Urban Broadcast Collective

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.

The Urban Squeeze What sorts of actions do planners take in response to immigration trends and immigration policy? Can cities be more proactive in influencing immigration? What have past trends in immigration told us about how we need to respond to urban growth pressures today? Jason Byrne discusses these and other questions, as well as how current patterns of immigration might shape the future of Gold Coast city, Australia’s tourism hot-spot. Twitter: @drtonymatthews @CityByrne @MattWebberWrite

This Must Be The Place In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth reports from the Rhine-Ruhr region of Germany. The area’s recent history is famously characterised by industry – coal, steel, cars – and its present by post-industrial restructuring and by new forms of tourism. The introduction to the podcast includes some soundscapes from the Ruhr Museum, housed in the Zollverein, a former coal works near Essen. The Rhine-Ruhr is a huge urban agglomeration and while the public transport facilities are far better than in Melbourne, it is also home to a large and growing number of cars. Car parking amply lines most streets and, in a special twist, when they can’t find a parking spot the locals are very comfortable parking cars all over the footpaths too. This podcast reports on the local Dortmund installment of “Park(ing) Day”, held September 16th as “an annual worldwide event where artists, designers and citizens transform metered parking spots into temporary public parks”. The broader goal is to critically reflect on the amounts of urban public space allocated to stationary cars. This year, in Dortmund’s first Parking Day. the German Transport Club (VCD) (Dortmund-Unner) and local community initiative “Open Answers” paid the meters for 5 parking spaces on Kaiserstrasse, a popular inner suburban street. They installed a drawing and art table, cake stand, games, seating, posters, and a car wrapped up in bed sheets (!). People stopped by to discuss and question, or to participate in activities. In the podcast Elizabeth speaks with Christian Lamker of TU Dortmund and a member of the VCD about how the event went. On Kaiserstrasse around 80% of the street is parking. There are some nice trees – although one resident not only didn’t like the parking day event taking parking space from cars, but also suggested that the trees too ought to be removed to make room for more parking. Others stopping by took the opportunity to suggest ideas for the street involving more greenery, seating, or space for children. In a dramatic twist, the police turned up – someone had called to complain about people using parking spaces. The police advised that under German law, only cars are allowed in parking spaces, so the tables and activities had to be packed up. (The decorated car was allowed to stay). Next year the group plans to try Parking Day again, with a larger and more planned event. They will probably apply for permission as a political demonstration - I think that’s the more feasible way for people to use car space legally in Germany. Meanwhile in the cities of the Rhine-Ruhr, parking on the footpaths continues unabated. You gotta park all those cars somewhere.

SubUrbanista Podcast Episode 2 of The Suburbanista Podcasts focuses on politics and sex! Not the sexual proclivities of democratically elected representatives, but rather the political proclivities of Fiona Patten MLC, leader of the Reason Australia Party, formerly known as the Australian Sex Party. I explore with Fiona why and how she decided to run for state politics; and how the Australian Sex Party was formed and why it has evolved into the Reason Australia Party. Furthermore, we discuss Fiona's major political/policy interests and successes during her time in office and what remains on her to do list; and, how she was received within the Victorian State Parliament given her gender identity and role as a lobbyist for the adult industry in Australia over the last two decades. Our interview took place in the Kelvin Club in Melbourne in February 2018. The backing track in the intro and outro to this Episode is titled "Sex Club" by chameleonic Melbourne-based band The Womb (https://www.thewombmusic.com/) which is led by Alan Driscoll.

Radio Reversal In this episode of Radio Reversal, Jo, Nat, and Anna, and special guest Dr Stefanie Fishel, Assistant Professor at the University of Alabama, put the body back into the body politic. Drawing on Stef’s new book The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic, they consider what the body politic looks like when microbiology, immunology, and parasitology have discredited the idea of the bounded, contained human subject, and consider the complex, messy relationships between bodies, borders and politics – particularly spatial and environmental politics – and the agency of more-than-human actors. @joanna_horton @DrNatOsborne @annajcarlson @flusterbird @RadioReversal

14. Airbnb and Cities_CR by Urban Broadcast Collective

Urban Squeeze How high should urban populations go? Is there an ideal population size for a city? Should we have population limits and how would they work? How do we plan for growing population? Tony Matthews and Jason Byrne discuss these and other questions against a backdrop of public concern over rapidly increasing urban populations. Twitter: @drtonymatthews @CityByrne @MattWebberWrite

This Must Be The Place In this installment of This Must Be the Place Elizabeth and David give a post-film review, along with Rebecca Clements (and also a bit of help from Trent and Casper), of the Jane Jacobs documentary “Citizen Jane: Battle for the City”. As is discussed, the film features a fantastic variety of archival footage and also has very high production values. It tells the iconic mid-20th century story of battles over freeways, slum clearances, high rise housing towers, the ‘cancer’ analogy that propelled urban renewal projects, and the frontlines between grassroots activism and top-down planning orthodoxy more broadly. Perhaps for planners there isn’t so much to learn from the film – Elizabeth and David to this end use the word “undergraduate” in the same sniffy way that chilled Elizabeth long ago (hearing Virigina Woolf describing James Joyce’s Ulysses, and wondering how hard someone would have to work to be so far up themselves). But there are several interesting insights into Jacobs’ background as a journalist, and it’s also worth revisiting her ideas afresh rather than tending to rely on what these ideas have been distilled into over the ensuing decades. The film celebrates – sometimes with a heavy, sappy hand – the inherent value of people and community, and makes a strong case for political engagement. To quote Jacobs, “I think it’s wicked, in a way, to be a victim” Also discussed in the review: pre-war Robert Moses as ‘bully for the people’; issues with looking at public and high-rise houses only from the outside; OTT choices of music; the Pruitt Igoe myth; gentrification (not, notably, discussed in the film); differences between preservation and life; Jacob’s glasses (I think – well we should have); and the challenge of accommodating nuance in a film while still making it compelling. Also some other stuff – part of which is set to the slightly distracting “ears on the street” soundtrack of Federation Square of a Friday evening. “Citizen Jane” was shown at Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne. It’s great to watch and also an excellent curiosity builder for a general audience. And if you’re a planner, you’ll no doubt see several people you know in the audience.