City Road Podcast

Is modern architecture actually energy efficient? Buildings like the Bauhaus Dessau designed by Walter Gropius required large amounts of heating in the 1920s.

The preservation of modern buildings like these often require large amounts of energy consumption, which places them at odds with contemporary ideas around energy efficiency.

"We have been conditioned as humans to a certain type of lifestyle that is dependant - heavily dependent - upon the use of fossil fuels." Associate Professor Daniel Barber

Dr Jennifer Ferng speaks with Associate Professor Daniel Barber from the University of Pennsylvania about the modernist principles behind the Bauhaus, its legacy, and how energy efficiency has changed how architects deal with renovations and regulations around cultural heritage. Innovations in heating systems often lagged behind the aesthetic principles that determined buildings like the Bauhaus Dessau. The performance of modernist structures remains incompatible with what we view now as contemporary standards of energy conservation. Architects must sometimes choose between preservation strategies and contemporary methods that reduce energy consumption.

Guest

Daniel A. Barber is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Chair of the Graduate Group in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. He is an architectural historian studying the relationship between the design fields and the emergence of global environmental culture across the 20th century.

Universities are grappling with creating an inclusive and global curriculum that will serve the needs of 21st century architecture students.

In terms of architecture, which theories and buildings from which countries and cities should be included, and what are academics doing to address the histories of Indigenous peoples?

"The reason I'm here is only because I basically dedicated 40 years of trying to get rid of the education I had in the past; critique it."  Professor Mark Jarzombek

Dr Jennifer Ferng speaks with Professor Mark Jarzombek and Professor Jaky Troy about the challenges in creating university curriculum that encompasses the contributions of many countries and peoples. They discuss the importance of first societies and first nations, the role of vernacular examples of architecture, and try to define what the global means for the 21st century. Jarzombek and Troy share some of their experiences from places around the world and explain how they try to bring these sites  - archaeological, architectural, and living – to the attention of the public.

"The university sends this strong message of Western scholarship and a kind of dominance of a political and religious ideology that in many ways obviates everything Indigenous". Professor Jaky Troy

Guests

Mark Jarzombek is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is one of the founders of the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC). He is a leading advocate of global history and was the first to teach a MOOC on the history of architecture, with thousands of participants worldwide. His most recent book is entitled Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age, published by the University of Minnesota Press.

Professor Jaky Troy is the Director of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander research at the University of Sydney. Her expertise includes documenting, describing, and reviving Indigenous languages. She is currently working on the indigenous languages of Pakistan. One current project is focused on the history of Aboriginal missions and reserves in eastern Australia and the history of non-institutionalised Aboriginal people. The other is about the practice of ‘corroboree’ by Aboriginal people in the assimilation period of the mid 20th century. She is part of the Ngarigu community from the Snowy Mountains.

Around the world cities are running out of drinking water. Yes, literally running out of water!

Cape Town is a well-publicised example. But recently Chennai, and before that São Paulo, all faced the possibility of water not coming out of the taps. So what do cities do to respond to this crisis? How is the crisis materialised differently across cities? For whom is there a water crisis?

“For me, it’s almost like, these experiences offer us an insight into what’s happening globally” Dr Nate Millington

We’re talking with Nate Millington about these questions, which emerge from his research in managing water in the midst of changing climate dynamics and profound inequalities in Cape Town and São Paulo.

"It's getting harder and harder for the infrastructures that we have in place to deal with the climate" Dr Nate Millington

Guest

Dr Nate Millington is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Studies in the Geography Department at the University of Manchester. His research is focused on the politics of the urban environment in an era of climate crisis, with particular interests in the governance of water and waste. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow with the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town and a visiting researcher at the University of São Paulo, and he has conducted extensive research in São Paulo, Brazil and in South Africa. His current research is dedicated to understanding the relationships between climate crisis, financial capital, and infrastructure in cities marked by intense inequality.

Nate is a managing editor of the Situated Urban Political Ecology webspace and a board member of the AAG Urban Geography Specialty Group.

Twitter: @nate_millington

The financial industry has an image problem; capitalism functions by creating both wealth and poverty. But for financiers, the problem of poverty might just be reimagined as an investment opportunity.

