Urban Broadcast Collective

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 characterises B

Outdoor advertising & cities: In this installment of PlanningxChange Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell interview Ged Hart manager of TOM P/L (Total Outdoor Media). Outdoor advertising is a prominent and sometimes derided feature of cities. Ged talks about the role of outdoor in 'public messaging' and suggests that traditional views of outdoor are outdated. This is because in some instances Government takes 60 - 70% of the available space for public messaging campaigns. He talks of new technologies and how the 'creative' role is the new public art. A change in views amongst city design professions and city administrators towards outdoor he suggests is appropriate. A discussion on an aspect of city experience not often heard.

Research on cars, parking, & travel planning in Melbourne apartment buildings: With Chris De Gruyter. How do people in Melbourne apartments travel? How often do they drive cars, or use public transport? How much parking is enough? Can planning influence this? Such questions are often debated in the planning system (and beyond). However, there is little data available on the observed travel behavior of people living in apartments. Instead, most discussions are based on rough demand estimates, or on personal experience. In this episode of This Must Be The Place, Elizabeth speaks with Dr Chris De Gruyter, who has recently undertaken – along with a small army of students – a comparative study of travel in apartment buildings in Melbourne. Chris is formerly of Monash University and starting a fellowship in the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT. Originally a traffic engineer, he has been in transport planning for around 15 years.

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, hundreds

On changing rooms, changing boundaries, and change makers: Retirement thoughts with Michael Buxton. In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth corners son-to-be Emeritus Professor Michael Buxton just before his retirement from RMIT after around 20 years. Michael describes his move to academia from state government, and as someone who has been closely involved in local government politics. Change is a recurring theme in the discussion, including changes to university management and administration styles, and changes in political cultures and attention spans. Michael and Elizabeth discuss the role of academics in public policy debates, and different strategies for this. They also discuss the merit of research and its voluminous outputs – the dream that, one day at least, someone might read it and find it useful. At least, that’s what researchers like to tell themselves. The episode finishes up on the massive collection of stuff that is Michael’s former office, much of it acquired via the garages of for

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 in sea

Contemporary Landscape Architecture: in this episode of new UBC members PlanningxChange, Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell interview landscape architect Tim Vernon of the CDA Design Group. Tim talks about the changes in the profession since he started in the mid 1980's, the influence of travel, sources of inspiration and the contemporary challenges (and joys) of landscape architecture. For more details: www.planningxchange.org.

What do planning podcast people do all day? This Must be the Place meets Planning Xchange. This episode of This Must Be The Place is a four-way conversation between David and Elizabeth; and the hosts of another Melbourne planning-related podcast – Planning Xchange (or ‘PX’). PX is a new member of the Urban Broadcast Collective. PX hosts Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell are both practicing planners, and their podcast features interviews with people employed across different roles in planning related fields. Produced in Melbourne, PlanningxChange promotes a better understanding of urban affairs and city design and function. It aims to be a useful addition to the many wonderful urbanist web resources which assess, appreciate, critique and enhance urban living. A theme in the episode’s discussion is the crossover between academic and practicing planning worlds – or rather the lack of it, whether there is a need for it, and how to go about closing gaps that exist. For more details: www.planningxchange.org.

Kiki Daire started her career in the porn industry in 1998, prior to this she worked as a stripper in Memphis, Tennessee where she is from. Kiki is of French and Cherokee descent. She has over 300 film credits, including featuring in a number of documentaries on pornography, and worked for companies including Evil Angel, Girlfriends Films and Adam and Eve. She is the host of Karaoke 2.0 X-Rated, a weekly social event for members of the adult entertainment scene and fans. This interview took place during the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in late January 2018. It is the first of several other podcasts recorded during the AVN with other performers including Ela Darling, Charlotte Cross, Alana Cruise and Lyndsey Love & Michael Scott. This podcast provides insights into Kik’s personal migration experiences of moving to and living in Los Angeles and Las Vegas as well as reflections of wider performer experiences of migration. A vodcast version of this interview can also be found on

Cities are vulnerable to climate change because they concentrate many people and buildings into a relatively small area. Consequently, even a relatively contained weather event can affect a large number of people. Cities are also very dependent on their “lifelines” – transportation systems to move people and goods, communications systems, water and energy distribution, sewers and waste removal systems. The concentration of people and wealth in cities, and their dependence on these infrastructure systems make urban centers particularly vulnerable to weather extremes. In this episode of The Urban Squeeze, Tony Matthews looks at the unique cause and effect relationship between cities and climate change and discusses what cities can do to reduce or manage climate change impacts now and into the future. Tony also details what cities globally are doing really well in responding to climate change and why they’re motivated to act. He also tackles a vexing question: Why are some cities doing really well with their res

In this episode of This Must Be the Place Elizabeth and David present a double whammy re: screen representation. David talks to Nigel Giles, author of the new book on the groundbreaking 70s TV show Number 96, set in a mixed use block of flats in bohemian Paddington, Sydney. (“Number 96, Australian TV's Most Notorious Address” by Nigel Giles‎, Melbourne Books). Then, in what promises to be a compelling regular feature looking at cities in film (specifically films found on DVD in op shops), Elizabeth and David review the Olsen twins’ New York Minute (2004), a film which – although your mature and responsible reviewers refrain from hanging shit on a dog – really goes a lot longer than anyone’s idea of a minute. Perhaps more of a Milwaukee Minute (reference explained if you hang in to the end). Footnote – the part where Elizabeth is wondering about whether New York has more films because of some policy supporting films being made there, she was thinking of “movie production incentives” or “tax credits” which were

