Urban Radar

Come with us to Johannesburg and Dhaka in this month's feature. Visit the markets and stalls of Jeppe, in inner city Johannesburg, a dynamic ecosystem of informal traders, sometimes called Africa’s shopping Mecca. Head with us to Korail, an informal settlement of 300,000 dwellers, sometimes called Bangladesh’s largest slum.

In this double book talk, we are joined by two critically-acclaimed authors. With Tanya Zack we discuss her book The Chaos Precinct: Johannesburg as a Port City, a narrative of how migrant Ethiopians have shaped this trading post in the inner city. With Tanzil Shafique we explore his book City of Desire: An Urban Biography of the Largest Slum in Bangladesh which challenges what and how we know the different desires of settlement-dwellers. 

Together we consider:

• how global-local dynamics shape and are shaped by different urban places around the world 
• how formal and informal spaces in cities are managed, policed and regulated
• the epistemic politics and positions of doing urban research

Guests

Tanya Zack is a South African urban planner and writer whose work has focused on urban regeneration, contemporary migration, informal work, urban policy and affordable housing. Her writing in Wake Up This Is Joburg (Duke University Press, 2022) has been lauded for being amongst the freshest and most original material on an African city. It was included in the longlist of the 2024 Sunday Times/Exclusive Books Literary Awards. The products of her professional practice in Johannesburg's inner city, including an inner-city transformation policy, and a study of cross border shopping, are recognised as ground-
breaking interventions. 

Tanzil is Senior Lecturer of Urban Design at the Sheffield School of Architecture and Associate of the Urban Institute. Tanzil’s research looks at southern urbanism, pluriversal architectural practice and informal planning, mainly focusing on the ongoing adaptation and transformation due to climate change led by the local citizens. He is currently leading a dweller-led urban wetland restoration stewardship project in Dhaka and co-convenes the Platform for Just Housing (Najjyo Abashon Moncho or NAM), which works towards housing and climate justice with local activists and citizens.

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, and CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: [email protected]

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. And to Sam Burgum, for post-production editing and promotion.

This month, Tom and Beth are joined by Hannah Sender, University of Sheffield, and Mariam Bazzi, Beirut Urban Lab to discuss how propertied families in small towns in Lebanon have responded to violence and displacement over the past years (Go to 35:04 for guests). 

When left with no savings, and little help to repair and reconstruct after military interventions, property becomes a moral relationship, as much as a personal asset: what ought housing to be used for, when urbicide becomes a core goal of warfare?

Also on our radar:

• Infrastructural causes of flooding in Nairobi
• What Cubans in Miami reveal about how diaspora shape urban politics 
• Banksy's loss of anonymity in an era of surveillance capitalism
• Data centre politics in the French local elections
• Scam centres in Cambodia
• Habermas, an unrecognised urbanist?

Guests:

Hannah Sender is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield. Her current research examines land and housing relations in Lebanon. 

Mariam Bazzi is a researcher at the Beirut Urban Lab, working on cultural heritage destruction and reconstruction in Palestine and Lebanon. Previous work included tracking the urbicide in Gaza.

And More:

Compound capitalism - Ivan Franceschini, Ling Li, Mark Bo

Capitalism and conflict at the margins - Xu Peng, Jonathan Goodhand, Patrick Meehan, Naomi Yonder

Habermas and the City - Tommaso Vitale

The Sheffield Declaration (see also episode 4)

Planning and crisis - Mona Fawaz (see also episode 10)

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, and CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: [email protected]

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. And to Sam Burgum, for post-production editing and promotion.

In this episode Beth and Tom are joined by Cristina Temenos from the University of Manchester to discuss a wide range of issues from trust in medicine, responses to COVID-19 and experimentation and evidence in localised healthcare settings. Together, they ask:

• Faced with crisis after crisis, how do municipalities deliver public health care in Athens, Santiago and Greater Manchester?
• What forms of experimentation, innovation and alternative provision emerge during crisis, and what does this mean for the role of state and non-state services in addressing the needs of vulnerable populations?
• What does crisis policy-making look like and how is it changing the way we are thinking about evidence and expertise?

