Cities After... podcast

Please keep an eye out for more episodes from Cities After... host Miguel Robles-Duran at an exciting new media organization: Politics in Motion! You can learn more at www.politicsinmotion.org Cities After... will no longer be produced by Democracy at Work. If you want to continue receiving episodes and analysis from Miguel Robles-Duran, please go to www.politicsinmotion.org. We thank Prof. Robles-Duran for the deep insights and thoughtful interviews he's shared with us over the years.

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán examines the histories and ideological underpinnings of the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) and YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) urban development movements. On the surface, these movements may seem to have opposing politics. However, by looking closely at their evolution and participation, it becomes clear that both have been co-opted and obscured by politicians and the media in order to serve the corporate elites and capitalist developers. As the story goes, the NIMBYs are staunch elitists that block progress by resisting change and innovation. The YIMBYs are promoters of growth and prosperity— they are inclusive, environmentally friendly and champions of affordability. But, as Prof. Robles-Durán explains, they do not really embody these virtues. He reveals the elitist and conservative principles that exist within both NIMBY and YIMBY ideologies, and shows why these terms should not be used in the progressive lexicon of urban action and housing activism.  References: https://fortune.com/2023/02/28/housing-crisis-nimbys-build-nothing-country-elon-musk-noah-smith-american-decline/ Cities After... is a Democracy at Work production, made possible by audience donations. Consider supporting us on Patreon. 

The number of people experiencing homelessness has been dramatically increasing across the globe. This crisis has been exacerbated in the last decade by uncontrolled predatory real-estate speculation, the pernicious privatization of social or public housing stock, record levels of inequality, a miserable supply of affordable homes, and the erosion or absence of legal and economic instruments to support social spending in elemental human needs. Neoliberal capitalism is at the heart of this issue.  This is the first of a Cities After… series in which Prof. Robles-Durán will address the global homeless crisis from a number of angles. In this episode, Robles-Durán focuses on the systemic failure of governments, private-public partnerships and non-profit organizations in eradicating homelessness. This trifecta has spawned the contemporary extractive homeless industry that for decades has been profiting from the creation and preservation of this particular social misfortune. Cities After... is a Democracy at Work production, made possible by audience donations. Consider supporting us on Patreon. 

"Housing is a basic human need and the market tends to ignore social needs, as it prioritizes individual profit.” - Prof. Robles-Durán There is a widespread belief that the central culprit of the housing crisis in most metropolitan regions around the world today is the lack of supply. This notion has been well spread by mainstream media outlets and urban professionals, such as urban planners, architects, housing developers, and real-estate agencies. For those disseminating this idea, ending the housing crisis is straightforward: more and more housing needs to be built. In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán contests this belief, explaining that this solution is built on the false notion of a stable market free of externalities and inherent contradictions. Addressing the housing crisis solely through supply and demand dogmas makes little sense in the era of real-estate financialization and mega-landlords. There is a much deeper systemic issue brewing than simply an unequal relationship between supply and demand.  Cities After... is a Democracy at Work production, made possible by audience donations. Consider supporting us on Patreon. 

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán discusses the growing prevalence of corporate landlords and their devastating impact on affordable housing and homeownership. The mass acquisition of single-family homes and apartment buildings by private investment companies, backed by global finance and, often, as Prof. Robles-Durán reveals our own pension funds, capitalizes on our basic need for housing as a human right and turns it into a profit-making enterprise. This phenomenon grows out of the capitalist-fed dream of private homeownership, which has never been truly accessible to the masses. We need community land trusts, cooperative housing, and to put an end to the predatory commodification of housing before it's too late. 

