Urbinary

POLI.RADIO
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Urbinary is a podcast by PhD students and research fellows from the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies at Politecnico di Milano. Born in 2022 as a student project, it was rebranded in 2024 with a renewed mission: to make urban studies accessible to a broader audience by exploring innovative research topics and fostering inclusive dialogue. Through fresh perspectives and experimental approaches, Urbinary bridges academia and the public, amplifying young voices and uncovering new paths in urban research.

  1. S252603B / Public space, public power: How protest reshapes a city - U10

    MAR 11

    S252603B / Public space, public power: How protest reshapes a city - U10

    Public space and protest power explores how protest movements do more than express political demands; they actively reshape the city itself. Through the ongoing student protests in Serbia, the series explores how public spacebecomes a site of visibility, conflict, solidarity, and collective identity. Beginning with the Novi Sad railway station canopy collapse and the institutional silence that followed, the podcast examines how grief turned into mobilization, and how student-led organizing transformed protest into arecurring urban rhythm. Across both episodes, protest is approached as an urban practice: something that reorganizes streets and squares, redefines everyday routines, and turns ordinary infrastructure into political terrain. By connecting political experience to spatial experience, Public space and protest power shows how democracy is not only debated. It is performed, negotiated, and made visible through the urban space. Public space, public power: How protest reshapes the city shifts the lens from protest as a political movement to protest as a spatial force. As demonstrations become recurring in Serbia, they begin to settle into the city’s everyday rhythm,reshaping how people move, gather, and relate to the spaces around them. Drawing on the Charter of Public Space and conversations with scholars and practitioners, the episode explores how public spaces gain visibility, symbolicpower, and political function during protest. From Beirut to Madrid to Belgrade, it traces how repeated occupation can transform ordinary streets and squares into sites of memory and identity. The episode also examines how protest communication now extends beyond physical space into digital space, allowing visibility to travel and meanings to circulate. Ultimately, the main argument is that public space is not merely where protests take place. It is one of the central stakes of protest itself, and one of the last arenas wheredemocratic presence can become visible, collective, and real.

    22 min
  2. S252603A / Public space and protest power. From Collapse to Collective: Student Protest in Serbia - U10

    MAR 4

    S252603A / Public space and protest power. From Collapse to Collective: Student Protest in Serbia - U10

    Public space and protest power explores how protest movements do more than express political demands; they actively reshape the city itself. Through the ongoing student protests in Serbia, the series explores how public spacebecomes a site of visibility, conflict, solidarity, and collective identity. Beginning with the Novi Sad railway station canopy collapse and the institutional silence that followed, the podcast examines how grief turned intomobilization, and how student-led organizing transformed protest into a recurring urban rhythm. Across both episodes, protest is approached as an urban practice: something that reorganizes streets and squares, redefines everydayroutines, and turns ordinary infrastructure into political terrain. By connecting political experience to spatial experience, Public space and protest power shows how democracy is not only debated. It is performed, negotiated, and made visible through the urban space. From Collapse to Collective: Student Protest in Serbia begins in Novi Sad, where the sudden collapse of a recently renovated railway station canopy turns a normal morning into a moment of collective shock. As accountability fails to arrive and justice remains suspended, the tragedy becomes more than an accident - it becomes a symbol of institutional breakdown. From this rupture, a student-led protest movement emerges, expanding across universities and cities and transforming grief into organization. The episode follows how students, supported by professors and structured through direct democratic plenums, became central actors in demanding transparency, responsibility, and the ruleof law. Positioned within both Serbia’s political climate and the longer global history of student movements, the episode asks why students so often become catalysts for change, and why their protests matter not only politically, but urbanistically as well. It raises an important question:  what happens when protest becomes part of the city’s fabric?

    28 min
  3. S252602B /Manuale minimo di urbanistica coloniale (come si pianifica un’occupazione). Cisgiordania

    12/15/2025

    S252602B /Manuale minimo di urbanistica coloniale (come si pianifica un’occupazione). Cisgiordania

    La seconda parte approfondisce la dimensione territoriale del colonialismo d’insediamento in Cisgiordania, dove il controllo lascia la scala urbana per trasformarsi in un progetto capillare di riorganizzazione dello spazio. L’episodio ricostruisce le radici storiche del progetto sionista, la nascita degli insediamenti dopo il 1967 e l’evoluzione della colonizzazione attraverso kibbutz, città suburbane, comunità collinari e outpost illegali poi legalizzati. Le voci degli intervistati guidano l’ascoltatore dentro le logiche di pianificazione che istituzionalizzano l’esproprio: la trasformazione delle terre in “state land”, la costruzione sulle alture come strumento ottico di controllo, l’architettura panottica degli outpost e l’emergere di università nei territori occupati come infrastrutture permanenti della colonizzazione. L’episodio affronta anche il tema della temporalità sospesa dei campi profughi e del ruolo dell’arte e della memoria nel contrastare la cronopolitica dell’occupazione. Fonte inserti audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxLDYkX7l9A https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=10156573118623487 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkXJwErm8DM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrdldVhfbaU

    38 min
  4. S252602A / Manuale minimo di urbanistica coloniale (come si pianifica un’occupazione). Gerusalemme

