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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The second episode of the Cities and Geopolitics series turns to the material architectures through which geopolitical power is organised and exercised. From energy grids and digital networks to ports, logistics hubs, and semiconductor infrastructures, contemporary geopolitical rivalries are increasingly mediated through complex, often invisible, urban systems. This episode explores how infrastructures are not merely technical backdrops to global politics, but strategic assets and active instruments of power. Our guests examine how infrastructures are designed, financed, and governed in ways that embed geopolitical priorities, whether through the securitisation of supply chains, the territorialisation of digital systems, or the reconfiguration of energy networks in the context of climate transitions and resource competition. At the same time, the conversation highlights how these large-scale infrastructural transformations are grounded in specific urban contexts. It considers how cities become key sites where global ambitions materialise in concrete forms, such as data centres, ports, corridors, and grids, and how these infrastructures reshape urban space, governance, and everyday life. In doing so, the episode foregrounds the uneven geographies of infrastructural development, asking who benefits, who is marginalised, and how these systems are contested on the ground. Moving between planetary strategies and situated urban experiences, our guests invite listeners to rethink infrastructure not as neutral or purely functional, but as deeply political, contested, and central to the making of contemporary geopolitics.

Within the last years four books have been published exploring the political economy of the private rental sector, with a focus on inequality and resistance. This episode would bring together all four authors (see below) to explore the political economy forces driving the growth of the private rental sector and associated forms of housing injustice (e.g. unaffordability, evictions), the analytical approaches that can best draw out what is at stake in all this (especially from a political perspective), and how this all relates to the renaissance of tenant organizing across many countries in the Global North. By bringing together four of the most prominent authors/activists in this area, the episode aims to capture a crucial moment in the articulation of the emerging politics of the private rental sector. The four books all share a critical urban political economy orientation, drawing on concepts such as financialization and rent. They are all also all interested in ‘residents as agents’, and the practices and organizational forms through which movements seek to create ‘tenants as subject’. The episode would not focus on any of the four books as such, but rather discuss the cross-cutting themes. As the books reflect a variety of different cities/countries, this discussion has the potential to gain a wide listenership and to inform tenant organizing and scholar activism.

In an era of intensifying geopolitical rivalries, the terrains of global power are increasingly being reconfigured through the infrastructure, economies, and everyday rhythms of urbanisation. From semiconductor supply chains and energy transitions to port expansions, data centres, and housing markets, urban space has become a critical arena through which geopolitical strategies are organised, exercised, and contested. This mini-series starts from the premise that geopolitics is not simply something that happens to cities, but something that is actively produced through them. Cities and Geopolitics brings together a set of conversations that explore how contemporary geopolitical transformations unfold across urban space. The series traces the material and spatial logics of power: how infrastructure become strategic assets, how logistics and circulation reorganise territories, and how investment, governance, and technological systems reposition cities within shifting global orders. In doing so, it highlights cities as key nodes where global rivalries are translated into concrete forms, such as roads, ports, grids, and digital systems that shape both planetary connections and urban everyday life. At the same time, the series attends to the uneven and lived dimensions of these transformations. It asks how geopolitical dynamics are encountered in everyday urban contexts, such as: how they are negotiated by residents, mediated by local institutions, and contested through situated practices. By moving between large-scale infrastructural shifts and the textures of daily life, the series develops a grounded understanding of how global power operates across scales. The episodes in this five-part mini-series are organised around themes such as infrastructure of power, corridors and circulation, urban political economies, and everyday geopolitics. The series offers a distinctly urban lens on contemporary geopolitics, inviting listeners to rethink the geographies of global power by foregrounding urbanisation not as a passive backdrop, but as active sites where geopolitical futures are being made, contested, and transformed. In the first episode of this mini-series our guests, Kevin Ward and Seth Schindler explore what it is to think of cities and geopolitics in the current conjuncture, often described as a “Second Cold War” and how is it differs from earlier geopolitical conjunctures.

While the first episode on the transformations of the local state focussed on current authoritarian takeover in different European contexts, this episode will zoom into the progressive possibilities of local state transformations. The episode discusses institutional changes within the local state, the role of other political actors and geographical scales as well as the limitations of localist solutions. The episode is moderated by Matthias Naumann and Gala Nettelbladt, with contributions from Anil Sindhwani, Anke Strüver and Enikö Zöller.

Across Europe, local states are in a dire predicament, experiencing the consequences of austerity cuts, shortage of staff as well as a lack of trust in (local) government. Overlapping crises such as climate change, military conflicts and displacement, precarious provisions of public services, the production of so-called left-behind spaces and the rise of the far right pose severe challenges to its institutions – on various scales and across a wide range of sectors. This situation has sparked seemingly paradoxical developments. In some contexts, it has evoked the loss of legitimacy of democratic institutions and authoritarian takeover, while in other cases the local state is becoming an arena for progressive statecraft tailored at social justice and sustainability. Much is being written on these authoritarian and progressive tendencies. In two episodes on the transformation of the local state, we want to complicate binary thinking that can be quick to romanticise progressive local institutions or paint a homogenous picture of authoritarian situations. Paying close attention to the intricacies of the local state, we want to draw attention to its inherent contradictions and frictions by asking: How does progressivism and authoritarianism play out in the everyday processes of the local state? What are the grey spaces where they might overlap and even coproduce each other? What power relations shape these processes? Both episodes are hosted by Matthias Naumann and Gala Nettelbladt. In the first episode, moderated by Ross Beveridge, we discuss authoritarian developments in local statehood with Harriet Dunn, Crispian Fuller and Theo Temple.

Are we seeing the emergence of a new conjuncture for urbanism? The final part of our mini series asks whether authoritarian neoliberalism has created the conditions for a more illiberal and distinct type of urban governance . Authoritarianism is not new to neoliberalism – the Pinochet regime, Thatcherism in the UK – these were evidently authoritarian and neoliberal, and given crises and stagnation it is no surprise to see these tendencies re-animated. But is something more also happening? The high point of neoliberal hegemony was associated with the development of technocratic, often obscure, market systems as well as notions of ‘sustainable development and even at times ‘participation’ and ‘consensus’ even if these were highly circumscribed. When we look at some new urban projects today, and those envisaged by leading powers, there seems to be less room for both markets, preventing climate breakdown or ‘woke’ notions of democracy and instead a more naked focus on iconoclastic real estate projects regardless of the social and ecological cost. The episode is hosted by Gareth Fearn with guests Jason Luger, Miklós Dürr, Aysegul Can and Oksana Zaporozhets. This episode is one of a three-part series which cover different aspects of ‘authoritarian neoliberal urbanism’, based on a special issue in the Urban Studies Journal edited by Guldem Ozatagan, Gareth Fearn and Ayda Eraydin.

Today it seems fairly obvious to say that urban government has become more authoritarian – there is vastly increased levels of surveillance, violent and militarised policing of dissent and the targeting of migrant, queer and ethnic minority communities. Building on the previous episode on ‘authoritarian populism’, the panel discussion focuses on the ‘authoritarian practices’ of urban governments. We discuss issues of scale i.e. the relationship between central and municipal government and global capital flows drawing on research on Turkey, Mexico, India, Russia and Eastern Europe. We cover overtly draconian practices such as violent crackdowns on protestors and the more subtle ‘sabotaging’ of accountability for key sections of capital – developers, big tech – and national infrastructure and whether this takes us beyond the era of neoliberal urban governance. The episode is hosted by Gareth Fearn with guests Ebru Kurt Özman, Alke Jenns, Nitin Bathla and Sven Daniel Wolfe. This episode is second in a three-part series which cover different aspects of ‘authoritarian neoliberal urbanism’, based on a special issue in the Urban Studies Journal edited by Guldem Ozatagan, Gareth Fearn and Ayda Eraydin.

Across the world, a rightward populist turn is reshaping politics, everyday life, and the spaces we inhabit. This series examines the rise of authoritarian urbanism born from the convergence of state power, militarised violence, infrastructure-led development, and racialised and religious nationalism. As neoliberalism faces a crisis of legitimacy, these forces work to consolidate control and drive new waves of urbanisation that deepen social polarisation. Alongside these authoritarian transformations, we trace the everyday democratic practices—subtle acts, collective refusals, and imaginative alternatives—that contest authoritarian rule and open space for different urban futures. Through conversations with researchers, activists, and practitioners, the series takes stock of this authoritarian conjuncture and asks how power, urbanisation, and resistance intersect in shaping our worlds. This episode focuses on the turn towards an ‘authoritarian populism’ as means of securing and extending neoliberal urban policy, and the extent to which a new political formation is being formed through popular contestation in and over urban space. The episodes discusses research on the USA, India, Brazil and the UK to identify both commonalities and differences across how authoritarian leaders mark out new enemies of the nation, extend police powers over the city, and how populist positioning serves to secure the interests of real-estate developers. We suggest that this authoritarian turn may even take us beyond neoliberalism towards an urbanism that is both illiberal in its politics and development model. The episode is hosted by Gareth Fearn with guests Natalie Koch, Malini Ranganathan and Leonardo Fontes. It is one of a three-part series which cover different aspects of ‘authoritarian neoliberal urbanism’, based on a special issue in the Urban Studies Journal edited by Guldem Ozatagan, Gareth Fearn and Ayda Eraydin.

This episode is our 100th! We are delighted that we have reached this landmark and thank all our listeners and contributors since we started the Urban Political in 2019. To mark the occasion of this 100th podcast we have produced a special issue containing two parts, in which we look backwards and forwards on all things Urban and Political. In the first part, Markus Kip and Ross Beveridge talk to Mathilde Gustavussen about the origins of the podcast, why they set up the podcast, how things have changed since the beginning and what their favourite episodes are. In the second part of the episode, Ross, Markus and Nitin Bathla talk to four of our most regular and brilliant guests: Roger Keil, Colin McFarlane, Julie-Anne Boudreau, Colin MacFarlane and Urban Political collective member Hanna Hilbrandt. We ask them to look back 6 years - to 2019 - and consider what has changed in the urban political landscape, what urban research and practice needs to do to grasp the contemporary moment. Finally, the third question is asking what they think, in reality, might change in the coming years. Thanks for your support as a listener!