City Road Podcast

We’ve got a treat for you today, a conversation about speculative fiction and cities with a fantastic panel. Our panel includes award-winning author and critic James Bradley. James is the author of books such as Wrack, The Deep Field, The Resurrectionist and Clade, the first two books of The Change Trilogy for young adults, The Silent Invasion and The Buried Ark, a book of poetry, Paper Nautilus,...

Fifty years after former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s short-lived attempts to foster decentralisation, this event, held in Albury, one of Whitlam’s flagship National Growth Centres, examines the prospects for future growth in regional Australia. With a diverse panel of regional leaders and experts, the discussion will canvas opportunities and risks confronting communities beyond the major cities...

Australia’s housing system is in crisis, and recent policy interventions have ranged from ineffective to counterproductive. From the deepening divide between home owners and renters, to unsustainable patterns of residential development and escalating climate risk – Australia’s housing policy framework needs an urgent reset. With new national and state housing initiatives on the table, this panel w...

In this event inspired by Elizabeth Farrelly’s acclaimed book ‘Killing Sydney’, we challenged creative thinkers, activists, and scholars from a range of disciplines to share their top-of-the-list solutions. Convened by prominent columnist, architectural critic and author Dr Farrelly, we invite you to join this frank and fearless conversation about Sydney’s future. Has Sydney reached her tipping po...

Dallas talks with Megan about high-rise legal architecture make vertical urban growth possible, but do we really understand the social implications of restructuring city land ownership in this way? Geographer and architect Megan Nethercote enters the condo tower to explore the hidden social and territorial dynamics of private vertical communities. Informed by residents’ accounts of Australian high...

What do authors think about when they’re writing a book about cities for kids? And why are books about cities and urban life important for kids? Dallas chats with kids book illustrator James Gulliver Hancock and Alexandra Crosby and Jesse Stein from UTS about kids, books and cities. We cover a lot of ground, from what it’s like to be an author to being a reader, parent and urbanist. Guests James G...

Dallas is talking with Anna Clark about her bold and expansive history that traces the changing and contested project of Australia’s national story. You will think about this country differently after reading this book. A few years ago Anna Clark saw a series of paintings on a sandstone cliff face in the Northern Territory. There were characteristic crosshatched images of fat barramundi and turtle...

Dallas talks with Jarrod Hore about Visions of Nature, which revives the work of late nineteenth-century landscape photographers who shaped the environmental attitudes of settlers in the colonies of the Tasman World and in California. Despite having little association with one another, these photographers developed remarkably similar visions of nature. They rode a wave of interest in wilderness im...

Dallas talks with Paul Daley about this his multi-generational saga about Australian frontier violence and cultural theft, and the myths that stand between us and history's unpalatable truths. Morally bereft popular historian Patrick Renmark flees London in disgrace after the accidental death of his infant son. With one card left to play, he reluctantly takes a commission to write the biography of...

A 2021 Festival of Urbanism panel discussion. Leading urbanists from North America to Australia discuss the lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic for future city planning and urban life. Hear from Sam Assefa, former Seattle Planning Director and at the frontline of that city’s COVID-19 experience; Irene Figueroa Ortiz, New York City urban designer and transport planner; and Glenn Grimshaw urban plann...

Endangered governance: Public trust, urban decisions, and ethical practice A 2021 Festival of Urbanism panel discussion. Clear and transparent ethical frameworks can and should feature much more overtly in decision making across development processes, which are uniquely exposed to risks associated with conflicts of interest, politicisation, compromise, and corruption. This panel explores the reali...

Endangered discourse: Improving the quality of public debate on urban and housing policy. A 2021 Festival of Urbanism panel discussion. An informed citizenry, independent analysis, and robust public debate are all essential for good public policy particularly in relation to housing and urban policy. This panel event, which also celebrates the work of the inaugural Director of the Henry Halloran Tr...