    12/10/2025

    S252602A / Manuale minimo di urbanistica coloniale (come si pianifica un’occupazione). Gerusalemme

    La prima parte di “Manuale minimo di urbanistica coloniale (come si pianifica un’occupazione)” esplora come la pianificazione urbana diventi un potente strumento di dominio nei territori occupati. L’episodio racconta come mappe, piani regolatori, vincoli e burocrazia siano impiegati da Israele per controllare Gerusalemme Est e ostacolare la possibilità, per la popolazione palestinese, di costruire, espandersi, accedere ai servizi e abitare la città in modo stabile. Dalla giudaizzazione del territorio all’“abusivismopianificato”, la puntata mostra come il potere si inscriva nello spazio: attraverso demolizioni selettive, permessi mai concessi, quartieri compressi e infrastrutture pensate per connettere colonie e isolare comunità palestinesi.Gerusalemme diventa così il laboratorio più evidente del colonialismo d’insediamento, dove urbanistica, legge e politica si intrecciano nel ridisegnare la città e la vita di chi la abita.

    30 min
  5. S252601 Urban studies and political economy in the digital era

    11/26/2025

    S252601 Urban studies and political economy in the digital era

    This episode brings together Jeremy Gilbert and Christian Schmid to explore how digital capitalism and Lefebvrian theory can shed light on the changing nature of urban space. Jeremy Gilbert opens the conversation with his work on Platform Capitalism, examining how digital platforms, such as Uber, Airbnb, and Amazon, colonise everyday life andrestructure the material and social fabric of cities. He highlights the ways in which platform power operates across scales, from the household to planetar logistics, transforming labour relations, deepening spatial inequalities, and embedding surveillance and algorithmic governance into urban life. In this account, the city no longer functions as an autonomous entity but as a node within vast digital networks, reshaped by the logics of data extraction and platform accumulation. Christian Schmid then situates these developments within the intellectual legacy of Henri Lefebvre. Revisiting Lefebvre’s notion of the urban revolution, Schmid reflects on the concept of Planetary Urbanisation: a new stage of urbanisation, distinct from the industrial age, that is the product of the digital era. He considers how digital infrastructures and physical spaces are increasingly entangled, producing hybrid spatialities that destabilise bounded definitions of the city.This entanglement, he suggests, redefines public space, accessibility, and inclusivity while also revealing ontological shifts in the city’s essence and functionality. Schmid emphasises that urban planning, historically shaped bytransformations in production, now faces the challenge of responding to Platform Capitalism: either through adaptation or through a radical rethinking of its foundations. Together, Gilbert and Schmid provide complementary perspectives on the contemporary urban condition. Their insights span questions of power, inequality, and planning, and point towards a critical horizon: can urban planning resist Platform Capitalism’s centralisation of power and imagine more democratic futures, or must the discipline itself betransformed to meet the conditions of digital urbanisation?

    33 min
  6. S242508C / Living the Divide: Save the City or Sell It Off - U10

    08/08/2025

    S242508C / Living the Divide: Save the City or Sell It Off - U10

    Can a law reshape a city? Salva Milano was introduced to unlock construction across Milan, but quickly became a symbol of something deeper: how urban planning isbeing redefined by private interests, legal loopholes, and political urgency. This episode unpacks what happens when development accelerates at the cost of transparency, equity, and long-term vision. Between satire, protest, andsuspended construction sites, we follow the ripple effects of a city built for speed—and ask: Who is this regeneration really for?

    14 min
  7. S242508B / Living the Divide: More Than a Roof - U10

    08/06/2025

    S242508B / Living the Divide: More Than a Roof - U10

    What happens when housing stops being treated as a right and becomes a residual category—something to manage, not invest in? In this episode, we return to one of Milan’s largest public housing districts to examine the material and institutional neglect shaping daily life. Through interviews with researchers and residents, we uncover the long retreat of public responsibility, the internal fractures within social housing, and the everyday forms of resistance and care that emerge in response.

    14 min
  8. S242508A / Living the Divide: Drawing the Line - U10

    08/04/2025

    S242508A / Living the Divide: Drawing the Line - U10

    Gated condos next to crumbling apartments. Luxury towers rising beside public neglect. In this first episode, we explore how Milan’s urban space has become a landscape of stark contrasts, where inequality is no longer hidden but spatialized, embedded in the city’s architecture. By tracing narratives, policies, and lived experiences, we ask: What kind of logic is driving the city’s transformation? And what does it mean when the same street hosts two versions of the urban future?

    15 min
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About

Urbinary is a podcast by PhD students and research fellows from the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies at Politecnico di Milano. Born in 2022 as a student project, it was rebranded in 2024 with a renewed mission: to make urban studies accessible to a broader audience by exploring innovative research topics and fostering inclusive dialogue. Through fresh perspectives and experimental approaches, Urbinary bridges academia and the public, amplifying young voices and uncovering new paths in urban research.

Information

  • Creator
    POLI.RADIO
  • Years Active
    2023 - 2026
  • Episodes
    52
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © POLI.RADIO
  • Show Website
    Urbinary