Urban Broadcast Collective

“Aim for nicer toilets, that’s my main tip for Australia”: Perspectives on Japanese cities from an 8-year old Australian, Juliette. This episode of This Must Be The Place is a kind of follow-up to the late-2017 episode, “Three travelling planners discuss their initial impressions of Japanese cities”, in which Elizabeth, Helen and Nicole did a round-up of their impressions – as planners and geographers, but largely uninformed by research – of Japanese cities in comparison to Australia. Here we hear impressions of Japan from a slightly different perspective – courtesy of Juliette, who is 8 years old and one of Elizabeth’s nieces, and who recently spent about 2 weeks on holiday in Japan. The episode was recorded at a dinner party in Jan’s backyard (so there’s a bit of plate clanking, and chattering, and some other guests including Nyoko from Japan sometimes chiming in). Juliette discusses: • Toilets - “aim for nicer toilets, that’s my main tip for Australia”; • Streets – with crowds of people, but “there wasn’t that many cars, and people were just walking in the middle of the road”; • Children walking to school (in single file, parentless, and on Saturdays); • Riding bikes, without helmets; • Traffic - “they drove considerably noticeably slower than they do here, and they weren’t eager to run the people on the bikes over” (a bit of link to the recent TMBTP episode on ‘roads, rights and rage’); • The uncomfortable dynamics of cat, owl, and other animal cafes (at one “there were 5 cats lined up at the window just looking out”); • Trains (bullet, rapid, and local) - “and there was one running pretty much every 5 minutes”; • Food – wasabi octopus, kit kats, vending machines, milk tea; • Making sense of the world via dire warning cartoons; and • (Perhaps a bit too much for a planning podcast) things about Harry Potter, porcupines, and video games. There are also musings on the dynamics of public space in different countries. The day after returning to Australia, there was “a man doing graffiti in the telephone booth”, and Sarah (Juliette’s mother’s) bike got stolen. Juliette reflects on how unexpected things like this rarely happened to them as tourists in Japan, which has some pros and cons. “My overall conclusion is there’s some things which I would definitely miss about Japan” (for example “I miss everyone actually being polite to you”), “but then there’s some things which you just have none of in Japan, like crazy guys, or graffiti artists”. Also preferred (in a way) about Australia is “you never know what’s going to happen – like you never know when someone’s going to steal your bike”.

PlanningxChange 46 features Doctor Elizabeth Taylor academic and podcaster ('This Must be the Place' – fellow UBC member). Her first book 'Dry Zones: Planning and the Hangovers of Liquor Licensing History' considers the temperance movement of the late 19th and early 20th century and the campaign for 'local control' of alcohol outlets in Victoria Australia. The author makes the case that these campaigns helped form the basis of contemporary planning practice. Also that many of the contested planning battles of today echo the events of 100 years ago.

In PX45, author David Sornig discusses his recently published book 'Blue Lake'. It concerns an area adjacent the Melbourne CBD known for many years as 'Dudley Flats'. This area contained squatter camps, rubbish dumps, noxious industry and the working infrastructure of the metropolis. Originally a place of pristine beauty, hence the title of the book, the area was degraded and became 'the other', a place outside respectable Melbourne. A wonderful pseudo - geographical study of an urban area typically overlooked.

A special podcast by PX as part of the PIA Victorian Division 2018 Symposium – In PX42, Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell interview Pru Goward. Pru is the New South Wales Minister for Family and Community Services, Minister for Social Housing and Minister for the prevention of Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault. An earlier portfolio included Minister for Planning. Prior to Parliament Pru was Australia's Sexual Discrimination Commissioner. She had a long career at the ABC where she received many awards including a special Walkey Award. A wide ranging discission on public policy and the need for fresh ideas. (PX42).

In PX 44, Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell interview long term journalist and author Peter Mares about his new book 'No Place Like Home: Repairing Australia's Housing Crisis'. An interesting discussion on contemporary housing and planning policy in Australia.

