In this summer instalment of erstwhile podcast This Must Be The Place, Liz Taylor (no, not the actor – who is dead by the way) talks with Brendan Gleeson (no, also not that other actor). Brendan Gleeson is Professor of Urban Policy at the University of Melbourne and has had a decades-long career in publishing urban research. But since 2021 Brendan has for health reasons “stepped off the plate” from heading the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute – he hasn’t read an academic theory text in over a year, and has instead been rescaling his focus to the local and the everyday of life in the Hotham Hill area of North Melbourne. Brendan’s recent projects include setting up an independent press, Shiel Street Press (named for the North Melbourne street – also home of the Public Records Office), publishing a book of poems based on Gardiner Reserve in North Melbourne (“Records of the Loss Property Department of Gardiner Reserve”), and researching the life and times of a long-lived cockatoo (Cocky Duggan) who lived in a hotel in North Melbourne in the mid 20th century and was known for his “more than passable impersonation of men vomiting”. 

Gardiner Reserve is a place Brendan suddenly spent a lot of time in, living and observing at a walking pace, and the “Records of the Loss Property Department of Gardiner Reserve” book is a faux-corporate drama made up of pictures and poems, in large part inspired by items left behind in the park that Brendan’s flat faces onto – beginning with the triggering sight of a set of sparkly children’s shoes discarded (but neatly arranged) in a playground. From these lost and found items – shoes, toys, milk crates, crochet rugs, single crutches, the routine sadness of lost cat signs - the discussion gets on to themes of loss, grief, time, decay, children gone and grown, and the broader cultural fascination of discarded objects. Liz ties it into Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project and his theories of modernity and decay, and to “Found Magazine” including Speckles the proto-viral “Loss Cat”.  Also covered are municipal micro-regulations, public trees, Blue Lake, urban noises (lots of them are in the background), the anxiety of public toilet announcements (“door locked – your maximum use time is…”), North Melbourne Swimming Pool, and of course concluding with the tale of Cocky Duggan of the Court House Hotel. It was a long conversation and most of the background on Shiel Street Press has been cut but you find more information here - https://www.shielstreetpress.com.

Records of the Loss Property Department of Gardiner Reserve: With Professor Brendan Gleeson

Welcome to the Urban Broadcast Collective. 

We are a curated network of podcast and radio shows on everything urban. Our goal is simple, to bring together all the amazing urban focused podcasts on one site. In this episode you’ll hear from some of our podcasters and radio makers. We’ll also tell you how to get involved in the Urban Broadcast Collective. For more information, please contact one of our podcast producers: Natalie Osborne from Griffith University; Elizabeth Taylor from RMIT; Tony Matthews from Griffith University; Paul Maginn from the University of Western Australia; Jason Byrne from the University of Tasmania; or Dallas Rogers from the University of Sydney. You can also find us on Twitter at @urbanpodcasts and ApplePodcasts. So sit back and enjoy some fascinating discussions about cities and urbanism.

1. Welcome_UBC

Ernest Fooks, Newlands Estate, & Melbourne modern design heritage by This Must be The Place

From Viennese Avant Garde to Newlands Pizza Plus: an episode of This Must Be the Place that’s about two things: a place, and a person who was influential in making that place. The place is the Newlands Estate, an area developed by the Housing Commission in the 1940s and 1950s, in Melbourne’s north. The person is Ernest Fooks – to whom Newlands owes part of its design. Fooks was an avant garde European émigré architect and planner, and Newlands was one of his first projects after emigrating to Melbourne from the war in Austria. The Newlands estate – known for its parks, topography, mix of housing types, ubiquitous red brick, and community facilities – was the beginning of an influential 40 year career in Australia for Fooks, whose work went on to include numerous luxury modernist homes for the Jewish community, and Jewish institutional buildings. In this episode David interviews architect Catherine Townsend, a Fooks expert. And Elizabeth interviews Cate Hall, an active member of the Newlands community who has been involved in campaigns to save the Coburg Olympic Pool (in Newlands), and to regain a high school for the area. The heritage value of modernist design is part of the story, as is the politics of investment in community infrastructure.

2. Newlands Estate Modern Fooks_TMBTP

Sustainable Housing by Urban Squeeze 

What are the features of sustainable houses? Is sustainable housing rewarded enough and should it be incentivised? Should you take your house off-grid? Will you be healthier and happier in a sustainable building? Tony Matthews and Jason Byrne discuss these and other questions, as well as some new technologies for sustainable house design. @drtonymatthews @CityByrne

3. Sustainable Housing_US

Land and Cities by City Road

What is the secret life of land title registration? The Torrens system of land title registration, developed in South Australia in 1858, is fast becoming the most popular system of land conveyancing and administration around the world. 

Sarah Keenan discusses the Torrens system of title registration that was invented for South Australia to assist the project of colonial settlement and land speculation. It was designed to increase efficiency of conveyancing, but title registration fundamentally changes the nature of title to land. The defining principles of Torrens title registration are ‘the mirror, the curtain, and indemnity’. These principles work together to hide the land’s unregistered history, making that history disappear from legal view. However the people who have those histories still exist. The Torrens system of title registration, or versions of it, are today favoured by the World Trade Organisation and World Bank, and are increasingly being adopted around the world in an effort to make land a liquid asset. New forms of title registration are being innovated to assist financial markets in land, for example the Mortgage Electronic Registration System in the US, which played a key role in facilitating the subprime crisis.

