City Road Podcast

Welcome to City Road's 50th episode!

To celebrate we've invited the very first guest of the show, Professor Nicole Gurran, back to talk about how we started City Road, our first episode on Airbnb and Cities, and Nicole's current work on Informal Housing.   

We also talk about some fun facts about City Road and the broader work that is coming out of the Urban Housing Lab at the University of Sydney. 

So here is a fun fact; did you know that Elizabeth Farrelly launched City Road at the 2017 Festival of Urbanism?

Guest

Professor Nicole Gurran is an urban planner and policy analyst whose research focuses on comparative urban planning systems and approaches to housing and ecological sustainability. She has led and collaborated on a series of research projects on aspects of urban policy, housing, sustainability and planning, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Australian Urban and Housing Research Institute (AHURI), as well as state and local government. Recent research has included AHURI Inquiries on affordable housing supply (2016-17); housing markets, economic productivity, and risk (2014) and planning system performance (2012), as well as an ARC Discovery Project on the impact of urban regulation on housing affordability in Australian cities and regions (2011-2014). Professor Gurran has authored and co-authored numerous publications and books including Urban Planning and the Housing Market: International Perspectives for Policy and Practice with Glen Bramley(Palgrave Macmillan 2017), Politics, Planning and Housing Supply in Australia, England and Hong Kong, with Nick Gallent and Rebecca Chiu (Routledge, July 2016) , and Australian Urban Land Use Planning: Principles, Policy, and Practice (Sydney University Press 2011, 2007). 

Paper 

Hidden homes? Uncovering Sydney’s informal housing market, by Nicole Gurran, Madeleine Pill, and Sophia Maalsen in Urban Studies

Who owns London?

In recent decades, London has fallen into the hands of the super-rich. It is today the essential “World City” for High-Net-Worth Individuals and Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals. Compared to New York or Tokyo, the two cities that bear the closest comparison, it has the largest number of wealthy people per head of population. Taken as a whole, London is the epicentre of the world’s finance markets, an elite cultural hub, and a place to hide one’s wealth.

"It's about how money has power, and how money has converted and perverted the mission statement of the city, which is to be a place for all citizens..." Rowland Atkinson

We're talking to Rowland Atkinson about his new book, Alpha City: How London Was Captured by the Super-Rich, which is published by Verso. Rowland presents a history of the property boom economy, going back to the end of Empire. It tells the story of eager developers, sovereign wealth and grasping politicians, all paving the way for the wealthy colonisation of the cityscape.

The consequences of this transformation of the capital for capital is the brutal expulsion of the urban poor, austerity, cuts, demolitions, and a catalogue of social injustices. This Faustian pact has resulted in the sale and destruction of public assets, while the rich turn a blind eye toward criminal money laundering to feather their own nests.

"... enabling and allowing money to destroy [London's] social fabric to create new rounds of development activity that have given little or more benefit what-so-ever to the wider citizenry"  Rowland Atkinson

Alpha City moves from gated communities and the mega-houses of the super-rich to the disturbing rise of evictions and displacements from the city. It shows how the consequences of widening inequality have an impact on the urban landscape.

Guest

Professor Rowland Atkinson is Chair in Inclusive Societies at the University of Sheffield. Rowland is an urban sociologist with a strong inter-disciplinary element to his work. His interests have tended to focus on the urban/spatial consequences of social divisions. These interests have generated significant research projects on household displacement from gentrification, social exclusion and housing policy interventions and the rise of gated communities. Most recently, his work has focused on the impact of wealth and the wealthy on urban life alongside a strong interest in the public role of social science and the university in community settings.

Doomsday peppers consider the COVID-19 pandemic a 'mid-level' event that they are well-prepared for.

We're talking with Bradley Garrett about Doomsday peppers, underground bunkers and COVID-19. Doomsday prepping is the practice of anticipating and adapting to an imagined impending crisis, ranging from low level crises to extinction-level events

"The inability to know which disaster is being prepared for, or at what scale, coupled with the perceived inevitability of catastrophe, has created the palpable affect of dread that preppers are acting on." Bradley Garret.