"I'm looking at how - the way that finance works in cities is to create a lot of inequalities [and this] is starting to be incorporated back into finance; as people who are in control of capital are looking for both new things to invest in and also looking at a lot of bad PR from this [capitalist] process". Dr Emily Rosenman

Dr Sophie Webber is talking to Dr Emily Rosenman from Penn State University about how social finance investment works, and whether it is actually possibly to reduce poverty while making money. Social finance claims to solve social problems emerging from impoverishment and inequality; while spinning a profit at the same time.

So what is social impact investment? It’s a way for governments to outsource and incentivise the services that are provided to address social disadvantage, such as poverty. Under this model of social service provision, the government draws up a contract with an investor to address a social issue, say, housing poverty, outlines a set of social targets, and if the social program meets these targets, then the investor gets paid.

Guest

Dr Emily Rosenman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at Penn State University. She is an urban and economic geographer who researches relationships between finance, impoverishment, and urbanization.  Her current work focuses on philanthropy and other financial instruments that work to counteract urban sociospatial inequalities reinforced or created through the financialization of urban space.

Rosenman, E. (2019). The geographies of social finance: Poverty regulation through the ‘invisible heart’ of markets. Progress in Human Geography 43(1), 141-162.

Rosenman, E. (2018). Capital and conscience: poverty management and the financialization of good intentions in the San Francisco Bay Area. Urban Geography.

Episode 1 of the Country and Cities Series

This a truth telling, of sorts, about how urban planning and built environment professions are implicated in the settler colonial process, with Libby Porter and Naama Blatman-Thomas

"[Settler colonialism is] a structure of governance and control where white people - European people - arrive to a new territory, a new area, and create a new political entity there; so a new nation state. We're talking about something that is ongoing, that is not a one-time invasion, or one-time event, but really something that transforms the nature of that place invaded. And everything that comes with that; social arrangements, economic arrangements and political constitutions." Dr Naama Blatman-Thomas

We're listening in on a conversation between Genevieve Murray, Joel Sherwood-Spring, Libby Porter and Naama Blatman-Thomas. Genevieve and Joel are talking to Libby and Naama about three ideas in their recent International Journal of Urban and Regional Research research article: Property as Land; Property as Object; and Property as Redress. You can find a link to their paper on our website, which is titled, Placing Property: Theorizing the Urban from Settler Colonial Cities.

"From a policy, governance perspective, planning as a discipline, my discipline, and geography is fully complicit in the colonial project. In fact, it is central to it. It can't happen without it, because it is the form of governance that comes and is imposed on something that was already here, and is used to do all that work of erasure. But of course never do anything to grapple with or unpick the underlying foundation of the will to erasure, and the ongoing persistent  attempt by the settler colonial structure... to continue to dispossess." Professor Libby Porter

Professor Libby Porter is a Vice Chancellor's Principal Research Fellow. Her current work is in the areas of critical property studies, urban governance, decolonisation and settler cities, and on children’s sense of space and place.

Dr Naama Blatman-Thomas joined the University of Sydney in 2019 as a lecturer in urban geography Previously, Naama was a visiting academic and adjunct lecturer at James Cook University where she undertook research and teaching at the school of social sciences. Prior to her academic work, Naama worked for many years in human rights organisations in Israel/Palestine.

The Country and Cities Series

We’ve handed the City Road audio field kit over to Genevieve Murray and Joel Sherwood Spring from the Future Method Studio and asked them to hit the road to talk to professional urban designers, architects and urban researchers who are working with Indigenous knowledge systems in their research or practice.

Joel Sherwood-Spring, a Wiradjuri man raised between Redfern and Alice Springs, is a Sydney based Masters of Architecture student and interdisciplinary artist currently focussing on the contested narratives of Sydney’s and Australia’s urban culture and indigenous history in the face of ongoing colonisation. Joel began working with Future Method in 2017.

Genevieve Murray, before establishing Future Method Studio in 2013, worked with Ric Leplastrier, Glenn Murcutt, Mcdonald Wright Architects (London), Hungerford+Edmunds, Rod Simpson and Andrea Wilson. Genevieve has written for Assemble Papers, Architecture AU, and teaches and lectures between UTS and Sydney University on a sessional basis. The studio’s work has been nominated for the Conde Naste Design Innovation Award 2010 and shortlisted for the Design boom competition Design For Death 2013.

Production

Miles Herbert and Dallas Rogers are the producers, sound editors and sound designers of the series.

