We speak to tenants, tenant advocates and academics about renting during COVID-19. "The COVID-19 pandemic has provided a hopefully once in a lifetime opportunity to fix the structural and systemic problems of housing that have always been here in Australia." Dr Alistair Sisson "It's very easy to think that a housing crisis is an individual persons problem and I think what's really interesting and important about COVID is that it's drawn into sharp relief the fact that a housing crisis is a community problem and not just an individual problem."  Dr Emma Power Guests Academics: - Dr Emma Power, Western Sydney University - Dr Alistair Sisson, University of New South Wales - Dr Andrew Clarke, University of Queensland - Dr Chris Martin, University of New South Wales Public and Private Renters: - Catherine - Henry - Sammy - Ella - Caitie Tenant Advocates: - Leo Patterson Ross, Tenants Union of NSW - Jemima Mowbray, Tenants Union of NSW This episode was produced as a part of a University of Technology student placement at City Road by guest producers: - Sam Dover - Ursula Aczel

You might have heard about the 'structural adjustment' program, but what about the Green Structural Adjustment of the World Bank’s Resilient City program? We're talking with Sophie Webber and Patrick Bigger about what they call Green Structural Adjustment. Within environmental and development finance practices, cities across the Global South are facing a costly infrastructural crisis stemming from rapid urbanisation and climate change. This threatens to further entrench poverty and precarity for millions of people. The cost of achieving urban resilience across the world dwarfs available public finance, however, from both development banks and governments themselves. Meanwhile, vast amounts of money on capital markets are searching for profitable investment opportunities. The World Bank is attempting to channel return-seeking investment into urban infrastructure in response to these challenges. To harness this private finance, though, cities must be reformatted in investment-friendly ways. In a recent article, Sophie and Patrick chart the emergence of this discourse and associated practices within the World Bank. They call this rescaled and climate-inflected program of leveraged investments coupled with technical assistance Green Structural Adjustment. Drawing on policy documents, reports, and interviews with key staff, they examine programs that include Green Structural Adjustment to show how it aims to restructure local governments to capture new financial flows. Green Structural Adjustment reduces adaptation to a question of infrastructure finance and government capacity building, reinscribing both causes and effects of uneven development while creating spatial fixes for over-accumulated Northern capital in the Global South. Guests Dr Sophie Webber is a human geographer, who conducts research about the political economies of climate change and international development assistance, principally in South East Asia and the Pacific region. In particular, Sophie studies how 'truth' (knowledge claims and expertise), 'capital' (financial flows and investments), and policy packages structure relations between the minority and majority worlds. Methodologically, this research requires relational fieldwork, examining how climatological and developmental crises and problems are interpreted, storied, and managed, both by local and governmental authorities, as well as by distant international experts such as the World Bank. Dr Patrick Bigger is a lecturer in the critical geographies group within LEC. His research examines the ways in which financial actors and their logics and practices are being brought to bear on diverse, but interrelated, environmental crises. Conceptually, his interests include the relationships between environmental-financial products and environmental regulations/regulators; how environmental-financial products fit into broader trends in finance; and how environmental finance values (including, but beyond price) the nature it is attempting to protect. His work focuses primarily on climate change mitigation and adaptation, but also touches on associated environmental problems, particularly biodiversity loss through land use changes. Publication Green Structural Adjustment in the World Bank’s Resilient City https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1749023

The world of night-time waste collectors, night shift nurses, office cleaners, rough sleepers and security guards rarely makes international headlines. Understanding what happens in cities after dark is crucial to global sustainable development, but will also help create a fairer society that values the night-time economy. The world of night-time waste collectors, night shift nurses, office cleaners, rough sleepers and security guards rarely makes international headlines. Yet the night-time is critical to building a fairer and more sustainable future for our cities. To do so, we urgently need to think more strategically about what happens after hours in Australian cities. The night-time is a critical space for addressing some of today’s most pressing sustainability challenges. For example, internationally, energy use peaks during evening hours. Then there is the an estimated 154 million people – about two per cent of the world’s population – who are homeless and face precarious situations at night when seeking food, shelter and transport in socially and environmentally hostile climates. In Australia it is has been estimated that around nine per cent of employees works in the night-time economy. Many are on low pay and work in unhealthy conditions, juggling multiple jobs. They also face longer and more difficult journeys to work, or to access services, than their daytime colleagues. More than two per cent of Australian households live in ‘food deserts’ concentrated in low-income and outer suburbs, like Western Sydney and Wyndham in Greater Melbourne, where access to affordable, healthy food options is limited or non-existent. At night, these conditions worsen as basic services like transport, retail and healthcare stop or shut and affordability plummets. Guest Producer  Kate Murray is a communications professional and knowledge broker focused on research translation. She has a Bachelor of Communication from Griffith University and a long multimedia career of content creation, ghostwriting and journalism. She is a natural organiser and community leader with a passion for collaboration challenges such as those found in interdisciplinary, international, or inter-organisational projects. Kate joined Connected Cities Lab as Coordinator in 2018, building on a career within the University of Melbourne that includes a role as Communication Officer with the Networked Society Institute. Kate works closely with the Lab Director to develop and coordinate research projects, activities and engagement that align with the Lab strategic objectives. She is also responsible for overseeing the daily administrative functions of the Lab and providing support and advice to a range of research projects and the wider Lab research community. Guest Michele Acuto is director of the Connected Cities Lab, Professor in Urban Politics and Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning. He is an expert in international urban development.

