The Super Urban Podcast

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.

In this episode, we speak with David Gianotten—Managing Partner-Architect of OMA, one of the world's most influential architecture and urbanism practices. OMA operates with a belief that going 'beyond the brief' is not optional but a fundamental responsibility: the role of the designer is to think beyond the immediate solution and shape trajectory, consequence, and meaning across time. Together, we look at a range of David's projects that demonstrate this philosophy in practice—including Potato Head Studios in Bali, the White Cube project in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the WA Museum Boola Bardip in Perth. Each project engages with a specific cultural and urban context while asking broader questions about what architecture can and should do in the world. The conversation explores what it means to practise architecture at a global scale without losing site specificity, and how OMA's visionary and optimistic design ethics continue to push the field forward. What does responsible global practice look like when culture, politics, and place are always at stake? And how do you design for trajectory when the future is perpetually uncertain? Check out the references from this episode.

In this episode, we focus on Adelaide—a city of clarity. Streets framed by gardens. Squares laid out with foresight. A river threading quietly through civic life. Unlike other Australian settlements born from convicts or ports, Adelaide was conceived as a civic experiment: a city designed to reflect ideals, not just occupation. Colonel William Light imagined a place that was orderly, hygienic, and morally structured, yet flexible enough to grow with its people. Families of Scots, Cornish, and German Lutherans brought non-conformist values—a commitment to education, hard work, and collaborative progress—embedding these ideals into the city's very fabric. In this episode, we speak with Ian McDougall, a founding director of ARM Architecture whose practice spans nearly 40 years from design to education to advocacy. Ian is an Adjunct Professor at RMIT University and a Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of Adelaide. The conversation explores what Adelaide's distinctive origins and physical clarity reveal about the relationship between urban form and civic values—and what lessons this carefully planned city might offer to the more chaotic and contested cities of today. Adelaide's story is one of intentional design meeting lived reality, a case study in how idealism shapes—and is in turn reshaped by—the city it produces. Check out the references from this episode.

Hong Kong is a city drawn in section—stacked, stepped, suspended. A culture of building that has learned to fold terrain and threshold into one continuous surface. Architecture here is not a discrete object but a system of adjacencies: markets pressed beneath housing blocks, temples nested into retaining walls, gardens hovering above malls. It is a vertical choreography, where the street has been lifted, buried, replicated, and rerouted. Its history plays out as a sequence of layers and ruptured chronologies—a British colonial outpost and financial port city whose civic and spatial rituals persist through abrupt political and material shifts. In this episode, we speak with Betty Ng—an architect who studied at both Harvard and Cornell, worked at renowned firms including OMA and Herzog & de Meuron, and is the founder of COLLECTIVE, an international practice with offices in London, Madrid, and Hong Kong. The conversation explores how architecture can operate as cultural infrastructure, supporting fragile economies, public life, and creative expression in a city of extraordinary density and nuance. Situated on the southern rim of the Pearl River Delta—one of the most intensely urbanised geographies on earth—Hong Kong remains an anomaly. Its design culture resists the smoothness of the region's emerging megacities; it is textured, improvised, and deeply local even as it performs on a global stage. Yet this unique urban literacy is now under pressure from the slow erasure of civic space, the standardisation of planning codes, and the soft violence of homogenised aesthetics. Is there still a culture capable of inhabiting theslippages—between east and west, past and future, resistance and assimilation? Check out the references from this episode.

As we walk around the built-up cities of today, it is easy to forget that nature laid the groundworklong before the first brick was laid. Ancient volcanic eruptions shaped the land and waterways we now build around, and these deep-time forces still influence where we place our cities—and how they grow. In this episode, we dive into the deep history of Melbourne—also known as Naarm—with Dr Gary Presland,who quite literally wrote the book on the subject: The Place for a Village: How Nature Has Shaped the City of Melbourne. Long before skyscrapers and laneways, this was Kulin Nation land—home to the Boon Wurrungand Woi Wurrung peoples, who cared for its rivers, grasslands, and volcanic plains for tens of thousands of years. The city as we know it was laid out in a grid beside the Birrarung—whatmany know as the Yarra River. Dr Presland is a non-Indigenous Melbourne-based writer and historian who studied history at La Trobe University and archaeology at the University of London, with major research interests in the Aboriginal and natural history of the Melbourne region. In an era of climate crisis, we are waking up to just how powerful the relationship between nature and city still is. As natural environments become increasingly altered—sometimes beyond recognition—nature continues to exert apowerful influence on the shape and size of cities. This conversation invites us to remember the deep-time forces beneath our feet, and to consider what a more ecologically attuned urbanism might look like. Check out the references from this episode.

