City Road Podcast

Dallas chats with Vanessa about her delicately wrought essays and hand-drawn maps, Vanessa describes her encounters with unusual, forgotten or abandoned places in the city in which she was born and raised, using their details to open up repositories of significance, and to create an alternative city, a Mirror Sydney, illuminated by memory and imagination.

She writes at a time when Sydney is being disassembled and rebuilt at an alarming rate. Her determined observation of the over-looked and the odd, the hidden and the enigmatic – precisely those details whose existence is most threatened by development – is an act of preservation in its own right, a testament to what she calls ‘the radical potential of taking notice’.

Vanessa’s work combines a low-fi DIY approach with an awareness of the tradition of philosophical urban investigation. Her unique style of map illustration was developed through the making of zines and artworks, collaging detailed line drawings with text from typewriters and Letraset.

We round out our conversation with a drip into Vanessa’s latest book, Gentle and Fierce. Having spent her life in city environments, Vanessa’s experiences with animals have largely been through encounters in urban settings, representations in art and the media, and as decorative ornaments or kitsch.

Join us for a series of fascinating conversations about some of the most interesting books about cities and urban life.

Author

Dr Vanessa Berry is a Sydney writer and artist who works with history, memory and archives. She is the author of the memoir Ninety9, the ‘autobiographical almanac’ Strawberry Hills Forever and Mirror Sydney, an essayistic atlas exploring the city’s marginal places and undercurrents, and which won the 2018 Mascara Review’s Avant-garde Award for nonfiction. Vanessa’s latest book is Gentle and Fierce.

Host

Fenella Kernebone, Head of Programming, Sydney Ideas at the University of Sydney

Interviewed by

Dallas Rogers, Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney.

Dallas and Tom discuss Shaking Up the City, which critically examines many of the concepts and categories within mainstream urban studies that serve dubious policy agendas.

Through a combination of theory and empirical evidence, Tom Slater “shakes up” mainstream urban studies in a concise and pointed fashion by turning on its head much of the prevailing wisdom in the field. To this end, he explores the themes of data-driven innovation, urban resilience, gentrification, displacement and rent control, neighbourhood effects, territorial stigmatisation, and ethnoracial segregation.

With important contributions to ongoing debates in sociology, geography, urban planning, and public policy, this book engages closely with struggles for land rights and housing justice to offer numerous insights for scholarship and political action to guard against the spread of an urbanism rooted in vested interest.

Join us for a series of fascinating conversations about some of the most interesting books about cities and urban life.

Author

Dr Tom Slater is Professor of Urban Geography at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Host

Fenella Kernebone, Head of Programming, Sydney Ideas at the University of Sydney

Interviewed by

Dallas Rogers, Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney.

As we reckon with the violent settler-colonial basis of our cities, Dallas talks with Adam Morton about a recent literary economy analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Adam published this reflection recently in the journal Political Geography. It is titled A Geography of Blood Meridian: Primitive accumulation on the frontier of space (see: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0962629821001463)

There is a factual husk to Cormac McCarthy’s novel Blood Meridian; or The Evening Redness of the West, based on the real spaces and historical occurrences of a group of filibusterers, or mercenaries, based in the United States that engage in racialised acts of scalping Native Americans licensed by the state in Mexico between the 1840s and 1850s. How are these conditions of settler-colonialism to be approached in the novel and what meaning do they convey about past and present experiences of violent dispossession of land, life and territory?

By advancing an approach to world literature covering literary studies, geographical studies and political economy, Adam Morton argues that Blood Meridian should be considered a quintessential novel of the racial and historical geography of the frontier economy and its spatial expansion within the uneven conditions of capitalist development.

Blood Meridian can therefore be understood as both a novel about the constitution of the frontier economy and Indigenous defiance, resistance and survival.

Join us for a series of fascinating conversations about some of the most interesting books about cities and urban life.

Reader Bio

Adam David Morton is Professor of Political Economy at the University of Sydney.

Host

Fenella Kernebone, Head of Programming, Sydney Ideas at the University of Sydney

Interviewed by

Dallas Rogers, Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney.

