Urban Political Podcast

This episode of the Urban Lives of Property Series expands discussions geographically and conceptually: Our guest in this episode, Jean-David Gerber, helps us think property from Switzerland and other places. Starting off with the observation that there is no single understanding of property, Jean-David argues that it is important for any consideration to be context-specific and to realize that property is not the same as propriété or Eigentum. Jean-David elaborates on his approach to property on the basis of the Institutional Resource Regime framework that he has been working on with colleagues for many years. Based on his fieldwork in Ghana, Senegal and Switzerland, he discusses the application of the framework aimed to consider the combined effects of public policies and property rights on the use of resources and the users themselves. Focusing on the case of Switzerland, he talks us through the legacy and ongoing relevance of old forms of collective property in forests and shared pastures in the mountains. Moving to the debate around new (urban) commons, the episode also covers current struggles and conflicts around the land policy paradigm in Switzerland, as well as new ideas in planning to exercise greater influence in urban development in the public interest.

In this discussion, members of the Terra-R (Territorialisations of the Radical Right) network examine the developments of the radical right in Germany beyond simplistic urban-rural and East-West attributions, and outline the current and future challenges for academia and civil society alike.

This is episode three of the Rent Strike Series, focusing on the Veritas Tenants Association’s ongoing multibuilding rent strike in San Francisco to demand a say in the terms of sale of their buildings. In November 2023, the Prado Group assumed ownership of 20 Veritas-owned buildings, while on January 18, 2024, Ballast Investments and their partner Brookfield Properties took over the remaining 75 buildings in the largest-ever sale of rent-stabilized units in San Francisco. Meanwhile, the rent strike has expanded to six buildings, and some of the strikers have secured concessions through collective bargaining, including a 75 percent reduction in rent over 12 months, cancellation of a scheduled rent increase, and dismissal of eviction lawsuits. In this episode, we get an update on these developments from Brad Hirn, lead organizer with the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco.

To live in the age of precarity is a tolling, everyday struggle. It erodes one's strength to carry on, live another day, and keep the hope for a modicum of prosperity due to come in some vague future. And when things get unbearably harsh, when the hegemony of neoliberalism has individualised the problems and told those who sustain life by the skin of their teeth to keep their head above the surface without having an eye for care from the retreating state that sees no obligation towards the lesser-able citizens, and when the politics of fear buffets on the anxiety evoked by the physical proximity of the Other, refugees —the most vulnerable of all living in the city— are scapegoated for all the problems befallen on daily life. Refugees are easy targets. They, on principle, lack most forms of capital to claim status; they look different and sound different with sometimes an uncanny unbeknownst culture that attracts all forms of shaming and stigma; they are 'foreigners', somebody else's 'problem' who happened to be dropped at 'our' doorstep; and they are easy to blame for everything that goes amiss, be it housing shortage, street violence, economic stagnation or what have you. However, we all have witnessed the compassion, solidarity, and affection given to refugees and all those who found little option but to flee from prosecution, war, climate disasters, and countless other unfortunate conditions that make one's life in her own home unbearable. We all can remember people congregating in Frankfurt, Munich and Humburg's Hauptbahnhof to welcome the war-stricken. We do remember protests, mass gatherings, the signs hung behind the windows to denounce the dehumanisation of the refugees, and countless families took in Ukrainians before they could find permanent residency. We remember the giving, hosting, embracing, and naturalising. We do remember the host society forcing itself to acculturate to new shapes of living. And we do remember hope. Yes, there were, and still are, heinous facets of hate. But there are hopes for cosmopolitan solidarity, too, and in this episode, we will talk about the latter.

Unregulated restitution of property to prewar owners (or rather their legal successors) remains a major source of conflict over housing in Poland, most notably in Warsaw. This episode features Beata Siemieniako, a Warsaw lawyer and urban activist who has been supporting tenants in their struggle against ruthless developers for years. In her book „Re-privatising Poland. The History of a Great Scam“ (Reprywatyzując Polskę. Historia wielkiego przekrętu, Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Krytyki Politycznej 2017), she tells the story of conflicting claims to urban property and reflects on the pitfalls of restituting past property orders while neglecting present-day social rights. Florian Peters has talked to her about law, grassroots activism, and the impossibility to achieve justice by trying to turn back time.

This is episode two of the Rent Strike Series, focusing on the Veritas Tenants Association’s ongoing multibuilding rent strike in San Francisco to demand a say in the terms of sale of their buildings. On August 30, corporate landlord Ballast Investments won the auction for Veritas Investments’ delinquent debt and will take over 75 Veritas-owned buildings. And on September 1 the strike expanded. In this episode, we get an update on these developments and the implications for the strike from Brad Hirn, lead organizer with the Housing Rights Committee of San Francisco.

