Urban Broadcast Collective

This episode of This Must be the Place is the first of our ‘walking tours’ – we are revisiting the walks of the 1980 book “Melbourne on Foot: 15 Walks Through Historic Melbourne”. This episode starts with David speaking with one of the authors of that book, Professor Graeme Davison of Monash University, about the genesis of the book in general. They are then joined by Elizabeth to discuss the Richmond tour specifically. (Confusingly this all takes place in St Kilda, ahead of a walking tour included in a later episode). Back in time, but later in the episode, Elizabeth and David retrace the 1980 tour of the inner suburb of Richmond. While some things have changed since then (beginning with tram routes, and also a cable tram station that has since been swallowed up by Punt Road), many of the houses and landmarks of Richmond’s layers of history remain. The tour takes in Richmond’s genteel hill area (now home to many urologists and cosmetic surgeons), down to the flat and the mix of 19th century housing and fact

Female Chinese Australians: A Feminist Tale of Multiculturalism by SoundMinds Radio. Stella Sun is a Chinese Australian woman who was born on Thursday Island in 1931. Stella travelled to mainland Australia when she was 17 years old. Dr Alanna Kamp has been interviewing women like Stella about their experiences of belonging and exclusion as female Chinese Australians during the White Australia Policy era. The women Alanna is interviewing piece many memories together to tell rich stories about migration, settlement and family. In this episode, Dallas (https://twitter.com/DallasRogers101) talks to Alanna about researching Chinese Australian women during the White Australia period. He learns she is putting these women front and centre of her research to produce a feminist reading of about the birth of Australian multiculturalism. Alanna Kamp (BA BSc (UNSW); PhD (WSU)) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Urban Research Program/School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University (WSU). As an hi

In this episode of the The Urban Squeeze, Tony and Jason talk about the rise of sport and leisure in the city and the role of sport in city-building, with particular attention on large-scale sporting events, including the 2018 Commonwealth Games, being held in Gold Coast City, Australia. They ask what role can planners play in fostering sport and leisure activities in the city? How does sport contribute to city-making and the lives of residents? What are some advantages and disadvantages of large-scale sporting events? Do cities always "win" in hosting these large-scale sporting events like Olympics and Commonwealth games?

This must be the place on everything I needed to know about life I learned from an old British comic strip. Actually it’s an interview by David Nichols in Helsinki at the International Conference on Urban History with Lucie Glasheen, a PhD student at the School of Geography, Queen Mary University at London. Lucie’s research looks at the representation of children in urban environments in British children’s comics of the 1930s. The episode also features an intro with Elizabeth discussing, with her sister Sarah Taylor, what was to be learned from an early over-exposure to British comic strips like Dandy and Beano.

In this episode of Radio Reversal, Anna (@annajcarlson), Jo (@joanna_horton) & Nat (@DrNatOsborne) talk about privacy, particularly philosophies, politics, and technologies of privacy. They explore questions of digital and spatial forms of privacy and ‘publicness’ & of surveillance and facial recognition & how these intersect with race, gender, colonialism & labour, the Internet of Things, Smart Cities & gentrification, data breaches, and what your Data Doppelgänger is saying about you. (A great show to revisit in light of Cambridge Analytica “revelations”).

There are more than 24 million pets in Australian homes. But our cities are not the easiest places to own a pet. You can’t take your dog on the train in Australia, and if you’re a renter owning a pet, well that can make things really difficult when you try to secure a home. In this episode of City Rd Podcast we talk with Drs Emma Power from the University of Western Sydney and Jen Kent from Sydney University, about why Australian cities don’t necessarily share Australians’ love of pets. Dr Jennifer Kent is a University of Sydney Research Fellow in the Urban and Regional Planning program at the University of Sydney. Jennifer’s research interests are at the intersections between urban planning, transport and human health and she publishes regularly in high ranking scholarly journals. Her work has been used to inform policy development in NSW and Australia, including Sydney’s most recent metropolitan strategy – A Plan for Growing Sydney. Prior to commencing a career in academia she worked as a town planner in N

‘Smart cities’ represent the integrated, digital future of cities. Also called the “wired”, “networked” or “ubiquitous” city, the “smart city” is the latest in a long line of catch-phrases, referring to the development of technology-based urban systems for driving efficient city management and economic growth. These can be anything from city-wide public wifi systems to the provision of smart water meters in individual homes. In this episode of The Urban Squeeze, Tony and Jason discuss the journey of some cities towards ‘smart city’ status. They examine some positive and negative implications of this new frontier and ask how good planning can help make cities 'smarter'?

