Cities After...

This is part three of the Cities After…Office Spaces as Homes series. In the last podcast, Prof. Robles-Durán pictured a dystopian future where waged labor takes over the household and unfolded a seemingly despairing critique of the post-covid exploitative tendencies in hybrid work and work from home. To contrast, this episode explores the resignification of utopia and the radical imaginaries that could emerge from reconstructing what work-from-home can be.

In Pt. 2 of the Cities After…Office Spaces as Homes series, Prof. Robles-Durán discusses the impacts of the hybrid work and work from home models which have exploded as a result of the pandemic. These seemingly unstoppable trends have rattled municipalities worldwide with never-seen office space vacancy rates (above 90% in some business districts) while record homelessness and the urgent demand for more affordable housing skyrockets. Robles-Duran theorizes about some of the capitalist dynamics at play here, dystopian consequences, and possible contradictory outcomes.

This episode of Cities After… is the first of a two-part series in which Prof. Robles-Durán will explore a post-covid urbanization trend taunting real estate developers and municipal governments across the globe: the adaptive reuse of vacant office spaces into homes. As businesses struggle to lure employees into the full-time occupation of their corporate cubicles and housing prices continue to rise, some champion the rezoning and transformation of office space into residential property as a win-win scenario for cities, while others forewarn the trend as a fiscal and economic catastrophe in the making. Robles-Durán takes a different stance on these positions in this two-part series, first, by unfolding a brief history of a few influential urban ideas from the end of the industrial revolution to the present—particularly functionalist and modernist principles—and, second, by discussing the effects and socio-spatial consequences of these trends.

Concurrent to the very important contributions of early Marxist eco-feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, Prof. David Harvey was amongst the first intellectuals that began to read in Marx a complex critique of capitalism's destructive metabolic relation to nature, a topic that has been constant in his writings from 1970 until today. In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán speaks with Prof. David Harvey on his current views about nature in his writings, the dialectical contradictions he sees in capitalism's response to the climate crisis, and the metabolic relation to nature as a key part of the socio-political problem to be addressed.

About our guest: David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Geography and Anthropology at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. His work into the fields of anthropology, geography, marxist studies, political-economy, urban studies and cultural studies have made him one of the most influential thinkers alive. Over his lifetime, Prof. Harvey has been dedicated to the production and transfer of critical knowledge to academics and the general public alike, his online lectures on Marx’s Capital volume I have been downloaded over half a million times with pending translations in over 129 languages and his co-produced animation on the Crisis of Capitalism has been watched over 3 million times. He has published 26 books, many of them widely influential in the humanities, social sciences as well as art and design fields. He is the recipient of twelve honorary doctorates. In 2019, he was granted the Leverhulme Gold Medal of the British Academy for Creative Contributions to the Social Sciences.

In Pt. 4 of Cities After…Summer Climate Change series, Prof. Robles-Durán talks about the most significant delusional solution to Climate change to date: The Circular Economy, an economic framework that highlights enormous business opportunities in the reuse and recycling of commodities while it claims to save the planet from ecological collapse. What seems like a win-win scenario for environmentally conscious capitalists might not be what it projects.

**Cities After…will be taking a short hiatus. We’ll be back with new episodes in September!**

Continuing with Pt. 3 of Cities After…Summer Climate Change series, Prof. Robles-Durán talks to the world-renowned performance artist and activist William Tallen, famously known for his character Reverend Billy, described in a recent National Public Radio article as a Veteran anti-consumerist crusader taking aim at capitalism and climate change. Tallen and Robles-Durán discuss the destruction of NY’s East River Park, the inseparable connection between art and the environment, the Sixth Extinction, greenwashing, and more.

About our guest: William Tallen began performing as Reverend Billy on the sidewalk at Times Square in 1998 outside the Disney Store, where he proclaimed Mickey Mouse to be the anti-Christ, duct-taping Mickey Mouse to a cross. Reverend Billy's early sermons decried the evils of consumerism and the racism of sweatshop labor and what Talen saw as the loss of neighborhood spirit in Rudolph Giuliani's New York.

According to William Tallen, the Reverend Billy character isn't so much a parody of a preacher as a preacher motif used to blur the lines between performance and religious experience. "It's definitely a church service," Talen explained to Alternet, but, he added, it's "a political rally, it's theater, it's all three, it's none of them." Alisa Solomon, the theater critic at the Village Voice said of Reverend Billy's persona, "The collar is fake, the calling is real." Along with the Church of Stop Shopping, a project directed by his life partner Savitri D, they have been referred to by academics as "performance activism," "carnivalesque protest," and "commercial disobedience."

In addition to protest performances throughout a given year, Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping have organized various campaigns focused on consumerist and environmental issues, often highlighting a particular company they feel best symbolizes the issue. The group stages actions in public spaces near the targets of their actions, often in the lobbies, halls, and plazas in buildings owned by the companies they protest. 

Since April 2020, Reverend Billy and Savitri D, have been hosting the EARTH RIOT podcast, which they describe as a comedy-infused, music-filled exploration of humanity’s most urgent issue—the planet’s Sixth Extinction. Made by "Earth-loving urban activists" from The Church of Stop Shopping, their podcast educates, inspires, and urges listeners to embrace reality and take action.

In the second episode of the Cities After…summer climate change series, Prof. Robles-Durán takes a deep dialectical dive into one of the most popular consumer "solutions" to the climate crisis: the electric car. He begins by sharing the reductionist points that both the auto industry and prestigious scientific journals promote to convince the masses that electric cars are environmentally friendly. In contrast, by looking dialectically and scrutinizing the capitalist industries involved in the whole production chain, Robles-Durán reveals that there is much more environmental destruction than we are told.

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán introduces a summer series on climate change, urban ecology, and its dialectical origins. It is essential to first differentiate how urban ecology should be understood in contrast to the typical green positivist canopy in which is commonly inscribed. In subsequent episodes throughout this summer, Robles-Durán will attempt to transform popular positivist thinking about climate solutions into active and dynamic anti-capitalist directions for facing head-on what has produced the crisis we are in.

This week we want to introduce the first Cities After…Grassroots Special, a quarterly series in which Prof. Robles-Durán speaks with core members of grassroots social movements about critical lessons from their work in the streets and the many projects they are pursuing to fight for the right to the city.

For the inaugural episode, Robles-Durán spoke with Santiago Mas De Xaxas Faus, João França, Delia Ccerare Paniora and Maka Suarez, four core members of Spain's most successful housing movement: La PAH (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, translated as The Platform for People Affected by Mortgages). They speak about their recently published La PAH: A Handbook—A manual that offers ideas, based on their 13 years of experience, for ways of organizing, mobilizing people, empowering people, and building networks between social movements and organizations, specifically in regards to the right to affordable and decent housing for all.

About La PAH: Established as a direct grassroots response to the 2008 financial crisis that burst the biggest housing bubble in Spain’s modern history, the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages has over 250 branches across the country and has instigated a paradigm shift in terms of viewing housing as an inalienable human right, and has demonstrated the strength of collective action in the pursuit of greater social justice. It has shown that there are ways of making the personal political and transforming struggles based initially on personal dramas into large, organized movements that challenge the authorities and our wider society.

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán speaks with Miodrag Mitrašinović, one of the world’s foremost researchers on public space. Robles-Durán and Mitrašinović consider differing definitions of “public space,” contrast Hudson Yards in Manhattan with Corona Plaza in Queens as distinct public investments with vastly different impacts on New York City’s residents, and speculate about a more equitable future in which communities can reappropriate the means of production of urban space away from oligarchs and philanthropists in order to build spaces that serve larger cultural, social, and political processes.