In the early 1990s, when China’s artists were less able to participate in open debate about the shape of Chinese society, they turned to the production of urban space instead. “If you want to see the political impact of Chinese artists, we can look to the city in order to see that.” Dr Christen Cornell After the 1989 protests at Tiananmen Square, Chinese cities entered a period of radical social and spatial reorganisation. During the process, artists began to move from the countryside into Beijing. Some artists took up residence in the old communist compounds that had once housed the collective work units – compounds that were now earmarked for demolition. You have probably heard of Ai Wei Wei, the controversial Chinese artist who designed the so-called birds nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics. But what you might not know about artists like Ai Wei Wei is they have been reshaping the physical, cultural and perhaps even the political fabric of Beijing. We’re chatting with Dr Christen Cornell to find out how. Christen says, when we look for examples of urban political activism in China many people search for signs of open protest in Chinese cities. And when we take an interest in the country’s artists, many people look for the political commentary in their artwork. But the role of the artist as a political actor in China involves a more complicated form of urban activism. Drawing on ideas that were popular in western cities at the time, the Chinese artists renamed the sites they were claiming ‘artists villages’ and ‘art districts’. This was a political move to save these sites and their artistic practice. We talk to Christen about the shape and significance of these urban arts communities, and the impact they had on the physical and cultural life of the city. Guest Dr Christen Cornell is a Research Associate in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Christen is working across issues of cultural policy, housing, urbanism and contemporary Chinese culture. She has lived and worked in China on and off since 2001.You can read more about Christen’s work here: Using movement: how Beijing’s post-1989 artists capitalized on a city in flux in Cultural Studies; and here: The temporal pocket: 1990s Beijing artist colonies in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies.

The utopian visions of architects, planners, philosophers and sociologists are important speculative projects. “We are all utopians, as soon as we wish for something different and stop playing the part of the faithful performer or watchdog”. Henri Lefebvre. In this episode, we take a deep dive into the idea of utopia with Professor Danilo Palazzo, who calls on us to become utopians. Utopians claim that cities can be used as a laboratory for imagining better urban futures. Such thinking recognises that the built and natural environments are complex systems of competing relationships; spanning the social, economic, physical, political, and environmental. These ideal cities “were convenient and attractive intellectual tools that enabled each planner to bring together his many innovations in design, and to show them as part of a coherent whole, a total redefinition of the idea of the city”. Robert Fishman In the nineteenth and twentieth century, utopian visions emerged to confront the challenges of the urban disorder and decay that followed in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Urban pollution, water quality issues, natural disasters, and the overall decay of the urban physical environment inspired new urban visions that relied on building a strong relationship between humans and their environment. We ask Professor Danilo Palazzo about the role of utopia today. Can we study the utopias of the past in search of new ways to face the huge environmental, ecological, social, and urban problems of today? Is there space for Utopia in our university programs? Guest Professor Danilo Palazzo was born in 1962 in Milano, Italy where he grew up. From 1997 to 2012, he has taught at Politecnico di Milano as Assistant Professor and later as Associate Professor of urbanism, urban planning and urban design. In 2012 he moved to United States as Director of the School of Planning, College of DAAP, University of Cincinnati. His articles have appeared in Landscape and Urban Planning, Landscape Journal, Oikos, Urbanistica, Territorio, among others, and his books include Urban Ecological Design. A Process for Regenerative Places, Island Press, Washington D.C., 2011 (with Frederick Steiner); Urban Design. Un processo di progettazione urbana, Mondadori Università, Milano, 2008; Sulle spalle di Giganti. Le matrici della pianificazione ambientale negli Stati Uniti, Franco Angeli, Milano, 1997. He resides in Cincinnati.