Guests:

Cristina Temenos is a Reader in Human Geography, an urban, political geographer, her current project explores how cities are managing intersecting health, economic and social crises to negotiate more just urban futures. Her research is focused on health inequalities and the politics of access to care in cities globally. Working in the field of policy mobilities, she has developed this work in relation to drug use and treatment, public health, housing, economic austerity, environmental sustainability, transport, and climate change.  She has recently published in journals such as Progress in Human Geography, IJURR and Dialogues in Urban Research.

Read More:
Crisis policy-making and revanchist public health politics
The modalities and politics of crisis urbanism
Urban crisis as infrastructure, not event: A view from Beirut
Crisis and the urban imagination
Austerity co-production

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, and CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: [email protected]

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. And to Sam Burgum, for post-production editing and promotion.

In this episode Tom and Beth are joined by Professor Aidan While from the University of Sheffield to explore how robotic urban infrastructures are already reshaping everyday lives, homes and mobilities. 

From self-driving taxis to autonomous delivery drones the size of a lorry, we take a closer look at how experimentation in US cities, across Africa and now in the UK foreshadows the stealthy rise of robots across multiple domains.

Go straight to 37:33 for this discussion.

First in our radar, we cover:

• Leaflet wars in the Gorton and Denton by-election, Greater Manchester
• How space and stigma play out in the Epstein and UK grooming scandals
• What the UK Royal Family have to do with cities 
• Urban foundations & fallouts from the death of Mexican drug lord, El Mencho
• The promise of Spain's approach to regularising undocumented migrants
• How to better assess the vulnerabilities of regions and cities to the green transition

Guests:

Aidan While researches environmental and climate policy, urban technology and future cities, and the politics of planning in the UK and internationally.  This podcast draws on his ESRC project on Robotics as Urban Automation. He has written on sidewalk delivery robots, ecologies of automation, and regulating urban robotics.

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, and CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: [email protected]

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. And to Sam Burgum, for post-production editing and promotion.

In this episode Tom and Beth are joined by visiting researchers to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester, Junia Mortimer and Felipe Magalhães. 

They discuss:

• How can we see and understand the city in this geopolitical age of conflict and global uncertainty?
• How can photographs and visual archives make visible the complexities of cities, particularly those in the Global South?
• When seeing directly is not possible, what other approaches can help us analyse the intense volatility of cities impacted by urbanisation and industrialisation processes?
• What do these methods mean for urbanists interested in urban change? What endures, what transforms and how do we validate what counts as knowledge?

Guests:

Junia Mortimer is an Assistant Prof at the Department of Urban Planning at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. She is currently an Urban Studies Foundation International Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield. She has curated exhibitions including Urbanos Arquivos (2023) in Salvador, which won first prize in the 2024 Arquisur Competition and she coordinates the Laboratory of Experiments on Image and Architecture.

Felipe Magalhães is an Assistant Prof at the Department of Geography, UFMG, Brazil and Visiting Fellow at University of Manchester. He has been working on popular and solidarity economies, deindustrialization and extractivism in the Brazilian context. He has recently published in the journals Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, IJURR and Antipode.

Key archives/figures mentioned:

Zumvi Afro-Photographic Archive: Lázaro Roberto.

Roberto Monte Mor

Edneia Aparecida de Souza

Ariella Azoulay

Francisco de Oliveira

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, and CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: [email protected]

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. And to Sam Burgum, for post-production editing and promotion.

In this first episode of Series 2 of Urban Radar, Beth and Tom start to tackle some of the many ways in which the current moment of geopolitical turmoil is filtering down into in cities and towns across the world. 

We make the most of our new Sheffield-Manchester partnership by bringing on Dr. Erika Garcia Fermin (29:45 minutes onwards) from the University of Manchester's Global Development Institute, for an in-depth conversation on the Venezuala crisis and its urban dimensions. With Erika we delve into Venezuela's recent history and how Hugo Chavez's distinctly urban populist project of redistribution morphed over two decades into extreme authoritarianism, mass population exodus and dysfunctional, disempowered city governments under Maduro. 

We then consider whether and how the dramatic US intervention and removal of Maduro might serve as a window of opportunity for opposition forces in the cities to reverse the tide of authoritarian, centralizing governance. 

