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 Kingdom perspective. Following his talk, Dirk Benzemer responses from his research perspective. Josh ponders on the current housing affordability and wealth inequality crisis. He argues that supply side reforms, which means increasing the amount of housing, will not be sufficient to ameliorate the housing crisis. Beyond this, he sees crucial responses needed in breaking the powerful feedback cycle between depth and wealth driven financial flows and house prices and reducing the potential for rent extraction from home ownership. Dirk Bezemer begins from the question ‘Roof or real estate?’ to go through counter arguments he has encountered in Dutch political and public debates to which he is connected for many years. We hope you enjoy the episode!

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, and justice left an indelible mark on everyone who knew him—and his legacy will continue to inspire activists, filmmakers, and listeners alike.

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 platforms, like Amazon? How are social media platforms reconfiguring the ways we live in cities and the ways we conduct politics? And what does the future hold? Ross discusses these questions with 4 scholars who have recently published important books in this field: Myria Georgiou, who is a Professor of Media and Communications and Head of the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. She is the author of the book: Being Human in Digital Cities, published by Polity Press. Rob Kitchin, who is a professor in the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute at Maynooth University. He is the author of Critical Data Studies: An A to Z Guide to Concepts and Methods, published by Polity Press. Yu-Shan Tseng, who is an Anniversary Research Fellow in Geography at the University of Southampton. She is the author of Liquid democracy: a comparative study of digital urban democracy, published by Wiley & Sons. Justus Uitermark, who is Professor of Urban Geography and the Academic Director of the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author, with Petter Törnberg, of Seeing Like a Platform An Inquiry into the Condition of Digital Modernity, published by Routledge.

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 London. The speakers discuss how nighttime perspectives shape how we encounter the urban polycrisis. They reflect on how night studies, and practice, prompt embedded thinking on the intersections of urban health, climate, economics and conflict with the experiences of dwelling, living and working in the city after dark. Crisis talk is being challenged through night talk, while the everyday dimensions of polycrisis are being considered, as they unfold in the mundanities of the night. The talk encourages us to engage with this world of urban research and practice by mixing a scholarly discussion, an insight into the urban challenges of a global city after dark, and a consideration of current solutions to improving nightlife inclusively, while taking us out on the streets of London after midnight.

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 with historians Javier Ortiz Cassiani and Orlando Deavila Pertuz, we dive into the city’s colonial past and explore how its racialised legacies shape contemporary urban life. We discuss how conflict, violence, and displacement have shaped racial politics, from Cartagena’s role in the transatlantic slave trade to its recent remaking as a tourist hub. The episode also looks at how Afro-descendant communities resist urban segregation and dispossession, offering insights into broader issues of racism and Blackness in urban Colombia and Latin America today.

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 of the Urban Political Podcast examines how the urban polycrisis manifests in housing production and urban infrastructure, from an alleged fraying of the social fabric to continually increasing environmental damage and deeply entrenched inequality. Catalina Ortiz (University College London(, Thireshen Govender (UrbanWorks), and Katrin Hofer (ETH Zurich) convey their experiences with the constant state of polycrisis in places like Colombia and South Africa. Where the state cannot fully supply the conditions required for people to flourish – where people are long accustomed to taking the maintenance of everyday life into their own hands “insurgently.” Hosted by Lindsay Blair Howe (TU Munich), this episode highlights how researches and practitioners are conducting their work in spite of – or even by finding opportunities in – the constant state of crisis. These observations and actions may also provide solutions that the Global North will soon require. As of mid-2025, we have passed the critical 1.5 degrees benchmark, are enduring multiple megalomaniacs at the helm of national governments, and continue to use far more resources than our planet could ever supply. We may not have the tools or imagination to respond to these challenges like places where the polycrisis is the norm.

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-billion corporations. In this work of creative non-fiction, scholar-activist and Nine Dots Prize winner Joanna Kusiak tells the story of a grassroots movement that convinced a million Berliners to pop the speculative housing bubble. She offers a vision of urban housing as democratically held commons, legally managed by a radically new institutional model that works through democratic conflicts. Moving between interdisciplinary analysis and her own personal story, Kusiak connects the dots between the past and the present, the local and the global, and shows the potential of radically legal politics as a means of strengthening our democracies and reviving the rule of law. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/radically-legal/7DB8C3F3E9272466A3926DCE9006CFBE#fndtn-information

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 contemporary Tanzania. Drawing on original research in the city of Dar es Salaam, Claire Mercer details how the “suburban frontier” has become the place where Africa’s middle classes are shaped. As the first book-length analysis of Africa’s suburban middle class, The Suburban Frontier offers significant contributions to the study of urban social change in Africa and urbanization in the Global South.

