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Urban Political Podcast

Urban Political Podcast

By: Ross Beveridge Markus Kip Mais Jafari Nitin Bathla Julio Paulos Nicolas Goez Talja Blokland
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The **Urban Political** delves into contemporary urban issues with activists, scholars and policy-makers from around the world. Providing informed views, state-of-the-art knowledge, and unusual insights, the podcast aims to advance our understanding of urban environments and how we might make them more just and democratic. The **Urban Political** provides a new forum for reflection on bridging urban activism and scholarship, where regular features offer snapshots of pressing issues and new publications, allowing multiple voices of scholars and activists to enter into a transnational debate directly. Hosted and produced by: Ross Beveridge (University of Glasgow) Markus Kip (Georg-Simmel-Center for Metropolitan Studies - Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Mais Jafari (Technische Universität Dortmund) Nitin Bathla (ETH-Zürich) Julio Paulos (Université de Lausanne) Nicolas Goez (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar) Talja Blokland (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) Hanna Hilbrandt (Universität Zürich) Powered in partnership with the Georg-Simmel-Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Music credits: "Something Elated" by Broke For Free, CC BY 3.0 US If you would like to produce an episode with us or have comments, please get in touch! Follow us on Twitter: @political_urban Instagram: @urban_political Featured on wisspod: https://wissenschaftspodcasts.de/podcasts/urban-political/ Email: urbanpolitical@protonmail.com Science Social Sciences
Episodes
  • 110 - Take Back the City: Grassroots Struggles, Housing Justice, and Decolonial Futures in Belfast

    110 - Take Back the City: Grassroots Struggles, Housing Justice, and Decolonial Futures in Belfast
    Jun 25 2026
    This podcast episode explores the political production of urban space in Belfast through the lenses of housing justice, grassroots organising, insurgent planning, and collective rights to the city. Developed as part of the Change Stories Project, the discussion draws on the experiences of the Take Back the City campaign and the work of Participation and the Practice of Rights (PPR), the discussion interrogates dominant narratives that frame Belfast primarily as a “divided city” defined by sectarian conflict. Instead, the conversation examines how colonial logics of spatial control, segregation, land governance, and infrastructural inequality continue to shape contemporary urban life, housing precarity, and exclusion. Bringing together organisers, campaigners, and community activists, the episode reflects on how alternative forms of urban citizenship and solidarity are being built across communities in Belfast. Themes including mutual aid, Meitheal, collective stewardship, counter-mapping, solidarity sovereignty, spatial agency, and the kind economy are explored as practical and political frameworks for imagining more equitable urban futures. The discussion also situates Belfast within wider transnational struggles, drawing connections with anti-colonial and grassroots movements in places such as Palestine, South Africa, the Amazon, and other cities shaped by segregation, displacement, and structural violence.
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    56 mins
  • 109 - Corridors, Logistics, and Circulation (Cities and Geopolitics III)

    109 - Corridors, Logistics, and Circulation (Cities and Geopolitics III)
    Jun 10 2026
    The third episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series explores the spatial and operational logics of circulation, examining how the movement of goods, capital, data, and people is organised, accelerated, and contested across urban and regional space. Our guests discuss how circulation has become a central terrain of geopolitical strategy, focusing on a range of infrastructures, from economic corridors and port expansions to special economic zones, rail networks, and digital logistics platforms. The episode highlights how circulatory systems are not only designed to facilitate flows, but also to direct, channel, and control them, reconfiguring territories, reshaping urban hierarchies, and producing new forms of inclusion and exclusion. The conversation traces how the control of corridors and logistical infrastructures materialises geopolitical ambitions in highly uneven ways, often generating fragmentation, dispossession, and environmental transformation along their routes. Cities emerge here not simply as nodes within global networks, but as sites where the frictions of circulation are negotiated, where congestion, labour struggles, infrastructural bottlenecks, and regulatory regimes reveal the limits and contradictions of seamless flow. At the same time, the episode attends to the lived and situated dimensions of logistics, showing how everyday practices rework infrastructural spaces. This episode invites listeners to rethink geopolitics through the lens of movement and mobility, highlighting how the governance of flows has become central to the organisation of global power, and how urban space is continuously remade through the infrastructures, and frictions of circulation.
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    48 mins
  • 108 – Infrastructures of Power (Cities and Geopolitics II)

    108 – Infrastructures of Power (Cities and Geopolitics II)
    May 25 2026
    The second episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series turns to the material architectures through which geopolitical power is organised and exercised. From energy grids and digital networks to ports, logistics hubs, and semiconductor infrastructures, contemporary geopolitical rivalries are increasingly mediated through complex, often invisible, urban systems. This episode explores how infrastructures are not merely technical backdrops to global politics, but strategic assets and active instruments of power. Our guests examine how infrastructures are designed, financed, and governed in ways that embed geopolitical priorities, whether through the securitisation of supply chains, the territorialisation of digital systems, or the reconfiguration of energy networks in the context of climate transitions and resource competition. At the same time, the conversation highlights how these large-scale infrastructural transformations are grounded in specific urban contexts. It considers how cities become key sites where global ambitions materialise in concrete forms, such as data centres, ports, corridors, and grids, and how these infrastructures reshape urban space, governance, and everyday life. In doing so, the episode foregrounds the uneven geographies of infrastructural development, asking who benefits, who is marginalised, and how these systems are contested on the ground. Moving between planetary strategies and situated urban experiences, our guests invite listeners to rethink infrastructure not as neutral or purely functional, but as deeply political, contested, and central to the making of contemporary geopolitics.
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    49 mins
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