Urban Political Podcast

Throughout the global south, many urban regions have become massive. In the familiar renditions of this notion, urban regions, mushrooming in population and spatial footprints, teeter close to chaos, environmental disaster, and ungovernability. Populations are being reshuffled, moved from one area to the other, something which an extensive landscape of built projects that never really worked has allowed as buildings are repurposed for other uses as they also take advantage of contiguities with new developments—sub-cities, new industrial zones and logistical centres. The sheer heterogeneity of developments at all scales, from thousands of small developers to large real estate corporations have equipped regions with a large volume of warehouses, housing estates, mega residential developments, industrial zones, commercial centres, and small enterprise districts that either never got off the ground, only partially fulfilled the intended functions or rates of occupancy, or quickly fell apart. When these “projec

Gianpaolo Baiocchi offers us an historical overview of what he terms Radical Cities in Latin America and draws out some lessons from the past 30 years. Comparing these experiences to municipal politics in Europe and elsewhere, he highlights the distinctive features and charts the ups and downs of these urban movements. Massive suburbanization, metropolitan fragmentation and reactionary backlashes in Brazil and elsewhere have been posing key challenges for reconfiguring a municipalist politics in this part of the world. Taking cues from our recent podcast roundtable on Murray Bookchin's work, Gianpaolo discusses radical misunderstandings around the notion of sovereignty and argues why a transformative urban politics needs to uphold a critical understanding and practice of popular sovereignty. The episode finishes with Gianpaolo's reflection on how he relates his position as a university researcher in New York City with current activist and political engagements.

This episode discusses the impact of COVID-19 on the behavior of people in public spaces in Dortmund (Germany), San Francisco (USA) and Isfahan (Iran). My guests, Teresa Sprague and Ghazal Farjami, and I (Mais Jafari) explain how people in these societies perceive and react to social distancing, mask wearing, and other measures in a variety of public space typologies such as city streets, parks, beaches, plazas and indoor spaces like shopping malls and restaurants and other social centers. Finally, we share our views from our own observation and scholarly background on what the new normality in these three cities will look like in the post COVID-19 world and what the major shifts in planning, especially at the design and use of urban spaces will be.

In this podcast we discuss the work of Murray Bookchin, relating it to the experiences and debates around municipalism and wider left political practices and theory. With our guests (Blair, Hilary and Kate) we focus the discussion on the recent edited collection of Bookchin's work: The Next Revolution: Popular Assemblies and the Promise of Direct Democracy (Verso), edited by Debbie Bookchin and Blair Taylor. Reflecting, but going beyond, the broad range of topics addressed by Bookchin in the book, we cover a lot of ground, such as the role of the state in left politics, sources of transformative change, 'reason', 'knowledge' and politics, popular democracy, the new municipalism in Barcelona and municipal socialism in 1980s London. **Blair Taylor** Program director of the Institute for Social Ecology, a popular education center for ecological scholarship and advocacy founded in 1974. He holds a PhD in Political Science from the New School for Social Research, and has written on U.S. social movements, conte

Starting off from her latest agenda-setting article "What does it mean to be a radical urban scholar-activist, or activist scholar today?" published earlier this year in the relaunch issue of the journal _CITY – analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action_. It was published before the pandemic shock and the current wave of Black Lives Matter protests took off. In our conversation, Margit will thus discuss with us her notion of three tipping points in light of these pressing concerns but also highlight the opportunities for political change and how the anti-racist protests have created a collective agency whose vibrancy compares to the movements of the 1960s. In this situation, urban researchs are called not only to scholarly rigor but also to a politics of mobilization. **Margit Mayer** has been professor for comparative and North American politics at Freie Universität Berlin, as of 2014 she is Senior Fellow at the Center for Metropolitan Studies at Technical University Berlin. Her research foc

This episode delves deep into the ongoing revolutionary movements in Algeria and Lebanon. Ratiba Hadj-Moussa and Rana Sukarieh provide us with a rich and inspiring account of developments, offering social-economic background to the events of the last two years, outlining the main contours of the political struggles in the two countries and drawing comparative insights. In particular we gain: a clear sense of the geographies of the movements, the solidarities and tensions within them, the crucial place of women activists and gender as a focal point, and how the state is reacting to these diverse demands for justice and democracy. We also consider how Covid-19 has shaped developments. Guests: Ratiba Hadj-Moussa is professor of Sociology at York University, Toronto. Her areas of specialization are the sociology of culture and political sociology. Her interests range from common cultural artefacts to art (cinema) and visual culture in general. My work is anchored within the scope of three major fields: 1. Medi

