The Geography of Everything

At first glance, parking might seem like a mundane topic, but Dr. Donald Shoup shows us it is anything but. In this episode, we explore how parking policies shape our cities, influence our daily lives, and even contribute to a societal Stockholm syndrome with cars. Join us as we uncover the hidden consequences of where and how we park, and why it matters more than you might think.

From ChatGPT to AI generated art, a lot has changed since we recorded our first geography of AI episode in 2022. It seems like in just 18 months the entire AI space has transformed. We made this follow-up episode with Dr. Pierre-Alexandre Balland to better understand these changes and what they could mean going forward.

Busses, bikes, trains, trams…. Aerial cable cars? In cities with uneven geographies of both physical and socio-economic kinds, can aerial cable cars solve the age old problem of urban mobility? In this episode we chat with Santiago Cardona Urrea, PhD candidate in urban geography and aerial cable car researcher.

Everybody poops, but what happens next? In this episode, we sit down with Chelsea Wald, author of Pipe Dreams: The Urgent Global Quest to Transform the Toilet to learn about the past, present, and future of the toilet, and of course, how embedded it is in our everyday geographies.

Humans have been migrating for just about as long as we’ve been humans. While migration is nothing new, it remains one of the most politically charged topics in the world. To help guide us through the tricky world of migration and its seemingly infinite categories, we’ve invited Dr. Ilse van Liempt.

Ever been in a conversation about crypto and realized you have no idea what anyone’s talking about? Well, us too. In this episode we discuss the history and development of crypto, policies surrounding it and if it’s truly possible for anything to be “decentralized”.

To say that inequality is a hot button topic these days is an understatement. But while the concept may seem straightforward, the ways in which we think about and approach inequality are much more variable than meets the eye. In this episode we talked about the fractality of inequality and how its distribution is not as simple as we may think.

Why is Paris a hub for fine arts and Vienna for classical music? The simple answer: migration. In this episode we chat with Phillip Koch, whose research uses Wikipedia data of famous people from the last 1000 years to demonstrate how these cities came to be. Do you want to know more about Philipp's research? The paper can be found here.

It's no secret that we have more data than ever before, or that we have more ways to analyze it today than at any point in history. But how are we using seemingly unrelated data to measure intangible concepts in our world? In this episode, we chat about how companies and academics use everything from flight data, Twitter word analysis, satellite imagery and much more in creative and unexpected ways to answer questions we once believed were unanswerable.