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Urban Political Podcast

Urban Political Podcast

By: Ross Beveridge Markus Kip Hanna Hilbrandt Mathilde Lind Gustavussen Nitin Bathla Gareth Fearn Leah Bonvin Mais Jafari Anne Gossler Jo Kosowska
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Summary
 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. Powered in partnership with the Georg-Simmel-Center for Metropolitan Studies at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Music credits: "Something Elated" by Broke For Free, CC BY 3.0 US If you would like to produce an episode with us or have comments, please get in touch! Follow us on: Instagram: @urban_political Bluesky: @urbanpolitical.bsky.social LinkedIn: Urban Political Podcast Featured on wisspod: https://wissenschaftspodcasts.de/podcasts/urban-political/ Email: urbanpolitical@protonmail.com Science Social Sciences
Episodes
  • 117 - Electric Life and Power in Atlanta

    117 - Electric Life and Power in Atlanta
    11 Nov 2026
    Electrical systems are a central infrastructure of urbanisation, one which can raise living standards and which we need to help reduce carbon emissions. Electricity is a also business, its own fraction of capital, one with a captive market that profits from our everyday lives. In this episode, Wan Smith and Nikkie Luke join Gareth Fearn to talk about the history and present struggles over electricity in Atlanta, Georgia. They discuss the formation of the monopoly, investor owned utility, its role in the city and the state, the relationship between the utility and government through the Public Service Commission, and how electricity fits into the wider political economy of the US South. We also discuss how citizens in Atlanta have long contested the utility, fighting the racial and economic injustices the utility had been complicit in producing from trolley-car segregation through to the present day fight over hyperscale data-centre development.
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    58 min
  • 116 - Between FinTech and Far-Right I: Placing Debt in a New Conjuncture

    116 - Between FinTech and Far-Right I: Placing Debt in a New Conjuncture
    28 Oct 2026
    Living with debt has become a widespread experience that has evolved alongside the housing crisis. Structurally produced by income stagnation, unemployment, rising living costs, prolonged austerity, inflation, and the retrenchment of social benefits, housing financialization exacerbated overindebtedness over the last decade. While access to subprime mortgages for single-family housing indebted lower- and middle-income populations in some cities, elsewhere, the financialization of and speculation with rental housing fostered indebtedness through rising rents and resulting rent arrears. Mortgage debts or rent arrears have developed in conjunction with other forms of formal and informal debt – platforms, credit cards, loan sharks – and in a global conjuncture of national and municipal debt. Our aim in this series is to advance conceptual groundwork on the nexus of technological, political and financial change as it is experienced at the household level. We seek to bring international scholars and activists into a global conversation that places debt in the techno-political conjuncture of our times. While extending financial actors’ influence into intimate domains and over existential needs of debtors, today’s politics of fin-techno-capitalist change plays out in a new political conjuncture defined by the global rise of illiberal and authoritarian forms of governance, the resurgence of far-right movements, and associated forms of financial violence. Scholars have not only witnessed ever more extractive and predatory debt regimes under far-right governments, but they have also traced the entanglement of far-right politics and industry development, a relationship that is especially visible in the emergence of Silicon Valley–driven technocapitalism. In the first episode of our series, Between FinTech and Far-Right: Placing Debt in a New Conjuncture, we ask: How do household debt, technological transformations in the financial sector, and the rise of authoritarian and far-right movements intersect today?
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    1 hr
  • 115 - Youth Protests and Urban Imaginaries in South Asia

    115 - Youth Protests and Urban Imaginaries in South Asia
    14 Oct 2026
    Across South Asia, young people have led powerful protests against economic insecurity, political exclusion, corruption, inequality, and the erosion of democratic possibilities. Often described as “Gen Z protests,” these movements have been enabled by digital networks, new political vocabularies, and experimental forms of organisation. Yet the generational label can also conceal important differences of class, caste, gender, geography, and political context. These mobilisations have been profoundly urban. Streets, squares, university campuses, and other public spaces have become sites of confrontation, collective care, political experimentation, communal joy, and the imagining of alternative futures. In this episode, we bring developments in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and India into conversation. We ask what conditions precipitated recent youth-led movements, how protesters have occupied and transformed urban space, and what kinds of cities, public cultures, and political communities they seek to create. We also explore regional resonances and differences - including the role of digital mobilisation, social inequalities, political achievements, and the internal limits and contradictions of these movements.
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    55 min
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