THE URBAN IMAGINATION
How do imaginations of the urban shape how we perceive and experience our lives? Where do we find the urban imagination, and how does it relate to social life, environmental change and political struggle?
The urban imagination is foundational to the history of cities yet a curiously overlooked idea in both research and public debate. In the context of global upheaval and crises – extended urbanisation, climate change, growing authoritarianism, and deepening inequalities – the question of what the urban imagination is now, and why and how it might matter, has not been asked in a sustained way.
Over four 30-minute episodes, this podcast examines what the urban imagination means to different people – from scholars and musicians to residents and activists – and how and why the imagination matters for all of us concerned with the urban and its future. Across these episodes, we come to the question of the urban imagination through what might first appear unusual starting points, from the beach and the countryside to the football stadium and genres of music. Doing so allows us to trouble at what we might collectively assume the urban imagination to be, including assumptions of where it might reside, what might be at stake, and how it might be constituted both now and into the future.
PRODUCERS
Tariq Jazeel is Professor of Human Geography at University College London. He is the author of Sacred Modernity (Liverpool University Press, 2013) and Postcolonialism (Routledge, 2019), and co-editor of Spatializing Politics (Sage, 2009, with Cathrine Brun), Subaltern Geographies (University of Georgia Press, 2019, with Stephen Legg).
Socials: @rikjaz / @rikjaz.bsky.social / LinkedIn: Tariq Jazeel
Colin McFarlane is Professor of Human Geography at Durham University. He is author of Waste and the City: The Crisis of Sanitation and the Right to Citylife (Verso, 2023), Fragments of the City: Making and Remaking Urban Worlds (University of California Press, 2021), and Learning the City: Knowledge and Translocal Assemblage (Wiley, 2011), as well as several edited books.
Socials: @colinmcfarlane.bsky.social / @colinmcfarlane3 / LinkedIn: Colin McFarlane