Endangered Communities and Resurgent Urbanism A 2021 Festival of Urbanism panel discussion. With ongoing processes of dispossession, marginalisation, gentrification and exclusion threatening urban and regional communities, what forms of insurgent and resurgent urbanism are emerging and how might urban policy makers and planners support these efforts? Chair: Professor Nicole Gurran, University of S...

Endangered Country? Indigenous perspectives on planning, and development A 2021 Festival of Urbanism yarn of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experts discussing their perspectives on planning, land management, cultural heritage, economic opportunity and what must be changed. Chair: Elle Davidson, Aboriginal planning lecturer, University of Sydney Panel includes: Chels Marshall, Urban Apostles...

Kurt Iveson talks with Elizabeth about her blueprint for the future of Sydney in a radically changing world. Columnist Elizabeth Farrelly brings her unique perspective as architectural writer and former city councillor to a burning question for our times: how will we live in the future? Can our communities survive pandemic, environmental disaster, overcrowding, government greed and big business? U...

Preston Peachey reflects on the book Benevolence with author Julie Janson. Julie’s intensely visual prose interweaves historical events with fictionalised characterisation in a story that shatters European stereotypes about life on the colonial frontier. Julie gives voice to an Aboriginal experience of early-settlement. Benevolence is a story about this important era in Australia’s history from an...

Dallas chats with Vanessa about her delicately wrought essays and hand-drawn maps, Vanessa describes her encounters with unusual, forgotten or abandoned places in the city in which she was born and raised, using their details to open up repositories of significance, and to create an alternative city, a Mirror Sydney, illuminated by memory and imagination. She writes at a time when Sydney is being...

Dallas and Tom discuss Shaking Up the City, which critically examines many of the concepts and categories within mainstream urban studies that serve dubious policy agendas. Through a combination of theory and empirical evidence, Tom Slater “shakes up” mainstream urban studies in a concise and pointed fashion by turning on its head much of the prevailing wisdom in the field. To this end, he explore...

As we reckon with the violent settler-colonial basis of our cities, Dallas talks with Adam Morton about a recent literary economy analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Adam published this reflection recently in the journal Political Geography. It is titled A Geography of Blood Meridian: Primitive accumulation on the frontier of space (see: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/...

Dallas and Shanthi discuss Shanthi’s fresh take on 21st-century migratory experiences and temporality from her innovative study of young Asian migrants’ lives in Australia’s cities and regions. The book shows how migration has reshaped lived experiences of time and place for middle-class young people moving between Asia and the West for work, study and lifestyle opportunities. Through a new concep...

Dallas and Catriona talk Second City, which puts on display the diverse literary talents that make Sydney’s western suburbs such a fertile region for writers. Beginning with Felicity Castagna’s warning about the dangers of cultural labelling, this collection of essays takes resistance against conformity and uncritical consensus as one of its central themes. From Aleesha Paz’s call to recognise the...

We speak to tenants, tenant advocates and academics about renting during COVID-19. "The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a hopefully once in a lifetime opportunity to fix the structural and systemic problems of housing that have always been here in Australia." Dr Alistair Sisson "It's very easy to think that a housing crisis is an individual persons problem and I think what's really interesting and...

You might have heard about the 'structural adjustment' program, but what about the Green Structural Adjustment of the World Bank’s Resilient City program? We're talking with Sophie Webber and Patrick Bigger about what they call Green Structural Adjustment. Within environmental and development finance practices, cities across the Global South are facing a costly infrastructural crisis stemming from...

The world of night-time waste collectors, night shift nurses, office cleaners, rough sleepers and security guards rarely makes international headlines. Understanding what happens in cities after dark is crucial to global sustainable development, but will also help create a fairer society that values the night-time economy. The world of night-time waste collectors, night shift nurses, office cleane...

Transport is connected to social justice, freedom and equality in the city. Transit networks are objects of intense political contestation and are key terrains of struggle in cities around the world. As sites of disruption, they signal the interrelated crises of urban poverty, social reproduction, security, racism, democracy, and climate. As sites of collectivity, they express the powers of being,...