Before, this, on our radar (from 05:40) we ponder: 

- The view from Greenland's capital, Nuuk, on potential US invasion and what this tells us about how urban areas are being geopolitically re-mapped

- the approval of plans for a Chinese 'mega-embassy' in London and its local and geopolitical significance

- Overlooked cities and towns in the US affected by Trumpian funding cuts and other 'erasures'

- Reforms to neighbourhood governance in the UK, and the importance of the neighbourhood scale for addressing wider division and challenges to democracy

- Dis/misinformation and crime stats in London, and the growing recognition of the need for urban anti-disinfo strategies 

- Iran's protest and the politics of physically relocating capital cities 

Guest:

Erika Garcia Fermin completed her PhD at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, in 2024. Grounded in questions of urban governance and socio-spatial justice, her work focuses on the politics of value extraction in urban development, especially around urban land, and in how these processes relate to the ways urban spaces are planned, governed, and valued.

Read More:

https://thetruesize.com/

Disinformation in the City: Response Playbook - https://www.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/5060724/Disinformation-in-the-City-Reponse-Playbook_compressed-1.pdf

Controlling the Capital: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/controlling-the-capital-9780192868329?cc=gb&lang=en& 

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, and CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: [email protected]

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. And to Sam Burgum, for post-production editing and promotion.

Urban Radar is a podcast series which reflects on current events and emerging trends through the lens of cities and urban life.  

Launched in 2025, Urban Radar hit the UK social science podcast charts, and was amongst the top 5% of new podcast entrants (according to one major streaming platform!).  It reached listeners in every continent, over 80 countries and 670 cities. Series 1 included 18 episodes, with 40 guests, including leading urban studies theorists and thinkers, early career scholars and PhD students. 

Series 2 of Urban Radar will continue to place urban dynamics at the centre of contemporary global affairs.  Hosted by Professor Tom Goodfellow and Professor Beth Perry, guests will be drawn from across the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester in a new transpennine collaboration. 

In this Series 2 trailer, Tom and Beth reflect on the first year of recording Urban Radar and share what's coming up in 2026.  

Episodes will be released 1-2 times per month, including a monthly round-up of the urban issues underlying the headlines and in-depth discussions with guests. We will continue to invite members of our research communities to provide evidence-based informed insights into the ways that cities and urban communities are impacted by, driving and responding to current events.

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, and CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: [email protected]

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. And to Sam Burgum, for post-production editing and promotion.

This month, we (Beth and Tom) are podding alone, using the final episode of the year to reflect on some of the big themes we’ve discussed in 2025 as well as on the process of making Urban Radar.  We start with our monthly radar for December, dipping into three current stories each as usual. 

Following this we offer some quick-fire thoughts on a number of issues and themes that have resurfaced repeatedly throughout the year and remain prominent as it draws to a close. Finally, we consider some of the highlights of podcasting itself, before unveiling a surprise in store for Series 2…

On our monthly radar for December: 

• Care work and the city - from the UK’s current ‘carers scandal’ to Bogota’s care blocks
• Urban ‘brandalism’, ZAP games and ‘subtervising’ (confused? Head to 9:15 to find out…)
• The decline of trial by jury in the UK and what this might mean for urban justice and efforts to overcome spatial, class and linguistic bias
• America’s new National Security Strategy and how this connects to Trump’s war on urban diversity
• The Australian social media ban and its potentially different ramifications in urban vs rural areas 
• Syrian cities one year after the fall of Assad

On our rapid fire ‘radar of radars’, we consider:

• Military coups and their urban implications
• Technology and public space
• Flag urbanism and the branding of the city
• The UK-Denmark anti-migration love-in
• Solidarity, belonging and ‘urban lawfare’
• The entanglements of local infrastructure and global finance
• Urban warfare, critical minerals and strongman diplomacy

Read More

The Independent Review of Carer's Allowance Overpayments: A Welcome Step Towards Wider Reform of Welfare Benefits for Carers | the Centre for Care

Caring Cities: Towards a Public Urban Culture of Care?

Dismantling the advertising city: Subvertising and the urban commons to come

Activating the playful city: A review of ludic urbanism and introducing the ludic continuum framework

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, and CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: [email protected]

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. And to Sam Burgum, for post-production editing and promotion.