Perth, the capital of Western Australia, is the most geographically isolated capital city on earth, sitting on the time zone sharedby two thirds of the world's population. It is one of the largest and least dense metropolisesanywhere—closer to the urban populations of Indonesia and Malaysia than to the Eastern Australian cities of Sydney and Melbourne. A paradoxical city, it is both bigger and smaller than it seems. Perth named itself the City of Light after it turned on its lights for astronaut John Glenn in 1962, and its connection to NASA continued when the Skylab space station crash-landed east of Perth in 1979. In this episode, we are joined by Emma Jackson—an architect turned tapestry designer who studied in Western Australia and has spent years as a colleague at RMIT, where she carried out a series of projects under the title 'The Strange,' exploring the world of Western Australia's mining town urbanism and vast landscapes. Herfascination with geology has led her to design tapestries and textiles drawn from geological formations, and as a once-local and partial outsider to Perth, she brings a unique lens to the city. Literary depictions of Perth—including Christos Tsiolkas's writing—frame it as a fragile, almostartificial place, where ancient landscapes and Indigenous histories challenge the city's sense of control and future ambitions. The ancient sand seeps through every crack, and the vast, unfathomable sky dwarfs human ambition. Emma explores how the natural environment strongly influences Perth's mining landscapes, geology, and urbanism—and what it means to build a city at the edge of the world. Check out the references from this episode.

In this episode, we explore architectures at the scale of the metropolis, where form resistsboundaries and systems redefine the city itself. At a moment when cities no longer exist as discrete, contained spaces, we interrogate the infrastructure and architecture that shape them—and, in turn, shape our behaviour within them. Historically, cities were imagined as fixed and bounded: centres of power and culture surrounded by expanding edges. Today, however, cities unfold as ongoing processes—continuous operations that extend far beyondtheir traditional cores. From Canberra's radial roads to Los Angeles's sprawling freeways; from London's Metroland to the architectural experiments of Chandigarh and Brasília; from São Paulo through Cairo to Beijing—we witness urbanisation as a vast and ever-evolving network, one that resists being fixed in either time or space. Drawing on visionary architects and urban theorists such as Romaldo Giurgola, Gordon Cullen, and Leon Krier, aswell as Cedric Price's radical proposals for flexible urbanism, the episode traces the logic of expansion from car-dominated suburbs to the rise of the shopping mall as an urban node. What happens when the city loses its centre? When nodes rather than traditional hubs become the essential units of urban life? We step into the networked, fluid, and plural landscapes of endless cities and the city as multiples—where urban form is no longer aboutfixed locations, but about the operations that produce them. Check out the references from this episode.

In this episode, we think of cities as the setting or backdrop to drama and events—ideas connected to Bertolt Brecht's development of Epic Theatre in the 1920s, Henri Lefebvre'sfocus on everyday urban life, and the explicitly theatrical architecture of Edmond and Corrigan. Designers of cities have been consciously creating the elements of theatrical urban life throughout history, and Conrad Hamann explores how quickly cinema took on the task of depicting the city, treating it as a main character—from Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) to countless films that followed. Conrad also speaks to the theatrical elements that have persisted in city design: the composedstreet, the city logo or icon, campus groupings, and triumphal arches—each functioning as a venue for the instant theatre of life. 21st-century cities are now seen through Google Earth by more people than any other means, and evenseeing cities from the air for the first time transformed the scale of urban drama. Yet the small theatrical moment of an encounter on a street corner persists. What does a theatrical reading of cities mean for us today? This episode invites us to consider thecity not just as infrastructure or economy, but as stage—a place where architecture, movement, and everyday encounter combine to produce the ongoing performance of urban life. Check out the references from this episode.