This Must Be the Place (for now): In this episode of This Must Be the Place Elizabeth speaks with Robin Chang, a Research Associate and Lecturer in the Department of European Planning Cultures at TU Dortmund in Germany. Robin’s research looks at temporary urbanism: uses that contravene formal zoning, which last for a time frame that is not intentionally permanent, and which are spontaneously initialized. ‘Temporary urbanism’ is a growing field of study including tactical urbanism, pop-up shops, food markets, and squatters’ collectives. Robin has five such case studies in the port city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and will add more from Bremen in Germany. In a context of post-industrial transition, urban shrinkage, and fallout from the financial crisis, municipalities and communities in these areas have found ways to activate vacant and brownfields sites. Some of Robin’s case studies of temporary uses are now major tourist and gastronomic attractions for the city. Robin discusses the role of temporary use

SoundMinds Radio What the Antarctic teaches us about the science of space exploration By SoundMinds Radio It’s 2026 and you are on board the Ares. The largest interplanetary spacecraft ever built. You are on the first colonial voyage to Mars and your crew will be the first hundred Martian colonisers. This is how Kim Stanley Robinson opens his award-winning science fiction Mars trilogy – a set of three books about the colonial settlement of Mars. For Associate Professor Juan Francisco Salazar, this science fiction series opens up some important philosophical questions about what we think were doing as we colonise Antarctica and beyond. In 2015 he release a documentary film based on ethnographic research undertaken in the Antarctic. The documentary is a speculative piece that sits at the intersections between science and social science. In this episode, he talks about his research and film making. Along the way, he raises questions about what we, as humans think we are doing in Antarctica. He says our act

The Urban Squeeze What are child friendly cities? Are we forgetting the needs of children when we plan cities? How can we make cities more pleasant for their youngest residents? What are the design features of child friendly cities? Tony Matthews discusses these and other questions, as well as the value of involving children in decisions about the cities they live in. Twitter: @drtonymatthews @CityByrne @MattWebberWrite

This Must Be The Place In this episode of “This Must Be The Place” David and Elizabeth visit the small Goldfields town of Clunes for the annual Clunes Booktown Festival. As you may pick up from the introduction, Elizabeth was slightly confused about the distinction between “Booktown” and “Booktown Festival”. Whereas (she realised later) “Clunes is a Booktown all year round”, the weekend Festival in May is in addition to this appellation and sees the town taken over by book stalls, author talks, and book-related seminars. The festival attracts around 18,000 visitors to Clunes – a town of largely intact Goldfields-era heritage you may recognise from such films as Mad Max and Ned Kelly – as in “Mad Max”, and “Ned Kelly”, although “Mad Max and Ned Kelly” might have a certain appeal in the style of “Alien vs Predator”. The Booktown/Festival can be characterized as a revival effort for the town. Other big changes in Clunes over the past decade or so have been the return of the passenger train service, and the arri

The Urban Squeeze What sorts of actions do planners take in response to immigration trends and immigration policy? Can cities be more proactive in influencing immigration? What have past trends in immigration told us about how we need to respond to urban growth pressures today? Jason Byrne discusses these and other questions, as well as how current patterns of immigration might shape the future of Gold Coast city, Australia’s tourism hot-spot. Twitter: @drtonymatthews @CityByrne @MattWebberWrite

This Must Be The Place In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth reports from the Rhine-Ruhr region of Germany. The area’s recent history is famously characterised by industry – coal, steel, cars – and its present by post-industrial restructuring and by new forms of tourism. The introduction to the podcast includes some soundscapes from the Ruhr Museum, housed in the Zollverein, a former coal works near Essen. The Rhine-Ruhr is a huge urban agglomeration and while the public transport facilities are far better than in Melbourne, it is also home to a large and growing number of cars. Car parking amply lines most streets and, in a special twist, when they can’t find a parking spot the locals are very comfortable parking cars all over the footpaths too. This podcast reports on the local Dortmund installment of “Park(ing) Day”, held September 16th as “an annual worldwide event where artists, designers and citizens transform metered parking spots into temporary public parks”. The broader goal is to crit

