Podcast production, presentation and editing: Tom Goodfellow and Beth Perry
Post-production editing and marketing: Polly Clifton
Training and production support: Jack Clayton
Sheffield Urbanism editing advice: Linda Westman
Distribution, promotion and marketing: Riya Singh and Vicky Simpson
Music: Horizon (original music by Tom Goodfellow, recorded and produced by Alan Thomson)
Podcast Cover: Dan Farley Designs
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, I'm Tom Goodfellow, Professor of International Development at the University of Sheffield; and I'm Beth Perry, Professor of Urban Epistemics and Director of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield.
We would like to tell you about our brand new podcast series, Urban Radar, brought to you by Sheffield Urbanism.
In each episode of this podcast we will reflect on current events and emerging trends through the lens of cities and urban life.
With the news dominated by international and civil conflicts, global economic crises, planetary climate change, threats to democracy, the rise of AI and a new era of superpower competition, it’s easy to lose sight of how most people experience these things locally - and specifically, in the context of cities and towns.
Those most affected by the economic turbulence, social exclusion, political upheavals and conflicts we are seeing globally are often city dwellers. And, importantly, the solutions to many of the challenges we face can, and must, emerge at the local and urban scale.
In this podcast we centre perspectives from cities, towns and their residents within current affairs. And we do so by drawing on the unique range of urban expertise in and beyond the Faculty of Social Science at the University of Sheffield, UK.
Sheffield Urbanism is a community of researchers working in a range of ‘urban’ fields - including planning, geography, architecture, education, politics, sociology and management. Many of us also engage in professional practice, policy-influencing and activism.
Our research community is united by a commitment to achieving urban social justice and analysing what hinders or helps realise this ambition.
In each episode we will scan the news in order to bring you unique urban perspectives into the issues that shape our world. We will invite members of our research community to provide evidence-based informed insights into the ways that cities and urban communities are impacted by, driving and responding to current events.
We will also include special features that profile cutting-edge research and analysis happening within and beyond the Sheffield Urbanism community, linking these to some of the overarching questions that we hope to explore through this podcast series.
These questions include:
- How can urban research help to build solidarity and a sense of belonging in the face of rising individualism, consumerism, and capital accumulation?
- How can we foster place-based innovation to harness technological developments as tools to address inequalities between different groups within and across urban areas?
- What potential does urban political mobilisation have to transform power relations in a world characterised by authoritarianism and oligarchy? And what are its limits?
- Whose knowledge and expertise - human, non-human and artificial - gets to determine the way we live together in urban space?
- How can and do urban communities re-imagine cities as spaces of environmental justice and sustainable inhabitation?
Join us each month as we attempt to decode some of the events and issues on our urban radar - and if you want to know more, follow Sheffield Urbanism on LinkedIn and Bluesk