The Super Urban Podcast

Senseable Cities with Fabio Duarte

This episode of the Super Urban Podcast turns to the city as a live, legible system — one that can be continuously read, measured, and acted upon in real time. The concept of the 'senseable city', as developed through the work of the MIT Senseable City Lab, is presented not simply as a technological proposition, but as a fundamental shift in how we understand, describe, and design urban environments. As layers ofsensors, networks, and data settle over urban space, the city ceases to be something we merely represent — it becomes something we can sense, interpret, and respond to as it unfolds.   The conversation moves across a series of related provocations: the tension between legibility and overload as data multiplies; the question of who this new visibility actually serves — citizens, governments, or the algorithms increasingly acting on their behalf; and the implications of a shift from long-term planning toward continuous, real-time adjustment. The Lab's prototypical projects are framed as a particular mode of practice — neither purely speculative nor fully deployed — that makes new urban possibilities visible and tangible before they are absorbed into everydayinfrastructure. Alongside this, the episode surfaces the ethical dimensions of the datafied city: questions of ownership, power, and the risk that sensing infrastructures, however neutral in appearance, may quietly reinforce existing structures of control.   The episode closes by holding open a space for uncertainty within the increasingly knowable city. If friction, delay, andunpredictability have historically generated social and cultural life, the question becomes: what should resist optimisation? As the city begins to resemble a feed — constantly refreshed, continuously informing and responding — the conversation asks whether anything can, or should, remain outside thesystem. It is a question as much about values as about technology, and one that sits at the heart of contemporary urban practice.Check out the references from this episode. [https://www.superurbanlab.com/sup/senseable-cities-with-fabio-duarte]

Global Cities with Caroline Bos

This episode of the Super Urban Podcast centres on the evolving nature of urban practice — from the design of discrete forms toward the orchestration of complex systems. The conversation frames contemporary urbanism as a practice of alignment: between infrastructures andecologies, between global operations and local conditions, between the physical fabric of cities and the digital layers increasingly woven through them. Rather than a single authored vision, the city emerges as a negotiated, continuously updated condition — one shaped by logistical, environmental, financial, and technological forces that extend far beyond architecture's traditional reach.   Against this backdrop, Caroline Bos reflects on decades of practice at UNS — formerly UNStudio — a networked firmwhose work spans architecture, infrastructure, and urban strategy across the globe. The conversation moves across several of the studio's defining interests: the role of infrastructure as a primary spatial generator (as seenin projects such as Arnhem Central Station and the Mercedes-Benz Museum); the studio's early engagement with diagrammatic and proto-digital thinking and its evolution into today's more immersive, data-driven environments; and thegrowing pressure on architecture to operate at territorial and regional scales — a condition exemplified by projects such as THE LINE and Expo City. Bos addresses the tension between global expertise and local specificity, and what authorship might mean within systems that no longer belong to any single discipline.   The episode closes on questions of speculation and agency. Architecture, the conversation suggests, cannot simplyrespond to the conditions it finds itself within — it must work through its entanglement with governance, environment, technology, and infrastructure to identify new forms of influence, even as certain forms of control are relinquished. Sustaining space for radical ideas within the constraints ofglobal practice remains one of the central challenges — and, perhaps, one of the discipline's most defining responsibilities.  Check out the references from this episode. [https://www.superurbanlab.com/sup/global-cities-with-caroline-bos]

Cineurbano

This episode is interested in cities in all their intensity and breadth—not just their realities, but how they exist in our imaginations and dreams. If we are to embrace the super urban, cities must excite our dreams and our nightmares.Cinema is of course a fabulous venue for these imaginations: whether science fiction dystopias, hyperreal dramas, or documentaries, the city can be re-imagined, invented, or observed with a heightened reality for even the mostprosaic moment.   Today's episode takes the form of a film club—each participant selects a favourite film and explores how it connects to their mental image of the city. We are joined by Desirée Grunewald, a designer and illustrator from Mallorca who has lived in Vietnam for over eight years researching the vernacular architecture of Ho Chi Minh City. Interested incomics, animation, video games, and urban studies, her perspective brings a rich visual and cultural dimension to the discussion.   Also joining us is Jésus Mayordomo, a geographer from Madrid who works for a Spanish chamber of commerceorganising trade missions to over 50 countries per year. Deeply interested in urban development, he seizes every opportunity on his travels to understand how cities work and function. Together, the three conversations trace how cinemahas shaped—and continues to shape—the way we see, feel, and imagine urban life. Check out the references from this episode. [https://www.superurbanlab.com/sup/cineurbano]

Kumbh Mela with Vaishnavi Laddha

In this episode, we speak with Vaishnavi Laddha about the Kumbh Mela—the world's largest experiment in ephemeral urbanism. Occurring every 12 years, it is a religious pilgrimage that manifests as a mega 'pop-up' city on the floodplains of India's sacred rivers, driven by religious mythology and collective devotion. With over 80 million visitors, the city emerges across 30 square kilometres of sandbanks, equipped with housing, temples, clinics, electricity, sanitation, and even governance structures—and then vanishes, leaving almost no trace.   What does this extraordinary event reveal about the nature of cities? The Kumbh Mela challenges many of our assumptions about permanence, infrastructure, and planning. It is a city that is simultaneously ancient in its origins and radically temporary in its form—a place where millions of people live, worship, and move through space with remarkable efficiency, despite the scale and intensity of the gathering. Vaishnavi Laddha is an urban designer and graduate of the Master of Urban Design program at RMIT, currently working as a Junior Urban Designer at Dewan Architects and Engineers in Dubai. Her research brings a rigorous design lens to the question of ephemeral urbanism—and invites us to consider what lessons the Kumbh Mela might hold for the way we plan, design, and inhabit permanent cities. Check out the references from this episode. [https://www.superurbanlab.com/sup/nasic-kumbh-mela-with-vaishnavi-laddha]

Singapore with Tat Haur Lee

In this episode, we turn our attention to Singapore—a city often described through the language of efficiency, optimisation, and control. A compact island state at the crossroads of trade routes and cultures, Singapore is frequently held up as a model of urban governance: clean, dense, green, orderly, and relentlessly planned. Yet beneath this carefully calibrated surface lies a far more intricate everyday urbanism.   Corridors become living rooms. Void decks host weddings and wakes. Kopitiams anchor daily rituals across generations. In a city where nearly 80 percent of residents live in public housing, the spaces between buildings carry as much meaning as the buildings themselves. We are joined by Tat Haur Lee to explore how this officially ordered city is also a deeply improvised one—shaped as much by the habits, adaptations, and social life of its residents as by the master plans of its planners.   The conversation explores what Singapore reveals about the limits and possibilities of top-down urban design, and what it means to build social cohesion through architecture and public space. Singapore is a city that has engineered much of its own reality—and yet the most compelling aspects of its urbanism are often those that exceed or escape the plan entirely.  Check out the references from this episode [https://www.superurbanlab.com/sup/singapore-with-tat-haur-lee].