City Road Podcast

Endangered Country? Indigenous perspectives on planning, and development A 2021 Festival of Urbanism yarn of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experts discussing their perspectives on planning, land management, cultural heritage, economic opportunity and what must be changed. Chair: Elle Davidson, Aboriginal planning lecturer, University of Sydney Panel includes: Chels Marshall, Urban Apostles and Director Flying Fish Blue Christian Hampson, CEO, Yerrabingin Belle Arnold, Consultant, Zion Engagement and Planning http://www.festivalofurbanism.com/2021-events/2021/9/20/endangered-country-indigenous-perspectives-on-planning-and-development Image credit: ‘Yanhambabirra Burambabirra Yalbailinya’ (Come, Share and Learn), 2020 by Luke Penrith for the One Sydney, Many People Strategy.

Kurt Iveson talks with Elizabeth about her blueprint for the future of Sydney in a radically changing world. Columnist Elizabeth Farrelly brings her unique perspective as architectural writer and former city councillor to a burning question for our times: how will we live in the future? Can our communities survive pandemic, environmental disaster, overcrowding, government greed and big business? Using her own adopted city of Sydney, she creates a roadmap for urban living and analyses the history of cities themselves to study why and how we live together, now and into the future. Killing Sydney is part-lovesong, part-warning: little by little, our politics are becoming debased and our environment degraded. The tipping point is close. Can the home we love survive? Author Dr Elizabeth Farrelly trained in architecture and philosophy, practiced in Auckland, London and Bristol, holds a PhD in urbanism from the University of Sydney, and is a former Associate Professor (Practice) at the University of NSW Graduate

Preston Peachey reflects on the book Benevolence with author Julie Janson. Julie’s intensely visual prose interweaves historical events with fictionalised characterisation in a story that shatters European stereotypes about life on the colonial frontier. Julie gives voice to an Aboriginal experience of early-settlement. Benevolence is a story about this important era in Australia’s history from an Aboriginal perspective. Told through the fictional characterisation of Darug woman Muraging (Mary James), Benevolence is a compelling story of first contact. Born around 1813, Muraging is among the earliest Darug generations to experience the impact of British colonisation – a time of cataclysmic change and violence, but also remarkable survival and resistance. At an early age Muraging is given over to the Parramatta Native School by her Darug father. Fleeing the school in pursuit of love, she embarks on a journey of discovery and a search for a safe place to make her home. Spanning the years 1816–35, Benevolenc

Dallas chats with Vanessa about her delicately wrought essays and hand-drawn maps, Vanessa describes her encounters with unusual, forgotten or abandoned places in the city in which she was born and raised, using their details to open up repositories of significance, and to create an alternative city, a Mirror Sydney, illuminated by memory and imagination. She writes at a time when Sydney is being disassembled and rebuilt at an alarming rate. Her determined observation of the over-looked and the odd, the hidden and the enigmatic – precisely those details whose existence is most threatened by development – is an act of preservation in its own right, a testament to what she calls ‘the radical potential of taking notice’. Vanessa’s work combines a low-fi DIY approach with an awareness of the tradition of philosophical urban investigation. Her unique style of map illustration was developed through the making of zines and artworks, collaging detailed line drawings with text from typewriters and Letraset. We rou

Dallas and Tom discuss Shaking Up the City, which critically examines many of the concepts and categories within mainstream urban studies that serve dubious policy agendas. Through a combination of theory and empirical evidence, Tom Slater “shakes up” mainstream urban studies in a concise and pointed fashion by turning on its head much of the prevailing wisdom in the field. To this end, he explores the themes of data-driven innovation, urban resilience, gentrification, displacement and rent control, neighbourhood effects, territorial stigmatisation, and ethnoracial segregation. With important contributions to ongoing debates in sociology, geography, urban planning, and public policy, this book engages closely with struggles for land rights and housing justice to offer numerous insights for scholarship and political action to guard against the spread of an urbanism rooted in vested interest. Join us for a series of fascinating conversations about some of the most interesting books about cities and urban lif

