The movement-party Barcelona en Comú
In this episode, we reflect on the rise, evolution, and legacy of Barcelona en Comú, the emblematic movement-party that governed the city of Barcelona from 2015 to 2023. Joined by long-time activist and former political advisor Elia Gran, as well as researchers Silke van Dyk and Luzie Gerstenhöfer (University of Jena), the conversation explores the key ambitions, successes, and tensions of this bold experiment in municipalist governance. The episode draws from the sociological research project „Public Politics and the Future of the Commons“ to unpack strategic shifts in areas like housing, municipalization of public services as well as social and economic policies. Together, the guests consider what can be learned from the Comuns’ experience, how the party related to social movements and class politics. Now that the Comuns are out of office, the time is ripe for a candid assessment beyond their frequent representation as a European lighthouse case for alternative local politics: What did the municipalist turn achieve—and where did it fall short? Tune in for a rich researcher-activist dialogue on the possibilities and pitfalls of transforming politics from the ground up.
Erschienen: 25.05.2025
Dauer: 01:24:51
Navigating Boundaries in the City
Kulkul presents her ethnographic work with Turkish Muslim women in Berlin as evidence that community is not an entity but is produced by instrumentalizing specific forms of identification and boundary-making. In examining the role of community in the case of her participants, Kulkul finds that religion and culture are important not for the values they perpetuate, but for their role in forming and sustaining the community. She looks at the importance of boundaries and especially their reciprocity. Social boundaries are a set of codes of exclusion often used against migrants and refugees, while symbolic boundaries are typically understood as the way one defines one's own group. Kulkul argues that these two types of boundaries tend to trigger each other and thus be mutually reinforcing. At the same time, she presents a picture of everyday life from the perspective of migrants and the children of migrants in a cosmopolitan European city – Berlin. A valuable read for scholars of migration and culture, which will especially interest scholars focused on Europe.
Erschienen: 12.05.2025
Dauer: 00:31:41
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "89 - Book Presentation: Turkish Muslim Women in Berlin"
The Urban Lives of Property Series
In this episode of The Urban Lives of Property, Markus Kip and Hanna Hilbrandt speak with Heather Dorries, about the intersections of settler colonialism and racial capitalism in urban property regimes. Drawing on Dorries’ recent publications and her wider expertise on property, Indigeneity, and urbanism the episode centers the ways in which planning practices contribute to Indigenous dispossession while also serving as a site of resistance and assertions of sovereignty. We foreground three themes: First, the conversation addresses planning’s complicity in processes of dispossession, examining how legal frameworks and land sales have historically undermined Indigenous political authority. This discussion delves into Dorries research on Brantford on how nuisance bylaws work as mechanisms that uphold white privilege. Second and more conceptually, we discuss tensions between and productive conversations emerging from combining the analytical lenses of settler colonialism and the lens of racial capitalism. Finally, Dorries reflects on Indigenous conceptions of property and alternative terminologies that better capture Indigenous relationships to land, emphasizing co-dependence and collective stewardship.
Erschienen: 28.04.2025
Dauer: 00:45:02
With Examples from the UK, Lebanon and Germany
This talk focuses on the role of public services in delineating the boundaries of belonging and possibilities of participation in cities. Drawing on the notion of 'infrastructural citizenship', it asks how non-citizens navigate access to urban circulations and how rights and responsibilities are negotiated at these interfaces. Based on ethnographic, participatory and design research conducted with migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in the UK, Lebanon and Germany, it concentrates in particular on the physical and social infrastructures supporting the circulation of food and waste. The talk will outline the various ways in which migrants use infrastructural engagement to craft novel forms of belonging at the local level, contributing to our understanding of participation and equitable service delivery in increasingly diverse cities.
Erschienen: 15.04.2025
Dauer: 00:37:31
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "87 - Infrastructures of Urban Citizenship"
Material Flows and Urbanization in West Africa
Concrete City: Material Flows and Urbanization in West Africa delivers a theoretically informed, ethnographic exploration of the African urban world through the life of concrete. Emblematic of frenetic urban and capitalistic development, this material is pervasive, shaping contemporary urban landscapes and societies and their links to the global world. It stands and circulates at the heart of major financial investments, political forces and environmental debates. At the same time, it epitomises values of modernity and success, redefining social practices, forms of dwelling and living, and popular imaginaries. The book invites the reader to follow bags of cement from production plant to construction site, along the 1000-kilometre urban corridor that links Abidjan to Accra, Lomé, Cotonou and Lagos, combining the perspectives of cement tycoons, entrepreneurs and political stakeholders, but also of ordinary men and women who plan, build and dream of the Concrete City. With this innovative exploration of urban life through concrete, Armelle Choplin delivers a fascinating journey into and reflection on the sustainability of our urban futures.
