Urban Broadcast Collective

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”).

There are more than 24 million pets in Australian homes. But our cities are not the easiest places to own a pet. You can’t take your dog on the train in Australia, and if you’re a renter owning a pet, well that can make things really difficult when you try to secure a home. In this episode of City Rd Podcast we talk with Drs Emma Power from the University of Western Sydney and Jen Kent from Sydney University, about why Australian cities don’t necessarily share Australians’ love of pets. Dr Jennifer Kent is a University of Sydney Research Fellow in the Urban and Regional Planning program at the University of Sydney. Jennifer’s research interests are at the intersections between urban planning, transport and human health and she publishes regularly in high ranking scholarly journals. Her work has been used to inform policy development in NSW and Australia, including Sydney’s most recent metropolitan strategy – A Plan for Growing Sydney. Prior to commencing a career in academia she worked as a town planner in NSW in both local government and as a consultant. Dr Emma Power is a Senior Research Fellow at Western Sydney University. She is an urban cultural geographer who researches housing, home, ageing and human – animal relations. A particular focus is on everyday practices of homemaking and neighbouring, and the governance of everyday life within home. Emma’s research interests include: companion animals and community making; and the governance of companion animals in urban Australia, including in strata apartments and through tenancy policy; the place of wildlife in cities and suburbs. Twitter: @CityRoadPod Host: (https://twitter.com/DallasRogers101) Website: cityroad.org

‘Smart cities’ represent the integrated, digital future of cities. Also called the “wired”, “networked” or “ubiquitous” city, the “smart city” is the latest in a long line of catch-phrases, referring to the development of technology-based urban systems for driving efficient city management and economic growth. These can be anything from city-wide public wifi systems to the provision of smart water meters in individual homes. In this episode of The Urban Squeeze, Tony and Jason discuss the journey of some cities towards ‘smart city’ status. They examine some positive and negative implications of this new frontier and ask how good planning can help make cities 'smarter'?

This Must Be the Place (for now): In this episode of This Must Be the Place Elizabeth speaks with Robin Chang, a Research Associate and Lecturer in the Department of European Planning Cultures at TU Dortmund in Germany. Robin’s research looks at temporary urbanism: uses that contravene formal zoning, which last for a time frame that is not intentionally permanent, and which are spontaneously initialized. ‘Temporary urbanism’ is a growing field of study including tactical urbanism, pop-up shops, food markets, and squatters’ collectives. Robin has five such case studies in the port city of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, and will add more from Bremen in Germany. In a context of post-industrial transition, urban shrinkage, and fallout from the financial crisis, municipalities and communities in these areas have found ways to activate vacant and brownfields sites. Some of Robin’s case studies of temporary uses are now major tourist and gastronomic attractions for the city. Robin discusses the role of temporary use for entrepreneurs, for communities, and for Rotterdam in particular (which has a history of experimentalism). She also discusses the unintended consequences of laws discouraging risk, and how temporality challenges the field of planning. Also, the shifting role of planners when past plans have not materialized. (The Ruhr for example was planned for twice the population it now has). Robin suggests it isn’t impossible to have long term planning in parallel with short-term mixed uses and uncertainty. The challenge is how to manage the specifics spatially, legally, and financially. Post-industrial regions are at the cusp: compared to other cities (say, Melbourne) that have other developmental pressures or other industries to count on and which are, as Robin suggests, maybe just 20 years behind. Temporality is here to stay. (No-one ever steps in the same Ruhr River twice?). Alternative river pun: if you wait by the Ruhr river long enough, the bodies of your industrial plans will float by? p.s. The music in this episode is “We are all Detroit”, by Taylor Project (www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3Wnm14Lyl0)

SoundMinds Radio What the Antarctic teaches us about the science of space exploration By SoundMinds Radio It’s 2026 and you are on board the Ares. The largest interplanetary spacecraft ever built. You are on the first colonial voyage to Mars and your crew will be the first hundred Martian colonisers. This is how Kim Stanley Robinson opens his award-winning science fiction Mars trilogy – a set of three books about the colonial settlement of Mars. For Associate Professor Juan Francisco Salazar, this science fiction series opens up some important philosophical questions about what we think were doing as we colonise Antarctica and beyond. In 2015 he release a documentary film based on ethnographic research undertaken in the Antarctic. The documentary is a speculative piece that sits at the intersections between science and social science. In this episode, he talks about his research and film making. Along the way, he raises questions about what we, as humans think we are doing in Antarctica. He says our actions in places like Antarctica tell us much about how we might act in the future when we set out to colonise other planets. Juan Francisco Salazar is an anthropologist and media scholar and practitioner. He currently holds an Associate Professor position in communication and media studies at the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and has been a member of the Institute for Culture and Society since 2006. His research interests and expertise centre on media anthropology; visual/digital ethnographies; citizens’ media; Indigenous media and communication rights in Chile and Latin America; documentary cinemas; environmental communication; climate change; future studies; cultural studies of Antarctica. He is a co-author of the book Screen media arts: introduction to concepts and practices (Oxford University Press), which was awarded the Australian Educational Publishing Award 2009 for best book in the Teaching and Learning Category. As a media artist, he has produced several documentary and experimental short films exhibited internationally and has been a digital storytelling trainer and producer in Australia, Chile and Antarctica. His 2015 documentary film is Nightfall on Gaia.

The Urban Squeeze What are child friendly cities? Are we forgetting the needs of children when we plan cities? How can we make cities more pleasant for their youngest residents? What are the design features of child friendly cities? Tony Matthews discusses these and other questions, as well as the value of involving children in decisions about the cities they live in. Twitter: @drtonymatthews @CityByrne @MattWebberWrite

This Must Be The Place In this episode of “This Must Be The Place” David and Elizabeth visit the small Goldfields town of Clunes for the annual Clunes Booktown Festival. As you may pick up from the introduction, Elizabeth was slightly confused about the distinction between “Booktown” and “Booktown Festival”. Whereas (she realised later) “Clunes is a Booktown all year round”, the weekend Festival in May is in addition to this appellation and sees the town taken over by book stalls, author talks, and book-related seminars. The festival attracts around 18,000 visitors to Clunes – a town of largely intact Goldfields-era heritage you may recognise from such films as Mad Max and Ned Kelly – as in “Mad Max”, and “Ned Kelly”, although “Mad Max and Ned Kelly” might have a certain appeal in the style of “Alien vs Predator”. The Booktown/Festival can be characterized as a revival effort for the town. Other big changes in Clunes over the past decade or so have been the return of the passenger train service, and the arrival of the Wesley College Clunes campus. Amongst the features at this year’s festival, David was invited to speak on his book “Dig: Australian Rock and Pop Music, 1960-85”. The episode features David’s author interview, undertaken on a chilly outdoor stage with Professor Keir Reeves of the Collaborative Research Centre in Australian History at Federation University.