Urban Broadcast Collective

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.

The Green Bans and Gentrification by SoundMinds Radio In this episode, we take to the streets of Sydney. We meet public housing resident Barney Gardner at his house in the suburb of Millers Point, which is just under Sydney Harbour Bridge. I’ve spent a bit of time with Barney over the last couple of years, interviewing him for various research projects on inner city gentrification. Barney was born in Millers Point and has lived there all his life. In 2014, he was told he had to move out of his house and the neighbourhood. The public housing he was living in was being sold off. For most of the last two centuries Millers Point’s proximity to major wharves and maritime industries saw the place develop as a largely low-income, working class neighbourhood. In the early 1970s the ‘Green Bans’ saved the suburb from modernist redevelopment. We talk to Nicole Cook, a Lecturer at the University of Wollongong, about urban development in Sydney, and what the Green Bans teach us about Global Sydney. Nicole is a Lecturer in the School of Geography and Sustainable Communities at The University of Wollongong. Nicole is an urban geographer with research interests in urban governance, power and participation, social movement and resident activism, housing and home. Barney Gardner was born in Millers Point and has lived there all his life. AUDIO Blue Dot Sessions, Outside the Terminal The Kyoto Connection, Close to the Abyss NSW Parliament, Life time resident Barney Gardner addresses crowd outside NSW Parliament House Tanya Plibersek, Millers Point Public Housing Blue Print for Living, Iconic Buildings: Sirius Building SHFATheRocks, Jack Mundey and the Victory – Part 3 of 3

Urban Green Space by Urban Squeeze What are the benefits of urban green spaces? What are their costs? Can urban greenery save lives, improve health and reduce health costs? Tony Matthews and Jason Byrne discuss these and other questions, as well as whether more urban greenery can reduce heat stress, Australia's biggest natural killer. @drtonymatthews @CityByrne

Lieven Ameel of the University of Tampere (Finland) on the literary unease of urban life by This Must be The Place This episode of This Must Be the Place features an interview by David (a self-confessed Finnophile) with Lieven Ameel at the University of Tampere in Finland, when David was a visiting scholar. They discuss Lieven’s book about literary representations of urban life in Helsinki in Early 20th Century Finnish Literature ("Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature: Urban Experiences in Finnish Prose Fiction 1890-1940" blogs.helsinki.fi/urbannarratives/publications/). Finish literature from the early 20th century tends to have been threaded through with unease about urban life – lots of farm girls getting exploited etc., perhaps because “it’s so easy to use a city is a metaphor or allegory of the human capacity for good and evil”. Apparently there was a rich body of urban literature from Finland, but this has largely been forgotten and not translated – even works by authors whose rural-based work is better known. In Finland, seemingly universal anxieties about cities and change were amplified by the fears of a newly formed country that defined itself in rural terms. Also, if you listen right to the end there’s us discussing Fawkner cemetery, Beechworth asylum, unmarked graves at Sunbury asylum, and more. Note - in the podcast we wonder aloud - when did cremation become legal in Victoria? The answer seems to be: 1903.