Dallas and Shanthi discuss Shanthi’s fresh take on 21st-century migratory experiences and temporality from her innovative study of young Asian migrants’ lives in Australia’s cities and regions.

The book shows how migration has reshaped lived experiences of time and place for middle-class young people moving between Asia and the West for work, study and lifestyle opportunities. Through a new conceptual framework of ‘chronomobilities,’ which looks at ‘time-regimes’ and ‘time-logics’, Robertson demonstrates how migratory pathways can profoundly affect the temporalities of everyday life, from the timelines of career trajectories to the tempos of urban living.

Drawing on extensive ethnographic material, Robertson deepens our understanding of the multifaceted relationship between migration, place and time.

Shanthi and Dallas also talk about Exit West in this conversation, a book by Mohsin Hamid. Shanthi calls Hamid’s book ‘almost speculative fiction’, that follows a young couple who escape civil unrest in their unnamed city through magical doors that begin to appear, allowing people to move instantly to different cities around the world.

Exit West follows these characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Shanthi says this book is ‘only lightly speculative’ and can be read as a powerful commentary on contemporary migration and borders.

And if you like this discussion, Dallas also talked with Shanthi on ABC Radio National’s The Philosopher’s Zone, see Chronomobilities.

Join us for a series of fascinating conversations about some of the most interesting books about cities and urban life.

Author Bio

Dr Shanthi Robertson is an Associate Professor at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and an Institute Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University.

Host

Fenella Kernebone, Head of Programming, Sydney Ideas at the University of Sydney

Interviewed by

Dallas Rogers, Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney.

Dallas and Catriona talk Second City, which puts on display the diverse literary talents that make Sydney’s western suburbs such a fertile region for writers.

Beginning with Felicity Castagna’s warning about the dangers of cultural labelling, this collection of essays takes resistance against conformity and uncritical consensus as one of its central themes. From Aleesha Paz’s call to recognise the revolutionary act of public knitting, to Sheila Ngoc Pham on the importance of education in crossing social and ethnic boundaries, to May Ngo’s cosmopolitan take on the significance of the shopping mall, the collection offers complex and humane insights into the dynamic relationships between class, culture, family, and love. Brought to you by City Road and The Henry Halloran Trust as a 2021 Festival of Urbanism podcast series.

Eda Gunaydin’s ‘Second City’, from which this collection takes its title, is both a political autobiography and an elegy for a Parramatta lost to gentrification and redevelopment. Zohra Aly and Raaza Jamshed confront the prejudices which oppose Muslim identity in the suburbs, the one in the building of a mosque, the other in the naming of her child. Rawah Arja’s comic essay depicts the complexity of the Lebanese-Australian family, Amanda Tink explores reading Alan Marshall as a child and as an adult, while Martyn Reyes combines the experience of a hike in the Dharawal National Park and an earlier trek in Bangkong Kahoy Valley in the Philippines.

Finally, Yumna Kassab’s essay on Jorge Luis Borges reminds us that Western Sydney writing can be represented by no single form, opinion, style, poetics, or state of mind.

Join us for a series of fascinating conversations about some of the most interesting books about cities and urban life.

Editor Bio

Catriona Menzies-Pike is a Sydney writer, editor and former academic. She is the editor of the Sydney Review of Books and holds a doctorate in English literature.

Host

Fenella Kernebone, Head of Programming, Sydney Ideas at the University of Sydney

Interviewed by

Dallas Rogers, Senior Lecturer, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney.

We speak to tenants, tenant advocates and academics about renting during COVID-19.

"The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a hopefully once in a lifetime opportunity to fix the structural and systemic problems of housing that have always been here in Australia." Dr Alistair Sisson

"It's very easy to think that a housing crisis is an individual persons problem and I think what's really interesting and important about COVID is that it's drawn into sharp relief the fact that a housing crisis is a community problem and not just an individual problem."  Dr Emma Power

Guests

Academics:

- Dr Emma Power, Western Sydney University

- Dr Alistair Sisson, University of New South Wales

- Dr Andrew Clarke, University of Queensland

- Dr Chris Martin, University of New South Wales

Public and Private Renters:

- Catherine

- Henry

- Sammy

- Ella

- Caitie

Tenant Advocates:

- Leo Patterson Ross, Tenants Union of NSW

- Jemima Mowbray, Tenants Union of NSW

This episode was produced as a part of a University of Technology student placement at City Road by guest producers:

- Sam Dover

- Ursula Aczel

You might have heard about the 'structural adjustment' program, but what about the Green Structural Adjustment of the World Bank’s Resilient City program?

