As the Global South rapidly urbanizes, millions of people have migrated from the countryside to urban slums, which now house one billion people worldwide. The transformative potential of urbanization hinges on whether and how poor migrants are integrated into city politics. Popular and scholarly accounts paint migrant slums as exhausted by dispossession, subdued by local dons, bought off by wily politicians, or polarized by ethnic appeals. Migrants and Machine Politics shows how slum residents in India routinely defy such portrayals, actively constructing and wielding political machine networks to demand important, albeit imperfect, representation and responsiveness within the country’s expanding cities.

Drawing on years of pioneering fieldwork in India’s slums, including ethnographic observation, interviews, surveys, and experiments, Adam Michael Auerbach and Tariq Thachil reveal how migrants harness forces of political competition—as residents, voters, community leaders, and party workers—to sow unexpected seeds of accountability within city politics. This multifaceted agency provokes new questions about how political networks form during urbanization. In answering these questions, this book overturns longstanding assumptions about how political machines exploit the urban poor to stifle competition, foster ethnic favoritism, and entrench vote buying.

By documenting how poor migrants actively shape urban politics in counterintuitive ways, Migrants and Machine Politics sheds new light on the political consequences of urbanization across India and the Global South.

Nicolás Palacios Crisóstomo is a doctoral candidate at the Spatial Development and Urban Policy chair at ETH Zürich. Born and raised in Chile, Nicolás has a background in political science and human geography, with a strong interest in the intersections of research and activism. He is currently working on his PhD project focused on the role of migrant platform labour in the production of space, as well as the urban experience of these workers in Berlin and Barcelona.

Adam Auerbach is an associate professor in the School of International Service at American University, Washington DC. His research focuses on local governance, urban politics, and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on South Asia and India in particular. Auerbach is the author of Demanding Development: The Politics of Public Goods Provision in India's Urban Slums (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and co-author (with Tariq Thachil) of Migrants and Machine Politics: How India's Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness (Princeton University Press, 2023).

Sofie Heintz is a PhD student in Political Science and Modern South Asian Studies at the University of Zurich. In her dissertation project, she aims to investigate whether and how the governance model of the Aam Aadmi Party has changed the dynamics of public service delivery in Delhi across different governance levels, how this affects citizens’ access to and expectations towards the state, and what the connected political implications of this might be.

Host:

Nitin Bathla is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich, where he works as part of the transdisciplinary project on agri-urbanisms at the Chair of Sociology. He also coordinates the Doctoral Programme at the Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies at the Department. His research practice actively combines academic research with artistic practices of filmmaking, and socially-engaged art. He is the director of award-wining film Not Just Roads, which premiered at several important film festivals across the world. Twitter – @nitin_bathla

In this second part of the series Urban Lives of Property, Hanna and Markus talk to Vera Smirnova, a human and political geographer to discuss property and territory from a Russian perspective. Smirnova’s genealogical account moves from the Czarist period to this day, illuminating also the current Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Smirnova offers a tour de force through Russia’s moving history of the last 150 years, addressing practices of serfdom, enclosures in the early 20th century, land collectivization following the Russian revolution and waves of privatization after 1991. Throughout this period the institution of property is shown to be fuzzy, insecure, and informal, a legacy that continues to this day as evidenced in current urban planning legislation and extra-legal practices of land grabbing. Similarly reflecting a pliability for powerful political interests, territory has been historically considered as vast, borderless and expansive. Smirnova identifies three ontologies of territory (commoning, assembling and peopling) that have determined the dynamics of Russian state territorialization as evidenced in the accounts of 19th century geographers and anthropologists whose ideas continue to influence foreign policy today. As decolonial rhetorics have been integrated and instrumentalized for Russia’s geopolitical strategy for the past century, Smirnova “thinks between the posts” – postcolonialism and postsocialism – and considers the role of Russia today in postcolonial discussions. Her reflection on the Russian land commune (obshchina) is a fascinating, as Smirnova discusses the origins of the land comnune, the persistence during feudalism and state-building, its instrumentalization during land collectivization and its ongoing powerful imaginary.

Guest:

Vera Smirnova is an assistant professor in Geography and Political Science at Kansas State University. Her work falls at the intersection of political geography, urban and territorial politics and explores the relations between land and power and their various manifestations in pre-and post-Soviet Russia. In particular, it tackles the question of how rights to land ownership and other modes of the appropriation of space are negotiated and how territorial policies are performed through formal and informal technologies of power. Through this lens, Vera researched Russian land privatization reforms, as well as perceptions of territorial integrity in Russian political and geographic thought. Her work has appeared in various outlets, among which are the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Geoforum, and Geographica Helvetica. Vera is also a co-Chair of the Eurasian Geography Specialty Group at the American Association of Geographers and an adjunct researcher at the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at the University of Kansas.