Whereas title to land in the common law world was previously conveyed using paper deeds that proved the owner had a history of possessing the land, under the Torrens system title is conveyed through the centralised, singular and increasingly electronic process of registration. The system was designed to make conveying land faster and more efficient, but it also changed the legal concept of land title, making it a discrete, dephysicalised object. Registered title is thus out of sync with land, which has a physicality and history that cannot be wiped away. This lack of synchronisation between land and title has a number of troubling effects. Dr Sarah Keenan is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London. Sarah is a legal geographer with research interests in critical race and feminist engagements with property.

https://cityroadpod.org/

4. Land And Cities_CR

Natural Disasters by Radio Reversal

Natalie and Jo talk about “natural” disasters, and how disasters are constructed and experienced along a variety of intersecting political, economic, social, and spatial lines. They explore environmental justice, what goes into turning an event into a disaster, how disasters intersect with collective trauma and collective identities, and processes and practices of resilience and recovery – with the help of lots of examples and gratuitous scare quotes.  
@RadioReversal @DrNatOsborne @joanna_horton

5. Natural Disasters_RR

Planning La La Land: A Scholarly View by Suburbanista Podcast
 
Los Angeles is generally seen as the prototypical car-dependent, sprawling city. Six to eight lane freeways criss-cross the Los Angeles metropolitan region. What many people don’t realise is that Los Angeles has been leading the way in the USA in terms of public transport investment, especially rail-based transit, over the last decade or so. In this, the inaugural episode of the Suburbanista Podcast (@SuburbanistaPod), Paul Maginn, aka @Planographer, discusses some of the major planning and transport issues and challenges within Los Angeles with Prof Marlon Boarnet (@Marlon_Boarnet), Chair of the Dept. of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis at the University of Southern California’s Sol Price School.  In this episode Paul asks Prof Boarnet what planning lessons, if any, can Los Angeles offer other global cities.

6. Planning La La Land_SU

Round-up of the Urban History Planning History (UHPH) conference, “Remaking Cities” by This Must be The Place

In this episode of This Must Be The Place Elizabeth and David do a round-up review of the 14th Urban History Planning History (UHPH) conference, themed “Remaking Cities” and hosted by RMIT University in January-February 2018. The UHPH is a biennial (every 2 years! For anyone else who wonders about that word) conference, and Elizabeth and David contributed in various respects to the planning and organizing of this, the 14th installment of the UHPH. In this discussion they cover (with varying levels of impartiality) several of the excellent plenaries including Chris Gibson on the geographies of making and manufacturing; and Cathie Oats on the future of Trove, the National Library of Australia’s digital archive service. They also comment on a few different sessions of interest including (in no particular order) quarrying and clay pits (the discussion is itself recorded at Fleming Park Brunswick, itself a former claypit); PBS radio; INXS and the Eels; post-war campuses including La Trobe and Macquarie; the failed border realignment of the ACT; Rambo the merino in Goulburn; Kodak in Melbourne; arcades; Ruth and Maurie Crow; past plans for a ‘mega centre’ at Moorabbin Airport; and modern Jewish Melbourne (featuring Catherine Townsend of the Newlands Estate episode). They also discuss the logistics of conferences generally and the final panel held at the conference. The final panel covered the future of the UHPH conference, of digital resources, and of the urban history discipline within the constraints and exclusions of the casualised university. The panel featured Lauren Piko, Seamus O’Hanlon, and Kate Folington (PROV). Frankly it would have been a good (or better) podcast in itself than a roundup discussion a week later, but this wasn’t thought of at the time. See the UHPH program website here: www.remakingcities-uhph2018.com/. Full papers will be available soon. Note - the next UHPH will (probably, but not officially) be held in Launceston.

7. UHPH Conference Roundup_TMBTP

Energy Futures by Urban Squeeze 

What does the future look like in terms of energy generation? How can we produce cheaper and cleaner energy to power our cities? Should you put solar panels on your roof? Tony Matthews and Jason Byrne discuss these and other questions, as well as the challenges of connecting renewable energy to the grid and new innovations in the sector. @drtonymatthews @CityByrne

8. Energy Futures_US

Lieven Ameel of the University of Tampere (Finland) on the literary unease of urban life by This Must be The Place

This episode of This Must Be the Place features an interview by David (a self-confessed Finnophile) with Lieven Ameel at the University of Tampere in Finland, when David was a visiting scholar. They discuss Lieven’s book about literary representations of urban life in Helsinki in Early 20th Century Finnish Literature ("Helsinki in Early Twentieth-Century Literature: Urban Experiences in Finnish Prose Fiction 1890-1940" blogs.helsinki.fi/urbannarratives/publications/). Finish literature from the early 20th century tends to have been threaded through with unease about urban life – lots of farm girls getting exploited etc., perhaps because “it’s so easy to use a city is a metaphor or allegory of the human capacity for good and evil”. Apparently there was a rich body of urban literature from Finland, but this has largely been forgotten and not translated – even works by authors whose rural-based work is better known. In Finland, seemingly universal anxieties about cities and change were amplified by the fears of a newly formed country that defined itself in rural terms. Also, if you listen right to the end there’s us discussing Fawkner cemetery, Beechworth asylum, unmarked graves at Sunbury asylum, and more. Note - in the podcast we wonder aloud - when did cremation become legal in Victoria? The answer seems to be: 1903.