Based on three years of detailed ethnographic research, we're talking with Bradley about a recent paper - ahead of his forthcoming book with more case studies - where he traces the activity of a single bunker builder in Kansas in the United States. Following its construction in the Cold War this missile silo was purchased by civilian Larry Hall in 2008.

Hall is an ex-government contractor, property developer and doomsday ‘prepper’. Since purchasing the missile silo, Hall has transformed it into a 15-story inverted tower block, which Hall calls the Survival Condo, but Brad calls a geoscraper. A community of up to 75 individuals can live in this geoscraper for up to five years. Inside, Hall has created a subterranean, sealed, self-sufficient and luxury habitat.

Bradley theorises this type of architecture as the Architecture of Dread, drawing on the work of Søren Kierkegaard’s 1844 The Concept of Dread and Sigmund Freud.

"The ‘objectless anxiety’ at the core of contemporary prepping, in contrast to the specific nuclear anxieties driving survivalism, is a ‘sense of existential dread we experience on many fronts’, without ‘much specification of particular risks’." Bradley Garret, citing Mills and Campbell.

Guest

Bradley Garrett is a cultural geographer based at University College Dublin. His new book Bunker: the Architecture of Dread is based on a three-year ethnographic study with people preparing for social, environmental and political collapse. The research was funded by the University of Sydney and will be published in August by Penguin in the UK and Commonwealth and Simon and Schuster in the USA.

In this episode we use Eugene McCann's four dialectical tensions to understand the COVID-19 city:

i) invisibility and visibility;

ii) privilege and privation;

iii) selfishness and solidarity; and

iv) absence and presence.

What’s the role of ‘academic experts’ in the debate about COVID-19 and cites, and how can we separate our expert role from our personal experience of being locked down in our cities and homes?

This is a question we’ve certainly been struggling with at City Road, and we think it's a question that a lot of academics are struggling with at the moment. Perhaps it's a good time to listen to the experiences of academics as their cities change around them, rather than ask them to speak at us about their urban expertise.

With this in mind, we asked academics from all over the world to open up the voice recorder on their phones and record a 2 minute report from the field about their city.

Over 25 academics from all over the world responded. As you will hear, some of their recordings are not great quality, but their stories certainly are. Many of those who responded to our call are struggling, just like us, to make sense of their experience in the COVID-19 city.

Reporters from the field:

- Roger Keil, Professor at York University

- Kurt Iveson, Associate Professor at the University of Sydney

- Tanja Dreher, Associate Professor at the University of NSW

- Carolyn Whitzman, Professor and Bank of Montreal Women’s Studies Scholar at the University of Ottawa

- Tooran Alizadeh, Associate Professor at the University of Sydney

- Eugene McCann, Professor at Simon Fraser University

- Beth Watts, a Senior Research Fellow at Heriot-Watt University

- Amanda Kass, PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago

- Elle Davidson, Aboriginal Planning Lecturer at the University of Sydney

- Creighton Connolly, Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln

- Kelly Dombroski, Senior Lecturer at the University of Canterbury

- Kate Murray, Connected Cities Lab at the University of Melbourne

- Em Dale, at Oxford University

- Matt Novacevski, PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne

- Mirjam Büdenbender, advisor to the chair of the social-democratic parliamentary group in Berlin

- Natalie Osborne, Lecturer at Griffith University

- Ash Alam, Lecturer at University of Otago

- Cameron Murray, Post-doctoral fellow at the University of Sydney

- Deepti Prasad, PhD candidate at the University of Sydney

- Madeleine Pill, Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield

- Matt Wade, postdoctoral fellow at the National University of Singapore is with Renae Johnson, an independent artist, in Singapore

- Susan Caldis, PhD candidate at Macquarie University

- Jason Byrne, Professor at the University of Tasmania

- Paul Maginn, Associate Professor at the University of Western Australia

Singapore is air-conditioning the inside and outside of buildings. This is about comfort and convenience, but it might also be about human survival.

