City Road Podcast

From preserving heritage to defining flood planning levels or calculating open space requirements, planning processes, and decisions are inherently bound by assumptions and practices from the past.

In this inaugural lecture, Dr Robert Stokes, former minister for Planning, Public Spaces, and Cities, will reflect on how these ‘wicked’ assumptions shape contemporary cities and define their future trajectory. Following Dr Stoke’s lecture, an eminent panel of policy and industry leaders will discuss whether and how outdated and detrimental planning assumptions can be contested and overcome.

KEYNOTE

Dr Rob Stokes, Former Minister for Planning, Public Spaces, Cities, Infrastructure, Transport, Education, Environment and Heritage

PANEL

Dillon Kombumerri, Principal Architect  Government Architect NSW,  Department of Planning and Environment

Davina Rooney, Chief Executive Officer, Green Building Council of Australia (GBCA)

Michelle Cramer, Future Communities Leader, Australia, GHD

PANEL CHAIR

Professor Nicole Gurran, Director, Henry Halloran Research Trust

Episode 1: Innovating urban governance: the work of Innovation Units

In this first episode in the Innovating Cities Series, Pauline McGuirk and Tom Baker discuss what innovating city governance means and explore one key example of urban governance innovation in practice: innovation units. Drawing from research on innovation units in the United States, Europe and Australia, the team tackles questions around how these innovation units work, what they hope to achieve, and the challenges they encounter in practice. The episode also raises wider questions about the longer termed implications of working in ‘innovation mode’ for urban governance.

Guests

Pauline McGuirk is Senior Professor of urban geography and Director of the Australian Centre for Culture, Environment, Society and Space, University of Wollongong.

Tom Baker is Associate Professor in the School of Environment, University of Auckland.

Thanks to our special guests Eliza Erickson (former Director of Innovation and Strategy,

Office of Innovation and Technology, City of Philadelphia); James Corless (Executive Director, Sacramento Area Council of Governments); Nico Diaz Amigo (Chief Innovation & Data Officer

Office of Accountability, Performance, & Innovation, City of Syracuse); and Shane Waring (Lead Dublin Beta Lab).

Innovating Cities Series

Across the series of episodes the Innovating Urban Governance team will be exploring these questions in conversation with practitioners from around the world about their insights in to the work of innovating city governance and its implications

New Orleans and Australia's Northern Rivers are miles apart but share similarities when it comes to natural disasters. This session shines a light on the difficult questions confronting communities as they seek to rebuild more resilient settlements in the wake of devastating natural disasters. Drawing on the experiences of flood urbanist Professor Elizabeth Mossop, and community leader Dan Etheridge, both of whom were at the front line of the New Orleans Hurricane Katrina response and rebuilding process, this special event asks what lessons can be learned from that experience and what planning, design, governance, and financial frameworks are needed to help other communities affected by catastrophic disaster and ongoing climate risk.

PANEL

Professor Elizabeth Mossop, Dean of School of Design, Architecture and Building, University Technology Sydney

Dan Etheridge, Director Living Lab, Northern Rivers

Jamie Simmonds, Principal Consultant, Water Technology

CHAIRED BY

Nicole Gurran, Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, Director, Henry Halloran Research Trust, the University of Sydney

From fragmentation to integration: Building collaborative governance

Different types of infrastructure need to work together to build and support great places and communities. Most of us can recognise the kinds of siloed and fragmented planning we see around us, but what do we mean when we make demands for, or promises of, “integrated governance”? This episode looks at the diverse challenges of trying to understand and enact integrated infrastructure governance within our highly fractured systems, including how government scales and institutions collaborate. We also hear insights about recent attempts at government integration from Joanna Kubota at the Western Parkland Councils (now called The Parks), an alliance of eight local governments involved in planning the Western Parkland City.

Researchers present: Glen Searle and Crystal Legacy

Guest: Joanna Kubota (Western Parkland Councils)

Production

This podcast series is sponsored by the Infrastructure Governance Incubator, a three-year (2020-2023) collaborative research platform—funded by the Henry Halloran Research Trust—across three universities (The University of Sydney, The University of Melbourne, and Monash University), and in partnership with Planning Institute of Australia (PIA) NSW & Victoria.

