Urban Broadcast Collective

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.

Female Chinese Australians: A Feminist Tale of Multiculturalism by SoundMinds Radio. Stella Sun is a Chinese Australian woman who was born on Thursday Island in 1931. Stella travelled to mainland Australia when she was 17 years old. Dr Alanna Kamp has been interviewing women like Stella about their experiences of belonging and exclusion as female Chinese Australians during the White Australia Policy era. The women Alanna is interviewing piece many memories together to tell rich stories about migration, settlement and family. In this episode, Dallas (https://twitter.com/DallasRogers101) talks to Alanna about researching Chinese Australian women during the White Australia period. He learns she is putting these women front and centre of her research to produce a feminist reading of about the birth of Australian multiculturalism. Alanna Kamp (BA BSc (UNSW); PhD (WSU)) is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Urban Research Program/School of Social Sciences and Psychology, Western Sydney University (WSU). As an historical and cultural geographer, Alanna is interested in feminist and postcolonial understandings of the migrant experience and attitudes to immigration in Sydney. She is particularly interested in the ways in which historical geographies of migrant experience have contemporary relevance and shape current community experiences and identities. Alanna is also a member of the Challenging Racism Project at WSU.

In this episode of the The Urban Squeeze, Tony and Jason talk about the rise of sport and leisure in the city and the role of sport in city-building, with particular attention on large-scale sporting events, including the 2018 Commonwealth Games, being held in Gold Coast City, Australia. They ask what role can planners play in fostering sport and leisure activities in the city? How does sport contribute to city-making and the lives of residents? What are some advantages and disadvantages of large-scale sporting events? Do cities always "win" in hosting these large-scale sporting events like Olympics and Commonwealth games?

This must be the place on everything I needed to know about life I learned from an old British comic strip. Actually it’s an interview by David Nichols in Helsinki at the International Conference on Urban History with Lucie Glasheen, a PhD student at the School of Geography, Queen Mary University at London. Lucie’s research looks at the representation of children in urban environments in British children’s comics of the 1930s. The episode also features an intro with Elizabeth discussing, with her sister Sarah Taylor, what was to be learned from an early over-exposure to British comic strips like Dandy and Beano.

In this episode of Radio Reversal, Anna (@annajcarlson), Jo (@joanna_horton) & Nat (@DrNatOsborne) talk about privacy, particularly philosophies, politics, and technologies of privacy. They explore questions of digital and spatial forms of privacy and ‘publicness’ & of surveillance and facial recognition & how these intersect with race, gender, colonialism & labour, the Internet of Things, Smart Cities & gentrification, data breaches, and what your Data Doppelgänger is saying about you. (A great show to revisit in light of Cambridge Analytica “revelations”).