As we reckon with the violent settler-colonial basis of our cities, Dallas talks with Adam Morton about a recent literary economy analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Adam published this reflection recently in the journal Political Geography. It is titled A Geography of Blood Meridian: Primitive accumulation on the frontier of space (see: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629821001463) There is a factual husk to Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian; or The Evening Redness of the West, based on the real spaces and historical occurrences of a group of filibusterers, or mercenaries, based in the United States that engage in racialised acts of scalping Native Americans licensed by the state in Mexico between the 1840s and 1850s. How are these conditions of settler-colonialism to be approached in the novel and what meaning do they convey about past and present experiences of violent dispossession of land, life and territory? By advancing an approach to world literature coverin

Dallas and Shanthi discuss Shanthi’s fresh take on 21st-century migratory experiences and temporality from her innovative study of young Asian migrants’ lives in Australia’s cities and regions. The book shows how migration has reshaped lived experiences of time and place for middle-class young people moving between Asia and the West for work, study and lifestyle opportunities. Through a new conceptual framework of ‘chronomobilities,’ which looks at ‘time-regimes’ and ‘time-logics’, Robertson demonstrates how migratory pathways can profoundly affect the temporalities of everyday life, from the timelines of career trajectories to the tempos of urban living. Drawing on extensive ethnographic material, Robertson deepens our understanding of the multifaceted relationship between migration, place and time. Shanthi and Dallas also talk about Exit West in this conversation, a book by Mohsin Hamid. Shanthi calls Hamid’s book ‘almost speculative fiction’, that follows a young couple who escape civil unrest in their

Dallas and Catriona talk Second City, which puts on display the diverse literary talents that make Sydney’s western suburbs such a fertile region for writers. Beginning with Felicity Castagna’s warning about the dangers of cultural labelling, this collection of essays takes resistance against conformity and uncritical consensus as one of its central themes. From Aleesha Paz’s call to recognise the revolutionary act of public knitting, to Sheila Ngoc Pham on the importance of education in crossing social and ethnic boundaries, to May Ngo’s cosmopolitan take on the significance of the shopping mall, the collection offers complex and humane insights into the dynamic relationships between class, culture, family, and love. Brought to you by City Road and The Henry Halloran Trust as a 2021 Festival of Urbanism podcast series. Eda Gunaydin’s ‘Second City’, from which this collection takes its title, is both a political autobiography and an elegy for a Parramatta lost to gentrification and redevelopment. Zohra Aly

We speak to tenants, tenant advocates and academics about renting during COVID-19. "The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a hopefully once in a lifetime opportunity to fix the structural and systemic problems of housing that have always been here in Australia." Dr Alistair Sisson "It's very easy to think that a housing crisis is an individual persons problem and I think what's really interesting and important about COVID is that it's drawn into sharp relief the fact that a housing crisis is a community problem and not just an individual problem."  Dr Emma Power Guests Academics: - Dr Emma Power, Western Sydney University - Dr Alistair Sisson, University of New South Wales - Dr Andrew Clarke, University of Queensland - Dr Chris Martin, University of New South Wales Public and Private Renters: - Catherine - Henry - Sammy - Ella - Caitie Tenant Advocates: - Leo Patterson Ross, Tenants Union of NSW - Jemima Mowbray, Tenants Union of NSW This episode was produced as a part of a University of Technology student

You might have heard about the 'structural adjustment' program, but what about the Green Structural Adjustment of the World Bank’s Resilient City program? We're talking with Sophie Webber and Patrick Bigger about what they call Green Structural Adjustment. Within environmental and development finance practices, cities across the Global South are facing a costly infrastructural crisis stemming from rapid urbanisation and climate change. This threatens to further entrench poverty and precarity for millions of people. The cost of achieving urban resilience across the world dwarfs available public finance, however, from both development banks and governments themselves. Meanwhile, vast amounts of money on capital markets are searching for profitable investment opportunities. The World Bank is attempting to channel return-seeking investment into urban infrastructure in response to these challenges. To harness this private finance, though, cities must be reformatted in investment-friendly ways. In a recent a

