After two full seasons on audio, Cities After… with Miguel Robles-Durán is now also available on video!

After two full seasons on audio, Cities After… with Miguel Robles-Durán is now also available on video! 

Constantly challenging us to imagine cities after capitalism, Miguel’s show now includes visuals to entice your civic imagination including photos & videos from on the ground urbanist projects to empower workers and fight for democracy.

Watch Cities After… Democracy at Work’s YouTube channel, Patreon or website! You can always enjoy this in audio on your favorite podcast player.

“I realized that cities were the material mirror of capitalism, that urbanization was the living text of inequality and that I could understand and predict capitalist dynamics by learning how to read this text, meticulously observing how macroeconomic abstractions had a clear and tangible physical representation in the spaces I inhabited."

The first episode, Urbanization as the Text of Inequality, revisits one of the central themes of Cities After…, the city as a manifestation of capitalism. Though they existed before capitalism, cities today are shaped by groups pursuing capital accumulation. Once you can see and understand these manifestations of capitalism, you can understand our economy’s inequality. Miguel’s new video format makes it possible to share some of the key readings where he learned this idea from Karl Marx.

The second episode, Neo-Imperialism & Neo-Fascism at the Border, brings us to Tijuana, where Miguel lived as a child. Reflecting on his family’s desire to find a prosperous city, Miguel uses a combination of personal experience and critical theory to investigate what created the urban environment of a border city between an imperialist country & its neighbors. He reads claims of the neoliberals promising the good of NAFTA, and then shares the disappointing results of such policies. Border politics, and their urban manifestations, have so much to teach us about this current economic moment. 

Season 3 episode 3 Urban Activisms at the Border introduces the work of two guests building urban infrastructure that will support the humanity and democratic economy of the border area’s working class. Fonna Forman & Teddy Cruz from San Diego share amazing videos and pictures of worker co-op development centers, migrant housing with career training programming and community theaters and climate change parks. These are shining examples of visionary, imaginative and powerful interventions in the urban fabric which disrupt the neoliberal, capitalist dynamics of most cities. 

With more cities to see and guests to meet, continue watching Cities After… with us on Democracy at Work’s YouTube channel, Patreon or website!


Producing Cities After… depends on audience donations. To help us grow, please consider becoming a monthly donor to Democracy at Work. Our monthly donors are invaluable to us, in that they allow us to plan for the future of Cities After… and share visions for a new urban life. Thank you.