Urban Broadcast Collective

The utopian visions of architects, planners, philosophers and sociologists are important speculative projects. We take a deep dive into the idea of utopia with Professor Danilo Palazzo, who calls on us to become utopians. “We are all utopians, as soon as we wish for something different and stop playing the part of the faithful performer or watchdog”, argued Henri Lefebvre. Cities have often been used as the laboratory for the imaginations of better futures. Such thinking recognises that the built and natural environments are complex systems of competing relationships; spanning the social, economic, physical, political, and environmental. As Robert Fishman pointed out in 1982, 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”. We ask Professor Danilo Palazzo about the role of utopia today. Can we study the past utopias in search of new ways to face the huge environmental, ecological, social, and urban problems of our times? Is there space for Utopia in our university programs? Professor Danilo Palazzo was born in 1962 in Milano, Italy where he grew up. He completed his Master in Architecture at Politecnico di Milano in 1987 and his PhD in Urban and Regional Planning at Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia in 1993. 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.

Contemporary Landscape Architecture: in this episode of new UBC members PlanningxChange, Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell interview landscape architect Tim Vernon of the CDA Design Group. Tim talks about the changes in the profession since he started in the mid 1980's, the influence of travel, sources of inspiration and the contemporary challenges (and joys) of landscape architecture. For more details: www.planningxchange.org.

What do planning podcast people do all day? This Must be the Place meets Planning Xchange. This episode of This Must Be The Place is a four-way conversation between David and Elizabeth; and the hosts of another Melbourne planning-related podcast – Planning Xchange (or ‘PX’). PX is a new member of the Urban Broadcast Collective. PX hosts Jess Noonan and Peter Jewell are both practicing planners, and their podcast features interviews with people employed across different roles in planning related fields. Produced in Melbourne, PlanningxChange promotes a better understanding of urban affairs and city design and function. It aims to be a useful addition to the many wonderful urbanist web resources which assess, appreciate, critique and enhance urban living. A theme in the episode’s discussion is the crossover between academic and practicing planning worlds – or rather the lack of it, whether there is a need for it, and how to go about closing gaps that exist. For more details: www.planningxchange.org.

Kiki Daire started her career in the porn industry in 1998, prior to this she worked as a stripper in Memphis, Tennessee where she is from. Kiki is of French and Cherokee descent. She has over 300 film credits, including featuring in a number of documentaries on pornography, and worked for companies including Evil Angel, Girlfriends Films and Adam and Eve. She is the host of Karaoke 2.0 X-Rated, a weekly social event for members of the adult entertainment scene and fans. This interview took place during the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in late January 2018. It is the first of several other podcasts recorded during the AVN with other performers including Ela Darling, Charlotte Cross, Alana Cruise and Lyndsey Love & Michael Scott. This podcast provides insights into Kik’s personal migration experiences of moving to and living in Los Angeles and Las Vegas as well as reflections of wider performer experiences of migration. A vodcast version of this interview can also be found on the @SubUrbanistaPod YouTube page - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcGRYfzZDWY&t=2s

Cities are vulnerable to climate change because they concentrate many people and buildings into a relatively small area. Consequently, even a relatively contained weather event can affect a large number of people. Cities are also very dependent on their “lifelines” – transportation systems to move people and goods, communications systems, water and energy distribution, sewers and waste removal systems. The concentration of people and wealth in cities, and their dependence on these infrastructure systems make urban centers particularly vulnerable to weather extremes. In this episode of The Urban Squeeze, Tony Matthews looks at the unique cause and effect relationship between cities and climate change and discusses what cities can do to reduce or manage climate change impacts now and into the future. Tony also details what cities globally are doing really well in responding to climate change and why they’re motivated to act. He also tackles a vexing question: Why are some cities doing really well with their responses to climate change even when the countries they are in are doing poorly overall? @CityByrne @drtonymatthews @MattWebberWrite

In this episode of This Must Be the Place Elizabeth and David present a double whammy re: screen representation. David talks to Nigel Giles, author of the new book on the groundbreaking 70s TV show Number 96, set in a mixed use block of flats in bohemian Paddington, Sydney. (“Number 96, Australian TV's Most Notorious Address” by Nigel Giles‎, Melbourne Books). Then, in what promises to be a compelling regular feature looking at cities in film (specifically films found on DVD in op shops), Elizabeth and David review the Olsen twins’ New York Minute (2004), a film which – although your mature and responsible reviewers refrain from hanging shit on a dog – really goes a lot longer than anyone’s idea of a minute. Perhaps more of a Milwaukee Minute (reference explained if you hang in to the end). Footnote – the part where Elizabeth is wondering about whether New York has more films because of some policy supporting films being made there, she was thinking of “movie production incentives” or “tax credits” which were, as David correctly guesses, introduced to stem the tide of US film productions going to Canada.

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