Against the Commons underscores how urbanization shapes the social fabric of places and territories, lending awareness to the impact of planning and design initiatives on working-class communities and popular strata. Projecting history into the future, it outlines an alternative vision for a postcapitalist urban planning, one in which the structure of collective spaces is defined by the people who inhabit them.

The first in an ongoing series hosted by Mathilde Gustavussen

We live in an urban age. It is well known that urbanization is changing landscapes, built environments, social infrastructures and everyday lives across the globe. But urbanization is also changing the ways we understand and practise politics. What implications does this have for democracy? This incisive book argues that urbanization undermines the established certainties of nation-state politics and calls for a profound rethinking of democracy. A novel way of seeing democracy like a city is presented, shifting scholarly and activist perspectives from institutions to practices, from jurisdictional scales to spaces of urban collective life, and from fixed communities to emergent political subjects. Through a discussion of examples from around the world, the book shows that distinctly urban forms of collective self rule are already apparent. The authors reclaim the ‘city’ as a democratic idea in a context of urbanization, seeing it as instrumental to relocating democracy in the everyday lives of urbanites. Original and hopeful, How Cities Can Transform Democracy compels the reader to abandon conventional understandings of democracy and embrace new vocabularies and practices of democratic action in the struggles for our urban future.

As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, millions of people have migrated from the countryside to urban slums, which now house one billion people worldwide. The transformative potential of urbanization hinges on whether and how poor migrants are integrated into city politics. Popular and scholarly accounts paint migrant slums as exhausted by dispossession, subdued by local dons, bought off by wily politicians, or polarized by ethnic appeals. Migrants and Machine Politics shows how slum residents in India routinely defy such portrayals, actively constructing and wielding political machine networks to demand important, albeit imperfect, representation and responsiveness within the country’s expanding cities. Drawing on years of pioneering fieldwork in India’s slums, including ethnographic observation, interviews, surveys, and experiments, Adam Michael Auerbach and Tariq Thachil reveal how migrants harness forces of political competition—as residents, voters, community leaders, and party workers—to sow unexpected seeds of accountability within city politics. This multifaceted agency provokes new questions about how political networks form during urbanization. In answering these questions, this book overturns longstanding assumptions about how political machines exploit the urban poor to stifle competition, foster ethnic favoritism, and entrench vote buying. By documenting how poor migrants actively shape urban politics in counterintuitive ways, Migrants and Machine Politics sheds new light on the political consequences of urbanization across India and the Global South.

In this second part of the series Urban Lives of Property, Hanna and Markus talk to Vera Smirnova, a human and political geographer to discuss property and territory from a Russian perspective. Smirnova’s genealogical account moves from the Czarist period to this day, illuminating also the current Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Smirnova offers a tour de force through Russia’s moving history of the last 150 years, addressing practices of serfdom, enclosures in the early 20th century, land collectivization following the Russian revolution and waves of privatization after 1991. Throughout this period the institution of property is shown to be fuzzy, insecure, and informal, a legacy that continues to this day as evidenced in current urban planning legislation and extra-legal practices of land grabbing. Similarly reflecting a pliability for powerful political interests, territory has been historically considered as vast, borderless and expansive. Smirnova identifies three ontologies of territory (commoning, assembling and peopling) that have determined the dynamics of Russian state territorialization as evidenced in the accounts of 19th century geographers and anthropologists whose ideas continue to influence foreign policy today. As decolonial rhetorics have been integrated and instrumentalized for Russia’s geopolitical strategy for the past century, Smirnova “thinks between the posts” – postcolonialism and postsocialism – and considers the role of Russia today in postcolonial discussions. Her reflection on the Russian land commune (obshchina) is a fascinating, as Smirnova discusses the origins of the land comnune, the persistence during feudalism and state-building, its instrumentalization during land collectivization and its ongoing powerful imaginary.

Meet urban scholar Oleg Pachenkov who left Russia few weeks after the invasion of Ukraine. Markus speaks with him about his personal and professional trajectory as a critical scholar bringing him to Berlin. The conversation covers the breakdown of the public sphere in Russia within weeks after the start of the war in Ukraine and Oleg's personal confrontation with a repressive system ready to crack down on critical voices. Self-censorship, Aesopian language and the retreat to the private sphere are aspects that now characterize dynamics of discussion in the attempt to cope with the authoritarian reality in the country. Olegs talk to us about the institutionalization of Urban Studies and the discrepancy between those parts who have arranged themselves within the regime, and those that didn't, between those actors who have stayed in the country and those who have fled. We hear Oleg reflect on these divisions and what needs to be learned for the future - for scholars both in Russia as well as beyond.

