Aurora Podcasts
Aurora Podcasts
Healthy Cities: An Aurora Podcast
What makes a city healthy, and who gets to decide? In this podcast series, students, researchers, and teachers from the University of Duisburg-Essen and its partners in the Aurora European University Alliance discuss cities as places of well-being, friction, and change. The conversations grow out of Aurora’s teaching and research formats, where cultural studies meet urban planning, medicine, and the social sciences. Zohra Hassan-Pieper (American Studies, Department of Anglophone Studies, UDE) hosts the podcasts.
Episode 1: Storytelling Is Impactful: Students on Learning Across Borders
UDE students Mona Gutmann and Jacqueline Ruffen look back on their path through Aurora with Prof. Barbara Buchenau, chair of North American Studies, and Zohra Hassan-Pieper, postdoc at the Department of Anglophone Studies. It took them from a research symposium in Essen to the City Science Initiative in Amsterdam, where they were the only master’s students in the room and found that their voices counted. They discuss what the humanities bring to urban research, why a healthy city must be defined by the people who live in it, and what they would tell future students: trust yourself, and be brave enough to deviate from your syllabus.
Episode 2: Two Universities in Conversation: From Healthy to Healing Cities
After a week-long workshop in Essen with students from Paris and the Ruhr, Prof. Barbara Buchenau (UDE), Dr. Hélène Dang Vu, and Prof. Marcus Zepf (École d’Urbanisme de Paris, UPEC) reflect on what happens when urban planners and cultural studies scholars work together. They discuss why shared narratives now matter as much as master plans, the productive friction between “invention” and “programmation,” and the idea of a nature-positive city. They also ask what inclusion means if health becomes the next luxury.
Read more about the workshop