On today’s episode we will talk about a different way of understanding, representing and interpreting cities through critical urban theory. In general, we all understand cities as the opposite of the rural areas. In fact, most of us have heard or frequently use the UN statistics that more than 50% of global population lives in cities. But that figure embodies a definition and a role of cities. Today, we will challenge this definition and look at the more intricate relationships between the urban and the non-urban through the concept of planetary urbanisation and operational landscapes. To talk about this quite fascinating topic I have not one but two guests. On the one hand, Neil Brenner who is Professor of Urban Sociology at the University of Chicago. He is a critical urban theorist, sociologist and geographer who is interested in all aspects of research on cities and urbanization within the social sciences, the environmental humanities, the design disciplines and environmental studies. He has authored and edited numerous books including New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question and Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization. On the other hand, I have with me live Nikos Katsikis, who is Assistant Assistant Professor at TU Delft, and Researcher at Urban Theory Lab Chicago, and Future Cities Laboratory, ETH, Zurich. He holds a Doctor of Design from Harvard Graduate School of Design (2016). Nikos is working at the intersection of urbanization theory, design and geospatial analysis. Through conceptual and cartographic experimentation, he helps us understand socio-metabolic relations between agglomerations and their operational landscapes.