City Road Podcast

In Sydney, changing international migration patterns and the rise of apartment living means people of different cultural backgrounds are regularly interacting with each other inside their high-density buildings. And it’s not without its problems. In 2016, it was estimated that around 55 per cent of the world's population now lived in cities. By 2030, urban areas are projected to house 60 per cent of the world’s population. While migration and compact city policies are rarely seen as intersecting by policy makers, cultural difference and living in close proximity to each other can compound the tensions that already exist in apartment buildings and society more broadly. These tensions could be about shoes being left in common areas, or washing hung on balconies, or 'offensive' cooking smells wafting beyond the kitchen walls and down the halls. These tensions are connected to the gradual shift away from migrants from countries such as the UK and the increase in migrants from countries such as China and India.

We’re talking about extinction, climate change, urban development and urban planning futures. Dr Donna Houston says urban planners need to be more attuned to the ecological realities and rhythms of our cities. “The longer view, but also the responsibility. So cosmo-ecological is also to put one self into obligation or responsibility; in a way that... Western euro-centric or anthropocentric practices don’t do”. Dr Donna Houston As urbanists, we need to imagine a different type of future to better plan for multispecies cities. Part of the answer might be to decentre the human from our discussion of cities and urban planning more specifically. “… to understand that the ecological and cultural processes that are entangled within our relations are really important to our survival. In fact, we won’t really survive if we don’t attend to them”. Dr Donna Houston Donna’s powerful and unnerving research starts with ecological time, which is important for understanding the way we plan, design and build cities. Donna

We face an energy governance trilemma: of peak demand for electricity in cities; ensuring prices remain low; and addressing climate change with renewable technologies. And your home is right in the middle of this energy trilemma.  A Smart Electrical Metre fitted to your home might just be the technology that pushes you into a more data-driven, digitally networked and automated energy world. But what do smart metres mean for you, your household and your home?  "So the main benefit of the smart metre is that it can lower your electricity retail bill, and as we all know, we've seen significant increases in electricity prices". Dr Sangeetha Chandra-Shekeran  We’re talking to Dr Sangeetha Chandra-Shekeran and Dr Jathan Sadowski about smart metres, energy governance, tech start-ups and privacy. They discuss the divergence between what smart metres promise electricity consumers and electricity managers, what they currently do, and what new data about electricity usage might allow in the future. These technologies

Everyone is talking about design thinking! But what, exactly, is design thinking? And how do these ideas relate to city making?  Design thinking is an increasingly valued skillset across a wide range of industries, with high demand for design-based skills in the workplace. Organisations are increasingly looking to theories of design to improve their businesses and the services and products they offer. But can these ideas also be applied to city making? Dr Martin Tomitsch is Associate Professor of Design and the Head of Design Lab at the University of Sydney. His research looks at how design thinking can be used to make better cities. Martin talks us through the design thinking process, within which the user-experience is central. "Design. Think. Make. Break." Martin Tomitsch In a world in which more than half of the population lives in cities, Martin is looking at new ways to engage with the smart city with design thinking. We’re talking to Martin about his new book Making Cities Smarter - Designing Inte

The Sydney Bachelor of Architecture degree has a lively history. It was open to men and women from its first offering in 1918, but the inclusion of women was controversial. In 1972 a student strike shut down the school for two weeks; students demanded the degree be remade. "In 1926... the University of Sydney put forward Marjorie [Holroyde nee] Hudson, a female student, for the award; and this really set the cat amongst the pigons. And the document we have from the Board of Architects minutes effectively gives every single battle that women had to fight in terms of equality in the profession." Daniel Ryan You might think that university degrees are fairly static cultural products, that change slowly and in line with the often-lethargic institutions they’re created within. But university degrees perhaps reflect the world back to us, just as much as their purpose is to shape the world around us. In this sense, university degrees are firmly located in society. They’re a cultural product of society. They ebb an

Imagine building a life size (1:1 scale) model of your urban design right there on the street to communicate and test your design ideas with local communities. This is exactly what Evelina Ozola and her Fine Young Urbanists colleague Toms Kokins did in Latvia with the tools of tactical urbanism. Evelina wants architects, urbanists and designers to be more proactive in their practice, and to engage more directly with issues concerning the spatial environment and communities in cities. "We should stand up for what we regard as valuable and vulnerable. To do this effectively, we must develop a broader skillset that includes inventive ways of communicating with governments, developers and organisations, and the general public." Evelina Ozola Evelina has been rethinking her relationships to radical urban theory through her practice. In this episode, we talk to Evelina about a Fine Young Urbanists tactical urbanism project called Mierīgi! — a project that explores the use of a life-size mock-up as a tool for tes

