Urban Broadcast Collective

Hayley Saul and Emma Waterton were doing ethnographic and anthropological fieldwork in the Langtang valley in Nepal when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit in 2015. The earthquake killed more than 9,000 people. At the time of the quake, they were with several local guides from the village of Langtang, one of the worst affected areas in Nepal. Emma and Hayley were recording local oral histories. Their ethnographic research was recording how local stories are written into the Himalayan landscape. Little do they know that their guides’ knowledge of the landscape would save their lives many times over, and enabled them to reach safety after the quake. FEATURED Dr Emma Waterton is an Associate Professor at the University of Western Sydney, where she is affiliated with both the School of Social Sciences and Psychology and the Institute for Culture and Society. She holds a BA (anthropology) for UQ and an MA (Archaeological Heritage Management) and a PhD from the University of York. Her research explores the interface between heritage, identity, memory and affect at a range of heritage sites. She is author of Politics, Policy and the Discourses of Heritage in Britain (2010, Palgrave Macmillan) and co-author of the Semiotics of Heritage Tourism (with Steve Watson; 2014; Channel View Publications), and Heritage, Communities and Archaeology (with Laurajane Smith; 2009, Duckworth). Dr Hayley Saul completed her PhD in 2011, on the Baltic Foragers and Early Farmers Ceramic Research project, specialising in the study of plant microfossils, particularly in pottery residues. Since then, she has completed a post-doctoral research position in Japan, looking at why some of the earliest pottery in the word was invented. Most recently, she has set up a fieldwork project in the Nepalese Himalayas called the Himalayan Exploration and Archaeological Research Team (HEART). Alongside fieldwork, HEART collaborates with local communities, NGOs and charities to stimulate the local economies of this developing region of the world using heritage-based initiatives.

Australia has a long history of natural hazards. The famous Dorothy MacKellar poem about a sunburned country is replete with references to a whole bunch of them. In this episode of The Urban Squeeze, Jason Byrne asks just how vulnerable are our cities to natural hazards and what can we do about it? As well as discussing the types of natural hazards facing cities now and into the future, Jason discusses how cities respond to disasters in the immediate aftermath, in the medium term and the longer term. He also considers some options for making cities more resilient into the future - something likely to be widely necessary as climate change impacts intensify. @CityByrne @drtonymatthews @MattWebberWrite

“Basically if you thought of it, someone Japanese had thought of it before you and catered for it in some way” – three travelling planners discuss their initial impressions of Japanese cities. In this episode of This Must be the Place Elizabeth chats with two traveling companions - Helen Rowe, a transport planner, and Nicole Cook, a lecturer in urban geography – at the tail end of their short trip through Japan. They debrief in a tapas bar at Tokyo main station, amidst one of the many glistening expanses of shopping malls that make up commuter life in Japan and set to the soundtrack of adult contemporary music including “Everybody Plays the Fool”. The discussion isn’t based on any particular expertise on Japanese planning or any research on it – it’s just some initial impressions of the striking features of urban life in Japan. They cover off subways, bullet trains (suggested slogan for Australia – “bite the bullet train”), braille signage, urban agriculture, toilets, car parking, Kyoto’s lost trams, coffee vending machines, love hotels, piped-in street music, plastic food coverings, being uncomfortable to avoid causing offense, smoking laws, crime (lack thereof), criminal law (force thereof), and the mysterious etiquette of slippers. Aside from occasionally feeling like a buffoon and having trouble finding vegetarian food in Kyoto, Elizabeth now suffers from more than a little case of Japanese envy and has taken to unfavorably comparing everything in Australia to things in Japan. For an Australian Japan is a wonderfully topsy turvy world where, for example, it’s illegal to smoke outside but inside restaurants is OK, and instead of having to buy a parking space when you buy a house (because you might get a car) when you buy a car you have to prove you have a parking space in walking distance. If you know more about the topics feel free to correct us or offer explanations - for example, the piped-in Beatles music of Shibuya and the origins of urban agriculture.

