Podcasts about ash amin

Hello Interactors,My daughter in Manhattan's East Village sent me an article about the curated lives of the “West Village girls.” A few days later, I came across a provocative student op-ed from the University of Washington: "Why the hell do we still go to Starbucks?" The parallels stood out.In Manhattan's West Village, a spring weekend unfolds with young women jogging past a pastry shop in matching leggings, iced matcha lattes in hand. Some film it just long enough for TikTok. Across the country, students cycle through Starbucks in Seattle's U-District like clockwork. The drinks are overpriced and underwhelming, but that's not the point. It's familiar. It's part of a habitual loop.Different cities, similar rhythms. One loop is visual, the other habitual. But both show how space and emotion sync. Like an ambient synth track, they layer, drift, and return. If you live in or near a city, you exist in your own looping layers of emotional geography.FLASH FEEDSMy daughter has been deep into modular synthesis lately — both making and listening. It's not just the music that intrigues her, but the way it builds: loops that don't simply repeat, but evolve, bend, and respond. She'll spend hours patching sounds together, adjusting timing and tone until something new emerges. She likens it to painting with sound. Watching her work, it struck me how much her synth music mirrors city life — not in harmony, but in layers. She's helped me hear urban rhythms differently.Like a pop synth hook, the Flash loop is built for attention. It's bright, polished, and impossible to ignore. Synth pop thrives on these quick pulses — hooks that grab you within seconds, loops that deliver dopamine with precision. Urban spaces under this loop do the same. They set a beat others fall in line with, often flattening nuance in exchange for momentum.This isn't just about moving to a beat. It's about becoming part of the beat. When these fast loops dominate, people start adapting to the spaces that reflect them. And those spaces, in turn, evolve based on those very behaviors. It's a feedback loop: movement shaping meaning, and meaning shaping movement. The people become both the input and the output.In this context, the West Village girl isn't just a person — she's a spatial feedback loop. A mashup of Carrie Bradshaw nostalgia, Instagram polish, and soft-lit storefronts optimized for selfies. But she didn't arrive from nowhere. She emerged through a kind of spatial modeling: small choices, like where to brunch, where to pose, where to post are repeated so often they remade a neighborhood.Social psychologist Erving Goffman, writing in the 1950s, called this kind of self-presentation "impression management." He argued that much of everyday life is performance. Not in the theatrical sense, but in how we act in response to what we expect others see. Urban spaces, especially commercial ones, are often the stage. But today, that performance isn't just for others in the room. It's for followers, algorithms, and endless feeds. The “audience” is ambient, but its expectations are precise.As places like the West Village get filtered through lifestyle accounts and recommendation algorithms, their role changes. They no longer just host people, but mirror back a version of identity their occupants expect to see. Sidewalks become catwalks. Coffee shops become backdrops. Apartment windows become curated messes of string lights and tasteful clutter. And increasingly, the distinction between what's lived and what's posted collapses.This fast loop — what we might call spatial virality — doesn't just show us how to act in a place. It scripts the place itself. Stores open where the foot traffic is photogenic. Benches are placed for backdrops, not rest. Even the offerings shift: Aperol spritzes, charm bars, negroni specials sold not for taste but for tagability.These are the high-tempo loops. They grab attention and crowd the mix. But every modular synth set, like a painting, needs contrast.So some people opt out, or imagine doing so. Not necessarily with loud protest, but quiet rejection. They look for something slower. Something that isn't already trending...unless the trend of routine sucks you in.PULSING PATTERNSIf Flash is the pop hook, Pulse is the counter-melody. It could be a bassline or harmony that brings emotional weight and keeps things grounded. In music, you may not always notice it, but you'd miss it if it were gone. In cities, this loop shows up in slow friendships, mutual aid, and cafés that begin to feel like second homes. These are places where regulars greet one another by name. Where where hours melt through conversations. It satisfies a need to be seen, but without needing to perform. It's what holds meaning when spectacle fades.If the fast loop turns space into spectacle, the counter loop tries to slow it down. It lures the space to feel lived in, not just liked. It's not always radical. Sometimes it's just choosing a different coffee shop.Back in Seattle's University District, students do have options. Bulldog News. Café Allegro. George Coffee. These places don't serve drinks meant to be posted. They serve drinks meant to be tasted. They're not aesthetic first. They're relational. These are small gestures that build culture.Social psychologists Susan Andersen and Serena Chen describe this through what they call relational self theory. We don't become ourselves in isolation. We become ourselves with and through others — especially those we repeatedly encounter. Think about the difference between ordering coffee from a stranger versus someone who knows you like sparkling water with your Cortado. It's a different kind of transaction. It eases things. It reinforces your own loop.So why do people routinely return to Starbucks? It isn't just about caffeine addiction. It's about being part of a socially reinforced rhythm — anchored in convenience, recognition, and the illusion of choice.Stores like Starbucks are often strategically located for maximum accessibility and convenience. They're nestled near transit hubs, along commuter corridors, or within high-traffic pedestrian zones. These placements aren't arbitrary. They're optimized to integrate into daily routines. It's less like a countermelody and more like a harmonic parallel melody. As a result, practical considerations like proximity, availability, and reliability often override ideological concerns.People return not because the product is exceptional, but because the store is exactly where and when they need it. The Starbucks habit isn't only about routine, but rhythmic predictability that appears personal. In this sense, it functions as a highly accessible pulse: a loop that's easy to join and hard to break. It's made of proximity, subtle trust, and convenience, but is dressed as choice.My daughter's chosen counter loop lives in the East Village — not far, geographically, from the Instagram inspired brunch queues of Bleecker Street. Her loops are different. She