Urban Political Podcast

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...

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 corr...

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 infrastruc...

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...

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, exer...

While the first episode on the transformations of the local state focussed on current authoritarian takeover in different European contexts, this episode will zoom into the progressive possibilities of local state transformations. The episode discusses institutional changes within the local state, the role of other political actors and geographical scales as well as the limitations of localist sol...

Across Europe, local states are in a dire predicament, experiencing the consequences of austerity cuts, shortage of staff as well as a lack of trust in (local) government. Overlapping crises such as climate change, military conflicts and displacement, precarious provisions of public services, the production of so-called left-behind spaces and the rise of the far right pose severe challenges to its...

Are we seeing the emergence of a new conjuncture for urbanism? The final part of our mini series asks whether authoritarian neoliberalism has created the conditions for a more illiberal and distinct type of urban governance . Authoritarianism is not new to neoliberalism – the Pinochet regime, Thatcherism in the UK – these were evidently authoritarian and neoliberal, and given crises and stagnation...

Today it seems fairly obvious to say that urban government has become more authoritarian – there is vastly increased levels of surveillance, violent and militarised policing of dissent and the targeting of migrant, queer and ethnic minority communities. Building on the previous episode on ‘authoritarian populism’, the panel discussion focuses on the ‘authoritarian practices’ of urban governments....

Across the world, a rightward populist turn is reshaping politics, everyday life, and the spaces we inhabit. This series examines the rise of authoritarian urbanism born from the convergence of state power, militarised violence, infrastructure-led development, and racialised and religious nationalism. As neoliberalism faces a crisis of legitimacy, these forces work to consolidate control and drive...

This episode is our 100th! We are delighted that we have reached this landmark and thank all our listeners and contributors since we started the Urban Political in 2019. To mark the occasion of this 100th podcast we have produced a special issue containing two parts, in which we look backwards and forwards on all things Urban and Political. In the first part, Markus Kip and Ross Beveridge talk to...

What does it mean to be at 'home', when 'home' is the expression of structural forms of violence, at the intersection of anthropocentrism, patriarchy, heteronormativity and racial capitalism? As the COVID-19 pandemic showed, home can be read as a juncture where many of the inequalities of our time come and are held together structurally; yet, at the same time, home maintains an attractive lure to...

This is our second episode in collaboration with the ‘Where is Urban Politics?’ hybrid seminar series hosted by the University of Groningen in the Netherlands between 2024-2026. This episode ponders urgent issues on (re)politicizing housing across Europe. The first speaker is Josh Ryan-Collins, who talks about the financialisation of housing, drivers, outcomes and options for reform from a United...

We dedicate this episode to the extraordinary urban filmmaker and tireless social-justice advocate, Mark Saunders, who passed away recently at the age of 68. Mark’s powerful contributions to documentary filmmaking, particularly through Despite TV, gave voice to the marginalized and illuminated urgent political and social issues across the globe. His unwavering commitment to storytelling, empathy,...

In this episode Ross Beveridge, co-founder of our Podcast, and guests discuss the topic of digital cities and democracy. Digitalisation is transforming cities, urbanization and urban life – but how is it changing urban politics? What issues of justice and democracy are at stake in the advance of digital technologies? What are the power implications of the unending rise of corporate digital platfor...

To what extent does the current polycrisis intensify in urban settings during nighttime hours? Night lives are already characterized by precarity, urban inequalities, deeply seeded health and wellbeing concerns and a life 'in the shadows'. In this Polycrisis series episode, Michele Acuto, Andreina Seijas and Alessio Kolioulis take us on a "walking roundtable", recorded on the road after dark in Lo...

This episode will be conducted in Spanish, in line with the podcast's aim to de-center urban knowledge production by showcasing distinctive urban perspectives, and linguistic viewpoints. We are thrilled to introduce you to the second episode of our series on Urban Polycrisis! Join us for an episode in Spanish exploring the complex urban racial politics of Cartagena, Colombia. In this conversation...

This new Polycrisis series will explore the complex set of protracted, interconnected, and mutually reinforcing crises that disproportionately affect urban centers and urban populations, ranging from housing, democracy, transit, infrastructure, inequality, conflict, the environment, to health. What relevance do discussions of the “urban polycrisis” have for places in the Global South? This episode...

This episode is a talk by Joanna Kusiak at the Think&Drink Colloquium of Georg-Simmel-Centre for Urban Studies at Humboldt University Berlin. It gives insights into her new book Radically Legal: Berlin Constitutes the Future (2024). Right in the middle of the German constitution, a group of ordinary citizens discovers a forgotten clause that allows them to take 240,000 homes back from multi-billio...

African cities are under construction. Beyond the urban redevelopment schemes and large-scale infrastructure projects reconfiguring central city skylines, urban residents are putting their resources into finding land and building homes on city edges. The Suburban Frontier examines how self-built housing on the urban periphery has become central to middle-class formation and urban transformation in...

In this episode, we reflect on the rise, evolution, and legacy of Barcelona en Comú, the emblematic movement-party that governed the city of Barcelona from 2015 to 2023. Joined by long-time activist and former political advisor Elia Gran, as well as researchers Silke van Dyk and Luzie Gerstenhöfer (University of Jena), the conversation explores the key ambitions, successes, and tensions of this bo...

Kulkul presents her ethnographic work with Turkish Muslim women in Berlin as evidence that community is not an entity but is produced by instrumentalizing specific forms of identification and boundary-making. In examining the role of community in the case of her participants, Kulkul finds that religion and culture are important not for the values they perpetuate, but for their role in forming and...

In this episode of The Urban Lives of Property, Markus Kip and Hanna Hilbrandt speak with Heather Dorries, about the intersections of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in urban property regimes. Drawing on Dorries’ recent publications and her wider expertise on property, Indigeneity, and urbanism the episode centers the ways in which planning practices contribute to Indigenous dispossessio...

This talk focuses on the role of public services in delineating the boundaries of belonging and possibilities of participation in cities. Drawing on the notion of 'infrastructural citizenship', it asks how non-citizens navigate access to urban circulations and how rights and responsibilities are negotiated at these interfaces. Based on ethnographic, participatory and design research conducted with...

Concrete City: Material Flows and Urbanization in West Africa delivers a theoretically informed, ethnographic exploration of the African urban world through the life of concrete. Emblematic of frenetic urban and capitalistic development, this material is pervasive, shaping contemporary urban landscapes and societies and their links to the global world. It stands and circulates at the heart of majo...