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 bold experiment in municipalist governance. The episode draws from the sociological research project „Public Politics and the Future of the Commons“ to unpack strategic shifts in areas like housing, municipalization of public services as well as social and economic policies. Together, the guests consider what can be learned from the Comuns’ experience, how the party related to social movements and class politics. Now that the Comuns are out of office, the time is ripe for a candid assessment beyond their frequent representation as a European lighthouse case for alternative local politics: What did the municipalist turn achieve—and where did it fall short? Tune in for a rich researcher-activist dialogue on the possibilities and pitfalls of transforming politics from the ground up.

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 sustaining the community. She looks at the importance of boundaries and especially their reciprocity. Social boundaries are a set of codes of exclusion often used against migrants and refugees, while symbolic boundaries are typically understood as the way one defines one's own group. Kulkul argues that these two types of boundaries tend to trigger each other and thus be mutually reinforcing. At the same time, she presents a picture of everyday life from the perspective of migrants and the children of migrants in a cosmopolitan European city – Berlin. A valuable read for scholars of migration and culture, which will especially interest scholars focused on Europe.

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 dispossession while also serving as a site of resistance and assertions of sovereignty. We foreground three themes: First, the conversation addresses planning’s complicity in processes of dispossession, examining how legal frameworks and land sales have historically undermined Indigenous political authority. This discussion delves into Dorries research on Brantford on how nuisance bylaws work as mechanisms that uphold white privilege. Second and more conceptually, we discuss tensions between and productive conversations emerging from combining the analytical lenses of settler colonialism and the lens of racial capitalism. Finally, Dorries reflects on Indigenous conceptions of property and alternative terminologies that better capture Indigenous relationships to land, emphasizing co-dependence and collective stewardship.

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 migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, Lebanon and Germany, it concentrates in particular on the physical and social infrastructures supporting the circulation of food and waste. The talk will outline the various ways in which migrants use infrastructural engagement to craft novel forms of belonging at the local level, contributing to our understanding of participation and equitable service delivery in increasingly diverse cities.

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 major financial investments, political forces and environmental debates. At the same time, it epitomises values of modernity and success, redefining social practices, forms of dwelling and living, and popular imaginaries. The book invites the reader to follow bags of cement from production plant to construction site, along the 1000-kilometre urban corridor that links Abidjan to Accra, Lomé, Cotonou and Lagos, combining the perspectives of cement tycoons, entrepreneurs and political stakeholders, but also of ordinary men and women who plan, build and dream of the Concrete City. With this innovative exploration of urban life through concrete, Armelle Choplin delivers a fascinating journey into and reflection on the sustainability of our urban futures.

This episode is part of our Think&Drink Series in collaboration with the Georg-Simmel-Centre for Urban Studies working with the Humboldt University Berlin. Today’s speaker is Andrei Semenov, an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. Authoritarian urbanism has recently become a buzzword applied to different settings and situations. Andrei attempts to clarify the conceptual foundations of this term by using a combination of political science and urban sociology analytical frameworks. He shows that the authoritarian part refers to the dictators' response to two key challenges to their rule: elite factionalism and mass uprisings. While a wide set of strategies is available to dictators, the instruments and practices of urban development constitute one possible way of responding. More specifically, he argues that authoritarian urbanism simultaneously aims at two (not always compatible) goals: providing rents to ensure the elites' loyalty and satisfying the mass demand for housing and a comfortable urban environment. He illustrates these features with examples from Eurasian countries and concludes with some further research questions.

