47. Listening to the city in a global pandemic

In this episode we use Eugene McCann's four dialectical tensions to understand the COVID-19 city: i) invisibility and visibility; ii) privilege and privation; iii) selfishness and solidarity; and iv) absence and presence. What’s the role of ‘academic experts’ in the debate about COVID-19 and cites, and how can we separate our expert role from our personal experience of being locked down in our cities and homes? This is a question we’ve certainly been struggling with at City Road, and we think it's a question that a lot of academics are struggling with at the moment. Perhaps it's a good time to listen to the experiences of academics as their cities change around them, rather than ask them to speak at us about their urban expertise. With this in mind, we asked academics from all over the world to open up the voice recorder on their phones and record a 2 minute report from the field about their city. Over 25 academics from all over the world responded. As you will hear, some of their recordings are not great quality, but their stories certainly are. Many of those who responded to our call are struggling, just like us, to make sense of their experience in the COVID-19 city. Reporters from the field: - Roger Keil, Professor at York University - Kurt Iveson, Associate Professor at the University of Sydney - Tanja Dreher, Associate Professor at the University of NSW - Carolyn Whitzman, Professor and Bank of Montreal Women’s Studies Scholar at the University of Ottawa - Tooran Alizadeh, Associate Professor at the University of Sydney - Eugene McCann, Professor at Simon Fraser University - Beth Watts, a Senior Research Fellow at Heriot-Watt University - Amanda Kass, PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago - Elle Davidson, Aboriginal Planning Lecturer at the University of Sydney - Creighton Connolly, Senior Lecturer at the University of Lincoln - Kelly Dombroski, Senior Lecturer at the University of Canterbury - Kate Murray, Connected Cities Lab at the University of Melbourne - Em Dale, at Oxford University - Matt Novacevski, PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne - Mirjam Büdenbender, advisor to the chair of the social-democratic parliamentary group in Berlin - Natalie Osborne, Lecturer at Griffith University - Ash Alam, Lecturer at University of Otago - Cameron Murray, Post-doctoral fellow at the University of Sydney - Deepti Prasad, PhD candidate at the University of Sydney - Madeleine Pill, Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield - Matt Wade, postdoctoral fellow at the National University of Singapore is with Renae Johnson, an independent artist, in Singapore - Susan Caldis, PhD candidate at Macquarie University - Jason Byrne, Professor at the University of Tasmania - Paul Maginn, Associate Professor at the University of Western Australia