Audio recording and editing by Mikayla Scolaro and Dallas Rogers.

We're talking with Professor Kate Fullagar about her new book on Bennelong and Phillip.

Grab the book here:

https://www.simonandschuster.com.au/books/Bennelong-and-Phillip/Kate-Fullagar/9781761108174

This book provides the first joint biography of Bennelong and Governor Arthur Phillip, two pivotal figures in Australian history – the colonised and coloniser – and a bold and innovative new portrait of both.

Bennelong and Phillip were leaders of their two sides in the first encounters between Britain and Indigenous Australians, Phillip the colony’s first governor, and Bennelong the Yiyura leader. The pair have come to represent the conflict that flared and has never settled.

Fullagar’s account is also the first full biography of Bennelong of any kind and it challenges many misconceptions, among them that he became alienated from his people and that Phillip was a paragon of Enlightenment benevolence. It tells the story of the men’s marriages, including Bennelong’s best-known wife, Barangaroo, and Phillip’s unusual domestic arrangements, and places the period in the context of the Aboriginal world and the demands of empire.

To present this history afresh, Bennelong & Phillip relates events in reverse, moving beyond the limitations of typical Western ways of writing about the past, which have long privileged the coloniser over the colonised. Bennelong’s world was hardly linear at all, and in Fullagar’s approach his and Phillip’s histories now share an equally unfamiliar framing.

Kate Fullagar is professor of history at the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, in the Australian Catholic University, and co-editor of the journal History Australia. Her book The Warrior, The Voyager and the Artist won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction at the 2021 NSW Premier’s Awards.

Jamie Peck talks with Gareth Bryant and Sophie Webber about their new book Climate Finance: Taking a Position on Climate Futures.

Responding to climate change is commonly understood as a financial challenge: What are the expected costs of the impacts of climate change? How much money is needed to reduce emissions to a safe level and to help people live in a changing climate? Who should pay? While these questions reflect the big issues of climate politics - about historical responsibility, unequal exposure and the terms of possible futures - they do not tell us a lot about the relationships between and contestations over climate change and finance capitalism. This book develops an expansive definition of climate finance and a critical framework for analysing its political economy. Drawing from a wide-range of case studies, the authors highlight the diversity, scale and contradictions of climate finance entanglements - from funding renewable energy, putting a price on carbon, responsible investing and financialising resilience.

Sophie is an ARC DECRA Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Geography in the School of Geosciences at the University of Sydney.

Gareth Bryant is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at the University of Sydney. He works as a senior lecturer in the Department of Political Economy and as economist-in-residence with the Sydney Policy Lab.

This interview is a part of the 2023 Festival of Urbanism Book Club Podcast series

Dallas Rogers talks with Stephen Gapps about his new book, Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance — The Bathurst War, 1822–1824

‘In May 1824, what can only be described as a period of all-out, total gudyarra (‘war’ in the Wiradyuri language) had begun west of the Blue Mountains. Relations between Wiradyuri people and the colonists in the country around Bathurst had completely broken down, and the number of raids and killings occurring across isolated stock stations in the district had intensified.’ In Gudyarra, Stephen Gapps – award-winning author of The Sydney Wars – unearths what led to this furious and bloody war, beginning with the occupation of Wiradyuri lands by Europeans following Governor Macquarie’s push to expand the colony west over the Blue Mountains to generate wealth from sheep and cattle. Gudyarra traces the co-ordinated resistance warfare by the Wiradyuri under the leadership of Windradyne, and others such as Blucher and Jingler, that occurred in a vast area across the central west of New South Wales. Detailing the drastic counterattacks by the colonists and the punitive expeditions led by armed parties of colonists and convicts that often ended in massacres of Wiradyuri women and children, Gapps provides an important new historical account of the fierce Wiradyuri resistance.