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán interviews Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman about their work with public institutions and community partners on both sides of the US/Mexico border, in San Diego and Tijuana. Tijuana, as Cruz reminds us, has always been a geography of conflict and of crisis. Cruz and Forman's work is deliberately situated at the intersection of formal, often exclusionary, American institutions and grassroots community organizing. By building coalitions, the interplay between various groups—researchers/political scientists and migrants/community organizers becomes more collaborative and less top-down. Their goal for creating community stations is to build public space that is “not about beautification, but public space that is deliberately injected with co-curatorial programming in perpetuity.” In this conversation, Cruz, Forman, and Robles-Durán discuss changes in border politics since Trump, asylum policies and climate change, working with formal institutions and creating “cultural coyote” organizations, the challenges they face while working at the local level, and more. About our guests: Teddy Cruz (MDes Harvard University) is a Professor of Public Culture and Urbanization in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. He is known internationally for his urban research of the Tijuana/San Diego border, advancing border neighborhoods as sites of cultural production from which to rethink urban policy, affordable housing, and public space.  Fonna Forman (PhD University of Chicago) is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of California, San Diego and Founding Director of the UCSD Center on Global Justice. Her work focuses on climate justice, borders and migration, and participatory urbanization. She serves as Co-Chair of the University of California's Global Climate Leadership Council. Together they are principals in Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, a research-based political and architectural practice in San Diego investigating borders, informal urbanization, climate resilience, civic infrastructure and public culture. They lead a variety of urban research agendas and civic/public interventions in the San Diego-Tijuana border region and beyond. Their work has been exhibited widely in prestigious cultural venues across the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; M+ Hong Kong, and representing the United States in the 2018 Venice Architectural Biennale. They have two new monographs: Spatializing Justice: Building Blocks and Socializing Architecture: Top-Down / Bottom-Up (MIT Press and Hatje Cantz) and one forthcoming: Unwalling Citizenship (Verso).

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán takes a closer look at the ever-growing migrant crisis along Mexico-US border cities and its critical socio-environmental implications. It is an issue of urgency, particularly given the humanitarian disaster, the heightened American security impositions, the neo-fascist retaliations from Texas and other Republican states, as well as the political ramifications at both sides of the border.

Welcome to Season 3! In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán presents a personal account of his life in Tijuana, Mexico to illustrate how cities are central to understanding the ways in which capitalism materializes into our daily lives. By tracing his earliest experiences with capitalism's complexities, Robles-Durán reveals how we can practice the reading of urbanization as the living text of inequality and invites each of us to exercise deciphering the capitalist and anti-capitalist code that is constantly being written in our cities and offering a myriad of possible futures.

This episode of Cities After… is a conversation between Prof. Robles-Durán and Silvia Federici, feminist activist and scholar, which took place at the New School in New York City. Silvia Federici has been shaking Marxist traditions to their core since the 1960s by posing critical questions about the role of women's reproductive labor in the development of our human environment and social conditions under capitalism. In this conversation, Robles-Durán and Federici weave through Federici's life and work in Italy, the US, Nigeria, and Latin America to explore major themes of feminism, class struggle, reproductive labor, colonialism, neoliberalism, and more. Federici's work is concerned largely with the power of communal spaces and land, welfare rights, reproductive rights and the role of women in social movements, collective memory, and the right to the city. About our guest: Silvia Federici is one of the most influential feminist thinkers of our times, a full time activist, scholar and teacher. In 1972, she was one of the co-founders of the International Feminist Collective, the organization that launched the Wages For Housework campaign internationally. In the 1990s, after a period of teaching and research in Nigeria, she was active in the anti-globalization movement and the U.S. anti–death penalty movement. She is one of the co-founders of the Committee for Academic Freedom in Africa, an organization dedicated to generating support for the struggles of students and teachers in Africa against the structural adjustment of African economies and educational systems. From 1987 to 2005 she taught international studies, women studies, and political philosophy courses at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY. All through these years she has written books and essays on philosophy and feminist theory, women's history, education and culture, and more recently the worldwide struggle against capitalist globalization and for a feminist reconstruction of the commons.

In this fourth and final episode of the Cities After…Office Spaces as Home mini-series, Prof. Robles-Durán talks to Cea Weaver, a prominent housing organizer in New York City who coordinates Housing Justice for All. In 2019, Weaver coordinated a statewide coalition to pass what many consider the most progressive housing laws in recent decades. She is currently working with the City Planning Commission to figure out what to do with vacant office towers and how to facilitate their conversion into affordable housing. Robles-Durán and Weaver speak about Housing Justice for All and what they're working to achieve, New York's importance in the history of rent control and tenant organizing, the homelessness crisis, and some of the specific policies and programs Cea is working on implementing. About our guest: Cea Weaver is a housing organizer, community advocate, and urban planner in New York City. She currently coordinates Housing Justice for All, a New York statewide coalition of over 100 organizations that represent tenants and homeless New Yorkers in Albany, the State's capital. In 2019, Cea coordinated the 2019 campaign to strengthen and expand tenants' rights across the state and, in 2020, worked to win an eviction moratorium during the COVID-19 pandemic. She has worked in affordable housing policy and planning in NYC for over a decade. In 2021, Cea Weaver became Public Advocate Jumaane D. Williams' first nomination to the City Planning Commission (CPC). In 2022, she was appointed by Williams to the NYC Adaptive Reuse Task Force, charged to convert obsolete office buildings to other potential uses, such as housing, schools, labs, and more. The Task Force includes 12 experts appointed by the Mayor, City Council Speaker, and Public Advocate.

This is part three of the Cities After…Office Spaces as Homes series. In the last podcast, Prof. Robles-Durán pictured a dystopian future where waged labor takes over the household and unfolded a seemingly despairing critique of the post-covid exploitative tendencies in hybrid work and work from home. To contrast, this episode explores the resignification of utopia and the radical imaginaries that could emerge from reconstructing what work-from-home can be.

In Pt. 2 of the Cities After…Office Spaces as Homes series, Prof. Robles-Durán discusses the impacts of the hybrid work and work from home models which have exploded as a result of the pandemic. These seemingly unstoppable trends have rattled municipalities worldwide with never-seen office space vacancy rates (above 90% in some business districts) while record homelessness and the urgent demand for more affordable housing skyrockets. Robles-Duran theorizes about some of the capitalist dynamics at play here, dystopian consequences, and possible contradictory outcomes.

This episode of Cities After… is the first of a two-part series in which Prof. Robles-Durán will explore a post-covid urbanization trend taunting real estate developers and municipal governments across the globe: the adaptive reuse of vacant office spaces into homes. As businesses struggle to lure employees into the full-time occupation of their corporate cubicles and housing prices continue to rise, some champion the rezoning and transformation of office space into residential property as a win-win scenario for cities, while others forewarn the trend as a fiscal and economic catastrophe in the making. Robles-Durán takes a different stance on these positions in this two-part series, first, by unfolding a brief history of a few influential urban ideas from the end of the industrial revolution to the present—particularly functionalist and modernist principles—and, second, by discussing the effects and socio-spatial consequences of these trends.

Concurrent to the very important contributions of early Marxist eco-feminists in the 1960s and 1970s, Prof. David Harvey was amongst the first intellectuals that began to read in Marx a complex critique of capitalism's destructive metabolic relation to nature, a topic that has been constant in his writings from 1970 until today. In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán speaks with Prof. David Harvey on his current views about nature in his writings, the dialectical contradictions he sees in capitalism's response to the climate crisis, and the metabolic relation to nature as a key part of the socio-political problem to be addressed. About our guest: David Harvey is Distinguished Professor of Geography and Anthropology at the Graduate Center of The City University of New York. His work into the fields of anthropology, geography, marxist studies, political-economy, urban studies and cultural studies have made him one of the most influential thinkers alive. Over his lifetime, Prof. Harvey has been dedicated to the production and transfer of critical knowledge to academics and the general public alike, his online lectures on Marx's Capital volume I have been downloaded over half a million times with pending translations in over 129 languages and his co-produced animation on the Crisis of Capitalism has been watched over 3 million times. He has published 26 books, many of them widely influential in the humanities, social sciences as well as art and design fields. He is the recipient of twelve honorary doctorates. In 2019, he was granted the Leverhulme Gold Medal of the British Academy for Creative Contributions to the Social Sciences.

In Pt. 4 of Cities After…Summer Climate Change series, Prof. Robles-Durán talks about the most significant delusional solution to Climate change to date: The Circular Economy, an economic framework that highlights enormous business opportunities in the reuse and recycling of commodities while it claims to save the planet from ecological collapse. What seems like a win-win scenario for environmentally conscious capitalists might not be what it projects.