Erschienen: 31.03.2025
Dauer: 00:52:23
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "86 - Book Review: Concrete City"
Examples from Russia, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan
This episode is part of our Think&Drink Series in collaboration with the Georg-Simmel-Centre for Urban Studies working with the Humboldt University Berlin. Today’s speaker is Andrei Semenov, an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Nazarbayev University in Astana, Kazakhstan. Authoritarian urbanism has recently become a buzzword applied to different settings and situations. Andrei attempts to clarify the conceptual foundations of this term by using a combination of political science and urban sociology analytical frameworks. He shows that the authoritarian part refers to the dictators' response to two key challenges to their rule: elite factionalism and mass uprisings. While a wide set of strategies is available to dictators, the instruments and practices of urban development constitute one possible way of responding. More specifically, he argues that authoritarian urbanism simultaneously aims at two (not always compatible) goals: providing rents to ensure the elites' loyalty and satisfying the mass demand for housing and a comfortable urban environment. He illustrates these features with examples from Eurasian countries and concludes with some further research questions.
Erschienen: 12.03.2025
Dauer: 00:31:09
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "85 - Authoritarian Urbanism in Eurasia"
Urban Political x Groningen University: Where Is Urban Politics?
This is the first seminar in the series 'Where is Urban Politics?' a hybrid seminar series hosted by the University of Groningen, in the academic year 2024-2025. This talk by Ross Beveridge and Philippe Koch provides a novel way of thinking about the relationship between democracy and the urban based on two main arguments. First, across the globe claims for and forms of urban collective self-rule signal that the city retains democratic significance in a very specific sense: as an object of practice and thought the city is a source and stake of the urban demos. Second, urbanisation unsettles seemingly fixed boundaries between the state and society and thus opens the possibility of weaving together a new democratic fabric encompassing both. There is a democratic politics of urbanisation that shifts perspectives from institutions to practices, from jurisdictional scales to spaces of collective urban life. Seeing democracy like a city, we argue, foregrounds a way to re-locate democracy in the everyday lives of urbanites and to unlock the transformative potential of an urban democracy. This talk draws on recent work including the book "How Cities Can Transform Democracy" (2023) and the article "Seeing Democracy like a City" (2023).
Erschienen: 12.02.2025
Dauer: 00:41:16
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "84 - How Cities Can Transform Democracy"
Productive misunderstandings in cooperative urban development
This is a new episode from our Think&Drink series in collaboration with the Georg-Simmel-Centre for Urban Studies and the Humboldt University Berlin. Co-operative urban development is the buzzword of the moment. It stands for the pursuit of a fairer city that is orientated towards the common good. In new partnerships - public-civic partnerships - actors from politics and administration work together with actors from civil society. Contradictory practices of urban design lead to misunderstandings, controversies and uncertainties in these co-operations. In this book, the authors explore the processes of two extraordinary experiments in cooperative urban development in Berlin: the Haus der Statistik and the Rathausblock Kreuzberg. To this end, they invite the actors involved to procrastinate. When hesitation becomes a method, ambivalences support cooperation, uncertainties replace conflicts and controversies between the partners become visible. The book presents concise theses on cooperative urban development, a glossary of misunderstandings and methodological reflections on the artistic-ethnographic research method and its embedding in urban anthropological discourses. For all those who are involved in co-operative urban development or want to accompany it with research. For a just city of the many.
Erschienen: 27.01.2025
Dauer: 00:44:01
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "83 - Book Presentation: Dithering for the Common Good"
Temporality and the Making of Global Urban Worlds
Whether waiting for the train or planning the future city, infrastructure orders—and depends on—multiple urban temporalities. This agenda-setting volume disrupts conventional notions of time through a robust examination of the relations between temporality, infrastructure, and urban society. Conceptually rich and empirically detailed, its interdisciplinary dialogue encompasses infrastructural systems including transportation, energy, and water to bridge often-siloed technical, political-economic and lived perspectives. With global coverage of diverse cities and regions from Berlin to Jayapura, this book is an essential provocation to re-evaluate urban theory, politics, and practice and better account for the temporal complexities that shape our infrastructured worlds.
Erschienen: 22.12.2024
Dauer: 00:59:05
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "Episode 82 - Book Review Roundtable: Infrastructural Times"
Valuing indeterminacy: Terrain vague, temporary use and the production of urban expertise in Barcelona and Berlin. This is the first episode of a new series from Urban Political. In collaboration with the Georg Simmel Center for Urban Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, this series will feature speakers from the center’s Think & Drink Colloquium. The colloquium invites international speakers from across urban studies to present their work and offers an informal setting for exchange between students, faculty, and the general public. Much ink has been spilled in urban studies on the dynamics of abandoned industrial sites, rubble areas and other indeterminate landscapes teeming with biodiversity, artists and (post-)capitalist potential. What is less explored are the histories of making indeterminacy into a desirable feature of cities. Engaging a range of ideas and strategies including terrain vague and temporary urbanism, this talk examines the role of urban experts in giving a positive meaning to ‘non-design’ as a feature of post-industrial change. Maroš Krivy draws evidence from late 20th century Barcelona and early 21st century Berlin: while the Catalan architect Ignasi de Solà-Morales called on his colleagues to appreciate the intrinsic value of terrain vagues even as he played a key role in Barcelona’s Olympic-led redevelopment, the Berlin collective Urban Catalyst advocated giving unused sites over to creative entrepreneurs as an alternative to the conservative policy of critical reconstruction. This talk presents findings from Maroš Krivys ongoing project investigating a series of situated intellectual histories of how progressive urban experts in Europe and North America accommodated late capital.
Erschienen: 04.12.2024
Dauer: 00:27:40
Weitere Informationen zur Episode "81 - Urban Political x Think & Drink: Maroš Krivy."