Articles by Vera discussed during the conversation:

Smirnova, V and Golubchikov, O (2023) More-Than-State Ontologies of Territory: Commoning, Assembling, Peopling. Annals of the American Association of Geographers: 1-17

Cover Image:

Meet urban scholar Oleg Pachenkov who left Russia few weeks after the invasion of Ukraine. Markus speaks with him about his personal and professional trajectory as a critical scholar bringing him to Berlin. The conversation covers the breakdown of the public sphere in Russia within weeks after the start of the war in Ukraine and Oleg's personal confrontation with a repressive system ready to crack down on critical voices. Self-censorship, Aesopian language and the retreat to the private sphere are aspects that now characterize dynamics of discussion in the attempt to cope with the authoritarian reality in the country. Olegs talk to us about the institutionalization of Urban Studies and the discrepancy between those parts who have arranged themselves within the regime, and those that didn't, between those actors who have stayed in the country and those who have fled. We hear Oleg reflect on these divisions and what needs to be learned for the future - for scholars both in Russia as well as beyond.

Guest:

Oleg Pachenkov, Dr., is a sociologist specialized in urban studies. He received his Doctor degree (Candidate of Science in sociology) at sociology department of St.-Petersburg State University in 2009. Since 2023 he is working as Research fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin in a research group "Urban Futures at Risk" supported by Einstein Foundation and based at Georg Simmel Zentrum for Metropolitan Studies. He is working mainly in the fields of urban studies and interdisciplinary art / social science projects as well as consulting on participatory urban development and participatory budgeting, and organises informal education & training programs for urban activists.

Previously, he worked for more than two decades as a leading researcher and a project coordinator ate the Center for Independent Social Reserach (CISR) in St.-Petersburg Russia. Starting in 2016 Dr. Pachenkov has also been working as an expert in the projects of CISR e.V. Berlin. From 2012 until 2022, he also led the Center for Applied Research (CeAR) at European University at St.-Petersburg (EUSP), worked as a Project leader and consultant at the Center "UP" for Urbanism and Participation at EUSP (2020-2022).

In 2006 Dr. Pachenkov received prestigious German Chancellor scholarship by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (BUKA) and did a research based at Humbioldt University of Berlin. In 2010 Oleg Pachenkov co-established an interdisciplinary expert & activist platform Open Urban Lab (OUL). Since 2012 he is a chief editor of the series of books titled Studia Urbanica at the NLO Publishing House in Russia. In 2021 he established an interdisciplinary educational program CO-URBANISM based at EUSP.

More about his activitires at: http://www.pachenkovvoronkova.com

Image Credits: View on St. Petersburg Graham from London, UK, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This podcast series explores the "life of property" in urban theory and practice. In conversations with scholars who have led the way in property debates, it aims is to advance conceptual and theoretical groundwork on this notion that fundamentally shapes everyday urban lives and political discussion about the city.

Within the social sciences and critical urban research property has lived a mostly implicit and underexamined life for several decades. Over the last years, it has become more central to conceptual, theoretical, and empirical work. Taking up this (renewed) interest in the concept, the series employs property as an entry point into critical urban debates about appropriation, dispossession and expropriation. The series seeks to situate the notion of property within urban research and to scrutinize power dynamics around property and their impacts on urban trajectories. Moreover we aim to provincialize Eurocentric understandings of property by bringing post-colonial, Indigenous, post-socialist (along with other "more global/Southern") approaches into the conversation.

Guest:

In this first conversation we are joined by Nick Blomley, Professor of Geography at Simon Fraser University (FRSC). His work focuses on legal geography, particularly in relation to property. He is interested in the spatiality of legal practices and relationships, as well as the worldmaking consequences of such legal geographies. His new book, Territory: New Trajectories in Law, was published with Routledge in 2023.

Building on Nick Blomley's foundational work, this episodes serves to clarify conceptions of property, related social theories and their trajectories in urban debates. Moreover, we scrutinize contestations of property and delve into questions of territory that are raised in Nick's new book.

Podcast Hosts: Hanna Hilbrandt, University of Zurich; Markus Kip, University of Jena

Stay tuned for the next conversation in this series with Vera Smirnova, Kansas State University.

