109 - Corridors, Logistics, and Circulation (Cities and Geopolitics III)

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.