In this episode of Radio Reversal, Nat, Amelia & Hannah explore new, messy imaginaries of what it means to be human and more-than-human in the Anthropocene and beyond. We tackle human exceptionalism, monism and vibrant matter, posthumanism, transhumanism, the Capitalocene and the Chthulucene and we try our hand (tentacles?) at what it would mean to Stay with the Trouble, as Donna Haraway implores. We consider what kinds of theories, politics, and practices are necessary for ethical lifeways when we’re no longer (if we ever were) simple, contained individual humans - but instead an entangled, composting, messy cyborgian assemblage in a precarious world. @RadioReversal @DrNatOsborne @AmeliaHine

This is a story about how the financial industry and governments turned a housing foreclosure crisis for everyday Americans into a financial opportunity for institutional real estate investors. And like all good stories, it involves the management of the new post-GFC housing asset class with digital technologies and algorithms. Say hello to The Automated Landlord. We talk to Desiree Fields about a new housing asset class that emerged from other side of the GFC in the United States. The period leading up to the GFC saw the banks reducing their lending standards for home loans in the United States. The financial industry bundled up these loans into mortgages backed securities and sold them off to investors around the world. And in a now familiar tale, this eventually lead to the subprime mortgage crisis and the GFC. When people could no longer afford to pay their mortgages, a lot of these properties wound their way through the process of foreclosure and finally settled on the balance sheets of the banks. The United States government famously bailed out some of the banks by buying up their so-called ‘toxic debt’. But according to Desiree, what emerged on the other side of the GFC was a new housing asset class that was underwritten by two opposing forces. On the one side, the banks were sitting on a lot of property and financial institutional don’t like to own or manage physical assets, like family homes. On the other side, Americans were having a hard time getting mortgages after the crisis because of tighter mortgage lending standards, and many were turning to renting. This created the ideal conditions for property investors, who thought, “ah ha… we can buy these properties for a low price, we can rent them out to people, who are kind of locked out of the homeownership market”, says Desiree. But before the institutional investors could bundle these houses up to create the new housing asset class, the government and the financial institutions needed to sell the idea of the single family rental to the public. Today, the management of this new post-GFC housing asset class is increasingly undertaken with digital technologies and algorithms. Desiree Fields is an urban geographer who theorises the rise of financial markets, actors and imperatives as a contemporary process of global urban change. With a particular focus on housing, Desiree is interested in how the link between real estate and finance is being reconstructed since the 2007-2008 global financial crisis, how residents experience this process, and its implications for housing policy and advocacy. https://cityroadpod.org/2018/02/01/automated-landlord-2/

There are many negative effects from a lack of physical activity and much to gain from regular exercise. Walking is a basic form of exercise but we have only recently begun to understand how important the potential to walk is in our cities. Walkability is a concept which measures how friendly an area is to walking. In this episode of The Urban Squeeze, Tony and Jason discuss how important it is for cities to be walkable. They consider the pressure points inspiring planning to think about walkability and examine how urban design can help or hinder our potential to walk around the cities we live in and visit. @CityByrne @drtonymatthews @MattWebberWrite

This is the first ever episode of “This Must Be the Place”: a documentary style visit to the remains of Cocoroc, inside the Western Treatment Plant. If you live in Melbourne, chances are you don’t give too much thought to where what you flush down the toilet goes to. The important part is it just goes ‘away’. But the chances are – as with 80% of Melbourne’s sewage - it travels to the Western Treatment Plant in Werribee. For much of its history, from the 1890s, the Plant was known as the ‘Metropolitan Farm’. It was the most productive farm in Victoria. And the farm was, for nearly a century, a home to many people. As recently as the late 1970s, hundreds of workers and their families lived inside the sewage farm, including in a township called Cocoroc. In this episode Elizabeth and David take a tour with Melbourne Water Heritage Manager Paul Balescone to see what remains of Cocoroc today. They also speak to a PhD student, Monika Schott, who's researching what life was like living on the Farm. And they introduce the idea of the This Must Be The Place podcast. Alternative title: “dropping the kids off at the pool”. (The town’s old swimming pool is featured. Also that’s a terrible joke). Corrections from the audio: The town of Cocoroc was occupied until the 1970s, not the 1980s. And although there were many place-names within the Farm some say there was only really one town, Cocoroc.