Episode Cover: Davidbena, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Community land trusts are proliferating across the globe, promoted as a potential solution to the ever-worsening affordable housing crisis. CLTs provide a mechanism for decommodification, collective ownership, and community control; however, those ideals are hard to operationalize, and many CLTs function more as traditional affordable housing providers than as urban commons. This episode discusses the causes of this tension as well as regional differences and issues of funding and scale framed around the question: are CLTs transformative?

The moderator of this podcast is Mathilde Lind Gustavussen. She is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her research focuses on housing, displacement, and tenant activism in Los Angeles.

The panel of guests consists of:

Nele Aernouts is assistant professor of urban design and planning at the Cosmopolis Centre for Urban Research, Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Her research interests lie in the planning, spatial design and governance of social and collective housing initiatives, with a specific focus on their effects on the inclusion of disadvantaged or marginalized groups. Theoretically, her work is informed by debates surrounding participatory planning, housing policy, and the commons: https://www.cosmopolis.be/people/nele-aernouts

Tarcyla Fidalgo is a lawyer and urban planner. She has a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her research is focused on land tenure and community development, especially on Community Land Trusts and their potential in the Global South. Currently she coordinates the Favela Community Land Trust project at Catalytic Communities, in Rio de Janeiro - Brazil.

Olivia R. Williams is a researcher, writer, advocate, and practitioner working for the decommodification of land and housing. She received a PhD in Geography in 2017 from Florida State University with research on community land trusts (CLTs), and began working at Madison Area Community Land Trust in Madison, Wisconsin as the executive director in 2020. She was also part of a research collaboration with MIT CoLab in developing the 2020 report, A Guide to Transformative Land Strategies. She has published in Urban Geography, Antipode, Housing Studies, Local Economy, and Area, among other academic outlets, as well as non-academic outlets like Jacobin, Shelterforce, and the 2020 book of essays on CLTs, On Common Ground.She also has served in board, staff, and volunteer leadership roles at various cooperative land-and-housing organizations such as Madison Community Cooperative, North American Students of Cooperation (NASCO), EcoVillagers Alliance, and Riverwest Investment Cooperative.

The episode was edited by Ross Beveridge.

How do “peripheries” form? And how does urbanization generate processes of peripheralization? Today, urban research is increasingly confronted with processes of extended urbanization that unfold far beyond cities and agglomerations: novel patterns of urbanization are crystallizing in agricultural areas and in remote landscapes, challenging inherited conceptions of the urban as a bounded and dense settlement type. While certain territories of extended urbanisation experience growth, others are affected by peripheralisation, experiencing deep socio-economic and ecological restructuring, marginalisation and inequality, and the re-articulation of power and privilege. These observations advocate for a radical reconceptualization of the experience of periphery at various spatial scales.

In this podcast, we discuss peripheralization not as a static spatial condition, but as a dynamic process that is shaped by uneven urbanization and complex multi-scalar relations, strongly put forward through moments of “crisis”. We debate on perpheralisation processes which manifest in different scales and geographies and discuss both their socioeconomic and ecological implications, as well as the emancipatory potential in ex-centric territories in times of exception.

The podcast follows the intense discussions that took place this August in Athens, during the RC21 conference, in the context of Panel 26 entitled ‘Peripheralization. The production of ex-centric places as an ordinary process of extended urbanisation’ conveyed by Christian Schmid and Metaxia Markaki, hosting twenty-six international contributions. Warm thanks and extended credits to all participants of Panel 26.

Shubhra Gururani is the Director of York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) and Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at York University, Canada. Her research lies at the intersection of urban anthropology, cultural and feminist geography, and political ecology and focuses on peripheral urbanization, agrarian-urban transformation, property-making, and caste politics. She is currently conducting an anthropological study of disappearing water bodies and flooding amid real-estate led urbanization in India. Her essays have appeared in

Christian Schmid is a geographer, sociologist and urban researcher, Professor of Sociology at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zürich. He has authored, co-authored, and co-edited numerous publications on theories of the urban and of space, on Henri Lefebvre, on territorial urban development, and on the comparative analysis of urbanisation. Together with architects Roger Diener, Jacques Herzog, Marcel Meili and Pierre de Meuron he co-authored the book Switzerland: an urban portrait, a pioneering analysis of extended urbanisation. Together with Neil Brenner he worked on the theorisation and investigation of emergent formations of planetary urbanisation. He is cofounder of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA). Currently, he also leads a project on Territories of Extended Urbanisation and one on Agrarian Questions under Planetary Urbanisation, which is based at the ETH Future Cities Laboratory Singapore.