We're talking with Sophie Webber and Patrick Bigger about what they call Green Structural Adjustment.

Within environmental and development finance practices, cities across the Global South are facing a costly infrastructural crisis stemming from rapid urbanisation and climate change. This threatens to further entrench poverty and precarity for millions of people.

The cost of achieving urban resilience across the world dwarfs available public finance, however, from both development banks and governments themselves. Meanwhile, vast amounts of money on capital markets are searching for profitable investment opportunities. The World Bank is attempting to channel return-seeking investment into urban infrastructure in response to these challenges.

To harness this private finance, though, cities must be reformatted in investment-friendly ways. In a recent article, Sophie and Patrick chart the emergence of this discourse and associated practices within the World Bank. They call this rescaled and climate-inflected program of leveraged investments coupled with technical assistance Green Structural Adjustment.

Drawing on policy documents, reports, and interviews with key staff, they examine programs that include Green Structural Adjustment to show how it aims to restructure local governments to capture new financial flows. Green Structural Adjustment reduces adaptation to a question of infrastructure finance and government capacity building, reinscribing both causes and effects of uneven development while creating spatial fixes for over-accumulated Northern capital in the Global South.

Guests

Dr Sophie Webber is a human geographer, who conducts research about the political economies of climate change and international development assistance, principally in South East Asia and the Pacific region. In particular, Sophie studies how 'truth' (knowledge claims and expertise), 'capital' (financial flows and investments), and policy packages structure relations between the minority and majority worlds. Methodologically, this research requires relational fieldwork, examining how climatological and developmental crises and problems are interpreted, storied, and managed, both by local and governmental authorities, as well as by distant international experts such as the World Bank.

Dr Patrick Bigger is a lecturer in the critical geographies group within LEC. His research examines the ways in which financial actors and their logics and practices are being brought to bear on diverse, but interrelated, environmental crises. Conceptually, his interests include the relationships between environmental-financial products and environmental regulations/regulators; how environmental-financial products fit into broader trends in finance; and how environmental finance values (including, but beyond price) the nature it is attempting to protect. His work focuses primarily on climate change mitigation and adaptation, but also touches on associated environmental problems, particularly biodiversity loss through land use changes.

Publication

Green Structural Adjustment in the World Bank’s Resilient City

https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1749023

The world of night-time waste collectors, night shift nurses, office cleaners, rough sleepers and security guards rarely makes international headlines.

Understanding what happens in cities after dark is crucial to global sustainable development, but will also help create a fairer society that values the night-time economy.

The world of night-time waste collectors, night shift nurses, office cleaners, rough sleepers and security guards rarely makes international headlines.

Yet the night-time is critical to building a fairer and more sustainable future for our cities. To do so, we urgently need to think more strategically about what happens after hours in Australian cities. The night-time is a critical space for addressing some of today’s most pressing sustainability challenges. For example, internationally, energy use peaks during evening hours.

Then there is the an estimated 154 million people – about two per cent of the world’s population – who are homeless and face precarious situations at night when seeking food, shelter and transport in socially and environmentally hostile climates.

In Australia it is has been estimated that around nine per cent of employees works in the night-time economy. Many are on low pay and work in unhealthy conditions, juggling multiple jobs. They also face longer and more difficult journeys to work, or to access services, than their daytime colleagues.

More than two per cent of Australian households live in ‘food deserts’ concentrated in low-income and outer suburbs, like Western Sydney and Wyndham in Greater Melbourne, where access to affordable, healthy food options is limited or non-existent. At night, these conditions worsen as basic services like transport, retail and healthcare stop or shut and affordability plummets.

Guest Producer 

Kate Murray is a communications professional and knowledge broker focused on research translation. She has a Bachelor of Communication from Griffith University and a long multimedia career of content creation, ghostwriting and journalism. She is a natural organiser and community leader with a passion for collaboration challenges such as those found in interdisciplinary, international, or inter-organisational projects.