Transport is connected to social justice, freedom and equality in the city. Transit networks are objects of intense political contestation and are key terrains of struggle in cities around the world. As sites of disruption, they signal the interrelated crises of urban poverty, social reproduction, security, racism, democracy, and climate. As sites of collectivity, they express the powers of being, acting, and moving in common. We're talking to Theresa Enright about transit as a critical infrastructure of oppression and resistance and as a key platform for political and social change. Drawing on transit-oriented mobilizations in several North American cities, Theresa talks about how transit is tied to claims of spatial justice, and how practices of commoning are realizing new ways to design, operate, and transform mobility systems. Guest Dr. Enright’s research examines urban and regional politics with a focus on infrastructure and mobility. She has written about conflicts over urban transit in Toronto, London, and Paris. Her most recent work considers cultural dimensions of transportation through an analysis of the art, architecture, and design of urban rail networks. Dr. Enright is the author of The Making of Grand Paris: Metropolitan Urbanism in the Twenty-first Century (MIT 2016) and editor (with Ugo Rossi) of The Urban Political: Ambivalent Spaces of Late Neoliberalism (Palgrave 2017). Specialty Focus Areas: Urban-regional planning; metropolitan governance, the politics of infrastructure, urban social movements, critical urban theory.

COVID-19 is altering city experiences and spaces. As cities respond, the contours of post-pandemic cities are also being altered, for better or worse. This podcast brings together a group of leading Sydney-based urbanists to start a conversation about what cities will look like post-COVID, and how pathways towards a just urban recovery might be fostered. “We’ve been thinking about the imperative for innovation; how that’s reshaping how cities are being governed. And all of that got thrown into a new light by COVID” Professor Pauline McGuirk We focus on whether COVID-19 reproduces or challenges existing urban inequalities, what innovations in urban governance are shaping recovery pathways, and what types of cities will result from altered planning and policy processes. “To keep a critical analytical gaze on exactly what decisions are made and keep the pressure on about publicising who benefits, who may not benefit to the same extent, what effect will they have, and that’s long been a project of critical political geography, political urban geography” Professor Pauline McGuirk Workshop Organisers This episode follows a Zoom conversation on post-pandemic urbanism and the prospects for a just urban recovery, which you can listen to in full conversation below. The workshop was organised by the following scholars and attended by almost 150 participants. Pauline McGuirk is Director of the Australian Centre for Culture, Environment, Society and Space (ACCESS) at the University of Wollongong. Her research focuses on how cities are governed and the practices, techniques and politics involved as approaches to urban governance change. Robyn Dowling is Dean of the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at The University of Sydney. Her research focuses on the character of everyday life in cities, and on the ways urban governance responds to the disruptions of technology and a changing climate. Sophia Maalsen is an ARC DECRA Fellow at the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. She researches the intersection of the digital, material and the everyday, with particular interest in the digital mediation of housing and cities. Tom Baker is a Senior Lecturer in Human Geography at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. His research examines the politics and practice of policy-making and the governance of socio-economic marginality. Workshop Panelists You can listen to the individual panelist’s talks below. Chris Gibson on the economy Professor of Human Geography, University of Wollongong Emma Power on housing Senior Lecturer in the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University Kurt Iveson on public space Associate Professor in the School of Geosciences, University of Sydney Jennifer Kent on transport DECRA in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney Elle Davidson on Indigeneity and urbanism Lecturer in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney Kristian Ruming on urban planning Associate Professor in Geography, Macquarie University Chris Pettit on technology and data Professor of Data Science, University of New South Wales Image: © Wendy Murray ‘Take your city back’

Welcome to City Road's 50th episode! To celebrate we've invited the very first guest of the show, Professor Nicole Gurran, back to talk about how we started City Road, our first episode on Airbnb and Cities, and Nicole's current work on Informal Housing.    We also talk about some fun facts about City Road and the broader work that is coming out of the Urban Housing Lab at the University of Sydney.  So here is a fun fact; did you know that Elizabeth Farrelly launched City Road at the 2017 Festival of Urbanism? Guest Professor Nicole Gurran is an urban planner and policy analyst whose research focuses on comparative urban planning systems and approaches to housing and ecological sustainability. She has led and collaborated on a series of research projects on aspects of urban policy, housing, sustainability and planning, funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Australian Urban and Housing Research Institute (AHURI), as well as state and local government. Recent research has included AHURI Inquiries on affordable housing supply (2016-17); housing markets, economic productivity, and risk (2014) and planning system performance (2012), as well as an ARC Discovery Project on the impact of urban regulation on housing affordability in Australian cities and regions (2011-2014). Professor Gurran has authored and co-authored numerous publications and books including Urban Planning and the Housing Market: International Perspectives for Policy and Practice with Glen Bramley(Palgrave Macmillan 2017), Politics, Planning and Housing Supply in Australia, England and Hong Kong, with Nick Gallent and Rebecca Chiu (Routledge, July 2016) , and Australian Urban Land Use Planning: Principles, Policy, and Practice (Sydney University Press 2011, 2007).  Paper  Hidden homes? Uncovering Sydney’s informal housing market, by Nicole Gurran, Madeleine Pill, and Sophia Maalsen in Urban Studies

Who owns London? In recent decades, London has fallen into the hands of the super-rich. It is today the essential “World City” for High-Net-Worth Individuals and Ultra-High-Net-Worth Individuals. Compared to New York or Tokyo, the two cities that bear the closest comparison, it has the largest number of wealthy people per head of population. Taken as a whole, London is the epicentre of the world’s finance markets, an elite cultural hub, and a place to hide one’s wealth. "It's about how money has power, and how money has converted and perverted the mission statement of the city, which is to be a place for all citizens..." Rowland Atkinson We're talking to Rowland Atkinson about his new book, Alpha City: How London Was Captured by the Super-Rich, which is published by Verso. Rowland presents a history of the property boom economy, going back to the end of Empire. It tells the story of eager developers, sovereign wealth and grasping politicians, all paving the way for the wealthy colonisation of the cityscape. The consequences of this transformation of the capital for capital is the brutal expulsion of the urban poor, austerity, cuts, demolitions, and a catalogue of social injustices. This Faustian pact has resulted in the sale and destruction of public assets, while the rich turn a blind eye toward criminal money laundering to feather their own nests. "... enabling and allowing money to destroy [London's] social fabric to create new rounds of development activity that have given little or more benefit what-so-ever to the wider citizenry"  Rowland Atkinson Alpha City moves from gated communities and the mega-houses of the super-rich to the disturbing rise of evictions and displacements from the city. It shows how the consequences of widening inequality have an impact on the urban landscape. Guest Professor Rowland Atkinson is Chair in Inclusive Societies at the University of Sheffield. Rowland is an urban sociologist with a strong inter-disciplinary element to his work. His interests have tended to focus on the urban/spatial consequences of social divisions. These interests have generated significant research projects on household displacement from gentrification, social exclusion and housing policy interventions and the rise of gated communities. Most recently, his work has focused on the impact of wealth and the wealthy on urban life alongside a strong interest in the public role of social science and the university in community settings.

Doomsday peppers consider the COVID-19 pandemic a 'mid-level' event that they are well-prepared for. We're talking with Bradley Garrett about Doomsday peppers, underground bunkers and COVID-19. Doomsday prepping is the practice of anticipating and adapting to an imagined impending crisis, ranging from low level crises to extinction-level events "The inability to know which disaster is being prepared for, or at what scale, coupled with the perceived inevitability of catastrophe, has created the palpable affect of dread that preppers are acting on." Bradley Garret. Based on three years of detailed ethnographic research, we're talking with Bradley about a recent paper - ahead of his forthcoming book with more case studies - where he traces the activity of a single bunker builder in Kansas in the United States. Following its construction in the Cold War this missile silo was purchased by civilian Larry Hall in 2008. Hall is an ex-government contractor, property developer and doomsday ‘prepper’. Since purchasing the missile silo, Hall has transformed it into a 15-story inverted tower block, which Hall calls the Survival Condo, but Brad calls a geoscraper. A community of up to 75 individuals can live in this geoscraper for up to five years. Inside, Hall has created a subterranean, sealed, self-sufficient and luxury habitat. Bradley theorises this type of architecture as the Architecture of Dread, drawing on the work of Søren Kierkegaard’s 1844 The Concept of Dread and Sigmund Freud. "The ‘objectless anxiety’ at the core of contemporary prepping, in contrast to the specific nuclear anxieties driving survivalism, is a ‘sense of existential dread we experience on many fronts’, without ‘much specification of particular risks’." Bradley Garret, citing Mills and Campbell. Guest Bradley Garrett is a cultural geographer based at University College Dublin. His new book Bunker: the Architecture of Dread is based on a three-year ethnographic study with people preparing for social, environmental and political collapse. The research was funded by the University of Sydney and will be published in August by Penguin in the UK and Commonwealth and Simon and Schuster in the USA.

In this episode we use Eugene McCann's four dialectical tensions to understand the COVID-19 city: i) invisibility and visibility; ii) privilege and privation; iii) selfishness and solidarity; and iv) absence and presence. What’s the role of ‘academic experts’ in the debate about COVID-19 and cites, and how can we separate our expert role from our personal experience of being locked down in our cities and homes? This is a question we’ve certainly been struggling with at City Road, and we think it's a question that a lot of academics are struggling with at the moment. Perhaps it's a good time to listen to the experiences of academics as their cities change around them, rather than ask them to speak at us about their urban expertise. With this in mind, we asked academics from all over the world to open up the voice recorder on their phones and record a 2 minute report from the field about their city. Over 25 academics from all over the world responded. As you will hear, some of their recordings are not great quality, but their stories certainly are. Many of those who responded to our call are struggling, just like us, to make sense of their experience in the COVID-19 city. Reporters from the field: - Roger Keil, Professor at York University - Kurt Iveson, Associate Professor at the University of Sydney - Tanja Dreher, Associate Professor at the University of NSW - Carolyn Whitzman, Professor and Bank of Montreal Women’s Studies Scholar at the University of Ottawa - Tooran Alizadeh, Associate Professor at the University of Sydney - Eugene McCann, Professor at Simon Fraser University - Beth Watts, a Senior Research Fellow at Heriot-Watt University - Amanda Kass, PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago - Elle Davidson, Aboriginal Planning Lecturer at the University of Sydney - Creighton Connolly, Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln - Kelly Dombroski, Senior Lecturer at the University of Canterbury - Kate Murray, Connected Cities Lab at the University of Melbourne - Em Dale, at Oxford University - Matt Novacevski, PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne - Mirjam Büdenbender, advisor to the chair of the social-democratic parliamentary group in Berlin - Natalie Osborne, Lecturer at Griffith University - Ash Alam, Lecturer at University of Otago - Cameron Murray, Post-doctoral fellow at the University of Sydney - Deepti Prasad, PhD candidate at the University of Sydney - Madeleine Pill, Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield - Matt Wade, postdoctoral fellow at the National University of Singapore is with Renae Johnson, an independent artist, in Singapore - Susan Caldis, PhD candidate at Macquarie University - Jason Byrne, Professor at the University of Tasmania - Paul Maginn, Associate Professor at the University of Western Australia

Singapore is air-conditioning the inside and outside of buildings. This is about comfort and convenience, but it might also be about human survival. In this talk with Dallas Rogers, Professor Simon Marvin outlines the scope and potential importance of a new agenda around urban climate control and urban weather modification, which he calls the 'new thermal fix' for our cities. “And the challenge is already here, in Australia in many respects; The outside temperature is going to be so high it's not safe for humans to be outside; and that's quite clear.” Professor Simon Marvin Simon’s research interests focus on socio-technical change and the urban condition. He has recently completed large collaborative programmes of work on the politics of urban transitions, urban living labs and the smart cities. His latest book with Andres Luque-Ayala “Urban Operating Systems: Producing the computational city” will be published by MIT press in 2020 as a freely available open access publication. His recent work is focused on the development of interior climate control for humans, animals and plants charting the increasingly strategic role of technologically mediated climates constructed to ensure comfort, convenience and survivability in a period of climate turbulence. “So the critical question then becomes, if the outside is going to be survivable during increasingly frequent, and more intense, and longer duration periods of extreme heat, we’re going to need to cool the outside down.” Professor Simon Marvin At Sydney his new work is focused on “Over heating cities” focused on understanding the dynamics, practices and consequences of the outdoor cooling industry that through a range of socio-technical systems provide active cooling through misting, FOG and even air conditioning in order to try to guarantee outdoor comfort and all-year round weather. Simon will work closely with Sydney Urbanism and colleagues in the school and university who specialises in different disciplinary approaches to urban overheating. “And that’s about survival. It’s no longer about comfort and convenience. That’s actually about whether the human body can actually survive outdoors.” Professor Simon Marvin Guest Simon Marvin is a fractional Professor in the School of Architecture Design and Planning at Sydney University for 2020/21. He is also The Director of the Urban Institute at Sheffield University. Simon previously worked at Newcastle, Salford, and Durham Universities before joining Sheffield in 2015 and Sydney in 2020.