Urban Political Podcast · Ross Beveridge, Markus Kip, Mais Jafari, Nitin Bathla, Julio Paulos, Nicolas Goez, Talja Blokland

93 - Normative Insurgency: Responses to the Urban Polycrisis from the Global South

·1 hr 47 min·4 clips

Experiences from the Global South are increasingly becoming relevant to the Global North

The Urban Political opens this episode by launching a new series on urban polycrisis. The series starts from the idea that cities live inside overlapping, interconnected, and mutually reinforcing crises. Housing, democracy, transit, infrastructure, inequality, conflict, the environment, and health all sit inside that frame. Lindsay Blair Howe hosts the conversation and asks about strategies and tactics for acting in a present shaped by polycrisis. The episode brings together Theryshen Govinda, Catalina Ortiz, and Katrin Hofer. Each guest speaks from a different urban context and disciplinary position. The discussion moves between Colombia, South Africa, London, and broader comparative reflection. It treats crisis as something protracted rather than sudden. It also treats crisis as something lived unevenly across urban populations. The conversation keeps returning to the urban dimension of violence and precarity. In that sense, the city is not just a backdrop but the place where political damage becomes visible. The guests connect these conditions to displacement, coercion, and the longer afterlives of conflict. They also ask how people organize under those conditions. The episode makes room for ideas about alliance building. It suggests that polycrisis can deepen disruption while also opening space for relationship building and solidarities. Catalina Ortiz describes work in Medellin and speaks about aesthetics of compassion and territorial healing. The conversation develops a strong line around the connection between body, territory, and planet. That idea becomes a basis for thinking about planning and city making as repair work. The episode does not rush the argument. It lets the guests work through its implications in connected, reflective discussion. By the end, the show has moved from diagnosis to practice without pretending the answers are simple. It leaves listeners with a sense that urban crises are persistent, but not politically closed.

As heard by us

A serious, comparative look at urban polycrisis, moving from diagnosis to the practices people build in response.

This episode opens a new series on urban polycrisis and keeps a steady hold on the pressures cities carry at once: housing, democracy, transit, infrastructure, inequality, conflict, the environment, and health.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a first episode in a new series on urban polycrisis that treats crisis as structure, not spectacle.

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