We’re talking about extinction, climate change, urban development and urban planning futures. Dr Donna Houston says urban planners need to be more attuned to the ecological realities and rhythms of our cities. From switching on a light, recycling a plastic bottle, shopping at the local supermarket, to asking a smartphone for directions, everyday life in cities is a key contributor to processes co-producing the Anthropocene, a potential new volatile geological era marked by the activity of humans. Activities core to urban life and the functioning of cities are exacerbating planetary changes across key terrestrial, atmospheric and aquatic thresholds, including: land cover change, ocean acidification, a warming in the average temperature of the planet; the six great mass species extinction, pollution and environmental degradation. These changes in biophysical worlds are acutely felt in social worlds, though they are experienced unevenly and disproportionately affect precarious and vulnerable human and nonhuman populations. Rarely, however, do we investigate the entanglements and dependencies of urban life and the Anthropocene. “The longer view, but also the responsibility. So cosmo-ecological is also to put one self into obligation or responsibility; in a way that… Western euro-centric or anthropocentric practices don’t do”. Dr Donna Houston This involves understanding what the choices and consequences that are bound up in these entanglements and dependencies mean for urban planners, designers, citizens and activists. It also involves understanding what they mean for the multitudes of earthly life dwelling within and beyond urban boundaries. The bio-cultural diversity of life on a planet of cities is complex and it doesn’t look the same everywhere. We are situated on a precarious threshold where forms of urban development matter profoundly for planetary futures. We need new ways of thinking about the city that are capable of connecting the unique social, historical and ecological dimensions of urban places with planetary changes. “… to understand that the ecological and cultural processes that are entangled within our relations are really important to our survival. In fact, we won’t really survive if we don’t attend to them”. Dr Donna Houston One way forward is to consider new problems for urban research: such as that of what our colleague at the University of Sydney, Thom van Dooren, refers to as the cultural and biological entanglements of extinction. Extinction stories offer a window into relationships between localised and mass extinction and help us in understanding what specific humans and nonhumans within particular cities are doing. In Perth Australia, an interesting story is unfolding involving endangered Carnaby’s Cockatoos, their people, plants and places and how considering black cockatoos in urban contexts highlights present incongruences between planning, time, and ecologies as well as new possibilities for thinking about how we can plan ‘multispecies’ cities. As urbanists, we need to imagine a different type of future to better plan for multispecies cities. Part of the answer might be to decentre the human from our discussion of cities and urban planning more specifically. Donna’s powerful and unnerving research starts with ecological time, which is important for understanding the way we plan, design and build cities. Donna ends by talking about the role of cosmo-ecological and Indigenous methodologies in urban planning. Guest Dr Donna Houston is an urban and cultural geographer in the Department of Geography and Planning at Macquarie University. Her research explores the intersections of urban political ecology and environmental justice in the Anthropocene; the biopolitics of climate change; toxic landscapes and bodies; and planning in the ‘more-than-human’ city. Dr Houston is the Director of the Bachelor of Planning and the Co-Director of the Faculty of Arts Environmental Humanities research stream.

Part II of our chat about democracy and cities. In cities around the world, citizens are channeling their frustration with existing community engagement processes into the creation of urban alliances. These alliances bring together diverse civil society actors in pursuit of social change. This is the second part of our two-part discussion about democracy and cities. We talk to Amanda Tattersall about how urban alliances work in practice in different cities around the world. We travel to Cape Town in South Africa and Barcelona in Spain, before returning to Sydney, Australia. “I’m interested in the urban alliances that are going to allow citizens to have a better city. I see them as progressive, because if citizens are going to have more rights, and more resources supporting their lives, that is a progressive outcome.” Dr Amanda Tattersall If you missed the first part of our discussion you might want to catch up on that episode first. We talk to Kurt Iveson about urban alliances that allow citizens to play a proactive role in shaping their cities. Kurt suggested these alliances are an alternative to the reactive modes of engaging people in city making that exist in current urban governance and planning frameworks. Guest Dr Amanda Tattersall is a scholar and a change maker. She is a Post-Doctoral Fellow as part of the Organising Cities Project in the School of Geosciences. She is the founder of some of Australia’s most interesting social change organisations, including the Sydney Alliance and GetUp.org.au, and she is the founder and Host of the ChangeMakers podcast, which tells stories about people trying to change the world. Her book, Power in Coalition, was the first international analytical study of alliance building as a strategy for social change. As an urban geographer, she focuses on questions of how the city can be a subject for democratic politics. She is currently undertaking research on intra and inter city coalition building strategies to identify ways in which networks of urban alliances may help citizens present solutions to wicked global problems like climate change, poverty, inequality and the politics of refuge. Her PhD was industrial relations, and she has previously worked as a union organiser and was an elected official at Unions NSW. As a teacher, Amanda’s greatest passion is to bring the community in – with stories, guest speakers, practical projects that are strengthened by her extensive network amongst Australia’s not for profit community. The Democratic Experiment Series This episode is a part of a series called The Democratic Experiment. This series is a partnership between City Road and The Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney. The Sydney Policy Lab exists to break down the barriers between researchers, policymakers, campaigners and the community at large. At the Sydney Policy Lab people of all backgrounds are coming together to strengthen our democracy, reduce spiralling inequality and help to empower communities to shape their own future.

