Urban Political Podcast

By Ross Beveridge, Markus Kip, Mais Jafari, Nitin Bathla, Julio Paulos, Nicolas Goez, Talja BloklandSociety & Culture Science Social Sciences

Urban Political Podcast episodes

September 26 114 - Everyday Geopolitics (Cities and Geopolitics VI)
A mini-series on Cities and Geopolitics by Urban Political Podcast in collaboration with the Second Cold War Observatory and Urban Geography Journal
Additional Links
Smeds, E., Verlinghieri, E., Kocsis, J., Connolly, J.J., Polgár, A., Manaugh, K., Waygood, E.O.D., Castañeda, P. and Wargent, M., 2023. ‘Seeing like a citizen’: Rethinking city street transformations through the lens of epistemic justice: Edited by Emilia Smeds and Ersilia Verlinghieri. Planning Theory & Practice, 24(5), pp.697-729.
Smith, S., 2012. Intimate geopolitics: Religion, marriage, and reproductive bodies in Leh, Ladakh. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 102(6), pp.1511-1528.
Moramudali, U. and Panduwawala, T., 2022. Evolution of Chinese lending to Sri Lanka since the mid-2000s: Separating myth from reality (No. 08/2022). Briefing Paper.
59 min
September 09 113 - Urban Political Economies and Geopolitical Worldmaking (Cities and Geopolitics V)
A mini-series on Cities and Geopolitics by Urban Political Podcast in collaboration with the Second Cold War Observatory and Urban Geography Journal
The fifth episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series examines how contemporary geopolitical transformations are increasingly mediated through urban political economies. From industrial policy and strategic investment to financial flows, real estate speculation, and technological development, cities have become central arenas through which geopolitical rivalries are organised, negotiated, and materialised.
This episode explores how urban space is reshaped by shifting configurations of global capital, state strategy, and economic governance. Our guests discuss how municipalities, regions, and urban institutions are drawn into broader geopolitical projects through infrastructure investment, development corridors, energy transitions, and competing visions of economic security and growth. In doing so, the conversation highlights how cities are not simply passive recipients of geopolitical change, but active participants in the production of new economic and political orders.
At the same time, the episode foregrounds the relationship between political economy and worldmaking. Beyond questions of investment and governance, it considers how urban transformations generate competing imaginaries of the future: visions of technological modernisation, green transition, national development, logistical integration, or alternative forms of urban life and solidarity. These processes are explored not only as material reorganisations of urban space, but also as struggles over how urban futures are imagined, governed, and inhabited.
Moving between global economic strategies and situated urban experiences, the episode invites listeners to rethink cities as key sites where geopolitical economies and urban futures are simultaneously produced. In tracing the intersections between finance, governance, infrastructure, and imagination, the conversation foregrounds the contested processes through which contemporary worlds are being made and remade.
1 hr 3 min
August 07 112 - Remaindered Life and the Architecture of Migration
Neferti Tadiar and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi in conversation with Nitin Bathla
Additional Links
Remaindered Life (Duke University Press, 2022) - https://www.dukeupress.edu/remaindered-life
Discourse on Imperialism (University of the Philippines Press, 2025) - https://press.up.edu.ph/product/discourse-on-imperialism/
Anti-Colonial Planetary Struggle: History, Humans, and Us (Bristol University Press, 2025) - https://bristoluniversitypressdigital.com/edcollchap-oa/book/9781529245547/ch007.xml?rskey=xror0y&result=3
Architecture of Migration: The Dadaab Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Settlement (Duke University Press, Theory in Forms) available open access - https://dukeupress.edu/architecture-of-migration
1 hr 4 min
July 15 111 - Bonus Episode: Geopolitical Ecology (Cities and Geopolitics IV)
A mini-series on Cities and Geopolitics by Urban Political Podcast in collaboration with the Second Cold War Observatory and Urban Geography Journal
What happens when we bring questions of power, territory, infrastructure, and ecological transformation into the same conversation? In this bonus episode of the Cities and Geopolitics miniseries, Nitin Bathla is joined by Malini Ranganathan and Garrett Graddy-Lovelace to explore the emerging field of geopolitical ecology. Moving beyond conventional understandings of geopolitics as a matter of states, borders, and great-power competition, the conversation examines how ecological processes, environmental governance, agrarian transformations, and everyday struggles over land, water, energy, and food have become central to contemporary geopolitical contestations.