Hayley Saul and Emma Waterton were doing ethnographic and anthropological fieldwork in the Langtang valley in Nepal when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit in 2015. The earthquake killed more than 9,000 people. At the time of the quake, they were with several local guides from the village of Langtang, one of the worst affected areas in Nepal. Emma and Hayley were recording local oral histories. Their ethnographic research was recording how local stories are written into the Himalayan landscape. Little do they know that their guides’ knowledge of the landscape would save their lives many times over, and enabled them to reach safety after the quake. FEATURED Dr Emma Waterton is an Associate Professor at the University of Western Sydney, where she is affiliated with both the School of Social Sciences and Psychology and the Institute for Culture and Society. She holds a BA (anthropology) for UQ and an MA (Archaeological Heritage Management) and a PhD from the University of York. Her research explores the interface be

Australia has a long history of natural hazards. The famous Dorothy MacKellar poem about a sunburned country is replete with references to a whole bunch of them. In this episode of The Urban Squeeze, Jason Byrne asks just how vulnerable are our cities to natural hazards and what can we do about it? As well as discussing the types of natural hazards facing cities now and into the future, Jason discusses how cities respond to disasters in the immediate aftermath, in the medium term and the longer term. He also considers some options for making cities more resilient into the future - something likely to be widely necessary as climate change impacts intensify. @CityByrne @drtonymatthews @MattWebberWrite

“Basically if you thought of it, someone Japanese had thought of it before you and catered for it in some way” – three travelling planners discuss their initial impressions of Japanese cities. In this episode of This Must be the Place Elizabeth chats with two traveling companions - Helen Rowe, a transport planner, and Nicole Cook, a lecturer in urban geography – at the tail end of their short trip through Japan. They debrief in a tapas bar at Tokyo main station, amidst one of the many glistening expanses of shopping malls that make up commuter life in Japan and set to the soundtrack of adult contemporary music including “Everybody Plays the Fool”. The discussion isn’t based on any particular expertise on Japanese planning or any research on it – it’s just some initial impressions of the striking features of urban life in Japan. They cover off subways, bullet trains (suggested slogan for Australia – “bite the bullet train”), braille signage, urban agriculture, toilets, car parking, Kyoto’s lost trams, coffee v

In this episode of Radio Reversal, Nat, Amelia & Hannah explore new, messy imaginaries of what it means to be human and more-than-human in the Anthropocene and beyond. We tackle human exceptionalism, monism and vibrant matter, posthumanism, transhumanism, the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene and we try our hand (tentacles?) at what it would mean to Stay with the Trouble, as Donna Haraway implores. We consider what kinds of theories, politics, and practices are necessary for ethical lifeways when we’re no longer (if we ever were) simple, contained individual humans - but instead an entangled, composting, messy cyborgian assemblage in a precarious world. @RadioReversal @DrNatOsborne @AmeliaHine

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 Un

There are many negative effects from a lack of physical activity and much to gain from regular exercise. Walking is a basic form of exercise but we have only recently begun to understand how important the potential to walk is in our cities. Walkability is a concept which measures how friendly an area is to walking. In this episode of The Urban Squeeze, Tony and Jason discuss how important it is for cities to be walkable. They consider the pressure points inspiring planning to think about walkability and examine how urban design can help or hinder our potential to walk around the cities we live in and visit. @CityByrne @drtonymatthews @MattWebberWrite

This is the first ever episode of “This Must Be the Place”: a documentary style visit to the remains of Cocoroc, inside the Western Treatment Plant. If you live in Melbourne, chances are you don’t give too much thought to where what you flush down the toilet goes to. The important part is it just goes ‘away’. But the chances are – as with 80% of Melbourne’s sewage - it travels to the Western Treatment Plant in Werribee. For much of its history, from the 1890s, the Plant was known as the ‘Metropolitan Farm’. It was the most productive farm in Victoria. And the farm was, for nearly a century, a home to many people. As recently as the late 1970s, hundreds of workers and their families lived inside the sewage farm, including in a township called Cocoroc. In this episode Elizabeth and David take a tour with Melbourne Water Heritage Manager Paul Balescone to see what remains of Cocoroc today. They also speak to a PhD student, Monika Schott, who's researching what life was like living on the Farm. And they introduce

CarPoolXXX is a special series of podcasts and vodcasts (hosted by Paul Maginn) that explores the issue of Porn Performers as a Migrant Community. Los Angeles has been the epicentre of global porn production since the 1980s and as such thousands of people from across the US and internationally - especially Europe - have migrated to California in order to be in the porn industry. Academic studies of migrant communities tend to focus on people who come from certain countries, nationalities, or religious/cultural backgrounds. Whilst economic migrants have been a feature of migration studies, again the focus often tends to be on particular types of migrants - i.e. the 'illegal' or 'undocumented' who come from particular countries. Porn performers, I argue, constitute a minority migrant community on the basis that a relatively small proportion of people are engaged in this form of labour, and many, if not most, of the people who work in porn both in front of and behind the camera have migrated to LA from elsew

Many cities around the world pride themselves on their live music scenes. But music cities don’t generally happen by accident - they are planned for, organised, marketed and protected. In this episode of the The Urban Squeeze, Tony and Jason examine how music cities are regulated and what good and bad regulations involve. They discuss the role for planning in promoting music as a cultural driver in cities. They also reflect on the question of whether good planning can leverage music as a way to make some cities more liveable while avoiding gentrification.