CarPoolXXX is a special series of podcasts and vodcasts (hosted by Paul Maginn) that explores the issue of Porn Performers as a Migrant Community. Los Angeles has been the epicentre of global porn production since the 1980s and as such thousands of people from across the US and internationally - especially Europe - have migrated to California in order to be in the porn industry. Academic studies of migrant communities tend to focus on people who come from certain countries, nationalities, or religious/cultural backgrounds. Whilst economic migrants have been a feature of migration studies, again the focus often tends to be on particular types of migrants - i.e. the 'illegal' or 'undocumented' who come from particular countries. Porn performers, I argue, constitute a minority migrant community on the basis that a relatively small proportion of people are engaged in this form of labour, and many, if not most, of the people who work in porn both in front of and behind the camera have migrated to LA from elsewhere in the US or from overseas. Despite our mass consumption of pornography plus the contribution of the porn industry to the economy, technology, entertainment, the arts and our culture in general, porn performers continue to endure stigma and discrimination in relation to things like housing, banking and employment opportunities outside of porn. As such, all of this begs the question: In what ways are the migration and resettlement experiences of porn performers similar/different to other minority migrant communities who seek to make a life in a new city/country? The CarpoolXXX series seeks to lift the lid on this question by exploring the experiences of a mix of porn performers who are based in Los Angeles and/or Las Vegas. Episode 1 of the CarpoolXXX series –͞Show Me the Monet͟ - features Melissa Monet, a native New Yorker, who entered the porn industry in the early 1990s. Melissa has starred in, written, directed and produced adult films. Recently retired from the industry, Melissa devotes much of her time to helping and rescuing lost dogs and making custom jewellery. This episode was recorded in late January 2018 whilst Melissa and I drove around Venice, Santa Monica and the Pacific Pallisades.

Many cities around the world pride themselves on their live music scenes. But music cities don’t generally happen by accident - they are planned for, organised, marketed and protected. In this episode of the The Urban Squeeze, Tony and Jason examine how music cities are regulated and what good and bad regulations involve. They discuss the role for planning in promoting music as a cultural driver in cities. They also reflect on the question of whether good planning can leverage music as a way to make some cities more liveable while avoiding gentrification.

This episode of This Must be the Place is the first of our ‘walking tours’ – we are revisiting the walks of the 1980 book “Melbourne on Foot: 15 Walks Through Historic Melbourne”. This episode starts with David speaking with one of the authors of that book, Professor Graeme Davison of Monash University, about the genesis of the book in general. They are then joined by Elizabeth to discuss the Richmond tour specifically. (Confusingly this all takes place in St Kilda, ahead of a walking tour included in a later episode). Back in time, but later in the episode, Elizabeth and David retrace the 1980 tour of the inner suburb of Richmond. While some things have changed since then (beginning with tram routes, and also a cable tram station that has since been swallowed up by Punt Road), many of the houses and landmarks of Richmond’s layers of history remain. The tour takes in Richmond’s genteel hill area (now home to many urologists and cosmetic surgeons), down to the flat and the mix of 19th century housing and factory buildings (many of them now disguising, ‘iceberg house’ style, James Bond style apartments behind), and the civic buildings and shops of Bridge Road. It also takes in what is now known as the Dogs in Space house (reference to the 1987 film), but in 1980 was noted as an unusually large house for such a small street. Graeme had written ‘The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne’ while living in Canberra. On his return to Melbourne, some of the walks in the book originated as urban history material both for his students and for himself. They were also partly inspired by the book ‘Chicago on Foot’ and the Chicago school tradition of urban walking. Plus, they were also pitched at a wider readership. The authors – who comprised a mix of academics and of community activists - consciously did not pick (then) fashionable suburbs such as East Melbourne or Parkville, but instead encouraged readers to visit parts of the city that they perhaps overlooked or were reluctant to see historic merit in. Graeme’s 4th year dissertation was on Richmond and he was once picked up by the police there, for looking shifty with a bag. It was that kind of place then. Nowadays many of us probably couldn’t afford to live in places like Richmond, but you can still take a walk there. Or visit a urologist, as you see fit.