The world of night-time waste collectors, night shift nurses, office cleaners, rough sleepers and security guards rarely makes international headlines. Understanding what happens in cities after dark is crucial to global sustainable development, but will also help create a fairer society that values the night-time economy. The world of night-time waste collectors, night shift nurses, office cleaners, rough sleepers and security guards rarely makes international headlines. Yet the night-time is critical to building a fairer and more sustainable future for our cities. To do so, we urgently need to think more strategically about what happens after hours in Australian cities. The night-time is a critical space for addressing some of today’s most pressing sustainability challenges. For example, internationally, energy use peaks during evening hours. Then there is the an estimated 154 million people – about two per cent of the world’s population – who are homeless and face precarious situations at night when se

Transport is connected to social justice, freedom and equality in the city. Transit networks are objects of intense political contestation and are key terrains of struggle in cities around the world. As sites of disruption, they signal the interrelated crises of urban poverty, social reproduction, security, racism, democracy, and climate. As sites of collectivity, they express the powers of being, acting, and moving in common. We're talking to Theresa Enright about transit as a critical infrastructure of oppression and resistance and as a key platform for political and social change. Drawing on transit-oriented mobilizations in several North American cities, Theresa talks about how transit is tied to claims of spatial justice, and how practices of commoning are realizing new ways to design, operate, and transform mobility systems. Guest Dr. Enright’s research examines urban and regional politics with a focus on infrastructure and mobility. She has written about conflicts over urban transit in Toronto, Lon

COVID-19 is altering city experiences and spaces. As cities respond, the contours of post-pandemic cities are also being altered, for better or worse. This podcast brings together a group of leading Sydney-based urbanists to start a conversation about what cities will look like post-COVID, and how pathways towards a just urban recovery might be fostered. “We’ve been thinking about the imperative for innovation; how that’s reshaping how cities are being governed. And all of that got thrown into a new light by COVID” Professor Pauline McGuirk We focus on whether COVID-19 reproduces or challenges existing urban inequalities, what innovations in urban governance are shaping recovery pathways, and what types of cities will result from altered planning and policy processes. “To keep a critical analytical gaze on exactly what decisions are made and keep the pressure on about publicising who benefits, who may not benefit to the same extent, what effect will they have, and that’s long been a project of critical po

Welcome to City Road's 50th episode! To celebrate we've invited the very first guest of the show, Professor Nicole Gurran, back to talk about how we started City Road, our first episode on Airbnb and Cities, and Nicole's current work on Informal Housing.    We also talk about some fun facts about City Road and the broader work that is coming out of the Urban Housing Lab at the University of Sydney.  So here is a fun fact; did you know that Elizabeth Farrelly launched City Road at the 2017 Festival of Urbanism? Guest Professor Nicole Gurran is an urban planner and policy analyst whose research focuses on comparative urban planning systems and approaches to housing and ecological sustainability. She has led and collaborated on a series of research projects on aspects of urban policy, housing, sustainability and planning, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Australian Urban and Housing Research Institute (AHURI), as well as state and local government. Recent research has included AHURI Inqui

Who owns London? In recent decades, London has fallen into the hands of the super-rich. It is today the essential “World City” for High-Net-Worth Individuals and Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals. Compared to New York or Tokyo, the two cities that bear the closest comparison, it has the largest number of wealthy people per head of population. Taken as a whole, London is the epicentre of the world’s finance markets, an elite cultural hub, and a place to hide one’s wealth. "It's about how money has power, and how money has converted and perverted the mission statement of the city, which is to be a place for all citizens..." Rowland Atkinson We're talking to Rowland Atkinson about his new book, Alpha City: How London Was Captured by the Super-Rich, which is published by Verso. Rowland presents a history of the property boom economy, going back to the end of Empire. It tells the story of eager developers, sovereign wealth and grasping politicians, all paving the way for the wealthy colonisation of the cityscape