This podcast series explores the "life of property" in urban theory and practice. In conversations with scholars who have led the way in property debates, it aims is to advance conceptual and theoretical groundwork on this notion that fundamentally shapes everyday urban lives and political discussion about the city. Within the social sciences and critical urban research property has lived a mostly implicit and underexamined life for several decades. Over the last years, it has become more central to conceptual, theoretical, and empirical work. Taking up this (renewed) interest in the concept, the series employs property as an entry point into critical urban debates about appropriation, dispossession and expropriation. The series seeks to situate the notion of property within urban research and to scrutinize power dynamics around property and their impacts on urban trajectories. Moreover we aim to provincialize Eurocentric understandings of property by bringing post-colonial, Indigenous, post-socialist (along with other "more global/Southern") approaches into the conversation. In this first conversation we are joined by Nick Blomley, Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University (FRSC). His work focuses on legal geography, particularly in relation to property. He is interested in the spatiality of legal practices and relationships, as well as the worldmaking consequences of such legal geographies. His new book, Territory: New Trajectories in Law, was published with Routledge in 2023. Building on Nick Blomley's foundational work, this episodes serves to clarify conceptions of property, related social theories and their trajectories in urban debates. Moreover, we scrutinize contestations of property and delve into questions of territory that are raised in Nick's new book. Podcast Hosts: Hanna Hilbrandt, University of Zurich; Markus Kip, University of Jena Stay tuned for the next conversation in this series with Vera Smirnova, Kansas State University.

Community land trusts are proliferating across the globe, promoted as a potential solution to the ever-worsening affordable housing crisis. CLTs provide a mechanism for decommodification, collective ownership, and community control; however, those ideals are hard to operationalize, and many CLTs function more as traditional affordable housing providers than as urban commons. This episode discusses the causes of this tension as well as regional differences and issues of funding and scale framed around the question: are CLTs transformative? The moderator of this podcast is Mathilde Lind Gustavussen. She is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on housing, displacement, and tenant activism in Los Angeles. The panel of guests consists of: Nele Aernouts is assistant professor of urban design and planning at the Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research, Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research interests lie in the planning, spatial design and governance of social and collective housing initiatives, with a specific focus on their effects on the inclusion of disadvantaged or marginalized groups. Theoretically, her work is informed by debates surrounding participatory planning, housing policy, and the commons: https://www.cosmopolis.be/people/nele-aernouts Tarcyla Fidalgo is a lawyer and urban planner. She has a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her research is focused on land tenure and community development, especially on Community Land Trusts and their potential in the Global South. Currently she coordinates the Favela Community Land Trust project at Catalytic Communities, in Rio de Janeiro - Brazil. Links: Project website: www.termoterritorialcoletivo.org Personal Linkedin Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tarcyla-fidalgo-746b9261/ Olivia R. Williams is a researcher, writer, advocate, and practitioner working for the decommodification of land and housing. She received a PhD in Geography in 2017 from Florida State University with research on community land trusts (CLTs), and began working at Madison Area Community Land Trust in Madison, Wisconsin as the executive director in 2020. She was also part of a research collaboration with MIT CoLab in developing the 2020 report, A Guide to Transformative Land Strategies. She has published in Urban Geography, Antipode, Housing Studies, Local Economy, and Area, among other academic outlets, as well as non-academic outlets like Jacobin, Shelterforce, and the 2020 book of essays on CLTs, On Common Ground.She also has served in board, staff, and volunteer leadership roles at various cooperative land-and-housing organizations such as Madison Community Cooperative, North American Students of Cooperation (NASCO), EcoVillagers Alliance, and Riverwest Investment Cooperative. The episode was edited by Ross Beveridge.

How do “peripheries” form? And how does urbanization generate processes of peripheralization? Today, urban research is increasingly confronted with processes of extended urbanization that unfold far beyond cities and agglomerations: novel patterns of urbanization are crystallizing in agricultural areas and in remote landscapes, challenging inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded and dense settlement type. While certain territories of extended urbanisation experience growth, others are affected by peripheralisation, experiencing deep socio-economic and ecological restructuring, marginalisation and inequality, and the re-articulation of power and privilege. These observations advocate for a radical reconceptualization of the experience of periphery at various spatial scales. In this podcast, we discuss peripheralization not as a static spatial condition, but as a dynamic process that is shaped by uneven urbanization and complex multi-scalar relations, strongly put forward through moments of “crisis”. We debate on perpheralisation processes which manifest in different scales and geographies and discuss both their socioeconomic and ecological implications, as well as the emancipatory potential in ex-centric territories in times of exception. The podcast follows the intense discussions that took place this August in Athens, during the RC21 conference, in the context of Panel 26 entitled ‘Peripheralization. The production of ex-centric places as an ordinary process of extended urbanisation’ conveyed by Christian Schmid and Metaxia Markaki, hosting twenty-six international contributions. Warm thanks and extended credits to all participants of Panel 26.

