7 Podcasts Urbanists Should Be Listening to Now
Podcasts, my editor wrote to me this week, are like “New Yorker” magazines: New ones are always piling up before you have a chance to appreciate the last one. As they’ve emerged over the past few years as a go-to medium for longform storytelling, unexpected takes on current events, and casual conversations among experts, celebrities, and besties, it seems there’s never enough time to listen to them all.
Link to entire report >> Next City
The Uncertain Hour, from Marketplace An immersive documentary look at America’s welfare system 20 years after Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it,” The Uncertain Hour was my favorite podcast of 2016.
Placemakers, from Slate Placemakers, hosted by Rebecca Sheir, focuses each 30-minute episode on one project, one person or one city. In its first 18 episodes, the show has taken on some classic urbanist topics — fighting blight, reforming the suburbs, designing walkable places — but often with a thought-provoking twist. The most recent episode, for example, asks why a dense, mixed-use community developed according to New Urbanism best practices also feels, well, pretty creepy.
99 Percent Invisible, from Radiotopia
99 Percent Invisible is the classic design-centric podcast. Host Roman Mars and a slate of excellent producers do a great job of conveying design concepts without being able to resort to visuals — no small feat.
With shows on everything from the history of credit cards to the future of nuclear waste storage, this podcast takes on a wide range of design topics, many of which touch on urban life. The show’s website also offers up transcripts of episodes and a vast trove of (predictably well-designed) articles on places and stories not featured on the podcast — visuals included. Users can browse by topics including infrastructure, architecture and cities.
The Urbanist and Tall Stories, from Monocle 24
The Urbanist, a 30-minute show centered around a theme or topic, and Tall Stories, 5-minute minisodes that each explore “one building, one statue or one park bench that reveals something about our cities,” both take a notably more global approach than many other city-focused shows.
The most recent episode of the Urbanist, for example, spans the globe to look at unsightly architecture, from Belgrade’s attempts to retain architectural integrity after years of attacks, to a Spanish city’s mushroom sculptures to Paris’ divisive Centre Pompidou. The U.S. crops up from time to time too.
Planet Money, from NPR
While not a strictly urban show, Planet Money does a better job than most of explaining the economy. Their tagline: “Imagine you could call up a friend and say, ‘Meet me at the bar and tell me what’s going on with the economy.’ Now imagine that’s actually a fun evening. That’s what we’re going for at Planet Money.”
And it works. One episode asks why the housing voucher program is a lottery — and such an underfunded one — when SNAP and other welfare programs are not. Another shines a light on the battle between states to lure jobs using corporate subsidies
Third Wave Urbanism If conversational podcasts are more your style, Third Wave Urbanism is less slickly produced than the others on this list but has a casual, intimate feel more in the vein of the popular Call Your Girlfriend podcast. Urbanists Kristen Jeffers and Katrina Johnston-Zimmerman chat about what they call “the new normal of human-scale cities in today’s globalized world.”
Candidate Confessional Another not-strictly-urban podcast, Candidate Confessional has a conceit so simple and so smart I can’t believe I haven’t seen it before. In each episode, Sam Stein and Jason Cherkis talk to people who ran for political office and lost. Or as they put it, “the only podcast that actually celebrates people who tried to achieve power and failed.”
Jen Kinney is a freelance writer and documentary photographer. Her work has also appeared in Satellite Magazine, High Country News online, and the Anchorage Press. See her work at jakinney.com.
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