Kate joined Connected Cities Lab as Coordinator in 2018, building on a career within the University of Melbourne that includes a role as Communication Officer with the Networked Society Institute. Kate works closely with the Lab Director to develop and coordinate research projects, activities and engagement that align with the Lab strategic objectives. She is also responsible for overseeing the daily administrative functions of the Lab and providing support and advice to a range of research projects and the wider Lab research community.

Guest

Michele Acuto is director of the Connected Cities Lab, Professor in Urban Politics and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning. He is an expert in international urban development.

Transport is connected to social justice, freedom and equality in the city.

Transit networks are objects of intense political contestation and are key terrains of struggle in cities around the world. As sites of disruption, they signal the interrelated crises of urban poverty, social reproduction, security, racism, democracy, and climate. As sites of collectivity, they express the powers of being, acting, and moving in common.

We're talking to Theresa Enright about transit as a critical infrastructure of oppression and resistance and as a key platform for political and social change. Drawing on transit-oriented mobilizations in several North American cities, Theresa talks about how transit is tied to claims of spatial justice, and how practices of commoning are realizing new ways to design, operate, and transform mobility systems.

Guest

Dr. Enright’s research examines urban and regional politics with a focus on infrastructure and mobility. She has written about conflicts over urban transit in Toronto, London, and Paris. Her most recent work considers cultural dimensions of transportation through an analysis of the art, architecture, and design of urban rail networks. Dr. Enright is the author of The Making of Grand Paris: Metropolitan Urbanism in the Twenty-first Century (MIT 2016) and editor (with Ugo Rossi) of The Urban Political: Ambivalent Spaces of Late Neoliberalism (Palgrave 2017).

Specialty Focus Areas: Urban-regional planning; metropolitan governance, the politics of infrastructure, urban social movements, critical urban theory.

COVID-19 is altering city experiences and spaces. As cities respond, the contours of post-pandemic cities are also being altered, for better or worse. This podcast brings together a group of leading Sydney-based urbanists to start a conversation about what cities will look like post-COVID, and how pathways towards a just urban recovery might be fostered.

“We’ve been thinking about the imperative for innovation; how that’s reshaping how cities are being governed. And all of that got thrown into a new light by COVID” Professor Pauline McGuirk

We focus on whether COVID-19 reproduces or challenges existing urban inequalities, what innovations in urban governance are shaping recovery pathways, and what types of cities will result from altered planning and policy processes.

“To keep a critical analytical gaze on exactly what decisions are made and keep the pressure on about publicising who benefits, who may not benefit to the same extent, what effect will they have, and that’s long been a project of critical political geography, political urban geography” Professor Pauline McGuirk

Workshop Organisers

This episode follows a Zoom conversation on post-pandemic urbanism and the prospects for a just urban recovery, which you can listen to in full conversation below.

The workshop was organised by the following scholars and attended by almost 150 participants.

Pauline McGuirk is Director of the Australian Centre for Culture, Environment, Society and Space (ACCESS) at the University of Wollongong. Her research focuses on how cities are governed and the practices, techniques and politics involved as approaches to urban governance change.

Robyn Dowling is Dean of the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at The University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the character of everyday life in cities, and on the ways urban governance responds to the disruptions of technology and a changing climate.

Sophia Maalsen is an ARC DECRA Fellow at the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. She researches the intersection of the digital, material and the everyday, with particular interest in the digital mediation of housing and cities.

Tom Baker is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His research examines the politics and practice of policy-making and the governance of socio-economic marginality.

Workshop Panelists

You can listen to the individual panelist’s talks below.

Chris Gibson on the economy

Professor of Human Geography, University of Wollongong

Emma Power on housing

Senior Lecturer in the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University

Kurt Iveson on public space

Associate Professor in the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney

Jennifer Kent on transport

DECRA in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney

Elle Davidson on Indigeneity and urbanism

Lecturer in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney

Kristian Ruming on urban planning

Associate Professor in Geography, Macquarie University

Chris Pettit on technology and data

Professor of Data Science, University of New South Wales

Image: © Wendy Murray ‘Take your city back’