"... the terrain of struggle for justice is happening in the city and in the countryside, and it's beginning to link." Eric Holt-Giménez

In response to the social inequities and ecological damage wrought by the industrial and globalising food system, a growing food movement that champions food and farm justice, sovereignty and democracy is driving social, economic and political change across the globe.

This industrial food system not only creates food and farm insecurity, it reformulates rural/urban relations, city to rural migrations and vice versa, and the social and political networks in cities - even what it means to be a citizen.  

"You think about the United States or Australian, for instance,  how many people are actually on the land? Well, less than 2 percent of the population in both cases. In the United States we have more people in prison than we have on the land." Eric Holt-Giménez

Eric Holt-Giménez talks about la Via Campesina, a global womens rights movement. "Rural and indigenous women have a long history of oppression and struggle," says la Via Campesina. "Feminist struggles have resulted in the recognition of women’s rights as human rights, rights to education and resources and improved social status for some women."

"...because most of the farmers in the world are women, unless we have food sovereignty, we can't insure womens rights. And from the point of view of la Via Campesina, because most of the farmers in the world are women, we can't have food sovereignty until we end all violence against women." Eric Holt-GiménezGuest

Eric Holt-Giménez has been Executive Director of Food First since 2006. He is the editor of the Food First bookFood Movements Unite! Strategies to Transform Our Food Systems; co-author of Food Rebellions! Crisis and the Hunger for Justice with Raj Patel and Annie Shattuck; and author of the book Campesino a Campesino: Voices from Latin America’s Farmer to Farmer Movement for Sustainable Agriculture and of many academic, magazine and news articles.

Of Basque and Puerto Rican heritage, Eric grew up milking cows and pitching hay in Point Reyes, CA, where he learned that putting food on the table is hard work. After studying rural education and biology at the University of Oregon and Evergreen State College, he traveled through Mexico and Central America, where he was drawn to the simple life of small-scale farmers.

A gender sensitivity urban design process considers the political, cultural and economic factors that produce gender-based exclusion and discrimination in our cities.

We're talking with Associate Professor Nicole Kalms from the Department of Design at Monash University. Nicole is the founding Director of the XYX Lab, a research group looking at the intersection of Space, Gender and Communication.

XYX Lab is a team of design researchers exploring gender-sensitive design practices and theory. Their work operates at the intersection of gender, identity, urban space and advocacy. They bring together planners, policy makers, local government and stakeholders to make tangible the experiences of underrepresented communities in urban space and planning.

XYX Lab is grounded in feminist and queer theory and activated through real-world projects. Equal parts qualitative and quantitative research, they regularly work to collect and analyse data and experiences in order to generate deeper understanding and support our design projects. Their approach is inclusive of all gender and sexual identities. Nicole and her XYX lab team are thinking about how we collect and report urban data in new ways. Through their Free to Be urban design thinking workshops, they allow women from all walks of life to redesign the city in ways that will have real world impacts for women and girls.

Nicole and her team are using digital technologies and citizen research methods to collect and analyse their data. We talk to Nicole about the hyper-sexualisation of our cities. The idea that the hyper-sexualised images that are put on display in our cities effect how women and men act in and experience the city. Nicole suggest we need to gender mainstream our cities, and that gender sensitivity urban design will change our cities for the better. 

Guest

Nicole Kalms is an Associate Professor in the Department of Design and founding director of the XYX Lab which leads national research in Space, Gender and Communication. In this role, Kalms is leading two significant research projects Urban Exposure: Interactively Mapping the Systems of Sexual Violence in Cites and Women and Girls Only: Understanding the Spaces of Sexual Harassment in Public Transport. These projects are in partnerships with state, national and international stakeholders.

We’re travelling up the east coast of Australia with two early career researchers to talk about families and cities.

Our first stop is Wollongong, about 70 kilometres south of Sydney with Dr Susannah Clement. Our second stop is Brisbane, about 900 kilometres north of Sydney with Dr Kate Raynor.

Susannah has been tagging on with mothers and their children as they walk along the streets of Wollongong. She’s interested in the everyday experiences of family life in the city, and how walking is experienced by families with young children. For these families, a walkable street has been design with families in mind, and this includes opportunities for care and play. Susannah suggests that a walkable street – a street with spaces of care and play – is a street where pedestrians and cars are held in tension. Thinking about streets in this way forces us to think about the role of cars in our cities, but it also opens up new spaces for, well, being a family.