The utopian visions of architects, planners, philosophers and sociologists are important speculative projects. We take a deep dive into the idea of utopia with Professor Danilo Palazzo, who calls on us to become utopians. “We are all utopians, as soon as we wish for something different and stop playing the part of the faithful performer or watchdog”, argued Henri Lefebvre. Cities have often been used as the laboratory for the imaginations of better futures. Such thinking recognises that the built and natural environments are complex systems of competing relationships; spanning the social, economic, physical, political, and environmental. As Robert Fishman pointed out in 1982, these ideal cities “were convenient and attractive intellectual tools that enabled each planner to bring together his many innovations in design, and to show them as part of a coherent whole, a total redefinition of the idea of the city”. We ask Professor Danilo Palazzo about the role of utopia today. Can we study the past utopias

What role does the government play in  facilitating displacement through transit-led development? We often hear about the role of the private sector, private landlords, and the purchasing power of individual real estate buyers in urban renewal, gentrification and displacement debates. The planning of new transit systems and overheating housing markets has renewed interest in understanding the role of government in neighbourhood change, specifically in the context of gentrification and displacement. “Many people conflate gentrification and displacement.” Professor Karen Chapple Karen Chapple and her team developed an online “neighbourhood early warning system;” a set of interactive maps that shows the current and future transformations that are underway in the San Francisco Bay Area, in the United States. “The city is always undergoing a process of renewal in some form.” Associate Professor Kristian Ruming The neighbourhood early warning system is a part of The Urban Displacement Project, which characteri

In New York, where anything’s possible, the privatisation of Manhattan's Central Park is even stranger than fiction. I imagine that few people would choose to travel back in time to visit the run down and quite frankly often dangerous Central Park of 1970s Manhattan. But many people don't realise that a casual and relatively safe stroll through Central Park today has come at significant cost to the park’s maintenance workers. "My dream is to have the park system privatised and run entirely for profit by corporations". Ron Swanson, fictional Parks Department Director, American Television sitcom Parks and Recreation. We’re talking to John Krinsky about his new book with Maud Simonet, Who Cleans the Park? and their research about parks management in New York. John and Maud bring the often-invisible work of the park’s maintenance workers into view. What’s exposed is much more that than an underpaid and unvalued workforce, but a set of questions that go to the heart of urban management today. In America, hundr

Australian cities are awash with construction activity. From Collingwood to Kogarah, Marrickville to Newstead, every passing month seems to bring with it a new, sold-off-the-plan high-rise apartment tower. Real estate, it seems, is the true national sport. Australia now hosts the world’s most active market for securitised home loans and has the world’s second highest, and rising, levels of household debt. There are reportedly more cranes in the east coast capital cities than all of North America. And with the cranes and high-rise towers, come social problems and no respite from affordability crises: overcrowded schools, longer working hours to pay off mortgages, and worsening homelessness. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that in recent polls, densification and housing affordability are among the issues of most concern to Australian voters. In this City Road episode, Alistair, Dallas and Chris revisit Maurice Daly’s classic 1982 book, Sydney Boom, Sydney Bust. Daly’s insights remain highly relevant to Austr

Pop-up, Guerrilla, DIY or Tactical Urbanism; whatever the name, temporary urban interventions are increasingly popular in contemporary cities.   From community gardens and pop-up cinemas to outdoor art installations and mobile libraries, pop-up urbanism can take many forms. Much of the discussion about pop-up urbanism is celebratory in tone, highlighting the ways in which these transient practices are putting on display alternative lifestyles, reoccupying urban space with new uses, or reinventing daily life from the bottom up. Many claim that pop-up urbanism is a political activity that can be undertaken in pursuit of a more just or sustainable city. Various levels of government are latching on to the idea of pop-up urbanism, and even borrowing some of the ideas that are associated with the more radical notion of tactical urbanism as they design and plan the city. Some governments even think that pop-up urbanism might be a quick, and cheap, solution to fostering participatory, bottom-up city-making. And the

What are the possibilities for community action that hold powerful urban actors to account? Strategic antagonism and the spaces that community alliances are opening up themselves to engage with urban development might hold the answer. It is not only urban planners and the formal planning system that shape the way residents contribute to the planning of their city. In Sydney, local resident action groups and other urban alliances are working beyond the market-centred urban planning system to achieve their urban development goals. Under market-centred urban planning paradigms, urban development is increasingly valued as an economic process and as a driver of the economy, rather than a social process that might create a more equitable city. We talk to Cameron McAuliffe about the work of the Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe, and the way her ideas are being applied to urban planning in Australia. Talking about research conducted with the host of City Road, Dallas Rogers, Cameron says resident action gro