Michael Lukas is an Assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Chile. His research focuses on the intersections of international political economy, urban political geography, and power relations in planning and governance in Latin American urbanization processes. Recently, he has been working on the role of corporate power and the extractive industries in urban development and governance in Chile and beyond. He is member of the international Contested Territories network, Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Investigaciones Geograficas and, together with Nadine Reis, the editor of the book Beyond the Megacity. New Dimensions of Peripheral Urbanization in Latin America, part of the series Suburbanisms.

Giulia Torino is a post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Geography and Teaching Associate at the Department of Politics, University of Cambridge. With a focus on Latin America and, more recently, the Mediterranean, her work centers around the changing politics of dwelling under global displacement and racial capitalism, at the intersection of urban and political geography, anthropology and sociology. Her current project “Extending Urbanisation: Migration, Labour and the Struggle for Place in the Black Mediterranean,” co-funded by the British Academy, explores the making of precarious forms of inhabitation at the nexus of transnational human movement, agro-industrial labor, and extended forms of urban life.

Podcast Hosts

Metaxia Markaki is an architect, educator and urban researcher, currently completing her PhD at ETH LUS Institute on processes of peripheralisation unfolding in mountainous Greece. She has recently contributed to the edited volume Extended Urbanisation: Tracing Planetary Struggles (eds. Schmid, Topalovic) with the chapter “Contesting the Expropriation of Land and Nature: The Peripheralisation of Arcadia.” Together with Christian Schmid, she co-chaired in August 2022, the RC21 Athens Panel 26, “Peripheralisation: An ordinary process of extended urbanisation in times of exception.”

Faiq Mari فائق مرعي

Introduction Voice: Dr. Nicolò Molinari, discussing his paper “Peripheralization processes and the emerging of new landscapes of conflict: between the Yellow Vests movement and the George Floyd rebellion.”

Podcast editing: Metaxia Markaki

LINKS

Shubhra Gururani : Engaging the Urban from the Periphery [https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/7131]

Christian Schmid : Henri Lefebvre and the theory of production of space

Michael Lukas : Beyond the Megacity: New Dimensions of Peripheral Urbanization in Latin America

Listen to this gripping account from the current „Woman Life Freedom“ movement in Iran and its impact on cities and their inhabitants. The movement was sparked by the killing of Mahsa Jina Amini in the custody of the Islamic regime’s „morality police“ in September 2022. After several weeks of uprising, the media coverage in Western countries has become more silent, in part, due to the extremely repressive acts of the government in which several people have been killed and many imprisoned. The regime has also made a deliberate attempt to control communication channels and even shut down the internet, making it more difficult for news about events to leave the country. The movement, however, is still very alive as you will hear in this episode. And it requires ongoing international attention, support, and mounting pressure against the regime.

A few days ago, we received audio records from Tehran activists and urban scholars, who bravely shared their absorbing experiences and analyses of the ongoing uprising. They delve into the symbolic character of the hijab, provide historical and geographical context to the movement, and discuss the challenges they're facing in their fight for freedom and equality. These speakers have chosen to remain anonymous, using aliases for their safety, as they've been repeatedly subjected to repression. We are in awe of their strength and determination in the face of adversity.

A big thank you to "Neda" who arranged and produced this podcast and everyone else involved in making this episode possible and whose names we cannot credit officially here.

At the end of the episode, you hear the "Liberty Song" from students of Tehran Art University. See also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoQNzoKwAUs

Links for further information:

https://linktr.ee/wlfkollektiv

https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/middle-east-and-north-africa/iran/

Having just celebrated the 10th anniversary of the important German-language journal for critical urban research, Ross speaks with sub\urban editorial members Gala Nettelbladt and Nina Gribat about why it is important to foster discussion around urban research in German, the challenge of organizing a horizontal editorial collective, of realizing an open access publication strategy, and of relating to political struggles of the current moment - among many other topics!

About the journal:

Guests:

Nina Gribat is an urban and planning scholar with a background in architecture and urban planning. Her current work examines hybrid urbanisms based on the delivery configurations of water and moblity in Ghana and Peru and practices of contemporary cultural production in rural areas in Brandenburg. She is part of the editorial collective sub\urban. zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung.

Gala Nettelbladt is an interdisciplinary urban scholar with a dual background in Social Sciences and Urban Planning. Her current work investigates the urban politics of far-right contestations in planning and governance processes. She is part of the editorial collective sub\urban. zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung.