SubUrbanista Podcast Episode 2 of The Suburbanista Podcasts focuses on politics and sex! Not the sexual proclivities of democratically elected representatives, but rather the political proclivities of Fiona Patten MLC, leader of the Reason Australia Party, formerly known as the Australian Sex Party. I explore with Fiona why and how she decided to run for state politics; and how the Australian Sex Party was formed and why it has evolved into the Reason Australia Party. Furthermore, we discuss Fiona's major political/policy interests and successes during her time in office and what remains on her to do list; and, how she was received within the Victorian State Parliament given her gender identity and role as a lobbyist for the adult industry in Australia over the last two decades. Our interview took place in the Kelvin Club in Melbourne in February 2018. The backing track in the intro and outro to this Episode is titled "Sex Club" by chameleonic Melbourne-based band The Womb (https://www.thewombmusic.com/)

Radio Reversal In this episode of Radio Reversal, Jo, Nat, and Anna, and special guest Dr Stefanie Fishel, Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama, put the body back into the body politic. Drawing on Stef’s new book The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic, they consider what the body politic looks like when microbiology, immunology, and parasitology have discredited the idea of the bounded, contained human subject, and consider the complex, messy relationships between bodies, borders and politics – particularly spatial and environmental politics – and the agency of more-than-human actors. @joanna_horton @DrNatOsborne @annajcarlson @flusterbird @RadioReversal

14. Airbnb and Cities_CR by Urban Broadcast Collective

Urban Squeeze How high should urban populations go? Is there an ideal population size for a city? Should we have population limits and how would they work? How do we plan for growing population? Tony Matthews and Jason Byrne discuss these and other questions against a backdrop of public concern over rapidly increasing urban populations. Twitter: @drtonymatthews @CityByrne @MattWebberWrite

This Must Be The Place In this installment of This Must Be the Place Elizabeth and David give a post-film review, along with Rebecca Clements (and also a bit of help from Trent and Casper), of the Jane Jacobs documentary “Citizen Jane: Battle for the City”. As is discussed, the film features a fantastic variety of archival footage and also has very high production values. It tells the iconic mid-20th century story of battles over freeways, slum clearances, high rise housing towers, the ‘cancer’ analogy that propelled urban renewal projects, and the frontlines between grassroots activism and top-down planning orthodoxy more broadly. Perhaps for planners there isn’t so much to learn from the film – Elizabeth and David to this end use the word “undergraduate” in the same sniffy way that chilled Elizabeth long ago (hearing Virigina Woolf describing James Joyce’s Ulysses, and wondering how hard someone would have to work to be so far up themselves). But there are several interesting insights into Jacobs’ backgro

The Green Bans and Gentrification by SoundMinds Radio In this episode, we take to the streets of Sydney. We meet public housing resident Barney Gardner at his house in the suburb of Millers Point, which is just under Sydney Harbour Bridge. I’ve spent a bit of time with Barney over the last couple of years, interviewing him for various research projects on inner city gentrification. Barney was born in Millers Point and has lived there all his life. In 2014, he was told he had to move out of his house and the neighbourhood. The public housing he was living in was being sold off. For most of the last two centuries Millers Point’s proximity to major wharves and maritime industries saw the place develop as a largely low-income, working class neighbourhood. In the early 1970s the ‘Green Bans’ saved the suburb from modernist redevelopment. We talk to Nicole Cook, a Lecturer at the University of Wollongong, about urban development in Sydney, and what the Green Bans teach us about Global Sydney. Nicole is a Lecturer

Urban Green Space by Urban Squeeze What are the benefits of urban green spaces? What are their costs? Can urban greenery save lives, improve health and reduce health costs? Tony Matthews and Jason Byrne discuss these and other questions, as well as whether more urban greenery can reduce heat stress, Australia's biggest natural killer. @drtonymatthews @CityByrne