Beneath the Surface: An Infrastructure Podcast

In this wrap-up episode, host Tamara Winter and producer Everett Katigbak reflect on the first season of Beneath the Surface, featuring highlights from our favorite episodes, and musings about future areas of exploration.

In this conversation, Shruti Rajagopalan, Head of India Policy Research at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and host Tamara Winter discuss Shruti's research on how population growth can accelerate economic development, the unintended consequences of fertility policy, and why 1991 was a pivotal year for India.

We explore the effects of declining birth rates and what, if anything, could be done to reverse them. Along the way, we’ll dig into one of the thorniest questions about population growth: what happens when governments try to influence it through policy?

In this conversation, host Tamara Winter and Alex Forrest, transit planner for the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission in Springfield, Massachusetts, discuss the history of transit in the US, the relationship between transit and housing prices, and the formative years Forrest spent in Japan—and how they’ve shaped his current work in Springfield.

We examine how officials in post WWII-Japan created one of the most efficient examples of scaled infrastructure in the modern world — and what cities around the world can learn from them.

In this conversation, host Tamara Winter and Ronan Lyons, Associate Professor in Economics at Trinity College Dublin, discuss Ireland’s economic development, the current challenges facing would-be homeowners and renters in Dublin, and the time the biggest concern in the Irish housing market was too much supply.

The price of housing in major cities has, over the past few decades, far outpaced the cost of construction. The immediate effects of the housing crunch are generally well-understood: productivity suffers when people aren’t able to live near the jobs they want. Still, there are reasons to be optimistic. Advocates of building more housing are gaining important victories all around the world—but it remains to be seen whether or not these victories will prove to be lasting.

A conversation with Ryan Petersen, CEO of Flexport.

Audrey Carleton, environmental journalist for VICE, discusses the potential for lithium extraction at the Salton Sea to catalyze the burgeoning electric vehicle industry, the parallels to the oil and gas industries, and what it all means for the area's residents.

In 1905, Colorado River floodwaters created one of the largest lakes in the United States: the Salton Sea. In this episode, we explore the future of energy production, how boom and bust cycles affect cities and communities, and the often overlooked environmental considerations that roil the development of green infrastructure.