Cities After...

Billionaires, or more accurately, oligarchs, exert disproportional influence and control over the world’s political power, media outlets, military discourse, human labor, and natural and urban resources, including those that we commonly regard as public. In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán looks at the idea of "public space" and asks: Is there anything "public" left in our urban and territorial infrastructure? What is the meaning of "public" within an oligarchy? How did the neoliberal agenda push public resources into the hands of private stakeholders and what can we do to reclaim and reinvest in truly public spaces?

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán talks with Laura Raicovich, NY-based writer and art curator, about the roles that the global oligarchy plays in art museums and cultural institutions. They discuss how cultural institutions have never been the neutral, inclusive spaces they often market themselves as. Rather, these spaces, both public or private, rely heavily on private funding by elite donors and wealthy board members. Robles-Durán and Raicovich look closely at these complexities within major art institutions, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, consider the dark money that funds these spaces, and highlight some organizations that are trying to reimagine cultural spaces with equity and care at the forefront. 

About our guest: Laura Raicovich is a New York-based writer and art curator. Her latest book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, addresses Western western cultural institutions’ long history of representing “neutrality” while protecting the political interests of the oligarchs, the elites, and those in power. She most recently served as interim director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, a museum devoted to queer art and artists and is the recipient of both the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship and the inaugural Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators at Hyperallergic. 

Until early 2018, she served as President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum where she oversaw an inviting and vital commons for art, ideas, and engagement. Prior to the Queens Museum, Raicovich inaugurated Creative Time’s Global Initiatives, where she successfully expanded the organization’s international work; launched Creative Time Reports, a media initiative featuring artists’ perspectives on world news and events; and directed the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference on art and social justice. She arrived there after a decade at Dia Art Foundation, where she served as deputy director and was a key member of the senior team during a period of transformation for the institution that included the opening of Dia:Beacon. Prior to that, she worked at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Public Art Fund, and New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation.

Raicovich lectures internationally and has organized numerous talks and programs, including the two collaborations on series of public seminars at The New School’s  Vera List Center for Arts and Politics and she is a member of the transnational consultancy Urban Front.

This week we are rebroadcasting our first episode of Cities After..., originally released in April of 2021. In this episode, Prof. Robles-Durán explores the urban shifts surrounding the dramatic rise of commercial and residential vacancies during the global pandemic.

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán discusses how the western oligarchy has been intrinsically interconnected with its Russian counterpart through massive urbanization projects around the world. Oligarch Business Districts have been developed in major cities at the command of dark money in the search for legal loopholes, fiscal gymnastics, and money laundering. By looking closely at two of these development districts, New York’s Hudson Yards and Russia's Moscow International Business District, Robles-Durán reveals how they render the invisible web of dark money visible and enable an immense service industry of lawyers, accountants, architects, creatives and financiers dedicated to supplying the wants and needs of the global neoliberal oligarchy. 

*This episode is being re-aired*

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Duran breaks down the allure for many average working millennials of moving to the suburbs. Robles-Duran looks at five key contradictions of the contemporary American Suburban Divide: politics, wellbeing, remote work, climate change and economic opportunity. Speculating on dystopian and utopian post-covid scenarios, Robles-Duran ends with a call to action for everyone to join housing movements against sprawl and in favor of metropolitan affordable housing for young generations and the planet.

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Duran talks with Josep Bohigas, Barcelona’s Chief Urban Planner, about the international image and perspectives of the hegemony of American Suburbia in Western Europe. Bohigas traces Spain’s suburban development from the 1920s until today, highlighting the similarities and differences from American sprawl. As Robles-Duran concludes this short series on the American Suburban Divide, it is important to emphasize how its disastrous influence on social and environmental urban dynamics continues to define many landscapes around the world. Thus, it becomes even more important to collectively imagine ways out of sprawl.

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Duran breaks down the allure for many average working millennials of moving to the suburbs. Robles-Duran looks at five key contradictions of the contemporary American Suburban Divide: politics, wellbeing, remote work, climate change and economic opportunity. Speculating on dystopian and utopian post-covid scenarios, Robles-Duran ends with a call to action for everyone to join housing movements against sprawl and in favor of metropolitan affordable housing for young generations and the planet.

In this episode of Cities After, Prof. Robles-Duran talks with Andrew Ross about his most recent book, Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing. Robles-Duran and Ross build on ideas from the previous episode by looking at the history of suburbanization in the United States and exploring how the entertainment fantasy industry has helped shape the utopian image of American Suburbia. This podcast zooms in on Central Florida, home of Walt Disney’s dreams for building perfect cities.

Welcome to Season Two of Cities After! Prof. Robles-Duran begins this season with a series of four episodes in which to make sense of the growing suburban divide in the United States by honing in on it's divisive politics, the consequential production of COVID-19 boomtowns, and the future of sprawl. 

In this first episode, Prof. Robles-Duran gives a brief overview of the primitive accumulation that gave rise to American suburbia together with its racist, patriarchal and capitalist ideologies. This will serve as a basis to further delve into the contemporary phenomenon of post-COVID sprawl and its social, political, economic and environmental consequences to the near future of American cities and their inhabitants.

In this episode, Prof. Robles-Duran is joined by Andres Arauz, arguably, one of the most influential and intriguing political and economic thinkers of the new Latin-American left. This episode expands on the previous discussion on the contemporary effects of the Latin American economic shock therapy and how it has changed the territorial and political dynamics of the south. Robles-Duran and Arauz explore new progressive directions to counter the most recent privatization policies, and discuss the pandemic and post-pandemic socio-political battles in Latin America.