Ross Beveridge, Markus Kip, Mais Jafari, Nitin Bathla, Julio Paulos, Nicolas Goez, Talja Blokland
105 episodes listed below
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The **Urban Political** delves into contemporary urban issues with activists, scholars and policy-makers from around the world. Providing informed views, state-of-the-art knowledge, and unusual insights, the podcast aims to advance our understanding of urban environments and how we might make them more just and democratic. The **Urban Political** provides a new forum for reflection on bridging urban activism and scholarship, where regular features offer snapshots of pressing issues and new publications, allowing multiple voices of scholars and activists to enter into a transnational debate directly. Hosted and produced by: Ross Beveridge (University of Glasgow) Markus Kip (Georg-Simmel-Cente…
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Urban Political Podcast connects urban theory to the lived consequences of infrastructure, authoritarian power, displacement and collective resistance.
Urban Political Podcast treats cities as places where large political forces become everyday conditions. Its roundtable conversations connect urban research with questions of power, resistance and public life, moving across authoritarian government, infrastructure, forced…
A toilet flush summons a whole city; your infrastructure rabbit hole starts in the bathroom.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A grounded study of suburban life in Dar es Salaam, anchored in housing, cash, and urban theory.
The Suburban Frontier: Middle Class Construction in Dar es Salaam comes across as a close study of how middle-class suburban life is imagined and built in Dar es Salaam.
A sober argument that housing affordability is also a story about credit, policy, and financialization.
Housing is treated here as more than a shortage story. The episode tracks how mortgage credit, homeownership policy, and financialization shape what people can afford, and it makes the case that too much capital moving through housing can press prices as hard as too little…
A grounded discussion of why concrete matters in West African city life.
This episode treats urban politics through concrete, and that material focus gives the conversation real weight. Using Armel Chopin's Concrete City, Material Flows and Urbanization in West Africa, it opens out to city-making, housing, infrastructure, political economy, and…
A serious look at how tourism, patrimony, and race reshape Cartagena's urban life.
Urban racial politics in Cartagena are treated here as a question of city-making: who is allowed to stay in the historic center, who is pushed outward, and how tourism and patrimony can become tools of exclusion.
A thoughtful roundtable on infrastructure, temporality, and the politics of urban life.
The roundtable treats infrastructure as a political and temporal question rather than a technical one, and it stays strongest when Jean-Paul Ady and the guests move through urban theory, participation, exclusion, and distributive justice without trying to force one neat takeaway.
A grounded discussion of sanitation, city life, and the right to city life.
Colin McFarlane's Waste and the City is presented as a case for thinking about sanitation, city life, and the right to city life together. The strongest stretch of the discussion comes when waste is treated as a route into infrastructure and interdependence, not as a separate…
A grave, measured discussion of land, planning, and Gaza's political future.
Urban Political treats the Israel-Palestine conflict as a land and planning story, not just a military one. It links the historical background to the Gaza war, the Negev, and the harder question of what any end state would mean for redevelopment.
A careful look at how local government absorbs crisis, pressure, and uneven discretion.
The piece keeps its attention on local state as the place where austerity cuts, staff shortages, mistrust, and overlapping crises actually hit.
Liberty argued from first principles.
Policy arguments with civic consequences.
Firearms talk from range to rights.
Italian politics, caught in the act.
The episode reviews Armel Chopin's *Concrete City, Material Flows and Urbanization in West Africa*.
The episode traces a long argument about housing affordability and the financial systems behind it.
The Urban Political dedicates Episode 97 to Mark Saunders, described as a radical filmmaker and witness who filmed streets, squats, protest lines, and underground screenings.
The Urban Political’s Spanish-language episode on The Urban Lives of Property features Clara Virginia Salazar Cruz, a researcher at El Colegio de México who works on land property, regularization, housing policy, and popular housing.
Ceren Kulkul presents her book Turkish Muslim Women in Berlin, Navigating Boundaries in the City, based on dissertation research completed at Humboldt University and turned into a book over two years.
Urban Political’s episode 85 features Andrei Semenov, an assistant professor of political science and international relations at Nazarbayev University in Astana, arguing that “authoritarian urbanism” should be defined more narrowly.
Urban Political opens by naming authoritarian urbanism as a mix of state power, militarized violence, infrastructure-led development, and racialized and religious nationalism.
This episode centers on Claire Mercer’s book The Suburban Frontier, Middle Class Construction in Dar es Salaam.
Urban expertise became a tool for marginalizing inequality even as it appeared progressive.
Urban Political’s episode 95, “The Urban Crisis at Night: Engaging the Polycrisis after Dark,” brings Michele together with Alessia and Andreina for a London walking roundtable on St.
Two scholars, Oren Yeftachel and Orwa Svetat, examine the Israel-Palestine conflict through the lens of urban planning, land rights, and settler colonialism.
Researcher Hannah Baumann presents a comparative analysis of how urban infrastructures shape citizenship for refugees and migrants across four cities: Jerusalem, Berlin, Bar Elias (Lebanon), and London.
Four scholars discuss the edited volume 'Infrastructural Times: Temporality and the Making of Global Urban Worlds' on the Urban Political podcast, exploring how infrastructure shapes temporal experience in cities worldwide.
The Urban Political podcast celebrates its 100th episode with co-founders Ross Beveridge and Markus Kipp reflecting on its punk-rock origins in 2019 Berlin, how the academic podcasting landscape has professionalized, and their favorite episodes covering global struggles from Hong Kong to Iran.
The episode turns to Cartagena, Colombia, to look at how urban racial politics are built into the city's present.
The Urban Political opens a new series on urban polycrisis and treats cities as places where several crises pile up and amplify one another.
Urban Political turns to eight years of municipalist government in Barcelona.
Urban Political opens with Colin McFarlane's *Waste and the City*.
The Urban Political podcast interviews Heather Dorries, assistant professor at the University of Toronto, about how settler colonialism and racial capitalism intersect through property and urban planning.
The episode opens the first half of a two part conversation about the local state and how it keeps changing.
Urban Political uses this conversation to ask what digitalization is doing to cities.
The Urban Political closes its authoritarian neoliberalism series with a conversation about where urban politics may be heading.
The episode moves from authoritarian rhetoric to the everyday routines that make it tangible.