Urban Political Podcast

About Urban Political Podcast

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

Publisher

Ross Beveridge, Markus Kip, Hanna Hilbrandt, Mathilde Lind Gustavussen, Nitin Bathla, Gareth Fearn, Leah Bonvin, Mais Jafari, Anne Gossler, Jo Kosowska

Category

science · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

28 Aug 2019

Latest episode

14 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

115 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   14 Oct 2026

   115 - Youth Protests and Urban Imaginaries in South Asia

   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.

2. 

   26 Sept 2026

   114 - Everyday Geopolitics (Cities and Geopolitics VI)

   The fifth and final episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series explores how geopolitical power is encountered, reproduced, and contested through everyday urban life. Moving beyond an understanding of geopolitics centred exclusively on states, borders, and diplomatic strategy, our guests examine how global conflicts and political imaginaries enter homes, streets, workplaces, neighbourhoods, and digital spaces. The conversation considers how ordinary practices, ranging from commuting, shopping, and consuming media to caring, protesting, and negotiating identity, connect intimate urban life to wider geopolitical formations. The episode highlights how geopolitical distinctions are materialised through mundane infrastructures and encounters. Housing markets, migration bureaucracies, policing, schools, monuments, religious spaces, social media platforms, and commodity networks shape who can move, settle, belong, and appear in the city. Geopolitics is therefore not only imposed from above but also lived affectively through fear, aspiration, suspicion, solidarity, memory, and attachment. Cities emerge as spaces in which distant wars, borders, colonial histories, and nationalist projects become proximate, entering everyday relations and producing uneven forms of visibility, vulnerability, and belonging. At the same time, the conversation attends to the capacity of everyday practices to unsettle dominant geopolitical scripts. Migrant networks, neighbourhood solidarities, commemorative practices, cultural production, and ordinary acts of care can rework the categories and divisions through which geopolitical power operates. This episode invites listeners to understand the everyday not as a scale beneath geopolitics, but as one of the principal sites through which geopolitical worlds are assembled, inhabited, contested, and transformed.

3. 

   9 Sept 2026

   113 - Urban Political Economies and Geopolitical Worldmaking (Cities and Geopolitics V)

   The fifth episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series examines how contemporary geopolitical transformations are increasingly mediated through urban political economies. From industrial policy and strategic investment to financial flows, real estate speculation, and technological development, cities have become central arenas through which geopolitical rivalries are organised, negotiated, and materialised. This episode explores how urban space is reshaped by shifting configurations of global capital, state strategy, and economic governance. Our guests discuss how municipalities, regions, and urban institutions are drawn into broader geopolitical projects through infrastructure investment, development corridors, energy transitions, and competing visions of economic security and growth. In doing so, the conversation highlights how cities are not simply passive recipients of geopolitical change, but active participants in the production of new economic and political orders. At the same time, the episode foregrounds the relationship between political economy and worldmaking. Beyond questions of investment and governance, it considers how urban transformations generate competing imaginaries of the future: visions of technological modernisation, green transition, national development, logistical integration, or alternative forms of urban life and solidarity. These processes are explored not only as material reorganisations of urban space, but also as struggles over how urban futures are imagined, governed, and inhabited. Moving between global economic strategies and situated urban experiences, the episode invites listeners to rethink cities as key sites where geopolitical economies and urban futures are simultaneously produced. In tracing the intersections between finance, governance, infrastructure, and imagination, the conversation foregrounds the contested processes through which contemporary worlds are being made and remade.

Who has been a guest on Urban Political Podcast

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Catalina Ortiz
• Thireshen Govender
• Katrin Hofer
• Joanna Kusiak
• Claire Mercer

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Spotify

4.9 / 5

20 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 50 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

80

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

51

Contact Urban Political Podcast

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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