S10E3 - Urbanism, Technology, Space, and the Invention of Catastrophe

Episode overview Episode 3 expands Season 10’s exploration of Contemplating Catastrophe with a wide-ranging conversation on urbanism, technology, space, and time. The episode brings together historical, geographical, and critical perspectives to examine how disasters are produced, anticipated, governed, and lived—often long before any so-called “event” occurs.

Hosts

• Jason von Meding

• Ksenia Chmutina

Guests

• Zachary Loeb — historian of technology and disasters, Purdue University

• Kevin Grove — professor of geography, Florida International University

Key themes

• Technology, risk, and the invention of new forms of catastrophe

• Urbanism and disaster as historically produced conditions

• Reading beyond disaster studies: technology critique, political geography, Black studies, and Caribbean thought

• Space, time, and temporality in disaster scholarship

• Warnings, prediction, and why societies fail to listen

• Power, knowledge, and whose experiences of space and time count

• Interdisciplinarity as a core strength of disaster studies

Core discussion highlights

• Zachary Loeb reflects on how critiques of technology—shaped by thinkers like Lewis Mumford and Paul Virilio—frame disasters as built into technological systems themselves, rather than accidental failures.

• The idea that every technological invention also invents its own accident becomes a lens for understanding contemporary risks, including digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence.

• Kevin Grove discusses how moments of discomfort and contradiction in fieldwork can become catalysts for deeper theoretical engagement, particularly through biopolitics, Caribbean studies, and Black geographies.

• Edward Soja and Doreen Massey are explored as thinkers who radically reshaped how scholars understand space, difference, and the politics of knowledge production.

• The episode challenges linear disaster timelines by introducing multiple, co-existing temporalities—slow disaster, repetition, duration, and suspended presents—especially as experienced by marginalized communities.

• Space is framed as lively, relational, and unfinished, while time is shown to be unevenly distributed and historically produced through violence, colonialism, and capitalism.