This is the first seminar in the series 'Where is Urban Politics?' a hybrid seminar series hosted by the University of Groningen, in the academic year 2024-2025. This talk by Ross Beveridge and Philippe Koch provides a novel way of thinking about the relationship between democracy and the urban based on two main arguments. First, across the globe claims for and forms of urban collective self-rule signal that the city retains democratic significance in a very specific sense: as an object of practice and thought the city is a source and stake of the urban demos. Second, urbanisation unsettles seemingly fixed boundaries between the state and society and thus opens the possibility of weaving together a new democratic fabric encompassing both. There is a democratic politics of urbanisation that shifts perspectives from institutions to practices, from jurisdictional scales to spaces of collective urban life. Seeing democracy like a city, we argue, foregrounds a way to re-locate democracy in the everyday lives of urbanites and to unlock the transformative potential of an urban democracy. This talk draws on recent work including the book "How Cities Can Transform Democracy" (2023) and the article "Seeing Democracy like a City" (2023).

This is a new episode from our Think&Drink series in collaboration with the Georg-Simmel-Centre for Urban Studies and the Humboldt University Berlin. Co-operative urban development is the buzzword of the moment. It stands for the pursuit of a fairer city that is orientated towards the common good. In new partnerships - public-civic partnerships - actors from politics and administration work together with actors from civil society. Contradictory practices of urban design lead to misunderstandings, controversies and uncertainties in these co-operations. In this book, the authors explore the processes of two extraordinary experiments in cooperative urban development in Berlin: the Haus der Statistik and the Rathausblock Kreuzberg. To this end, they invite the actors involved to procrastinate. When hesitation becomes a method, ambivalences support cooperation, uncertainties replace conflicts and controversies between the partners become visible. The book presents concise theses on cooperative urban development, a glossary of misunderstandings and methodological reflections on the artistic-ethnographic research method and its embedding in urban anthropological discourses. For all those who are involved in co-operative urban development or want to accompany it with research. For a just city of the many.

Whether waiting for the train or planning the future city, infrastructure orders—and depends on—multiple urban temporalities. This agenda-setting volume disrupts conventional notions of time through a robust examination of the relations between temporality, infrastructure, and urban society. Conceptually rich and empirically detailed, its interdisciplinary dialogue encompasses infrastructural systems including transportation, energy, and water to bridge often-siloed technical, political-economic and lived perspectives. With global coverage of diverse cities and regions from Berlin to Jayapura, this book is an essential provocation to re-evaluate urban theory, politics, and practice and better account for the temporal complexities that shape our infrastructured worlds.

Valuing indeterminacy: Terrain vague, temporary use and the production of urban expertise in Barcelona and Berlin. This is the first episode of a new series from Urban Political. In collaboration with the Georg Simmel Center for Urban Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, this series will feature speakers from the center’s Think & Drink Colloquium. The colloquium invites international speakers from across urban studies to present their work and offers an informal setting for exchange between students, faculty, and the general public. Much ink has been spilled in urban studies on the dynamics of abandoned industrial sites, rubble areas and other indeterminate landscapes teeming with biodiversity, artists and (post-)capitalist potential. What is less explored are the histories of making indeterminacy into a desirable feature of cities. Engaging a range of ideas and strategies including terrain vague and temporary urbanism, this talk examines the role of urban experts in giving a positive meaning to ‘non-design’ as a feature of post-industrial change. Maroš Krivy draws evidence from late 20th century Barcelona and early 21st century Berlin: while the Catalan architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales called on his colleagues to appreciate the intrinsic value of terrain vagues even as he played a key role in Barcelona’s Olympic-led redevelopment, the Berlin collective Urban Catalyst advocated giving unused sites over to creative entrepreneurs as an alternative to the conservative policy of critical reconstruction. This talk presents findings from Maroš Krivys ongoing project investigating a series of situated intellectual histories of how progressive urban experts in Europe and North America accommodated late capital.

In this episode, we explore the role of land policies and spatial planning in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Our two guests, Oren Yiftachel and Orwa Switat, discuss the historical context of the conflict, focusing on how settler colonialism and land regimes have shaped hierarchical types of citizenship and exacerbated tensions. The conversation looks at the impact of the recent war in Gaza on planning and development policies, especially in relation to Bedouin communities in the Naqab/Negev and their responses. This episode concludes by exploring prospects for peace, the potential for redevelopment in Gaza and the broader Palestine-Israel region, and the role of the movement "Land for All" and international society in shaping the future.

In this episode, we are discussing Theodore Greene’s latest book, Not in my Gayborhood! Gay neighborhoods and the rise of the vicarious citizen, published by Columbia University Press in July 2024. This book is a lively and generous study of gay neighborhoods in Washington DC, highlighting the evolving dynamics of LGBTQ spaces in urban settings.