carries conversations across record stores, basement venues, bookstores with hand-scrawled signs, and a few stubborn restaurants.These are Places where the playlists aren't streaming through Spotify. Her city isn't organized around visibility. It's organized around presence. Around being seen to be honored and remembered. Like the bookstore dude who knows the lore on everyone, or the cashier who waves her through without paying, or her Brooklyn bandmate friends who fold her in like family.Sure, this scene intersects with the popular loops — modular synths are having a moment — but it sidesteps the sameness. It stays unpredictable, grounded in curiosity and care rather than clicks. The gear is still patched by hand. The performances are messy and often temporary. And yet, the loops — literal and figurative — keep returning. Not because they're engineered for attention, but because they allow people to build something slowly...together...from the inside. Especially when done in partnership with another synthesist.You might see this in your own city. The quiet transformation of spaces: a café hosting a poetry night; a yoga studio turned warming shelter during the storm; a laundromat that leaves a stack of free books near the dryers. These are not accidents. They are interventions. Sometimes small, sometimes subtle...but always deliberate.They stand in contrast to the churn of the viral. They also offer an alternative to despair. Because the counter loop isn't just critique. It's care enacted. And care takes time.Still, even pulsing care needs structure. It needs floor drains, power outlets, and open hours. It needs a stable substructure.UNDERCURRENT UNDERTONESUndertone is the foundational structure on which other elements are built. It's the core of modular synth music. This isn't just rhythm. It's the subtle, slow, and reactive scaffolding. These core loops evolve and shift setting the timing and emotional tonality for everything else.They don't dominate, but they shape the flow. They respond to what surrounds them to ground the composition. Cities, too, have these base layers. Often imperceptible, they are visceral, ambient, and persistent. They come into focus with the smell of rain on warm pavement. The clink of a key in a front door. These are not songs you hum, they're the ones your heart and lungs make.Long before the influencer run clubs, celebrity shoe stores, and curated stoops, there was the mundane sidewalk. Not the kind tagged on a friend's story or filtered through the latest app. Just concrete. Scuffed by strollers, scooter wheels, boots, and time. The sidewalk doesn't follow trends, but it does remember them.Cities are built on these undertones: habitual routes, early deliveries, overheard exchanges, open signs flipped at the same hour each morning. They aren't glamorous. They don't go viral. But they are what hold everything together.Urban scholar Ash Amin calls this the “infrastructure of belonging.” In his work on ordinary urban life, he writes that much of what connects us isn't spectacular. It's what happens when people brush past one another without ceremony: the steady hum of life happening without the need for headlines. Cities function not just because of design, but because of everyday cooperation — shared rhythms, implicit trust, systems that keep working because people show up.It can seem mundane: a delivery driver making the same drop, a retiree watering the sidewalk garden they planted without permission, the clatter of trash bins returning to their spots. These moments don't make the city famous, but they do make it work.Even the flashiest loops rely on them. The West Village girl's curated brunch only happens because someone sliced lemons before sunrise and wiped the table clean before she sat down. The Starbucks habit loop in the U-District clicks into place because the supply truck showed up at 5 a.m. and the barista clocked in on time. They're the dominant undertone of cities: loops so steady we stop noticing them...until they stop. Like during the pandemic.A synthesist might point to an LFO: Low Frequency Oscillator. These make slow drones that hum under a syncopated rhythm; a pulsing sub-bass holding space while textures come and go. The mundane in a city does the same: it holds the mix together. Without it, the composition falls apart.If you've ever heard a modular synth set, you know it doesn't move like pop music. The loops aren't clean. They evolve, layer, drift in and out of sync. They build tension, release it, then find a new rhythm. Cities work the same way.Their beauty isn't always in sync — it's in polyrhythm. Like when two synth voices loop at slightly different speeds: a saw wave pinging every three beats, a filtered drone stretching over seven. They collide, resolve, then drift again. Like when a car blinker syncs to the beat of a song and then falls out again. In modular music, this dissonance isn't a flaw. It creates a sonic texture.City rhythms don't always align either. A delivery truck pulls up as a barista closes shop; protest chants counter a stump speech; showtimes shift with transit delays. These clashes don't cancel each other out — they deepen the city's texture, giving it groove.Sociologists Scannell and Gifford call this place attachment: the slow accrual of meaning in a space through repetition, emotional memory, and lived interaction. It's not always nostalgic. Sometimes it's forward-looking. The act of building the kind of city you want to live in, one relationship at a time.And beneath all of this, the city continues its own loop: subways running through worn tunnels, trash collected on quiet mornings, someone sweeping a shop floor before the door opens.Both protest and performance rely on this scaffold. The Starbucks picket line doesn't just appear. It's supported by planning, scheduling, and shared labor. The music scene doesn't just materialize. It's shaped by decades of flyers, friendships, and repeat customers.The viral and the intentional both need the mundane.Cities, when they work, are made of all three: the flash of now, the pulse of choice, and the undertone of the necessary. Like springtime flowers, the city creates blooms that emerge at the surface. They draw attention, cameras, and admiration. These blossoms don't just attract the eye, they draw in pollinators who carry influence and energy far beyond the original scene. But none of this happens without the rest of the plant. It's the leaves that capture sunlight day after day, the roots that pulse the unseen through tunnels, the microbes that toil in the grime and dirt to nourish those all around them. Urban life mirrors this looping ecology. Moments that flash brightly, pulses that quietly sustain, and undertones that hold it all together. The bloom is what gets noticed, but it's the layered and syncopated life below — repeating, decomposing, reemerging — that make the next blossom possible. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit interplace.io

Welcome to the first episode of 2023! In this episode, Giselle Mendonça Abreu and I have the privilege of talking to a scholar well known among those of us who study Latin American cities: Teresa Caldeira. Professor Caldeira's work, rooted in ethnography of Sao Paulo's peripheral urbanization, has made substantial methodological and theoretical contribution to how se study cities, particularly in the Global South, for decades. In this episode, we discuss Teresa's trajectory as an urban anthropologist in the 1970s in favelas in Sao Paulo. We then move on to talk about what has changed since then by discussing her two latest articles, which explore the twin concepts of “transversality” and “transitoriness”. Departing from the belief in progress of the midcentury, which was implicit in autoconstruction, Teresa takes us to the transitory, fragmented and non-linear dynamics which characterize cities today. Like so much of her work, she asks us to critically reflect on the categories we use, including that of the Global South, and pushes us to think transversally with concepts that “travel” in unexpected ways. The texts we discuss today can be found here: “Transitoriness: Emergent Time/Space Formations of Urban Collective Life” (published in Grammars of the Urban Ground, edited by Ash Amin and MIchele Lancione “Transversal Connections: Seeing Cities from Other Spaces” (published in Catalan in 16 Barris, 1000 Ciutats, edited by Valentín Roma, Teresa Caldeira, Frits Gierstberg Teresa Caldeira is a professor at the University of California - Berkeley in the Department of City and Regional Planning. Her research, which is rooted in anthropology, looks on the predicaments of urbanization, such as spatial segregation, social discrimination, and the uses of public space in cities of the global south. Her book City of Walls: Crime, Segregation, and Citizenship in São Paulo (University of California Press, 2000), won the Senior Book Prize of the American Ethnological Society in 2001, and presents a comprehensive analysis of the ways in which crime, fear of violence, and disrespect of citizenship rights intertwine with urban transformations to produce a new pattern of urban segregation based on fortified enclaves. Giselle Mendonça Abreu is is PhD candidate in City & Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. Her research examines the political economy of rapidly-growing “soybean” cities in Brazil's hinterland.