For more information about the financing consortium for open access publishing "KOALA" - in which sub\urban is member - see here: https://projects.tib.eu/koala/en/project/

The book provides an overview of ecologically conscious contemporary art that responds to today’s environmental crisis, from species extinction to climate change.

Art and Climate Change collects a wide range of artistic responses to our current ecological emergency. When the future of life on Earth is threatened, creative production for its own sake is not enough. Through contemporary artworks, artists are calling for an active, collective engagement with the planet in order to illuminate some of the structures that threaten biological survival.

Exploring the meeting point of decolonial reparation and ecological restoration, artists are remaking history by drawing on the latest ecological theories, scientific achievements, and indigenous worldviews to engage with the climate crisis. Across five chapters, authors Maja and Reuben Fowkes examine these artworks that respond to the Anthropocene and its detrimental impact on the planet’s climate, from scenes of nature decimated by ongoing extinction events and landscapes turned to waste by extraction, to art coming out of the communities most affected by the environmental injustice of climate change.

Featuring a broad range of media, including painting, photography, conceptual, installation, and performance, this text also dives into eco-conscious art practices that have created a new kind of artistic community by stressing a common mission for creators all over the world. In this art history, the authors emphasize the importance of caring for and listening to marginalized and indigenous communities while addressing climate uncertainty, deforestation, toxicity, and species extinction. By proposing scenarios for sustainable futures, today’s artists are reshaping our planet’s history, as documented in this heavily illustrated book.

Host:

Nitin Bathla is a lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich, where he works as part of the transdisciplinary project on agri-urbanisms at the Chair of Sociology. He also coordinates the Doctoral Programme at the Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies at the Department. His research practice actively combines academic research with artistic practices of filmmaking, and socially-engaged art. He is the director of award-wining film Not Just Roads, which premiered at several important film festivals across the world.

Guests:

Dr. Maja Fowkes and Dr. Reuben Fowkes are art historians, curators and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Central and Eastern European Art Since 1950 (Thames & Hudson, 2020) and Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021). Recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions “Colliding Epistemes” at Bozar Brussels (2022) and “Potential Agrarianisms” at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021). Their research on the “Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts” is supported by a UKRI Frontier Research grant. www.translocal.org

Debjani Bhattacharyya holds the Chair of the History of the Anthropocene at the University of Zürich and is the author of Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge University Press, 2018) won the 2019 honorable mention for the best book in Urban History. Her work has been supported by the American Institute of Indian Studies, The History Project funded by the Joint Centre for History and Economics, Harvard University, and Social Science Research Council. She held visiting fellowships at the International Institute of Asian Studies (Leiden), Max-Planck-Institute for Legal History (Frankfurt), and the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies, Princeton University. Her work has been published in the Journal of Social and Economic History of the Orient, Comparative Studies in South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Economic and Political Weekly, Global Environment, and Modern Asian Studies. She is the editor for History Compass. Her writings have also appeared in The Telegraph, Amrita Bajar Patrika, n+1, The Diplomat, and Somatosphere.

Tatjana Schneider is Professor for Architectural Theory at Technical University Braunschweig, where she heads the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture and the City (GTAS) and the Collection for Architecture and Civil Engineering (SAIB). Her work – from setting up the architectural workers cooperative G.L.A.S. via Flexible Housing and Spatial Agency as well as running for mayor of Braunschweig in 2021 – is concerned with focusing attention to aspects and mechanisms that explain architecture in context of its political, economic and imperial entanglements.

Twitter - @tat_schneider

Related Links

Urbanization has become central in recent political discourses, as well as a contested concept in experts' spheres. This podcast of the Urban Political delves into the phenomenon of urbanization and traces back how the idea of "expanding cities" is causing disagreement in urban studies and leading researchers to raise questions that have haunted the discipline since the times of Georg Simmel. In this episode, Nicolas Goez, one of our new members of the editorial board at Urban Political, talks with Johanna Hoerning and Hillary Angelo about current discussions around urbanization, against the background of the so-called urban age. Join us in this discussion and tune in!

Hosted by Nicolas Goez.

Guests:

Johanna Hoerning is currently the Substitute Professor of Urban and Regional Sociology at the Hafencity University Hamburg. Her research focuses on urban and spatial theory, postcolonial theory, and housing and social movements.

Hillary Angelo is Assistant Professor at the University of California - Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on understandings of the environment and its relationship to large-scale spatial and social transformations.

References: