Cities After...

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?

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.

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.

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.