**Cities After…will be taking a short hiatus. We'll be back with new episodes in September!** Continuing with Pt. 3 of Cities After…Summer Climate Change series, Prof. Robles-Durán talks to the world-renowned performance artist and activist William Tallen, famously known for his character Reverend Billy, described in a recent National Public Radio article as a Veteran anti-consumerist crusader taking aim at capitalism and climate change. Tallen and Robles-Durán discuss the destruction of NY's East River Park, the inseparable connection between art and the environment, the Sixth Extinction, greenwashing, and more. About our guest: William Tallen began performing as Reverend Billy on the sidewalk at Times Square in 1998 outside the Disney Store, where he proclaimed Mickey Mouse to be the anti-Christ, duct-taping Mickey Mouse to a cross. Reverend Billy's early sermons decried the evils of consumerism and the racism of sweatshop labor and what Talen saw as the loss of neighborhood spirit in Rudolph Giuliani's New York. According to William Tallen, the Reverend Billy character isn't so much a parody of a preacher as a preacher motif used to blur the lines between performance and religious experience. "It's definitely a church service," Talen explained to Alternet, but, he added, it's "a political rally, it's theater, it's all three, it's none of them." Alisa Solomon, the theater critic at the Village Voice said of Reverend Billy's persona, "The collar is fake, the calling is real." Along with the Church of Stop Shopping, a project directed by his life partner Savitri D, they have been referred to by academics as "performance activism," "carnivalesque protest," and "commercial disobedience." In addition to protest performances throughout a given year, Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping have organized various campaigns focused on consumerist and environmental issues, often highlighting a particular company they feel best symbolizes the issue. The group stages actions in public spaces near the targets of their actions, often in the lobbies, halls, and plazas in buildings owned by the companies they protest.  Since April 2020, Reverend Billy and Savitri D, have been hosting the EARTH RIOT podcast, which they describe as a comedy-infused, music-filled exploration of humanity's most urgent issue—the planet's Sixth Extinction. Made by "Earth-loving urban activists" from The Church of Stop Shopping, their podcast educates, inspires, and urges listeners to embrace reality and take action.

In the second episode of the Cities After…summer climate change series, Prof. Robles-Durán takes a deep dialectical dive into one of the most popular consumer "solutions" to the climate crisis: the electric car. He begins by sharing the reductionist points that both the auto industry and prestigious scientific journals promote to convince the masses that electric cars are environmentally friendly. In contrast, by looking dialectically and scrutinizing the capitalist industries involved in the whole production chain, Robles-Durán reveals that there is much more environmental destruction than we are told.

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán introduces a summer series on climate change, urban ecology, and its dialectical origins. It is essential to first differentiate how urban ecology should be understood in contrast to the typical green positivist canopy in which is commonly inscribed. In subsequent episodes throughout this summer, Robles-Durán will attempt to transform popular positivist thinking about climate solutions into active and dynamic anti-capitalist directions for facing head-on what has produced the crisis we are in.

This week we want to introduce the first Cities After…Grassroots Special, a quarterly series in which Prof. Robles-Durán speaks with core members of grassroots social movements about critical lessons from their work in the streets and the many projects they are pursuing to fight for the right to the city. For the inaugural episode, Robles-Durán spoke with Santiago Mas De Xaxas Faus, João França, Delia Ccerare Paniora and Maka Suarez, four core members of Spain's most successful housing movement: La PAH (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, translated as The Platform for People Affected by Mortgages). They speak about their recently published La PAH: A Handbook—A manual that offers ideas, based on their 13 years of experience, for ways of organizing, mobilizing people, empowering people, and building networks between social movements and organizations, specifically in regards to the right to affordable and decent housing for all. About La PAH: Established as a direct grassroots response to the 2008 financial crisis that burst the biggest housing bubble in Spain's modern history, the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages has over 250 branches across the country and has instigated a paradigm shift in terms of viewing housing as an inalienable human right, and has demonstrated the strength of collective action in the pursuit of greater social justice. It has shown that there are ways of making the personal political and transforming struggles based initially on personal dramas into large, organized movements that challenge the authorities and our wider society.

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán speaks with Miodrag Mitrašinović, one of the world's foremost researchers on public space. Robles-Durán and Mitrašinović consider differing definitions of “public space,” contrast Hudson Yards in Manhattan with Corona Plaza in Queens as distinct public investments with vastly different impacts on New York City's residents, and speculate about a more equitable future in which communities can reappropriate the means of production of urban space away from oligarchs and philanthropists in order to build spaces that serve larger cultural, social, and political processes. 

Billionaires, or more accurately, oligarchs, exert disproportional influence and control over the world's political power, media outlets, military discourse, human labor, and natural and urban resources, including those that we commonly regard as public. In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán looks at the idea of "public space" and asks: Is there anything "public" left in our urban and territorial infrastructure? What is the meaning of "public" within an oligarchy? How did the neoliberal agenda push public resources into the hands of private stakeholders and what can we do to reclaim and reinvest in truly public spaces?

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán talks with Laura Raicovich, NY-based writer and art curator, about the roles that the global oligarchy plays in art museums and cultural institutions. They discuss how cultural institutions have never been the neutral, inclusive spaces they often market themselves as. Rather, these spaces, both public or private, rely heavily on private funding by elite donors and wealthy board members. Robles-Durán and Raicovich look closely at these complexities within major art institutions, such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, consider the dark money that funds these spaces, and highlight some organizations that are trying to reimagine cultural spaces with equity and care at the forefront.  About our guest: Laura Raicovich is a New York-based writer and art curator. Her latest book, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest, addresses Western western cultural institutions' long history of representing “neutrality” while protecting the political interests of the oligarchs, the elites, and those in power. She most recently served as interim director of the Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, a museum devoted to queer art and artists and is the recipient of both the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowship and the inaugural Emily H. Tremaine Journalism Fellowship for Curators at Hyperallergic.  Until early 2018, she served as President and Executive Director of the Queens Museum where she oversaw an inviting and vital commons for art, ideas, and engagement. Prior to the Queens Museum, Raicovich inaugurated Creative Time's Global Initiatives, where she successfully expanded the organization's international work; launched Creative Time Reports, a media initiative featuring artists' perspectives on world news and events; and directed the Creative Time Summit, an annual conference on art and social justice. She arrived there after a decade at Dia Art Foundation, where she served as deputy director and was a key member of the senior team during a period of transformation for the institution that included the opening of Dia:Beacon. Prior to that, she worked at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Public Art Fund, and New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation. Raicovich lectures internationally and has organized numerous talks and programs, including the two collaborations on series of public seminars at The New School's  Vera List Center for Arts and Politics and she is a member of the transnational consultancy Urban Front.

This week we are rebroadcasting our first episode of Cities After..., originally released in April of 2021. In this episode, Prof. Robles-Durán explores the urban shifts surrounding the dramatic rise of commercial and residential vacancies during the global pandemic.

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Durán discusses how the western oligarchy has been intrinsically interconnected with its Russian counterpart through massive urbanization projects around the world. Oligarch Business Districts have been developed in major cities at the command of dark money in the search for legal loopholes, fiscal gymnastics, and money laundering. By looking closely at two of these development districts, New York's Hudson Yards and Russia's Moscow International Business District, Robles-Durán reveals how they render the invisible web of dark money visible and enable an immense service industry of lawyers, accountants, architects, creatives and financiers dedicated to supplying the wants and needs of the global neoliberal oligarchy. 

*This episode is being re-aired* In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Duran breaks down the allure for many average working millennials of moving to the suburbs. Robles-Duran looks at five key contradictions of the contemporary American Suburban Divide: politics, wellbeing, remote work, climate change and economic opportunity. Speculating on dystopian and utopian post-covid scenarios, Robles-Duran ends with a call to action for everyone to join housing movements against sprawl and in favor of metropolitan affordable housing for young generations and the planet.

In this episode of Cities After…, Prof. Robles-Duran talks with Josep Bohigas, Barcelona's Chief Urban Planner, about the international image and perspectives of the hegemony of American Suburbia in Western Europe. Bohigas traces Spain's suburban development from the 1920s until today, highlighting the similarities and differences from American sprawl. As Robles-Duran concludes this short series on the American Suburban Divide, it is important to emphasize how its disastrous influence on social and environmental urban dynamics continues to define many landscapes around the world. Thus, it becomes even more important to collectively imagine ways out of sprawl.

In this episode of Cities After, Prof. Robles-Duran talks with Andrew Ross about his most recent book, Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing. Robles-Duran and Ross build on ideas from the previous episode by looking at the history of suburbanization in the United States and exploring how the entertainment fantasy industry has helped shape the utopian image of American Suburbia. This podcast zooms in on Central Florida, home of Walt Disney's dreams for building perfect cities.

Welcome to Season Two of Cities After! Prof. Robles-Duran begins this season with a series of four episodes in which to make sense of the growing suburban divide in the United States by honing in on it's divisive politics, the consequential production of COVID-19 boomtowns, and the future of sprawl.  In this first episode, Prof. Robles-Duran gives a brief overview of the primitive accumulation that gave rise to American suburbia together with its racist, patriarchal and capitalist ideologies. This will serve as a basis to further delve into the contemporary phenomenon of post-COVID sprawl and its social, political, economic and environmental consequences to the near future of American cities and their inhabitants.