Then we leave the street and head up into a high-density apartment building in Brisbane with Dr Kate Raynor. We’re talking about high-density living and families. Kate draws out the tension between the use value of the home, or how we live in and make home in a dwelling, and the exchange value of a home, or how we value a dwelling as a commodity in a housing market. Kate’s worried that new apartments are being designed and built for investors and capital gains, rather than for families and family life.

Guests

Dr Susannah Clement’s research interests can be best described as taking a material feminist approach to explore the everyday experiences of family life. Her PhD research explored how families living in Wollongong experience and make sense of their everyday walking practices. The aim of the project was to understand how and why families make time (or don’t make time) for walking in their everyday lives. The project aimed to inform work around sustainable transport use, active travel and broader debates in the child and family geography literature about everyday mobilities and family life. Some findings of my research are explored in this blog post: Getting families moving: what makes a pedestrian friendly city for families?

Dr Kate Raynor is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, working on the Transforming Housing project. This is an action research project focused on investigating strategies to increase the amount and quality of affordable housing in Melbourne. The project combines academic research with a strong emphasis on engagement with industry, government and philanthropic partners. Kate’s other research interests include urban consolidation, higher density housing and media analysis. Prior to joining the University of Melbourne she worked in digital communications, providing community engagement support for large-scale infrastructure and development projects.

You've probably heard about residential mortgage-backed securities and the global financial crisis. But did you know corporate mortgage-backed securities were reshaping American cities at the same time?

During the Great Recession, the housing bubble took much of the blame for bringing the American economy to its knees, but commercial real estate also experienced its own boom-and-bust.

"... somebody would still be interested in the building they were putting up because it was viewed less as a space and place for economic activity to take place in and more as a financial commodity" Professor Rachel Weber

We're talking to Rachel Weber about her book 'From Boom to Bubble', and the role of tax increment financing and corporate mortgage-backed securities in the city of Chicago. Rachel debunks the idea that booms occur only when cities are growing and innovating. Instead, she argues, even in cities experiencing employment and population decline, developers rush to erect new office towers and apartment buildings when they have financial incentives to do so.

Focusing on the main causes of overbuilding during the early 2000s, Rachel documents the case of Chicago’s “Millennial Boom,” showing that the Loop’s expansion was a response to global and local pressures to produce new assets. An influx of cheap cash, made available through the use of complex financial instruments, helped transform what started as a boom grounded in modest occupant demand into a speculative bubble, where pricing and supply had only tenuous connections to the market. Innovative and compelling, From Boom to Bubble is an unprecedented historical, sociological, and geographic look at how property markets change and fail—and how that affects cities.

In Chicago, for example, law firms and corporate headquarters abandoned their historic downtown office buildings for the millions of brand-new square feet that were built elsewhere in the central business district. What causes construction booms like this, and why do they so often leave a glut of vacant space and economic distress in their wake?

Guest

Professor Rachel Weber is an urban planner, political economist, and economic geographer who researches the relationship between finance and the built environment. Rachel's focus has been on instruments (tax increment financing, auction rate securities, crowdfunding, mortgage backed securities, tax credits) and infrastructures (school facilities, toll roads, commercial real estate). She is interested in why cities adopt certain instruments and how the use of particular methods of raising capital affects who benefits from and pays for urban infrastructures. In her work she has advanced the concept of financialisation as shorthand for how these tools bring new politics, kinds of knowledge, and risks to bear on policy and development decisions.

What’s at stake in podcasting the urban? There might be more to this question than you think.

Podcasting the Urban is a five-part series where we turn the academic gaze back onto our podcasting practice. We are playing the first episode in the series in the City Road feed. For more details see:

https://cityroadpod.org/2018/12/19/podcasting-the-urban-five-part-series/

In 2018 City Road organised four public panel discussions to critically interrogate the idea of academics podcasting the urban, and we recorded two of them for this series. We ran the two recorded panel discussions as live listening events in front of a studio audience. At each event we played podcast excerpts from some of our favourite podcasts and we talked about them.

We discuss: Oral storytelling and Indigenous methodologies as radio practice; the history of Aboriginal community radio in Sydney; podcasting as an engaged research methodology; podcasting as a research dissemination tool; the politics of representation and voice; working across sound, text and images; podcasting technology and narrative; journalism verses academic ethics; urban sounds as data;

and more.