Drawing on examples ranging from agricultural frontiers and resource extraction to environmental justice movements, the discussion explores how geopolitical projects are materialised through ecological relations and how ecological crises, in turn, reshape political orders across scales. The episode reflects on the growing entanglement of environmental change, security, infrastructure, and global inequality, while considering what a geopolitical ecology perspective can contribute to understanding a rapidly urbanising and warming planet consumed by wars and blockades.
The speakers discuss the intellectual origins of geopolitical ecology, its relationship to political ecology and critical geopolitics, and its potential to illuminate emerging struggles over territory, sovereignty, and planetary futures in the twenty-first century.
40 min
June 25 110 - Take Back the City: Grassroots Struggles, Housing Justice, and Decolonial Futures in Belfast
This podcast episode explores the political production of urban space in Belfast through the lenses of housing justice, grassroots organising, insurgent planning, and collective rights to the city. Developed as part of the Change Stories Project, the discussion draws on the experiences of the Take Back the City campaign and the work of Participation and the Practice of Rights (PPR), the discussion interrogates dominant narratives that frame Belfast primarily as a “divided city” defined by sectarian conflict. Instead, the conversation examines how colonial logics of spatial control, segregation, land governance, and infrastructural inequality continue to shape contemporary urban life, housing precarity, and exclusion.
Bringing together organisers, campaigners, and community activists, the episode reflects on how alternative forms of urban citizenship and solidarity are being built across communities in Belfast. Themes including mutual aid, Meitheal, collective stewardship, counter-mapping, solidarity sovereignty, spatial agency, and the kind economy are explored as practical and political frameworks for imagining more equitable urban futures. The discussion also situates Belfast within wider transnational struggles, drawing connections with anti-colonial and grassroots movements in places such as Palestine, South Africa, the Amazon, and other cities shaped by segregation, displacement, and structural violence.
56 min
June 10 109 - Corridors, Logistics, and Circulation (Cities and Geopolitics III)
A mini-series on Cities and Geopolitics by Urban Political Podcast in collaboration with the Second Cold War Observatory and Urban Geography Journal
The third episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series explores the spatial and operational logics of circulation, examining how the movement of goods, capital, data, and people is organised, accelerated, and contested across urban and regional space. Our guests discuss how circulation has become a central terrain of geopolitical strategy, focusing on a range of infrastructures, from economic corridors and port expansions to special economic zones, rail networks, and digital logistics platforms. The episode highlights how circulatory systems are not only designed to facilitate flows, but also to direct, channel, and control them, reconfiguring territories, reshaping urban hierarchies, and producing new forms of inclusion and exclusion.
The conversation traces how the control of corridors and logistical infrastructures materialises geopolitical ambitions in highly uneven ways, often generating fragmentation, dispossession, and environmental transformation along their routes. Cities emerge here not simply as nodes within global networks, but as sites where the frictions of circulation are negotiated, where congestion, labour struggles, infrastructural bottlenecks, and regulatory regimes reveal the limits and contradictions of seamless flow. At the same time, the episode attends to the lived and situated dimensions of logistics, showing how everyday practices rework infrastructural spaces.
This episode invites listeners to rethink geopolitics through the lens of movement and mobility, highlighting how the governance of flows has become central to the organisation of global power, and how urban space is continuously remade through the infrastructures, and frictions of circulation.
49 min
May 25 108 – Infrastructures of Power (Cities and Geopolitics II)
A mini-series in collaboration with the Second Cold War Observatory and Urban Geography Journal
The second episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series turns to the material architectures through which geopolitical power is organised and exercised. From energy grids and digital networks to ports, logistics hubs, and semiconductor infrastructures, contemporary geopolitical rivalries are increasingly mediated through complex, often invisible, urban systems.