In this episode, Prof. Robles-Duran is joined by Andres Arauz, arguably, one of the most influential and intriguing political and economic thinkers of the new Latin-American left. This episode expands on the previous discussion on the contemporary effects of the Latin American economic shock therapy and how it has changed the territorial and political dynamics of the south. Robles-Duran and Arauz explore new progressive directions to counter the most recent privatization policies, and discuss the pandemic and post-pandemic socio-political battles in Latin America.  

In this podcast, Prof. Robles-Duran's attempt is to revise and follow on the urbanization of shock therapy, a topic that he first wrote about in 2011 for a book titled "Urban Asymmetries: Studies and Project on Neoliberal Urbanization" and later expanded on in an essay he wrote for the 2014 edition of the Tirana Contemporary Art Biennial. Ten years later, the topic is more relevant than ever, especially, as the shock of the pandemic becomes normalized and absorbed by capitalist forces. Looking at the evolution of the urbanization of shock therapy might allow us to foresee the coming urban transformations and thus, be more prepared and organized to resist and counteract them.

In todays episode, Prof. Robles-Duran continues to discuss the social, spatial and environmental effects of mass tourism by focusing on Barcelona, one of the worlds top tourist destinations and the first major city that developed important strategic policy to fight the predatory global tourism industry. For this discussion, he is joined by two very important personalities from Barcelona's municipal government and urban social movements alike. 

In this episode, Prof. Robles-Duran talks about the startling urban and socio-environmental consequences of mass tourism before, during and after the pandemic. He emphasizes four key contradictions: 1) The global privatization of local cultures; 2) Labor, Technology and Digitalization; 3) Alienation in The production of Infinite spectacles; 4) Environmental needs and its Destruction.

In today's podcast, Prof. Robles-Duran will continue to discuss Post-pandemic urbanization trends by taking a deep dive in the speculative global rent markets and their exacerbating social ills. For help with this, he is joined by Dr. Jaime Palomera from Barcelona's radical research cooperative La Hidra who will help focus a conversation on a striking report that they published two months ago titled “The Social Impacts of the Rental Market”, done in collaboration with the Public Health Agency of Barcelona and the Institute of Government and Public Policy at the University of Barcelona.

This podcast will be the first of four episodes where, together with future guests, Prof. Robles-Duran will slowly adopt the city of Barcelona as a sample to think through some of the tendencies of a post-pandemic neoliberal urbanization. He will do so by looking at three trending development drivers, the production of urban spectacle, the burdens of rental housing, and the limitless expansion of mass tourism.

In this episode, Prof. Robles-Duran is joined by the famed Marxist Urban Theorist Andy Merrifield to have a conversation about inter-urban competition, the socio-spatial consequences of late neoliberalism and the pervasive privatization of urban societies.

In this episode, Prof. Robles-Duran will attempt to shed some light on the impact of inter-urban competition as it is structured by supranational organizations, and how these organizations are the ones that are actually determining and deciding the contemporary urbanization patterns we all see around us, which include the dominant cultural strategies, property development trends, labor practices and the forms of municipal governance that make our cities today.

In this episode, Prof. Robles-Duran is joined by Palin Tan, Professor of Sociology, Art, Architecture History to talk the outmoded talks about the outmoded forms of knowledge that architecture and related urban design disciplines uphold.

In this episode, Prof. Robles-Durán talks about the outmoded forms of knowledge that architecture and related urban design disciplines uphold, as global populations face ever-growing social and environmental urgencies in their cities.

In this episode, Prof. Robles-Duran is joined by Leilani Farha, a Canadian human rights lawyer and Global Director of The Shift, to talk about the effects of the pandemic on housing markets. 

In this episode, Prof. Robles-Duran talks about contradictions that have emerged during the global pandemic all around the world. Job losses, loss of livelihoods, homelessness, and evictions have dramatically increased in cities across the globe. However, the coronavirus crisis has also effected the creation of a tremendous amount of wealth for a small minority. While the economies of many countries report contractions, the real estate and luxury goods markets report record profits. Wealth is being concentrated at the very top. Prof. Robles-Duran explores both dystopian and utopian scenarios that can emerge from this new urban development paradigm.

In this episode, Prof. Robles-Duran and guest, the Marxist geographer David Harvey have a conversation about possible futures to the new empty spaces that now permeate our cities.  

In the first episode, Prof. Robles-Duran explores the urban shifts surrounding the dramatic rise of commercial and residential vacancies during the global pandemic.