Listen to this gripping account from the current „Woman Life Freedom“ movement in Iran and its impact on cities and its inhabitants. The movement was sparked by the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini in the custody of the Islamic regime’s „morality police“ in September 2022. After several weeks of uprising, the media coverage in Western countries has become more silent due in part to the extremely repressive acts of the government in which several people have been killed and many imprisoned. The regime has also made a deliberate attempt to control communication chanels including the control or shut-down of the internet, making it more difficult for news about events to leave the country. The movement, however, is still very alive as you will hear in this episode. In this audio recording, produced by activists and urban scholars in Tehran, they bravely share their absorbing experiences and analyses of the ongoing uprising. They delve into the symbolic character of the hijab, provide historical and geographical context to the movement, and discuss the challenges they're facing in their fight for freedom and equality. These speakers have chosen to remain anonymous, using aliases for their safety, as they've been repeatedly subjected to repression.

Having just celebrated the 10th anniversary of the important German-language journal for critical urban research, Ross speaks with sub\urban editorial members Gala Nettelbladt and Nina Gribat about why it is important to publish urban research in German, the challenge of organizing a horizontal editorial collective, of realizing an open access publication strategy, and of relating to political struggles of the current moment - among many other topics. First part of a series of episodes on forums of discussion and publication outlets in different geographical contexts.

The book provides an overview of ecologically conscious contemporary art that responds to today’s environmental crisis, from species extinction to climate change. Art and Climate Change collects a wide range of artistic responses to our current ecological emergency. When the future of life on Earth is threatened, creative production for its own sake is not enough. Through contemporary artworks, artists are calling for an active, collective engagement with the planet in order to illuminate some of the structures that threaten biological survival. Exploring the meeting point of decolonial reparation and ecological restoration, artists are remaking history by drawing on the latest ecological theories, scientific achievements, and indigenous worldviews to engage with the climate crisis. Across five chapters, authors Maja and Reuben Fowkes examine these artworks that respond to the Anthropocene and its detrimental impact on the planet’s climate, from scenes of nature decimated by ongoing extinction events and landscapes turned to waste by extraction, to art coming out of the communities most affected by the environmental injustice of climate change. Featuring a broad range of media, including painting, photography, conceptual, installation, and performance, this text also dives into eco-conscious art practices that have created a new kind of artistic community by stressing a common mission for creators all over the world. In this art history, the authors emphasize the importance of caring for and listening to marginalized and indigenous communities while addressing climate uncertainty, deforestation, toxicity, and species extinction. By proposing scenarios for sustainable futures, today’s artists are reshaping our planet’s history, as documented in this heavily illustrated book.

Urbanization has become central in recent political discourses, as well as a contested concept in experts' spheres. This podcast of the Urban Political delves into the phenomenon of urbanization and traces back how the idea of "expanding cities" is causing disagreement in urban studies and leading researchers to raise questions that have haunted the discipline since the times of Georg Simmel. In this episode, Nicolas Goez, one of our new members of the editorial board at Urban Political, talks with Johanna Hoerning and Hillary Angelo about current discussions around urbanization, against the background of the so-called urban age. Join us in this discussion and tune in! #Urbanization #UrbanTheory #Anthroposcene #UrbanStudies #PlanetaryUrbanization

The RC21 Conference 2022, “Ordinary cities in exceptional times,” was held in Athens from August, 24 to 26. A large group of participants from all over the world gathered for was the first in-person conference of the RC21 network since the start of the pandemic. However, the pandemic continued to dominate the conference with a number of participants being unable to travel to Athens due to the uncertain visa regimes. On the opening day of the conference, the participants gathered in the historical building of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) in the Exarchia neighbourhood in downtown Athens. At the reception in the grand courtyard of NTUA, the participants came face-to-face with a group of protestors that raised banners against the state-projects promoting the gentrification and pacification of the anarchist neighbourhood of Exarchia. The remaining two days of the conference were organised on the premises of the Harokopio University in the Kallithea neighbourhood of Athens. The University hosted over forty parallel presentation panel sessions along with a number of keynote panels and book launches. The next RC21 meeting will take place at the ISA 2023 conference in Melbourne, Australia. In the episode you will hear fragments of interviews from the following people: Julie Ren, Giulia Torino, AbdouMaliq Simone, Eduardo Marques, Talja Blokland, David dit Dato Gogishvili, Simone Tulumello, Nidhi Subramanyam, Eleni Triant, and Stavros Stavrides