Podcasts
1 – Urban Studies Journal
Walking the city with… Jon Silver and urban corridors
Corridors, inscriptions, and urban studies careers. Caitlin takes to the streets of Manchester with local Jon Silver, discussing the trajectory of urban theorising between Norths and Souths. Jon expertly navigates us, in practice and in personal reflection, through Manchester and many Southern settings of his work, with a close eye to urban infrastructure and questions of social justice. We jump between Ancoats and Mbale in Eastern Uganda, via sizeable urban corridors that are recasting the politics and economics of urbanisation across the world. Jon prompts us to think of working with experts, local and professional, untangling hugely complex urban infrastructures through forensic collaborations. We get taken into a deeply personal reflection on the meaning of the (global) urban scholar and the possibilities for us to create a more inclusive research space for the next generations.
Credits
EveryBeginningIsHard 1v46 by Setuniman, nothing more 1T37 by Setuniman, Albatross by Corals, sipi falls morning by NinadeVroome, Ndere by NinadeVroome, 14.12.2011.001.wav by deathicated
2 – Urban Radar Live
The Global Infrastructure Race
In this feature of the Urban Radar Podcast, Tom Goodfellow and Beth Perry discuss the Global Infrastructure Race with colleagues from the Urban Institute, recorded live as part of the UI’s 10 year anniversary celebrations. Drawing on insights emerging from the GlobalCORRIDOR and Pluralize projects, Jon Silver, Zhengli Huang and Linda Westman share their interpretation of the Global Infrastructure Race, its urban impacts and how we can centre and decentre the role of China. Specifically, they discuss: What is the Global Infrastructure Race and how can we understand its diverse geopolitical and economic manifestations? How can historical and contemporary analysis help unpack the role of China and Chinese investments? What are the impacts on cities and urban inequalities of these activities in and beyond China?
3 – The Urban Political: Corridors, Logistics, and Circulation (Cities and Geopolitics III)
The third episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series explores the spatial and operational logics of circulation, examining how the movement of goods, capital, data, and people is organised, accelerated, and contested across urban and regional space. Our guests discuss how circulation has become a central terrain of geopolitical strategy, focusing on a range of infrastructures, from economic corridors and port expansions to special economic zones, rail networks, and digital logistics platforms. The episode highlights how circulatory systems are not only designed to facilitate flows, but also to direct, channel, and control them, reconfiguring territories, reshaping urban hierarchies, and producing new forms of inclusion and exclusion.
The conversation traces how the control of corridors and logistical infrastructures materialises geopolitical ambitions in highly uneven ways, often generating fragmentation, dispossession, and environmental transformation along their routes. Cities emerge here not simply as nodes within global networks, but as sites where the frictions of circulation are negotiated, where congestion, labour struggles, infrastructural bottlenecks, and regulatory regimes reveal the limits and contradictions of seamless flow. At the same time, the episode attends to the lived and situated dimensions of logistics, showing how everyday practices rework infrastructural spaces.
This episode invites listeners to rethink geopolitics through the lens of movement and mobility, highlighting how the governance of flows has become central to the organisation of global power, and how urban space is continuously remade through the infrastructures, and frictions of circulation.
This episode was edited and posted by Anne Goßler
