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  • 117 - Electric Life and Power in Atlanta

    117 - Electric Life and Power in Atlanta
    2026/11/11
    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 分
  • 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
    2026/10/28
    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 時間
  • 114 - Everyday Geopolitics (Cities and Geopolitics VI)

    114 - Everyday Geopolitics (Cities and Geopolitics VI)
    2026/09/26
    The sixth 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.
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    58 分
  • 113 - Urban Political Economies and Geopolitical Worldmaking (Cities and Geopolitics V)

    113 - Urban Political Economies and Geopolitical Worldmaking (Cities and Geopolitics V)
    2026/09/09
    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.
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    1 時間 3 分
  • 112 - Remaindered Life and the Architecture of Migration

    112 - Remaindered Life and the Architecture of Migration
    2026/08/07
    Amid endless wars, authoritarianism, neocolonialism, and displacement, millions are being uprooted, while pervasive uncertainty grips millions more. As the world is remade through what some have described as neo-illiberalism, the very façade of humanitarianism, and indeed the boundaries of who counts as human, is beginning to unravel. Contemporary capitalism, imperialism, and colonial power produce vast populations whose lives are treated as disposable, surplus, or expendable. Yet the social worlds, forms of care, survival practices, and creative capacities of these populations continually exceed such imposed disposability. To understand the present conjuncture, we must attend to the “life-times” of migrants, informal workers, slum dwellers, and other populations rendered surplus by dominant political and economic orders. This episode brings together two scholars whose work has grappled with these questions in profound ways. At the same time, the humanitarian incorporation of displaced populations into conditions of permanent temporariness is not outside history. Refugee camps and other spaces of displacement are complex built environments with their own material, social, and political histories. Using Remaindered Life and Architecture of Migration as heuristics, our guests explore the political imaginaries animated by these influential books and reflect on their relevance to the current conjuncture. In doing so, they situate contemporary forms of displacement, disposability, and humanitarian governance within the enduring palimpsest of colonial pasts.
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    1 時間 3 分
  • 111 - Bonus Episode: Geopolitical Ecology (Cities and Geopolitics IV)

    111 - Bonus Episode: Geopolitical Ecology (Cities and Geopolitics IV)
    2026/07/15
    What happens when we bring questions of power, territory, infrastructure, and ecological transformation into the same conversation? In this bonus episode of the Cities and Geopolitics miniseries, Nitin Bathla is joined by Malini Ranganathan and Garrett Graddy-Lovelace to explore the emerging field of geopolitical ecology. Moving beyond conventional understandings of geopolitics as a matter of states, borders, and great-power competition, the conversation examines how ecological processes, environmental governance, agrarian transformations, and everyday struggles over land, water, energy, and food have become central to contemporary geopolitical contestations. Drawing on examples ranging from agricultural frontiers and resource extraction to environmental justice movements, the discussion explores how geopolitical projects are materialised through ecological relations and how ecological crises, in turn, reshape political orders across scales. The episode reflects on the growing entanglement of environmental change, security, infrastructure, and global inequality, while considering what a geopolitical ecology perspective can contribute to understanding a rapidly urbanising and warming planet consumed by wars and blockades. The speakers discuss the intellectual origins of geopolitical ecology, its relationship to political ecology and critical geopolitics, and its potential to illuminate emerging struggles over territory, sovereignty, and planetary futures in the twenty-first century.
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    39 分
  • 110 - Take Back the City: Grassroots Struggles, Housing Justice, and Decolonial Futures in Belfast

    110 - Take Back the City: Grassroots Struggles, Housing Justice, and Decolonial Futures in Belfast
    2026/06/25
    This podcast episode explores the political production of urban space in Belfast through the lenses of housing justice, grassroots organising, insurgent planning, and collective rights to the city. Developed as part of the Change Stories Project, the discussion draws on the experiences of the Take Back the City campaign and the work of Participation and the Practice of Rights (PPR), the discussion interrogates dominant narratives that frame Belfast primarily as a “divided city” defined by sectarian conflict. Instead, the conversation examines how colonial logics of spatial control, segregation, land governance, and infrastructural inequality continue to shape contemporary urban life, housing precarity, and exclusion. Bringing together organisers, campaigners, and community activists, the episode reflects on how alternative forms of urban citizenship and solidarity are being built across communities in Belfast. Themes including mutual aid, Meitheal, collective stewardship, counter-mapping, solidarity sovereignty, spatial agency, and the kind economy are explored as practical and political frameworks for imagining more equitable urban futures. The discussion also situates Belfast within wider transnational struggles, drawing connections with anti-colonial and grassroots movements in places such as Palestine, South Africa, the Amazon, and other cities shaped by segregation, displacement, and structural violence.
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    56 分