In this episode we are joined by Professor Julia Moses to consider the working lives and rights of children, and then Dr Dani Madrid-Morales to discuss disinformation and how it plays out across urban and rural areas. Reflecting on World Children's Day on 20 November, we explore children's rights and how these relate to questions of labour, as well as how attitudes to child labour have varied over time and in different national contexts (28:08). Then, in light of recent accusations from Donald Trump towards the BBC's reporting, we delve into the the challenge of misinformation, how it is changing and how it differs spatially across and within urban and rural areas (48:24). 

Also on our radar:

• how policy learning between Denmark and the UK is shaping Labour's new 'hostile environment'
• whether new curbs on ticket touts suggest lessons for wider market regulation
• the deadly response to urban protests in post-election Tanzania 
• how Belem has shaped the agenda and design of COP30
• whether the world is urbanizing faster than we think
• what recent UK statistics on multiple deprivation tell us about urban decline

Guests:

Julia Moses is a Professor of Modern History in the School of History, Philosophy and Digital Humanities at the University of Sheffield. She is currently leading a project, funded by AHRC, on Global Socio-Economic Rights, Local Contexts, with colleagues at the Universities of Edinburgh, Dar es Salaam and Ruhr University Bochum. The call for the virtual exhibition, mentioned in the podcast, is here Virtual Exhibition – Call for Contributions! – Global Socio-Economic Rights, Local Contexts.

Dr Dani Madrid Morales is a Lecturer in Journalism and Global Communication in the School of Information, Journalism and Communication at the University of Sheffield. He co-leads the Disinformation Research Cluster in his School. His own work studies the geopolitics of disinformation in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly from an audience perspective. His latest book on this topic, co-edited with Herman Wasserman, is Disinformation in the Global South (Wiley). Dani also helps curate disinfoafrica.org, a website that brings together research on mis/disinformation in Africa. 

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, and CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: [email protected]

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. And to Sam Burgum, for post-production editing and promotion.

In this feature, Tom and Beth discuss the Global Infrastructure Race with colleagues from the Urban Institute (UI), recorded live as part of the UI’s 10 year anniversary celebrations. Drawing on insights emerging from the GlobalCORRIDOR and Pluralize projects, Jon Silver, Zhengli Huang and Linda Westman share their interpretation of the Global Infrastructure Race, its urban impacts and how we can centre and decentre the role of China. Specifically they discuss:

• What is the Global Infrastructure Race and how can we understand its diverse geopolitical and economic manifestations?
• How can historical and contemporary analysis help unpack the role of China and Chinese investments?
• What are the impacts on cities and urban inequalities of these activities in and beyond China?             

Guests

Professor Jon Silver is an urban geographer interested in the uneven ways in which infrastructure is planned, operationalised and experienced, working across a range of cities in the global norths and south. He leads the GlobalCORRIDOR project.

Dr Zhengli Huang works on Chinese investment in infrastructure across Africa. She worked and lived in Kenya and her fieldwork experience extends to Ethiopia, Uganda, Zambia, and Mozambique. She works on GlobalCORRIDOR and Pluralize. 

Dr Linda Westman focusses on climate politics, urban transformation, and sustainability discourses, including the policy/governance aspects of low-carbon development in cities in China. She leads the Pluralize project. 

Read More 

The Material Geographies of the Belt and Road Initiative

Governing Climate Change in a Changing World 

Chinese Economic Zones in Africa

Funding

GlobalCORRIDOR (ID: 947779) funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

Pluralize was originally granted by the HORIZON Call: ERC-2022-STG and funded by UKRI (EP/Y00020X/1).

Hosts:

Tom Goodfellow is Professor of Urban Development in the Global Development Institute, and CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium, University of Manchester.  His research focuses on the political economy of urban development and change in Africa, particularly the politics of urban land and transportation, conflicts around infrastructure and housing, and urban institutional change. (linkedin.com/in/tom-goodfellow-0b418441) 

Beth Perry is Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationships between urban expertise, governance and justice, underpinned by a commitment to co-producing collective intelligence across multiple scales to address complex urban challenges. She has worked in cities in Africa, Europe and the UK. (linkedin.com/in/itsbethperry)

Email feedback to: [email protected]

You can also follow us on instagram: @urbanradarpodcast

Thanks to the Universities of Sheffield and Manchester for providing time, resources and equipment to support this podcast. And to Sam Burgum, for post-production editing and promotion.