Global Cities with Caroline Bos

This episode of the Super Urban Podcast centres on the evolving nature of urban practice — from the design of discrete forms toward the orchestration of complex systems. The conversation frames contemporary urbanism as a practice of alignment: between infrastructures and ecologies, between global operations and local conditions, between the physical fabric of cities and the digital layers increasingly woven through them. Rather than a single authored vision, the city emerges as a negotiated, continuously updated condition — one shaped by logistical, environmental, financial, and technological forces that extend far beyond architecture's traditional reach.

Against this backdrop, Caroline Bos reflects on decades of practice at UNS — formerly UNStudio — a networked firm whose work spans architecture, infrastructure, and urban strategy across the globe. The conversation moves across several of the studio's defining interests: the role of infrastructure as a primary spatial generator (as seen in projects such as Arnhem Central Station and the Mercedes-Benz Museum); the studio's early engagement with diagrammatic and proto-digital thinking and its evolution into today's more immersive, data-driven environments; and the growing pressure on architecture to operate at territorial and regional scales — a condition exemplified by projects such as THE LINE and Expo City. Bos addresses the tension between global expertise and local specificity, and what authorship might mean within systems that no longer belong to any single discipline.

The episode closes on questions of speculation and agency. Architecture, the conversation suggests, cannot simply respond to the conditions it finds itself within — it must work through its entanglement with governance, environment, technology, and infrastructure to identify new forms of influence, even as certain forms of control are relinquished. Sustaining space for radical ideas within the constraints of global practice remains one of the central challenges — and, perhaps, one of the discipline's most defining responsibilities.

SUP is hosted by Ian Nazareth, Graham Crist and Christine Phillips.  

This podcast is produced with support from the Alastair Swayn Foundation and the RMIT University 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.