Doomsday peppers consider the COVID-19 pandemic a 'mid-level' event that they are well-prepared for. We're talking with Bradley Garrett about Doomsday peppers, underground bunkers and COVID-19. Doomsday prepping is the practice of anticipating and adapting to an imagined impending crisis, ranging from low level crises to extinction-level events "The inability to know which disaster is being prepared for, or at what scale, coupled with the perceived inevitability of catastrophe, has created the palpable affect of dread that preppers are acting on." Bradley Garret. Based on three years of detailed ethnographic research, we're talking with Bradley about a recent paper - ahead of his forthcoming book with more case studies - where he traces the activity of a single bunker builder in Kansas in the United States. Following its construction in the Cold War this missile silo was purchased by civilian Larry Hall in 2008. Hall is an ex-government contractor, property developer and doomsday ‘prepper’. Since purchasi

In this episode we use Eugene McCann's four dialectical tensions to understand the COVID-19 city: i) invisibility and visibility; ii) privilege and privation; iii) selfishness and solidarity; and iv) absence and presence. What’s the role of ‘academic experts’ in the debate about COVID-19 and cites, and how can we separate our expert role from our personal experience of being locked down in our cities and homes? This is a question we’ve certainly been struggling with at City Road, and we think it's a question that a lot of academics are struggling with at the moment. Perhaps it's a good time to listen to the experiences of academics as their cities change around them, rather than ask them to speak at us about their urban expertise. With this in mind, we asked academics from all over the world to open up the voice recorder on their phones and record a 2 minute report from the field about their city. Over 25 academics from all over the world responded. As you will hear, some of their recordings are not

Singapore is air-conditioning the inside and outside of buildings. This is about comfort and convenience, but it might also be about human survival. In this talk with Dallas Rogers, Professor Simon Marvin outlines the scope and potential importance of a new agenda around urban climate control and urban weather modification, which he calls the 'new thermal fix' for our cities. “And the challenge is already here, in Australia in many respects; The outside temperature is going to be so high it's not safe for humans to be outside; and that's quite clear.” Professor Simon Marvin Simon’s research interests focus on socio-technical change and the urban condition. He has recently completed large collaborative programmes of work on the politics of urban transitions, urban living labs and the smart cities. His latest book with Andres Luque-Ayala “Urban Operating Systems: Producing the computational city” will be published by MIT press in 2020 as a freely available open access publication. His recent work is focused

In this episode we talk to Matthew Mindrup about his new book, which provides an intriguing narrative about the practical and cultural factors motivating the development of the architectural model’s different uses. "Painters make paintings, poets make poetry and musicians make music, but architects do not make architecture." Dr Matthew Mindrup The attractiveness of the architectural model, he argues, is that it, unlike drawings or other two-dimensional representations of buildings, has a “here-ness” permitting their users to see before them an entire structure, the volumes of its spaces, and its constituent parts in three dimensions, including the size and location of the openings, its materials, and even its methods of construction. Here is the book blurb from the MIT Press. The Architectural Model: Histories of the Miniature and the Prototype, the Exemplar and the Muse Rigorously researched and informed by the latest research, The Architectural Model is written to help orient the reader in the study of

How do urban planners regulate the sex industries in our cities? The sex industries - from sex work to porn production - are often perceived and therefore regulated as unsuitable businesses for the high streets and residential neighbourhoods of cities. We talk with Associate Professor Paul Maginn about the role the planning system plays in regulating urban sex-scapes, the conservative morality of regulating the sex industries in cities and the perverse urban outcomes when both collide. Paul argues we need to take the sex-scapes of our cities seriously. "So people say, 'so what do you do?' I say, oh, I study aspects of the sex industry!" Associate Professor Paul Maginn In his edited book, (Sub)Urban Sexscapes, Paul and his co-authors discuss the regulation of the commercial sex industry.(Sub)urban Sexscapes highlights the mainstreaming of commercial sex premises (e.g., sex shops, brothels, strip clubs and queer spaces) and products (e.g., sex toys, erotic literature and pornography); both which are now comm