9. Lieven Ameel Helsinki_TMBTP

In this episode of This Must be The Place Elizabeth is joined by Sam Whiting, a PhD candidate and lecturer in popular culture in the school of Media and Communications at RMIT; and by Dr Sarah Taylor (Elizabeth’s sister), who recently completed a PhD on the historical geography of live music in Sydney and Melbourne and who is now a data scientist, also at RMIT. 
Sam’s PhD explores small live music venues: how they work as concentrations of cultural & social capital, and as places where acts get their first break. His study sites are The Old Bar and The Tote, in Melbourne’s inner north. Sarah’s PhD compared spatial patterns of live music in two cities over three decades, during which Sydney’s live music scene declined, and Melbourne’s grew, albeit both in spatially uneven ways. Both Sam and Sarah spoke with musicians about how they got started with gigs, and their experiences in different venues and cities. 
Inspired by Elizabeth recently reading autobiographies by Phil Collins and Johnny Marr, they discuss the ways musicians live and remember their lives in the context of spaces and places.  Geographies of live music are revealed not only by memoirs (which are, in Sam’s words, usually “romanticised, but that’s kind of what rock and roll is all about”), but patterns of success clearer at a wider scale.  
One theme is the pull of cities like Melbourne in the migration of musicians, famous and not. Sam explains most staff and musicians at Melbourne venues are from regional and interstate areas. Aspiring musicians often migrate based on authenticity myths surrounding venues (“the home of rock”). Also covered: places musicians get breaks, musicians as public figures (or, often, notable jerks), managers & social connections, conundrums of liking songs despite musicians’ personal lives, community radio, planning regulations, and long-running venues- these are rare, and those that survive navigate risks of becoming a museum to their pasts. 
Sam is suspiciously averse to musician biographies and claims to have rarely read past a first chapter, as musicians are “fundamentally boring people”. Sam is a musician, and teaches music & writing about music - which may explain his burnout on biographies. Sarah by contrast (though also a musician) is a voracious reader of musician biographies, even bad ones. 
The episode was recorded outside the Curtin Hotel in Carlton, a live music venue. You can hear the band upstairs starting up, adding to sounds of motorbikes, buses, sirens, and chewing ‘loaded’ fries. Tune in for trivia on bands you may like, dislike, or like (but risk disliking if you hear about their biographies). Explicit content warning – swear words, horrible musician stories.

Reading List: 
Phil Collins “Not Dead Yet” 
Johnny Marr “Set the Boy Free”
Jeff Apter “Tomorrow Never Knows: The Silverchair Story” 
Jimmy Barnes “Working Class Boy” 
Carrie Brownstein“Hunger Makes me a Modern Girl”
Kim Gordon “Girl in a Band”
Tex Perkins “Tex” 
David Nichols “The Go-Betweens”
Andrew Stafford “Pig City” 
Bruce Springsteen “Born to Run” 
Daryl Easlea “Crazy in Love: The Beyonce Knowles Biography”
Spandau Ballet “Soul Boys of the Western World” (documentary) 
Martin Kemp “True”
Gary Kemp “I Know This Much”
Anthony Kiedis “Scar Tissue”
Motley Crue “The Dirt” 
Nikki Sixx “The Heroin Diaries” 
David Hasselhoff “Making Waves” 
Mark Seymour “Thirteen Tonne Theory” 
Sara Cohen “Rock Music in Liverpool”
Justin Heazlewood (aka The Bedroom Philosopher) “Funemployed”
George Orwell “Road to Wigan Pier” 
Burke, M. & A. Schmidt How should we plan and regulate live music in Australian cities? Learnings from Brisbane. Australian Planner. 
Sarah: 
http://cordite.org.au/essays/lost-venues-long-nights/4/
https://www.rmit.edu.au/study-with-us/engineering/surveying-and-geospatial-sciences/meet-our-students/sarah-taylor
Sam: 
https://www.rmit.edu.au/news/all-news/2017/feb/first-melbourne-music-memorabilia-event
https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-whiting-04849a110

Musicians, memoirs and maps: a bookish Curtin-side chat with Sarah Taylor and Sam Whiting

This Must Be the Place is a podcast-in-the-offing with occasional installments, hosted by David Nichols (University of Melbourne) and Elizabeth Taylor (Monash University). It’s a podcast about space, place, culture and society. It’s kind of like the Urbanists (a community radio show on RRR, about urban planning type issues in Melbourne) but it’s a podcast.

Musicians, memoirs and maps: a bookish Curtin-side chat with Sarah Taylor and Sam Whiting

This Must Be The Place Podcast

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