Participants: Ash Amin (University of Cambridge), Massimo De Angelis (University of East London), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Richard Sennett (Chair, Council on Urban Initiatives, United Nations Habitat) Moderators: Alex Grigor, Michal Huss, Konstantinos Pittas Description: This panel explores the current potentials of and constraints for the production of the city (understood as a social, historical, and multi-sensual construct) as a common space. How can we prevent a pandemic from becoming another excuse for neoliberal austerity, new enclosures, repression, and mass securitisation at the city level? How can physical spaces become ‘common’, against the backdrop of the privatisation impetus of global capitalism and the proliferation of virtual spaces? As information and communication technologies influence the city’s networks and the processes of immaterial labour, what new capacities to be ‘in common’ emerge and what new forms of solidarity and mutual care networks can be prefigured? How can emerging urban social movements practise the commons in translocal spaces? The final section of this panel included audiences participation. This was not recorded due to GDPR guidelines. Thank you for your understanding. VIRTUAL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME: Commoning the City Friday 12 June 2020, 14.00 – 15.45 (BST) Participants: Ash Amin (University of Cambridge), Massimo De Angelis (University of East London), Shannon Mattern (The New School), Richard Sennett (Chair, Council on Urban Initiatives, United Nations Habitat) Whose Commons, for Whom? Friday 12 June 2020, 17.00 – 18.45 (BST) Participants: Tali Hatuka (Tel Aviv University), Zizi Papacharissi (University of Illinois-Chicago), Doina Petrescu (University of Sheffield / atelier d’architecture autogerée), Laura Lo Presti (University of Padua) Reclaiming the Cultural Commons Saturday 13 June 2020, 13.00 -14.45 (BST) Participants: Sepake Angiama (Institute for International Visual Arts-London), Gavin Grindon (University of Essex), Ella McPherson (University of Cambridge), Pelin Tan (Bard College) All recordings are available on: https://www.youtube.com/user/crasshpublicity

CRASSH Mellon CDI Visiting Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah (New York University) in conversation with Professor Ash Amin (University of Cambridge). Abstract “Cosmopolitanism” is an ancient idea – that we are – or should aspire to be –citizens of the world and not merely beholden to a local community. This originally Epicurean and then Christian ideal has become one of the most pressing issues in modern ethics and political thought thanks to the brilliant work of Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers inaugurated a debate that has also been taken forward by Martha Nussbaum and Danielle Allen. If globalization has become the condition of modern society what are the implications for ethical action? Can we care for distant others as vividly as we do for our own immediate ties? How do the claims of a universal ethics stand against the recognition of cultural difference? What “habits of co-existence” are required to make the global world habitable? What narrative or moral or affective obligations make sense in or across modern societies?

In the first panel of the Decade of Migration conference Ash Amin and Vicki Bell focus on cities. Ash Amin outlines work set out in his book "City of Migrants", looking at the characteristic of the city and its construction of migrants and migrant experiences. Vicki Bell considers "Routes not taken", examining routes not taken in the field of memory studies and its relation to history based on research in Cordoba, Argentina. Part of the Decade of Migration Conference. This international conference marked the 10 year anniversary of COMPAS and looked to future research agendas. Bringing together leading academics and senior practitioners from across the world, this event discussed how migration research has re-configured the social sciences over the past 10 years and in turn how changes in the social sciences have influenced the study of mobility and migration, their patterns, consequences and policies.