After the Arab Spring, Occupy and the Umbrella Movement the streets were cleared. But as the dust was settling some more durable democratic experiments emerged. These urban alliances sought to make our cities more equitable places to live. In this two-part episode on democracy and cities we’re talking about a new type of political movement that is forming in different cities around the world; its called an urban alliance. In this first episode, Associate Professor Kurt Iveson sets up the discussion by telling us why cities are important for democracy. “There’s a basic demographic thing about, you know, the majority of the world’s population now living in cities… that’s really important, in the sense of, the particular problems of everyday life in cities are now being experienced by millions of people around the planet… questions of water, food, housing, transport…” Associate Professor Kurt Iveson It’s not only that there are different ways to practise democracy in our cities, but the very fabric of our cities and even the ecologies of our cities can shape how the new urban alliances operate. In other words, the geographies and socialities of the city matter for how democracy is practised. The story we tell ourselves about democracy is often focused on nation-states and citizenships. But for Kurt, urban alliances and sustained community organising in cities are just as important for democracy as nations. Questions about cities frequently focus on who counts as a democratic subject and how to participate in various political, interest or geographical communities. These types of questions are being creatively re-imagined in cities around the world, and one of these re-imaginings is called an urban alliance. “At the very basic level, what we’re trying to signal by this term of urban alliance is a kind of political formation that is not just about a particular issue, and is also not just based on a particular identity, but is an alliance that operates – the thing that binds people together is their shared inhabitance of a city”. Associate Professor Kurt Iveson If you like this discussion you can listen to the second part of this two-part episode about democracy and cities via City Road. In part two, we start with Kurt’s suggestion that urban alliances are not just flash-in-the-pan protests on the latest political bugbear, rather they are a new form of democratic practise. We pick up where Kurt left off with Kurt’s collaborator, Dr Amanda Tattersall, who is an urban activist and researcher. Amanda talks about her fieldwork uncovering new urban alliances in Cape Town and Barcelona. Guest Associate Professor Kurt Iveson is interested in the question of how social justice can be achieved in cities. In this episode, Kurt discusses his current study with collaborator Dr Amanda Tattersall: Organising the 21st Century City: An International Comparison of Urban Alliances as Citizen Engagement. The study is funded by the Henry Hallroan Trust. This study builds on Kurt’s previous research, which has focused on two main areas. First, he has examined the significance of the urban public realm for citizenship and democracy. Second, he has explored how urban planning might work better to achieve social justice in cities. Kurt is the author of Publics and the City The Democratic Experiment Series This episode is a part of a series called The Democratic Experiment. This series is a partnership between City Road and The Sydney Policy Lab at the University of Sydney. The Sydney Policy Lab exists to break down the barriers between researchers, policymakers, campaigners and the community at large. At the Sydney Policy Lab people of all backgrounds are coming together to strengthen our democracy, reduce spiralling inequality and help to empower communities to shape their own future.