In this talk with Dallas Rogers, Professor Simon Marvin outlines the scope and potential importance of a new agenda around urban climate control and urban weather modification, which he calls the 'new thermal fix' for our cities.

“And the challenge is already here, in Australia in many respects; The outside temperature is going to be so high it's not safe for humans to be outside; and that's quite clear.” Professor Simon Marvin

Simon’s research interests focus on socio-technical change and the urban condition. He has recently completed large collaborative programmes of work on the politics of urban transitions, urban living labs and the smart cities. His latest book with Andres Luque-Ayala “Urban Operating Systems: Producing the computational city” will be published by MIT press in 2020 as a freely available open access publication. His recent work is focused on the development of interior climate control for humans, animals and plants charting the increasingly strategic role of technologically mediated climates constructed to ensure comfort, convenience and survivability in a period of climate turbulence.

“So the critical question then becomes, if the outside is going to be survivable during increasingly frequent, and more intense, and longer duration periods of extreme heat, we’re going to need to cool the outside down.” Professor Simon Marvin

At Sydney his new work is focused on “Over heating cities” focused on understanding the dynamics, practices and consequences of the outdoor cooling industry that through a range of socio-technical systems provide active cooling through misting, FOG and even air conditioning in order to try to guarantee outdoor comfort and all-year round weather. Simon will work closely with Sydney Urbanism and colleagues in the school and university who specialises in different disciplinary approaches to urban overheating.

“And that’s about survival. It’s no longer about comfort and convenience. That’s actually about whether the human body can actually survive outdoors.” Professor Simon Marvin

Guest

Simon Marvin is a fractional Professor in the School of Architecture Design and Planning at Sydney University for 2020/21. He is also The Director of the Urban Institute at Sheffield University. Simon previously worked at Newcastle, Salford, and Durham Universities before joining Sheffield in 2015 and Sydney in 2020.

In this episode we talk to Matthew Mindrup about his new book, which provides an intriguing narrative about the practical and cultural factors motivating the development of the architectural model’s different uses.

"Painters make paintings, poets make poetry and musicians make music, but architects do not make architecture." Dr Matthew Mindrup

The attractiveness of the architectural model, he argues, is that it, unlike drawings or other two-dimensional representations of buildings, has a “here-ness” permitting their users to see before them an entire structure, the volumes of its spaces, and its constituent parts in three dimensions, including the size and location of the openings, its materials, and even its methods of construction.

Here is the book blurb from the MIT Press.

The Architectural Model: Histories of the Miniature and the Prototype, the Exemplar and the Muse

Rigorously researched and informed by the latest research, The Architectural Model is written to help orient the reader in the study of this important cultural object, its development, and its continued utility from antiquity up to the present.

For more than five hundred years, architects have employed three-dimensional models as tools to test, refine, and illustrate their ideas. But, as Matthew Mindrup shows, the uses of physical architectural models extend beyond mere representation. An architectural model can also simulate, instruct, inspire, and generate architectural designs. It can be, among other things, sign, souvenir, toy, funerary object, didactic tool, medium, or muse. In this book, Mindrup surveys the history of architectural models by investigating their uses, both theoretical and practical.

Tracing the architectural model's development from antiquity to the present, Mindrup also offers an interpretive framework for understanding each of its applications in the context of time and place. He first examines models meant to portray extant, fantastic, or proposed structures, describing their use in ancient funerary or dedicatory practices, in which models are endowed with magical power; as a medium for architectural reverie and inspiration; and as prototypes for twentieth-century experimental designs.

Mindrup then considers models that exemplify certain architectural uses, exploring the influence of Leon Battista Alberti's dictum that models be simple, lest they distract from the architect's ideas; analyzing the model as a generative tool; and investigating allegorical, analogical, and anagogical interpretations of models.

Mindrup's histories show how the model can be a surrogate for the architectural structure itself, or for the experience of its formal, tactile, and sensory complexity; and beyond that, that the manipulation, play, experimentation, and dreaming enabled by models allow us to imagine architecture in new ways.