This episode explores how infrastructures are not merely technical backdrops to global politics, but strategic assets and active instruments of power. Our guests examine how infrastructures are designed, financed, and governed in ways that embed geopolitical priorities, whether through the securitisation of supply chains, the territorialisation of digital systems, or the reconfiguration of energy networks in the context of climate transitions and resource competition.
At the same time, the conversation highlights how these large-scale infrastructural transformations are grounded in specific urban contexts. It considers how cities become key sites where global ambitions materialise in concrete forms, such as data centres, ports, corridors, and grids, and how these infrastructures reshape urban space, governance, and everyday life. In doing so, the episode foregrounds the uneven geographies of infrastructural development, asking who benefits, who is marginalised, and how these systems are contested on the ground.
Moving between planetary strategies and situated urban experiences, our guests invite listeners to rethink infrastructure not as neutral or purely functional, but as deeply political, contested, and central to the making of contemporary geopolitics.
49 min
May 12 107 - Tenant Politics and Urban Political Economy
Within the last years four books have been published exploring the political economy of the private rental sector, with a focus on inequality and resistance. This episode would bring together all four authors (see below) to explore the political economy forces driving the growth of the private rental sector and associated forms of housing injustice (e.g. unaffordability, evictions), the analytical approaches that can best draw out what is at stake in all this (especially from a political perspective), and how this all relates to the renaissance of tenant organizing across many countries in the Global North. By bringing together four of the most prominent authors/activists in this area, the episode aims to capture a crucial moment in the articulation of the emerging politics of the private rental sector.
The four books all share a critical urban political economy orientation, drawing on concepts such as financialization and rent. They are all also all interested in ‘residents as agents’, and the practices and organizational forms through which movements seek to create ‘tenants as subject’. The episode would not focus on any of the four books as such, but rather discuss the cross-cutting themes. As the books reflect a variety of different cities/countries, this discussion has the potential to gain a wide listenership and to inform tenant organizing and scholar activism.
1 hr 25 min
April 27 106 - Cities and Geopolitics I
A mini-series by Urban Political Podcast in collaboration with the Second Cold War Observatory and Urban Geography Journal
Additional Links
Schindler, Seth, et al. "The second cold war: US-China competition for centrality in infrastructure, digital, production, and finance networks." Geopolitics 29.4 (2024): 1083-1120. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2023.2253432
Schindler, Seth, and Steve Rolf. "Geostrategic globalization: US–China rivalry, corporate strategy, and the new global economy." Globalizations 22.6 (2025): 897-914. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2024.2434306
Schindler, Seth, Jessica DiCarlo, and Dinesh Paudel. "The new cold war and the rise of the 21st‐century infrastructure state." Transactions of the institute of British geographers 47.2 (2022): 331-346. https://rgs-ibg.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/tran.12480
Byrne, Jeffrey James. Mecca of revolution: Algeria, decolonization, and the third world order. Oxford University Press, 2016. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/mecca-of-revolution-9780190053772?cc=gb&lang=en&
Friedman, Jeremy. Shadow cold war: The Sino-Soviet competition for the third world. UNC Press Books, 2015. https://uncpress.org/9781469645520/shadow-cold-war/
Lorenzini, Sara. "Global development: A cold war history." Global development. Princeton University Press, 2019. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691180151/global-development
Roberts, G. "Revolutionary state-making in Dar es: Salaam: African liberation and the global Cold War, 1961-1974. Cambridge University Press." (2021). https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/revolutionary-statemaking-in-dar-es-salaam/29879C60DFB8D4D5CFAFFEBF5A55C944
Westad, Odd Arne. The global Cold War: Third World interventions and the making of our times. Cambridge University Press, 2005. https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/global-cold-war/75870878657DC67E0BC70FA7D2388494
36 min
March 12 105 -Transforming Local Statehood II: Progressive Possibilities?
While the first episode on the transformations of the local state focussed on current authoritarian takeover in different European contexts, this episode will zoom into the progressive possibilities of local state transformations. The episode discusses institutional changes within the local state, the role of other political actors and geographical scales as well as the limitations of localist solutions.
The episode is moderated by Matthias Naumann and Gala Nettelbladt, with contributions from Anil Sindhwani, Anke Strüver and Enikö Zöller.
55 min