SUP – The Super Urban Podcast – is hosted by Ian Nazareth, Graham Crist and Christine Phillips.

In this second episode of the Super Urban Podcast, we dissect another fundamental layer of urban development: Cities as Industry. If cities were once defined by ideological and religious order, industrial modernity reconfigured them into factories of progress and production, landscapes of extraction and acceleration. Industry was not merely an economic function; it was a defining urban idea, and a remapping of power. 

Smoke billowing from factories was once a sign of economic vitality and civic virtue. With industry came stratification, pollution, and the entanglement between economic advancement and environmental degradation. What happens when the engines of prosperity become the mechanisms of decline and collapse? Have we arrived at the end of industry, or merely its mutation? 

This episode traverses the industrial city’s evolution—where railways were once the connective tissue of empires, birthing towns and economies in their wake, and later, the automobile fractured urban coherence, ushering in sprawl, highways, and logistical spines that would redefine mobility and access. Now, in the era of digital economies and dematerialized labour, are cities still industrial, or have they become pure software—factories of data, energy, and capital? If industry no longer requires proximity, what holds the city together? 

If industrial cities were designed to process goods and people, what do they process now? Information? Influence? Exhaust? Have we substituted one form of extraction for another, replacing coal with data, production lines with algorithmic efficiencies? Is the city itself the industry—an infrastructure of endless optimization, a logistical playground, a warehouse of desires? 

This podcast is made possible by the generous support of the Alastair Swayn Foundation and the RMIT University School of Architecture & Urban Design.

The podcast is part of the ⁠⁠Super Urban Lab⁠⁠ at RMIT’s School of Architecture & Urban Design. 

We acknowledge the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups on whose unceded Country we are recording this podcast.