City Road Podcast

In Washington, DC, neighbourhood activists attempted to make themselves at home in their city by using the techniques of neighbourhood preservation. What became clear in that process is that those who control the historical narrative about a neighbourhood often have the power to shape its character and identity.

We talk to Cameron Logan, author of Historic Capital: Preservation, Race and Real Estate in Washington, DC., about the fragility of history and the battles over the past in the US. The physical landscape of Washington, DC, has been deeply shaped by grassroots citizen action organisations, especially preservation and restoration groups. These citizens groups sought to address issues of social and spatial justice through neighbourhood preservation. But as with most urban initiatives it produced unforeseen problems, and its benefits flowed disproportionately to those with established cultural and financial resources.

These benefits Cameron calls  'Historic Capital', which is a particular kind of cultural capital that can be turned into real estate wealth. Just like any other social or spatial tension in cities, urban planning rules that preserve old dwellings and neighbourhoods are never apolitical. In Washington, DC, the displacement associated with the battles over preserving the past have displacement logics with a strong racial salience.

Dr Cameron Logan is an urban and architectural historian and the Director of the Postgraduate Program in Heritage Conservation in the School of Architecture, Design, and Planning at the University of Sydney.

What is the secret life of land title registration? The Torrens system of land title registration, developed in South Australia in 1858, is fast becoming the most popular system of land conveyancing and administration around the world.

Sarah Keenan discusses the Torrens system of title registration that was invented for South Australia to assist the project of colonial settlement and land speculation. It was designed to increase efficiency of conveyancing, but title registration fundamentally changes the nature of title to land. The defining principles of Torrens title registration are ‘the mirror, the curtain, and indemnity’. These principles work together to hide the land’s unregistered history, making that history disappear from legal view. However the people who have those histories still exist. The Torrens system of title registration, or versions of it, are today favoured by the World Trade Organisation and World Bank, and are increasingly being adopted around the world in an effort to make land a liquid asset. New forms of title registration are being innovated to assist financial markets in land, for example the Mortgage Electronic Registration System in the US, which played a key role in facilitating the subprime crisis.

Whereas title to land in the common law world was previously conveyed using paper deeds that proved the owner had a history of possessing the land, under the Torrens system title is conveyed through the centralised, singular and increasingly electronic process of registration. The system was designed to make conveying land faster and more efficient, but it also changed the legal concept of land title, making it a discrete, dephysicalised object. Registered title is thus out of sync with land, which has a physicality and history that cannot be wiped away. This lack of synchronisation between land and title has a number of troubling effects.     

Dr Sarah Keenan is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London. Sarah is a legal geographer with research interests in critical race and feminist engagements with property.

The New South Wales state government recently passed legislation to remove a group of homeless people camped for several months in Sydney’s central business district.

Located just metres from New South Wales Parliament and some of Australia’s largest banks, the homeless camp was a practical response to a lack of affordable housing and a political activity designed to capture the attention of policy-makers and the general public. The state government’s legislation—which gave the relevant minister power to confiscate property and remove people from Crown land on public safety grounds—sought to end months of disagreement about who should take responsibility, and about what the appropriate responses might be. Was it the job of local government or state government? Should the campers simply be excluded from the central business district of Sydney? Or should there be a response that addresses the root causes of their homelessness?

The events in Sydney are not unique. Melbourne’s Lord Mayor recently attempted to introduce by-laws that would ban people from sleeping on the streets of the central business district. Public protests quickly followed. Elsewhere in the world, governments and civil society organisations are grappling with how to manage the seemingly intractable problem of homelessness, particularly in large cities.

In this episode we talk to Dr Tom Baker, a lecturer at the University of Auckland, about the 'problem' of homelessness. We discuss the factors that have led to the crisis of homelessness. We ask what policy makers and academics can do to address homelessness in the 21st century city.

Can cities experience growing pains? Not the type of growing pains we usually associate with awkward teenagers but the growing pains of population growth. 

Australia has one of the fastest growing populations in the world with most of us living in major urban centres. This puts pressure on urban planners, who have to deal with the city’s growth. To add to the pain, state governments do not always have the resources to cope with the development that is needed to keep up with the growth.

Associate Professor Glen Searle is an adjunct at the University of Queensland and the University of Sydney’s Urban Housing Lab. He talks with us about how other big cities have dealt with increasing populations, and what it might take for Australians to have the difficult discussion we need to have about population and economic growth.

How is the history of urban and land use planning connected to US racial discrimination? 'Heavily' according to Sarah Coffin! In 2014, an African American teenager named Michael Brown was shot by police in Ferguson Missouri. Michael Brown's death led to widespread protests across the United States and the rise of the black lives matter movement.

Many of us watching the events unfold on television. We probably made assumptions about Ferguson being one of those typically poor black US neighbourhoods, riddled with violence, crime and drugs – but according to Associate Professor Sarah Coffin nothing could be further from the truth. Sarah takes us back to the Civil War to show how the history of urban and land use planning are connected to racial discrimination in the US.

The 'Smart City' is not an urban planning term, it was dreamed up by large global tech companies. This week we hear from Dr Tooran Alizadeh about smart cities, the digital infrastructure that is required to enable them, and the need for telecommunications planners. This Sydney Business Insights podcast is from our friends over in the University of Sydney’s Business School.

The terms "Car Sharing" and "Smart Homes" conjure up images of driverless cars and automatic coffee machines. But the digital transformation of our lives is a bit more complex than this. In this episode, Robyn Dowling and Sophia Maalsen take a look at the digitisation of our urban lives. Sophia talks about doing digital ethnography and Robyn talks about the politics of digital infrastructure and data.

You could be forgiven for thinking that the Chinese are the only foreign investors buying housing in Sydney and Melbourne. There has certainly been a lot of stories about foreign real estate investment in Australia in the news lately. Often, this news is about Chinese investment in housing. 

In this episode of City Road Podcast we talk with University of Sydney PhD scholar Sha Liu, who has been digging into the patchy data to find out just how much foreign investment in Australian housing comes from China, and what makes Australian property so attractive to foreign investors.

There are more than 24 million pets in Australian homes. But our cities are not the easiest places to own a pet. You can’t take your dog on the train in Australia, and if you’re a renter owning a pet, well that can make things really difficult when you try to secure a home.

In this episode of City Rd Podcast we talk with Drs Emma Power from the University of Western Sydney and Jen Kent from Sydney University, about why Australian cities don’t necessarily share Australians’ love of pets.

We talk to Professor Nicole Gurran from Sydney University’s School of Architecture, Design and Planning about the impact of online home-sharing platforms for global cities like Sydney.

Short term rental websites have certainly transformed the way we travel around the world. More than 150 million people have already stayed in an Airbnb home and you can choose from over 3 million homes listed in more than 190 countries. That’s more than the world’s largest hotel chains, such as the Marriott and Hilton.

But by reimagining local residential homes and bedrooms as potential tourist accommodation, Airbnb and others might also be transforming local communities. These global digital tech operators are operating beyond the established tourist quarters of many cities, and in some places, they’re trying to bypass existing urban planning and building management controls.

So not everyone is convinced of the local benefits that these global digital tech operators promote. In fact, there’s increasing opposition to so-called “holiday home-sharing” platforms from local residents and authorities throughout North America, Europe, and Australasia.

There are concerns about the influx of tourists, and along with them, increasing noise, rubbish and traffic congestion. Then there’s the declining business for local tourist operators and a decrease in permanent rental accommodation in major global cities.

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