This is a story about how the financial industry and governments turned a housing foreclosure crisis for everyday Americans into a financial opportunity for institutional real estate investors. And like all good stories, it involves the management of the new post-GFC housing asset class with digital technologies and algorithms. Say hello to The Automated Landlord. We talk to Desiree Fields about a new housing asset class that emerged from other side of the GFC in the United States. The period leading up to the GFC saw the banks reducing their lending standards for home loans in the United States. The financial industry bundled up these loans into mortgages backed securities and sold them off to investors around the world. And in a now familiar tale, this eventually lead to the subprime mortgage crisis and the GFC. When people could no longer afford to pay their mortgages, a lot of these properties wound their way through the process of foreclosure and finally settled on the balance sheets of the banks. The

In Washington, DC, neighbourhood activists attempted to make themselves at home in their city by using the techniques of neighbourhood preservation. What became clear in that process is that those who control the historical narrative about a neighbourhood often have the power to shape its character and identity. We talk to Cameron Logan, author of Historic Capital: Preservation, Race and Real Estate in Washington, DC., about the fragility of history and the battles over the past in the US. The physical landscape of Washington, DC, has been deeply shaped by grassroots citizen action organisations, especially preservation and restoration groups. These citizens groups sought to address issues of social and spatial justice through neighbourhood preservation. But as with most urban initiatives it produced unforeseen problems, and its benefits flowed disproportionately to those with established cultural and financial resources. These benefits Cameron calls  'Historic Capital', which is a particular kind of cultur

What is the secret life of land title registration? The Torrens system of land title registration, developed in South Australia in 1858, is fast becoming the most popular system of land conveyancing and administration around the world. Sarah Keenan discusses the Torrens system of title registration that was invented for South Australia to assist the project of colonial settlement and land speculation. It was designed to increase efficiency of conveyancing, but title registration fundamentally changes the nature of title to land. The defining principles of Torrens title registration are ‘the mirror, the curtain, and indemnity’. These principles work together to hide the land’s unregistered history, making that history disappear from legal view. However the people who have those histories still exist. The Torrens system of title registration, or versions of it, are today favoured by the World Trade Organisation and World Bank, and are increasingly being adopted around the world in an effort to make land a liqu

The New South Wales state government recently passed legislation to remove a group of homeless people camped for several months in Sydney’s central business district. Located just metres from New South Wales Parliament and some of Australia’s largest banks, the homeless camp was a practical response to a lack of affordable housing and a political activity designed to capture the attention of policy-makers and the general public. The state government’s legislation—which gave the relevant minister power to confiscate property and remove people from Crown land on public safety grounds—sought to end months of disagreement about who should take responsibility, and about what the appropriate responses might be. Was it the job of local government or state government? Should the campers simply be excluded from the central business district of Sydney? Or should there be a response that addresses the root causes of their homelessness? The events in Sydney are not unique. Melbourne’s Lord Mayor recently attempted to i

Can cities experience growing pains? Not the type of growing pains we usually associate with awkward teenagers but the growing pains of population growth.  Australia has one of the fastest growing populations in the world with most of us living in major urban centres. This puts pressure on urban planners, who have to deal with the city’s growth. To add to the pain, state governments do not always have the resources to cope with the development that is needed to keep up with the growth. Associate Professor Glen Searle is an adjunct at the University of Queensland and the University of Sydney’s Urban Housing Lab. He talks with us about how other big cities have dealt with increasing populations, and what it might take for Australians to have the difficult discussion we need to have about population and economic growth.

How is the history of urban and land use planning connected to US racial discrimination? 'Heavily' according to Sarah Coffin! In 2014, an African American teenager named Michael Brown was shot by police in Ferguson Missouri. Michael Brown's death led to widespread protests across the United States and the rise of the black lives matter movement. Many of us watching the events unfold on television. We probably made assumptions about Ferguson being one of those typically poor black US neighbourhoods, riddled with violence, crime and drugs – but according to Associate Professor Sarah Coffin nothing could be further from the truth. Sarah takes us back to the Civil War to show how the history of urban and land use planning are connected to racial discrimination in the US.

The 'Smart City' is not an urban planning term, it was dreamed up by large global tech companies. This week we hear from Dr Tooran Alizadeh about smart cities, the digital infrastructure that is required to enable them, and the need for telecommunications planners. This Sydney Business Insights podcast is from our friends over in the University of Sydney’s Business School.

The terms "Car Sharing" and "Smart Homes" conjure up images of driverless cars and automatic coffee machines. But the digital transformation of our lives is a bit more complex than this. In this episode, Robyn Dowling and Sophia Maalsen take a look at the digitisation of our urban lives. Sophia talks about doing digital ethnography and Robyn talks about the politics of digital infrastructure and data.