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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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Summary

 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
  • 107 - Tenant Politics and Urban Political Economy

    107 - Tenant Politics and Urban Political Economy
    May 12 2026
    Within the last years four books have been published exploring the political economy of the private rental sector, with a focus on inequality and resistance. This episode would bring together all four authors (see below) to explore the political economy forces driving the growth of the private rental sector and associated forms of housing injustice (e.g. unaffordability, evictions), the analytical approaches that can best draw out what is at stake in all this (especially from a political perspective), and how this all relates to the renaissance of tenant organizing across many countries in the Global North. By bringing together four of the most prominent authors/activists in this area, the episode aims to capture a crucial moment in the articulation of the emerging politics of the private rental sector. The four books all share a critical urban political economy orientation, drawing on concepts such as financialization and rent. They are all also all interested in ‘residents as agents’, and the practices and organizational forms through which movements seek to create ‘tenants as subject’. The episode would not focus on any of the four books as such, but rather discuss the cross-cutting themes. As the books reflect a variety of different cities/countries, this discussion has the potential to gain a wide listenership and to inform tenant organizing and scholar activism.
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    1 hr and 24 mins
  • 106 - Cities and Geopolitics I

    106 - Cities and Geopolitics I
    Apr 27 2026
    In an era of intensifying geopolitical rivalries, the terrains of global power are increasingly being reconfigured through the infrastructure, economies, and everyday rhythms of urbanisation. From semiconductor supply chains and energy transitions to port expansions, data centres, and housing markets, urban space has become a critical arena through which geopolitical strategies are organised, exercised, and contested. This mini-series starts from the premise that geopolitics is not simply something that happens to cities, but something that is actively produced through them. Cities and Geopolitics brings together a set of conversations that explore how contemporary geopolitical transformations unfold across urban space. The series traces the material and spatial logics of power: how infrastructure become strategic assets, how logistics and circulation reorganise territories, and how investment, governance, and technological systems reposition cities within shifting global orders. In doing so, it highlights cities as key nodes where global rivalries are translated into concrete forms, such as roads, ports, grids, and digital systems that shape both planetary connections and urban everyday life. At the same time, the series attends to the uneven and lived dimensions of these transformations. It asks how geopolitical dynamics are encountered in everyday urban contexts, such as: how they are negotiated by residents, mediated by local institutions, and contested through situated practices. By moving between large-scale infrastructural shifts and the textures of daily life, the series develops a grounded understanding of how global power operates across scales. The episodes in this five-part mini-series are organised around themes such as infrastructure of power, corridors and circulation, urban political economies, and everyday geopolitics. The series offers a distinctly urban lens on contemporary geopolitics, inviting listeners to rethink the geographies of global power by foregrounding urbanisation not as a passive backdrop, but as active sites where geopolitical futures are being made, contested, and transformed. In the first episode of this mini-series our guests, Kevin Ward and Seth Schindler explore what it is to think of cities and geopolitics in the current conjuncture, often described as a “Second Cold War” and how is it differs from earlier geopolitical conjunctures.
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    35 mins
  • 105 -Transforming Local Statehood II: Progressive Possibilities?

    105 -Transforming Local Statehood II: Progressive Possibilities?
    Mar 12 2026
    While the first episode on the transformations of the local state focussed on current authoritarian takeover in different European contexts, this episode will zoom into the progressive possibilities of local state transformations. The episode discusses institutional changes within the local state, the role of other political actors and geographical scales as well as the limitations of localist solutions. The episode is moderated by Matthias Naumann and Gala Nettelbladt, with contributions from Anil Sindhwani, Anke Strüver and Enikö Zöller.
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    55 mins
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