Urban Broadcast Collective

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.

Part II of our chat with Professor Brett Christophers from Uppsala University about his new book, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain. And it’s a story that we just couldn’t squeeze into one episode, so alas, we’ve given the next two episodes of City Road over to exploring the ideas in the book. In the first episode we talk about the old enclosure acts of the last few centuries before moving to what Brett calls the new enclosure—or the privatisation of public land in the UK today. In the second episode, Brett draws some connections between the privatisation of public land and addressing the housing problem in the UK. He maps out the winners and losers of The New Enclosure, and here’s a hot tip, if you’re looking to buy or rent a house, you’re unlikely to be a winner. Here is the book blurb from Verso. Much has been written about Britain’s trailblazing post-1970s privatisation programme, but the biggest privatisation of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatisation of land. Since Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, and hidden from the public eye, about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass, including some of its most valuable real estate, has passed from public to private hands. Forest land, defence land, health service land and above all else local authority land—for farming and school sports, for recreation and housing—has been sold off en masse. Why? How? And with what social, economic and political consequences? The New Enclosure provides the first ever study of this profoundly significant phenomenon, situating it as a centrepiece of neoliberalism in Britain and as a successor programme to the original eighteenth-century enclosures. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done. Guest Professor Brett Christophers’ research ranges widely across the political and cultural economies of Western capitalism, in historical and contemporary perspectives. Particular interests include money, finance and banking; housing and housing policy; urbanization; markets and pricing; accounting, modelling and other calculative practices; competition and intellectual property law; and the cultural industries and the discourse of “creativity”. Brett has written many articles and book chapters, including: The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law (Harvard University Press, 2016), which provides a theoretical and historical examination of the relationship between competition and monopoly in capitalism (focusing historically on the development of the US and UK economies from the late nineteenth century to the present-day), and of the role of competition/antitrust and intellectual property laws in mediating that relationship; Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), which explores representations of finance in Western political-economic thought and systems of economic measurement (e.g. national accounting); practices of international banking and their historical evolution; and the relationships between these respective representations and practices; Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television (Lexington Books, 2009) from his PhD thesis at the University of Auckland and explores the geographical political economy of international television and cognate media products; and Positioning the Missionary: John Booth Good and the Confluence of Cultures in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia (University of British Columbia, 1998), is based on his Master’s thesis at the University of British Columbia and is a study of the missionary axis of British colonialism in Western Canada, drawing on postcolonial and poststructural theory.

How much public land has been stolen from the British people? The short answer is, a lot! In this episode of City Road we talk to Professor Brett Christophers from Uppsala University about his new book, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain. And it’s a story that we just couldn’t squeeze into one episode, so alas, we’ve given the next two episodes of City Road over to exploring the ideas in the book. In the first episode we talk about the old enclosure acts of the last few centuries before moving to what Brett calls the new enclosure—or the privatisation of public land in the UK today. In the second episode, Brett draws some connections between the privatisation of public land and addressing the housing problem in the UK. He maps out the winners and losers of The New Enclosure, and here’s a hot tip, if you’re looking to buy or rent a house, you’re unlikely to be a winner. Here is the book blurb from Verso. Much has been written about Britain’s trailblazing post-1970s privatisation programme, but the biggest privatisation of them all has until now escaped scrutiny: the privatisation of land. Since Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, and hidden from the public eye, about 10 per cent of the entire British land mass, including some of its most valuable real estate, has passed from public to private hands. Forest land, defence land, health service land and above all else local authority land—for farming and school sports, for recreation and housing—has been sold off en masse. Why? How? And with what social, economic and political consequences? The New Enclosure provides the first ever study of this profoundly significant phenomenon, situating it as a centrepiece of neoliberalism in Britain and as a successor programme to the original eighteenth-century enclosures. With more public land still slated for disposal, the book identifies the stakes and asks what, if anything, can and should be done. Guest Professor Brett Christophers’ research ranges widely across the political and cultural economies of Western capitalism, in historical and contemporary perspectives. Particular interests include money, finance and banking; housing and housing policy; urbanization; markets and pricing; accounting, modelling and other calculative practices; competition and intellectual property law; and the cultural industries and the discourse of “creativity”. Brett has written many articles and book chapters, including: The Great Leveler: Capitalism and Competition in the Court of Law (Harvard University Press, 2016), which provides a theoretical and historical examination of the relationship between competition and monopoly in capitalism (focusing historically on the development of the US and UK economies from the late nineteenth century to the present-day), and of the role of competition/antitrust and intellectual property laws in mediating that relationship; Banking Across Boundaries: Placing Finance in Capitalism (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), which explores representations of finance in Western political-economic thought and systems of economic measurement (e.g. national accounting); practices of international banking and their historical evolution; and the relationships between these respective representations and practices; Envisioning Media Power: On Capital and Geographies of Television (Lexington Books, 2009) from his PhD thesis at the University of Auckland and explores the geographical political economy of international television and cognate media products; and Positioning the Missionary: John Booth Good and the Confluence of Cultures in Nineteenth-Century British Columbia (University of British Columbia, 1998), is based on his Master’s thesis at the University of British Columbia and is a study of the missionary axis of British colonialism in Western Canada, drawing on postcolonial and poststructural theory.

In this episode of City Road we talk to Saskia Sassen about her work on globalisation and the global city by tracing the key ideas in three of her books. We start with Saskia’s most famous book, The Global City, and the idea of intermediation in the global city. We move onto Saskia’s historical and, as Saskia suggests, her best book, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages to discuss the methodological tools of capacities, tipping points and organising logics. We end our discussion with Saskia’s latest book, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy and the ideas of expulsion and the systemic edge in the present. Guest Professor Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and a Member of its Committee on Global Thought, which she chaired till 2015. She is a student of cities, immigration, and states in the world economy, with inequality, gendering and digitization three key variables running though her work. Born in the Netherlands, she grew up in Argentina and Italy, studied in France, was raised in five languages, and began her professional life in the United States. She is the author of eight books and the editor or co-editor of three books. Together, her authored books are translated in over twenty languages. She has received many awards and honors, among them multiple doctor honoris causa, the 2013 Principe de Asturias Prize in the Social Sciences, election to the Royal Academy of the Sciences of the Netherlands, and made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government.

Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell interview Jessie Hochberg the CEO of Nightingale Housing which is based in Melbourne Australia. Nightingale is an innovative facilitator in the housing development market bringing together housing creators (the development team)and end users at the outset of projects. Their template has much to be admired. Jessie explains the unique approach of Nightingale and the need for innovation in the housing sector. For more details go to www.planningxchange.org. Audio engineering by Zak Willsallen.

Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell interview Gavin Queit of GK Solutions ('Securing Your Tomorrow') on design measures to improve the safety of the public realm whilst improving aesthetics.

In this This Must Be the Place David has a chat with Anthony O'Donnell, one of the three authors of the book Moss Cass and the Greening of the Australian Labor Party. Cass was a minister in the Whitlam government of 1972-75 and made major inroads in the Labor party's embrace of the green movement (so, paving the way for the saving of the Franklin River in the early 80s for instance) and was responsible for the granting of the public radio licenses which, let's face it, have completely changed Australia's cultural landscape since the mid-1970s. It's a great piece of Australian political history.

Jess and Peter of PlanningXChange interview Brett Davis. Brett is the Executive Dirctor of Regional Planning at the VPA. Prior to this he was a senior Panel member at Planning Panels Victoria. A broad range of planning and design topics are covered emphasising the importance of sound regional planning. UPDATE from Liz - file now replaced with the correct file (Brett not Gavin!)