Here’s a bit of a cheat update of the This Must Be The Place podcast: 4 episodes of student work from a course I recently coordinated for Monash Masters of Urban Planning and Design and Masters of Architecture students. A new course Called Urban Positions and Practices, this was essentially urban history and theory, focused on critically interpreting the role of professionals like architects and planners. I structured it around a series of 12 ‘things’: fence, pipe, pig, garden, house, plan, pub, tower, street, person, car park and pylon. One assessment task was group story telling– AKA critical audio, or basically, podcasting. In groups of 3-4, students researched, recorded, and edited a roughly 15-minute audio story on the theme of “the past is present” – connecting planning history to a contemporary urban feature. Students picked their own topics and the podcasts had to have 3 parts –scripted part, conversational, and something else. This was a research task but also about learning an unfamiliar medium. I’m sharing a few partly to draw attention to our students and the Monash UPD course. Also, to illustrate podcasting as a learning tool. And hopefully they’re just interesting. I’ve picked 4 student podcasts to share – the topics are ‘dogs’, ‘park benches’, ‘playgrounds’ and ‘billboards’. This first one is ‘Dogs’ – or ‘Dogs in Cities’, with Benjamin, Bethany, Nick and Saeed. Join them in unpacking colonial dog nuisance laws; different cultural norms around relationships between humans and non-human animals; and visiting the soon to be lost ‘Lost Dogs Home’ in North Melbourne.