SUP – The Super Urban Podcast – is hosted by Ian Nazareth, Graham Crist and Christine Phillips.In this episode Cities as Order, we speak to Conrad Hamann as we discuss contemporary perspectives on the emulated city, questioning its role as a symbol of order and an instrument of control.

Conrad Hamann explores the impulse to emulate cities as a means of establishing order, authority, stability, and clarity. The enduring presence of Rome and Athens in urban design serves as a prime example, but we also see this in 19th-century Melbourne’s fascination with Venice. These forms of emulation are often colonial,where rapidly growing settlements borrow familiar urban forms to create an instant sense of structure and legitimacy—mirroring the mother country.

This pattern extends beyond architecture into cinema, from the archetypal Wild West town to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, where urban forms reinforce control, hierarchy, and power. The desire for order is closely tied to protection, conquest, and the assertion of ownership over land. This may also explain the obsession withcreating city icons—perhaps nowhere more apparent than in Melbourne—where a single building is expected to embody the identity of an entire city.

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.