91. Radical History of Urban Planning

City Road Podcast

Joe Penny, Lecturer in Global Urbanism at the UCL Urban Laboratory in London, talks with Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago about his alternative history of capitalist urbanization through the lens of the commons. Against the Commons underscores how urbanization shapes the social fabric of places and territories, lending awareness to the impact of planning and design initiatives on working-class communities and popular strata. Projecting history into the future, it outlines an alternative vision for a postcapitalist urban planning, one in which the structure of collective spaces is defined by the people who inhabit them. Álvaro Sevilla Buitrago is Associate Professor of Planning History and Theory, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (http://multipliciudades.org/). Blending critical spatial theory and urban history, his research traces the role of planning in the genealogy of capitalist territorial formations, understanding it as a device for the dispossession and reconfiguration of autonomous modes of social reproduction. This interview is a part of the 2023 Festival of Urbanism Book Club Podcast series