Stephen Gapps has a long-standing interest in public history and the history of early colonial Sydney. In 2011 he won the NSW Premiers History Prize for Regional and Community history with my book Cabrogal to Fairfield – A history of a multicultural community. Since then he has held a position as a curator at the Australian National Maritime Museum. In 2014 he developed the exhibition War at Sea – The Navy in WWI and in 2015 curated the highly successful Black Armada – Australian support for Indonesian independence 1945-1949. In 2018 he worked on concept development of the new permanent displays at the museum that explore deep time and Australian maritime history. In 2017 he was awarded the NSW State Library Merewether Fellowship for a project on Australian resistance warfare for publication in May 2018 called The Sydney Wars – Conflict in the early colony 1788-1817, which became a book project. His most recent book is Gudyarra: The First Wiradyuri War of Resistance — The Bathurst War, 1822–1824.

This interview is a part of the 2023 Festival of Urbanism Book Club Podcast series

Adam David Morton, Professor of Political Economy in the Discipline of Political Economy at the University of Sydney, talks with Mark Steven about his new book, Class War: A Literary History.

This book is a thrilling and vivid work of history, Class War weaves together literature and politics to chart the making and unmaking of social class through revolutionary combat. In a narrative that spans the globe and more than two centuries of history, Mark Steven traces the history of class war from the Haitian Revolution to Black Lives Matter. Surveying the literature of revolution, from the poetry of Shelley and Byron to the novels of Émile Zola and Jack London, exploring the writings of Frantz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Assata Shakur, Class War reveals the interplay between military action and the politics of class, showing how solidarity flourishes in times of conflict. Written with verve and ranging across diverse historical settings, Class War traverses industrial battles, guerrilla insurgencies, and anticolonial resistance, as well as large-scale combat operations waged against capitalism’s regimes and its interstate system. In our age of economic crisis, ecological catastrophe, and planetary unrest, Steven tells the stories of those whose actions will help guide future militants toward a revolutionary horizon.

Mark Steven is Senior Lecturer in Twentieth- and Twenty-first Century Literature at the University of Exeter, UK. He is the author of Red Modernism: American Poetry and the Spirit of Communism (2017) and Splatter Capital (2017).

This interview is a part of the 2023 Festival of Urbanism Book Club Podcast series

Joe Penny, Lecturer in Global Urbanism at the UCL Urban Laboratory in London, talks with Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago about his alternative history of capitalist urbanization through the lens of the commons.

Against the Commons underscores how urbanization shapes the social fabric of places and territories, lending awareness to the impact of planning and design initiatives on working-class communities and popular strata. Projecting history into the future, it outlines an alternative vision for a postcapitalist urban planning, one in which the structure of collective spaces is defined by the people who inhabit them.

Álvaro Sevilla Buitrago is Associate Professor of Planning History and Theory, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (http://multipliciudades.org/). Blending critical spatial theory and urban history, his research traces the role of planning in the genealogy of capitalist territorial formations, understanding it as a device for the dispossession and reconfiguration of autonomous modes of social reproduction.

This interview is a part of the 2023 Festival of Urbanism Book Club Podcast series

Dallas talks with A/Prof Dinesh Wadiwel about his new book on the industrial production of animals for food, and where cities fit into this process.

This book provides the first systematic application of Marx’s value theory to animal labour within the context of capitalist food systems. Dinesh applies Marx’s value theory which builds on and adapts recent work in animal studies, posthumanities, critical race theory and feminist theory to provide new insights into human-animal relations under capitalism. He explores animals as labour, and the implications for the interaction of human and animal labour forces. The book presents animal-sourced food as a means of subsistence and social reproduction for human populations, and it elaborates on animal resistance and its role within capitalist production. Building on Karl Marx’s value theory, Dinesh argues that factory farms and industrial fisheries are not merely an example of unchecked human supremacism. Nor a result of the victory of market forces. But a combination of both. In Animals and Capital Dinesh untangles this contemporary handshake between hierarchical anthropocentrism and capitalism.

Dinesh is an Associate Professor in human rights and socio-legal studies, with a background in social and political theory. He is an expert in human animal studies, and disability rights. He has a background working within civil society organisations, including in anti-poverty and disability rights roles.

This interview is a part of the 2023 Festival of Urbanism Book Club Podcast series