for a Village: How Nature Has Shaped the City of Melbourne. For those outside Australia, Melbourne/Naarm sits on the southeast coast and is Australia’s second-most populous city. But long before skyscrapers and laneways, this was Kulin Nation land—home to the Boon Wurrung and Woi Wurrung peoples, who cared for its rivers, grasslands, and volcanic plains for tens of thousands of years. The city as we know it was laid out in a grid beside the Birrarung—what many know as the Yarra River. Today, it’s easy to forget just how deeply nature has shaped this place—but that’s exactly what we’re here to explore.  Dr Gary Presland is a non-Indigenous Melbourne/Naarm based writer and historian that studied history at La Trobe University and archaeology at the University of London.  His major research interests have been in Aboriginal and natural history of the Melbourne area and Gary has written many terrific books including Aboriginal Melbourne: The lost land of the Kulin People, for God’s sake, send the trackers’, ‘The first peoples of Melbourne, Port Phillip and Central Victoria: The Eastern Kulin and not forgetting ‘The Place for a Village: how nature has shaped the city of Melbourne, just to name a few, which will be the main focus of our discussion today.

    57 min
  8. Planet City: Liam Young

    07/03/2025

    Planet City: Liam Young

    We’re living through a polycrisis - a moment where cascading ecological, technological, social, political and economic pressures are reshaping the world in the latency of the present. Complexity is not an anomaly of our time but its default setting. The challenge is not merely to decode it, but to engage with its temporalities, influence its exchanges, and anticipate reactions before they spiral beyond control.  The future is not a thing you stumble into - but rather a continuous act. It is the unravelling of hacks – that are coded, crafted, and built in the friction of the present.   Design practice in this realm holds urgency as its condition. The next lines of code… What we nurture, control, or push back against will determine continuity or collapse.  We are interested in the agency of critical design practice – the tools, stories, and strategies we need to move from paralysis to possibility. How do we investigate the blind spots of our technologies, the narratives that shape them, and the speculative practices - architecture, fiction, design - that help us inhabit the present more consciously.  This isn’t about imagining perfect futures or fearing catastrophic ones. It’s about a grounded optimism. This is a design problem to assemble radical frameworks and possibilities, even when the dominant narrative is collapse.  Because to speculate today is not an escape. It’s a responsibility.  To lead us through this domain - we are joined by Liam Young.  Liam Young is an Australian architect and designer, a film maker, director and BAFTA nominated producer and visionary storyteller whose work explores the intersection of architecture, technology, and the future city. Operating between design, fiction, and critical foresight, he is the co-founder of the think tank Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today and the nomadic research studio Unknown Fields Division.  His film work is grounded in academic research conducted at institutions such as Princeton, MIT, and Cambridge, and he now leads the groundbreaking Master’s program in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. He has authored and edited several books, including Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post-Anthropocene and Planet City, which imagines a speculative city designed to house the entire population of the Earth.

    1h 4m
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About

SUP – The Super Urban Podcast is a conversation about cities and how they’re designed; how we imagine them and how we could re-imagine them. Cities are the most complex things ever constructed and they are also our everyday, barely noticed environment. We’re here for a talk about cities from as many perspectives as possible. Each episode will focus on a specific theme, blending diverse viewpoints and engaging with broader contexts like history, economics, politics, and current social issues. The Super Urban Podcast is hosted by Ian Nazareth, Graham Crist and Christine Phillips.

Information

  • Creator
    Super Urban Lab
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    18
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Super Urban Lab
  • Show Website
    The Super Urban Podcast