Guest

An architect by training, Matthew completed a Ph.D. in Architecture and Design at Virginia Tech University on the physical and metaphysical coalition of two architectural models assembled by Kurt Schwitters in the early 1920s. Dr. Mindrup's ongoing research in the history and theory of architectural design locates and projects the implications that materials have in the design process. Dr. Mindrup has presented some of this research at conferences and published others in The Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), Interstices, Wolkenkuckucksheim and his edited volume The Material Imagination: Reveries on Architecture and Matter (Routledge, 2015). In August of 2019, Matthew will welcome the publication of his new book: The Architectural Model: Histories of the Miniature and the Prototype, the Exemplar and the Muse (MIT Press, 2019)

How do urban planners regulate the sex industries in our cities?

The sex industries - from sex work to porn production - are often perceived and therefore regulated as unsuitable businesses for the high streets and residential neighbourhoods of cities. We talk with Associate Professor Paul Maginn about the role the planning system plays in regulating urban sex-scapes, the conservative morality of regulating the sex industries in cities and the perverse urban outcomes when both collide. Paul argues we need to take the sex-scapes of our cities seriously.

"So people say, 'so what do you do?' I say, oh, I study aspects of the sex industry!" Associate Professor Paul Maginn

In his edited book, (Sub)Urban Sexscapes, Paul and his co-authors discuss the regulation of the commercial sex industry.(Sub)urban Sexscapes highlights the mainstreaming of commercial sex premises (e.g., sex shops, brothels, strip clubs and queer spaces) and products (e.g., sex toys, erotic literature and pornography); both which are now commonplace in night time economy spaces, the high street, suburban shopping centres and the home. They argue the aesthetics of commercial and alternative sexual practices (e.g., BDSM and pornography) permeate the (sub)urban landscape.

"I'm interested in the production, regulation and consumption of the sex industries; and that ranges from everything from adult stores through to online pornography". Associate Professor Paul Maginn      

We talk to Paul about the role of sex, sexuality and commercialised sex in contributing to the general character of our cities. We cover morality and planning rules, and Paul argues policy-makers need to be realistic about presence of the sex industry.

Guest

Associate Professor Paul Maginn is Programme Co-ordinator of the Masters in Urban and Regional Planning at The University of Western Australia. He is the co-editor/contributor of (Sub)Urban Sexscapes: Geographies and Regulation of the Sex Industry which won the 2016 Planning Institute of Australia (National) Award for Cutting Edge Research and Teaching. His research on the sex industry has examined male sex work in Ireland/Northern Ireland, the suburbanisation of adult retailing, and, most recently he has been analysing online porn consumption in Australia, the gender attitudes of male porn consumers, and porn expos as a form of sexualised leisure. You can find Paul’s podcast – Suburbanista Podcast – on soundcloud, and him on Twitter at @Planographer and @SuburbanistaPod.

What can urban alliances and community organising teach us about building political unity across difference in cities?

The 'progressive dilemma' is an apparent problem for contemporary left politics and our two guests have very different takes on the issue, and how it relates to urban politics. Our first guest is professor of politics from the UK and the other is a community organiser from Sydney. They discuss the challenges of centre-left politics and urban alliances.

"It's a terrible city sometimes, and it's a beautiful city, and there are interesting people in it that matter, who deserve the kind of city people want to live in. I think we need a core of people who are committed to that city, who are willing to transform it." Chantelle Ogilvie-Ellis

They talk about the possibilities for political renewal in political practices that build relationships across diverse urban geographies and political difference in cities, and in cultivating a belonging to place that is still open to and attentive of diversity.

Guests

Chantelle Ogilvie-Ellis is a community organiser with the Sydney Alliance, who spends her days meeting and working with a huge variety of people and communities right across Sydney. She, and the Sydney Alliance, are building a coalition of people willing to fight for a fair and sustainable city. You can read about the Sydney Alliance here.

Chantelle shares her experience organising across Sydney with Adrian Pabst, Professor of Politics and the University of Kent. Adrian is a key thinker in the UKs Blue Labour movement and author of the recently-released book Story of Our Country: Labor's Vision for Australia.