Kan studier av en prinsessas självbiografi och musik från 70-talet skydda oss mot dagens främlingsfientlighet? Ja det menar forskarna som medverkar i tredje delen i Forum Specials programserie som handlar om vad de humanistiska forskarna kan hjälpa oss med mänsklighetens stora utmaningar. - För det första gäller det att läsa, det behöver inte vara vetenskapliga undersökningar eller hård statistik, men det gäller att läsa nånting! säger Jane Rhodes, professor i amerikastudier vid Macalester College i Minnesota i USA. Forum Special besöker bland annat Cambridge universitet i England för att ta reda på hur humaniora kan hjälpa oss bekämpa rasism och främlingsfientlighet. Vi hör professor Jane Rhodes som studerat rasismen i USA under 18-1900-talen, och som berättar att den tydliga, sociala rasismen minskat, men den strukturella och mer mer farliga rasismen klamrar sig fast i samhället. Litteraturvetaren Gaurav Desai har studerat en afrikansk prinsessas självbiografi och menar att hur vi ser på rasbegreppet är social konstruktion och att forskning om litteraturen ger oss värdefull kunskap om andra kulturella verkligheter. Ash Amin, professor i geografi som forskar i gränslandet mellan humaniora och samhällvetenskap, varnar för främlingsfientligheten som sprider sig i Europa och västvärden. Filosofen David Brax defenierar olika versioner av rasism i samband med att han är med och förbättrar hatbrottslagen, gemensam för alla EU-länder. Han rekomenderar filmen American history x, som illustrerar det mest effektiva sättet att bli av med fördomar. Programledare: Niklas Zachrisson

Ash Amin discusses his new book, "Land of Strangers: From a Politics of Social Ties to a Politics of the Commons". He states that the impersonality of social relationships in the society of strangers is making majorities increasingly nostalgic for a time of closer personal ties and strong community moorings. Whereas multiculturalism has been steadily 'downgraded' on the policy agenda both in the UK and other parts of Europe during the 2000s, social life at neighbourhood level is increasingly characterised by an everyday negotiation of categorical boundaries such as migration histories, religions, migrant statuses, and socio-economic disparities. This series will focus on emerging empirical research and methodologies that engage with such localised, intercultural processes. The presentations are based on findings from a range of different settings, including London, northern England, the Netherlands and Germany, and also focusing on new 'zones of encounter' that go beyond the traditional inner-city perspective.

POIESIS: Interdisciplinary Interventions on Urban Transformation Urban Democracy by Design? Introduction: Poiesis and Cross-Sectoral Work Markus Hipp (Executive Director, BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt) Panelists: Michael Arad (Partner, Handel Architects) Ricky Burdett (Professor of Urban Studies and Director of the Cities and the Urban Age Programme, London School of Economics) Saskia Sasen (Robert S Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University) Richard Sennett (University Professor, New York University and Centennial Visiting Professor, London School of Economics) Chair: Ash Amin (1931 Chair in Geography, University of Cambridge) The Poiesis symposium is the culmination of a three year research project on the making and remaking of cities led by Richard Sennett and Craig Calhoun in partnership with the Herbert Quandt and Gerda Henkel Foundations. Over three days, the international, interdisciplinary, group of scholars and practitioners involved in the project – from architects and filmmakers to physicists, sociologists and lawyers – will be convened by Cambridge geographer Ash Amin to discuss the future city. Combining plenaries, workshops and roundtable discussions, the symposium will debate the salience of reading the city from its physical and cultural infrastructures, the potential of urban democracy 'by design', and the implications of comprehensive urbanism for social thought and political practice.

“I wanted to look for a politics for the stranger, and of the stranger, which didn’t require of strangers to become friends with each other or with the host community. I felt that that kind of politics was just too narrow and impossible quite frankly in a very cosmopolitan age.” My guest in this podcast is Ash Amin, who until last year was professor of geography at the University of Durham, and now holds the 1931 chair in geography at Cambridge. I met Ash Amin in Cambridge recently to talk about his latest book, Land of Strangers. Most modern Western societies are nothing more than a collection of strangers, Amin maintains; public and political awareness of the stranger has become acute: nobody wants the immigrant or the asylum seeker. The stranger has become a figure of fear and hate, to be contained and disciplined. Land of Strangers argues that humanist policies of inclusiveness are not up to the demands of our extraordinarily cosmopolitan age. The book instead calls for a different kind of politics of …