Nina Stener Jørgensen and Maroš Krivý offer us the broader picture of the contemporary urbanist discourse of liveability and Jan Gehl's rise to prominence. In a tour de force, they walk us through Gehl's original work within the Danish welfare state of the 1960s, his indebtedness to the contributions of his wife Ingrid, his rise to stardom following Al Gore's liveability agenda, and why his success throws a shadow even on people like Richard Florida. The political responses to the Covid-19 situation show no significant disruption with the liveability discourse but possibly allow for a new round of implementations in public space. The presented critique situates the liveability approach in the context of neoliberal urbanism that posits equality while simultaneously remaining blind, if not covering up structural inequalities and social conflicts. In effect, the current Black Lives Matter protests against anti-Black racism confront this paradigm with the question: Liveability for whom? **Guests:** **Maroš K

On the basis of the book _The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth_, we discuss with Margaret Kohn her resuscitation of the early 20th century solidarist ideas and the links to the Lefebvrian notion of the right to the city. We challenge her on the question of scale and the role of the state in solidarist thinking, how all of this may enlighten the response to the Covid-19 moment, and recommend that you listen to her smart and thoughtful reflections. **Margaret Kohn** is a professor of political science at the University of Toronto. She received her MA and PhD from Cornell University. Her most recent book _The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth_ was published by Oxford University Press (2016). It won the David Easton Award for Best Book in Political Theory and the Judd Award for Best Book in Urban and Local Politics. She is the author of _Radical Space: Building the House of the People_ (Cornell University Press 2003), and _Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space_ (Routledge 200

Robin Chang and Meg Holden discuss how the Covid-19 situation has disrupted teaching and learning practices in urban research, deepening existing and exposing new inequalities. They consider in particular the short and long term implications of on-going restrictions for experiential learning, what this means for urban research methods, drawing on concepts like discomfort and positing a notion of an ethics of experience. Robin A. Chang is PhD Researcher and Instructor in the School of Spatial Planning at the Technical University of Dortmund in Dortmund, Germany. Her comparative research investigates temporary and adaptive uses through a complexity lens on urban and industrial lands in Germany and the Netherlands. As a Canadian based in Germany, she also combines her research and teaching interests with cross-cultural experiences in British Columbia and Metro Vancouver, her original home and professional planning context. Meg Holden is Director of the Urban Studies Program and Professor of Urban Studies and

Reflecting on how shocks are applied as tools to further political agendas, Creighton Connolly, S. Harris Ali, and Roger Keil consider the implications for racialized inequalities and the Global South-North divide. Two months after the first conversation with out guests, at a moment when the coronavirus outbreak was declared a pandemic, Creighton, Harris, and Roger analyze how cities have responded in different ways and what kind of lasting effects we should expect in our urban lives. **Guests:** **Creighton Connolly** is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies and the Global South in the School of Geography, University of Lincoln, UK. He researches urban political ecology, urban-environmental governance and processes of urbanization and urban redevelopment in Southeast Asia, with a focus on Malaysia and Singapore. He is editor of ‘Post-Politics and Civil Society in Asian Cities’ (Routledge 2019), and has published in a range of leading urban studies and geography journals. Previously, he worked as a rese

How is the pandemic affecting conditions of labour and migrant workers? How are Unions and other organisations reacting? In this wide-ranging and forensic discussion with Michelle Buckley (Toronto), Rajan Pandey (Bangalore) and Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay (Mohali) tell us about on-going struggles around mobility and labour in Canada and India. We hear about how the Indian state is seeking to unravel regulation and working rights under the guise of enabling the economy to deal with the crisis and how the situation is deepening inequalities and conflicts around ethnicity and religion. We also discuss how labour organisations in Canada are gearing up for the struggles to come and consider what 'resistance' means. **Guests:** **Ritajyoti Bandyopadhyay** (Assistant Professor, Humanities & Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Mohali) is a historical anthropologist of the Present. My earlier and ongoing research projects explore themes in informality, infrastructure technologies a