Here There Be Dragons

Welcome to Stockholm!

For all the city's seeming calm and quiet there were many stories of fear, safety, and identity to be told. We are excited to take you to the big little capital of Sweden, where one in every five Swedish residents call home. Let's find out how Stockholmers feel about their city's bigness and smallness.

We are produced with the generous support of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts and Konstnarsnamden (The Swedish Arts Council. Our senior producer Adélie Pojzman-Pontay returns and we would also like to welcome our team of graduate assistants from the architecture department at the Rhode Island School of Design: Bilal Ismail Ahmed, Daniel Choconta Guerrero, Kimberly Ayala Najera, and Uthman Olowo. Fatou Camara consults for the show. Cory Jacobs does the music for the podcast. And the wonderful Adriene Lilly does our sound design.

Support us on Patreon for HTBD stickers and exclusive mini-episodes spotlighting some amazing digressions that we can’t fit in the show. http://patreon.com/htbdpodcast

Special thanks to Lev Bratishenko for voicing Ingmar Bergman.

Also check out the music of Kristofer Svensson https://xkatedral.bandcamp.com/track/ir-himinn-gr-nn and Slackerist https://movecutclone.bandcamp.com/track/slackerist-skogas-other-places.

This time around Jess Myers returns alongside senior producer Adélie Pojzman-Pontay, to discuss the triumphs and trials of Stockholm, Sweden. Since the Cold War, Sweden has positioned itself as a third way between Soviet collectivism and American capitalism. Through the eyes of Stockholmers we explore how that vision has aged, as politics across the West seek to cast the country as the ideal of a socialist future or the crumbling of a failed experiment.

Paris: Centres (Season Finale) by Jessica Myers

It will come as no surprise to you that Paris, a city that is roughly two thousand years old, has had many plans for urban utopias. Utopias of morality, technology, health, and much more. Plans for the aristocracy, for the poor, for police, for immigrants and on and on. But one person’s utopia can be another person’s nightmare depending on who you talk to. 

In this episode we’ll be diving into the utopias scattered throughout Paris in the 20th century. Who were they built for and who were they built to keep out?

This episode will focus not just on the identities of people but of places. We’ll be talking about the way that Paris is divided through years of history, politics and design. Cities have significant physical and psychic borders that create local bias and affinities. Paris is no different.

Last episode we talked about “French hipsters” or bobos and the anxiety about being perceived as one. This episode we’ll be expanding our ideas about how people want to be perceived in public space. The stereotype of Parisians being stylish and glamorous trendsetters is nothing new. But the more you get to know the city the more you see how style can be contentious. It often dances along the fault lines of gender, class, religion, race, and sexuality. How people dress is directly influenced by how they want to be treated in public space.

Bobo means bourgeois-bohème; a left leaning, culture loving elite. Kind of the French version of the hipster. Someone of or joining a more comfortable class who likes to dabble in the cultural spaces of the working class and/or ethnic groups. The bobo like the hipster is the boogieman of gentrification. No one wants to be bobo and yet we see them everywhere. And with their presence goes the neighborhoods we knew. This episode will be dispatches from and on the edge of Boboland.

Paris: Communautarisme (Community) by Jessica Myers

Does a good social mix create greater security for urban residents? 

This episode we're talking mixité or diversity. How does it affect public space socially and politically in the Parisian region.

Welcome back! This is the first episode of Here There Be Dragons season 2. This season we're listening to Parisians tell their stories of fear and identity in the city of lights.

You might remember the horrifying news we’ve heard from Paris as terrorist attacks rocked the city. Three attacks in the past two years. The one on November 13th 2015 left 130 people dead and 413 injured. These attacks lead to increased media attention and speculation about whether France’s capital was safe, what to do from there and who to blame.

In this episode we'll hearParisians talking about how the attacks affected them and how they see their safety in the city in their wake.