The Democratic Experiment Series

This episode is a part of a series called The Democratic Experiment and hosted by Rosie Hancock. Rosie researches social movements, community organising, and grassroots urban political coalitions. She is convenor of the Religion and Global Ethics program and is the Managing Editor of Solidarity: Journal of Catholic Social Thought and Secular Ethics. She holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Auckland, an MA in Arabic and Islamic Studies from the University of Sydney, and completed her PhD on Islamic Environmental Activism at the University of Sydney in 2015. Rosie is an Editorial Board Member of The Sociological Review, and the co-convener of the Sociology of Religion Thematic Group for The Australian Sociology Association.

The Democratic Experiment series is a partnership between City Road and The Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney. The Sydney Policy Lab exists to break down the barriers between researchers, policymakers, campaigners and the community at large. At the Sydney Policy Lab people of all backgrounds are coming together to strengthen our democracy, reduce spiralling inequality and help to empower communities to shape their own future.

Contemporary global circuits of policy advice are abuzz with 'urban solutions' from a growing industry of 'thought leaders'.

These urban experts talk about 'policy solutions' and 'best practice models' and they have a ready supply of policy success stories from around the world.

"What I'm really trying to study is this global circuitry of knowledge, a global network, and I'm engaging with cities not as specific field sites, but as entry points into this dynamic, fast-moving landscape." Rachel Bok

Rachel Bok calls this 'superlative urbanism'; a practice whereby urban solutions experts have created an industry out of selling city managers a range of urban fixes. And while we're talking about urban fixes, you really should read Rachel's paper on the idea of the 'fix' called By our metaphors you shall know us’: The ‘fix’ of geographical political economy. Rachel says the celebratory policy narratives about innovation and progress often stand in stark contrast to the lack of urban policy innovation on the ground.

"I see 'best practice' as a legitimising technique. You use it to mean a certain organisational benchmark. You have to say 'best practice' otherwise people... inside your organisation, people outside your organisation are not going to listen.

We handed the City Road audio field kit over to Sophie Webber, who is reporting from in the field in this episode. She's talking with Rachel in Washington DC about her global, multi-sited ethnography on the global urban solutions industry.

The global urban solutions industry "have also become rather inoculated; immunised to the language of 'best practice', which is why to them it is something that is everyday, it's commonplace, but it does really have much currency anymore". Rachel Bok

Rachel's undertaking a range of internships with businesses involved in the global circuitry of urban solutions for her PhD. We track Rachel down in Washington DC to talk about her global, multi-sited ethnography.

Guest

Rachel Bok is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia. Her research interests sit at the intersections of global urban governance, critical urban theory, and political economy. Her current research examines the globalisation of the urban “solutions” industry and its emergent norms and forms of superlative urbanism.

What makes up a nation? In the 21st century, nationalist frames are giving way to new interpretations of the global.

Dr Jennifer Ferng speaks with Professor Vikram Prakash and Professor Julie Willis about the Encyclopedia of Australian architecture, national identity, and the obstacles to capturing selected moments of history. Prakash and Willis speak about the tensions between the national and the global. They share personal experiences about how they each came to study Australian architecture and India’s architecture as well as how their roles in universities have come to shape their trajectories as academics and intellectual leaders.

Guests

Vikram Prakash is the Director of Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Programs in the Office of the Dean, College of Built Environments, University of Washington and founding board member of GAHTC – the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative. He is a fellow podcast host himself – in fact, he hosts ArchitectureTalk in the US – a bi-weekly podcast with curated conversations on contemporary architecture and architectural thinking. His books among others include Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India and A Global History of Architecture (with Francis DK Ching & Mark Jarzombek).

Julie Willis is Dean of Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the Melbourne School of Design. She is an authority on the history of Australian architecture 1890-1950 and has undertaken significant projects researching modern hospital architecture in Australia. She has also examined the importance of public buildings in community, civic and national identities; architecture during wartime and its subsequent impact on practice and production; and equity and diversity in the Australian architectural profession. Her current research includes writing a new short history of Australian architecture; the transmission of architectural knowledge through professional networks in architecture.