The Super Urban Podcast

This episode of the Super Urban Podcast ventures into one of the most expansive propositions in contemporary architectural thinking: that everything is urbanism. Drawing from Winy Maas's 2019 guest editorship of Domus, theconversation explores what it means when the city is no longer a bounded object but a total condition — absorbing climate systems, data networks, food production, finance, an...

This episode of the Super Urban Podcast turns to the city as a live, legible system — one that can be continuously read, measured, and acted upon in real time. The concept of the 'senseable city', as developed through the work of the MIT Senseable City Lab, is presented not simply as a technological proposition, but as a fundamental shift in how we understand, describe, and design urban en...

This episode of the Super Urban Podcast centres on the evolving nature of urban practice — from the design of discrete forms toward the orchestration of complex systems. The conversation frames contemporary urbanism as a practice of alignment: between infrastructures andecologies, between global operations and local conditions, between the physical fabric of cities and the digital layers increasin...

This episode is interested in cities in all their intensity and breadth—not just their realities, but how they exist in our imaginations and dreams. If we are to embrace the super urban, cities must excite our dreams and our nightmares. Cinema is of course a fabulous venue for these imaginations: whether science fiction dystopias, hyperreal dramas, or documentaries, the city can be re-imagined, in...

In this episode, we speak with Vaishnavi Laddha about the Kumbh Mela—the world's largest experiment in ephemeral urbanism. Occurring every 12 years, it is a religious pilgrimage that manifests as a mega 'pop-up' city on the floodplains of India's sacred rivers, driven by religious mythology and collective devotion. With over 80 million visitors, the city emerges across 30 square ki...

In this episode, 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...

In this episode, we speak with David Gianotten—Managing Partner-Architect of OMA, one of the world's most influential architecture and urbanism practices. OMA operates with a belief that going 'beyond the brief' is not optional but a fundamental responsibility: the role of the designer is to think beyond the immediate solution and shape trajectory, consequence, and meaning across time....

In this episode, we speak with Paul van Herk—architect, urbanist, and lecturer at RMIT—about his particular mix of humour and frustration towards our cities, with a focus on Melbourne and its numerous failed urban ventures, including the long-troubled Fisherman's Bend precinct. Paul has recently completed his PhD titled 'Urban Myths: Counterfactuals for Articulating Political Dissonance,&#...

In this episode, 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...

In this episode, 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 and the coast, the neighbourhoods of Potts Point, Surry Hills, and 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. A...

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...

Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, is a metropolis of intense fascination. A city of close to 10 millionpeople, it has experienced explosive growth in the 21st century after emerging from a turbulent 20th century—under French colonial occupation as Indochina until 1954, and reunited with North Vietnam in 1975, when it was almost instantly renamed. Today it is a city with a famously intense street life,...

As we walk around the built-up cities of today, it is easy to forget that nature laid the groundworklong before the first brick was laid. Ancient volcanic eruptions shaped the land and waterways we now build around, and these deep-time forces still influence where we place our cities—and how they grow. In this episode, we dive into the deep history of Melbourne—also known as Naarm—with Dr Gary Pre...

We are living through a polycrisis—a moment where cascading ecological, technological, social, political, and economic pressuresare reshaping the world in real time. 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. Th...

Perth, the capital of Western Australia, is the most geographically isolated capital city on earth, sitting on the time zone sharedby two thirds of the world's population. It is one of the largest and least dense metropolisesanywhere—closer to the urban populations of Indonesia and Malaysia than to the Eastern Australian cities of Sydney and Melbourne. A paradoxical city, it is both bigger and...

Ask a physicist, and they'll tell you: the universe is mostly made of something we can't see. Ordinary matter makes up less than 5% of reality. The rest is dark matter—unseen forces shaping galaxies, bending space, governing possibility. Now shift that lens to the city. What if the urban realm is also shaped by its own dark matter? Not cosmic, but economic, legal, and institutional—invisib...

In this episode, we explore architectures at the scale of the metropolis, where form resistsboundaries and systems redefine the city itself. At a moment when cities no longer exist as discrete, contained spaces, we interrogate the infrastructure and architecture that shape them—and, in turn, shape our behaviour within them. Historically, cities were imagined as fixed and bounded: centres of power...

This episode discusses cities as being fragmented and divided—stressed and dystopian urban environments, places rendered irreconcilable by ideology, religion, or ethnicity. His discussion is highly charged, employing terms such as ghetto, apartheid, and redlining. It conjures an urban image shaped not only by walls and barbed wire fences, but also by invisible virtual or administrative borders. Na...

This episode explores the connection between urban design, social transformation, and political ideologies, drawing on historical examples to understand how cities have been reshaped toreflect and influence the societies that inhabit them. Cities and built environments are not just backdrops for daily life—they are battlegrounds for ideas, power, and progress. From the grand utopian visions of Gar...

In this episode, we think of cities as the setting or backdrop to drama and events—ideas connected to Bertolt Brecht's development of Epic Theatre in the 1920s, Henri Lefebvre'sfocus on everyday urban life, and the explicitly theatrical architecture of Edmond and Corrigan. Designers of cities have been consciously creating the elements of theatrical urban life throughout history, and Conra...

In this episode, we speak again with Conrad Hamann as we dissect another fundamental layer of urban development: the city as industry. If cities were once defined by ideological and religious order, industrial modernity reconfigured them into factories of progress and production—landscapes of extraction and acceleration. Industry was not merely an economic function; it was a defining urban idea, a...

In this episode, we speak to Conrad Hamannas we discuss contemporary perspectives on the emulated city, questioning its role as a symbol of order and an instrument of control.   Conrad Hamann explores the impulse to emulate cities as a means of establishing order, authority, stability, and clarity. The enduring presence of Rome and Athens in urban design serves as a prime example, but we also see...

Welcome to SUP – The Super Urban Podcast – a discussion on cities from RMIT Architecture & Urban Design, in Narrm, Melbourne, Australia. Hosted by Ian Nazareth, Graham Crist and Christine Phillips. This podcast is made possible by the generous support of the Alastair Swayn Foundation and the RMIT University School of Architecture and Urban Design . Our first series, Urban Emulation , builds on...

Welcome to SUP – The Super Urban Podcast – a discussion on cities from RMIT Architecture & Urban Design, in Narrm, Melbourne, Australia. Hosted by Ian Nazareth, Graham Crist and Christine Phillips. We would firstly like to acknowledge the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups on whose unceded Country we are recording this podcast and extend that acknowledgment to all First...