a journal of cities and culture
Who creates public spaces and what gives life to them? Grace Yixian Zhou examines the photogenic Sai Wan Pier, a vibrant yet contested waterfront site in Hong Kong, as an emblem of the wider struggle for the future of public space in the city.
In the latest episode of our Voices podcast series, Monica Degen and Gillian Rose discuss with Scott Rodgers their recent book exploring the emerging and varied digitalisation of urban aesthetics.
Monica Degen and Gillian Rose discuss their book The New Urban Aesthetic: Digital Experiences of Urban Change with Scott Rodgers.
Irina van Aalst and Gery Nijenhuis present the City Studio as an innovative, creative method that transforms the city into a dynamic, multilayered workshop for co-creating knowledge and designing tangible interventions, transcending traditional academic boundaries.
Employing a feminist participatory mapping approach that respects and amplifies the voices of vulnerable communities, Sylvana Jahre and Antonie Schmiz research refugee interaction with urban spaces in Berlin.
Drawing on an encounter in Amsterdam, Gillian Sonnad and Noortje van Amsterdam examine the intersection of urban spaces with the lived experiences of fat bodies, utilizing autoethnography and poetry to articulate such bodies’ hypervisibility and simultaneous affective invisibility.
Karin van Es and Marcel Broersma explore the dynamics of place-maintenance through a multifaceted case study of Rome’s Trevi Fountain, employing innovative methods of urban data walking and participatory observation.
Inte Gloerich and Gabriele Ferri investigate the impacts of Covid-related datafication on marginalized urban communities, emphasizing the importance of creativity and imagination in fostering resilience and agency in the face of ongoing and future crises.
Revealing how embracing uncertainties can unlock creative potential, Anastasia Hacopian highlights the significance of flexibility in urban research, using arts-based methods and Instagram to address ethnographic challenges in multicultural Rotterdam.
Jan van Duppen, Augusto Aneas, Aileen Harvey, Sandra Jasper, Laura Kemmer, and Claudia Andreoli Muniz investigate two veiled rivers in the cities of Sāo Paulo and London through creative urban experimentation, revealing the intertwined narratives of colonialism, urban planning, and more-than-human life.
In their introduction to the Creative Urban Methods dossier, Sigrid Merx, Coco Kanters, Michiel de Lange, and Nanna Verhoeff advocate for revisiting “situated knowledges” and adopting creative approaches for studying the multifaceted nature of contemporary urban life and culture.
In the latest episode of our Events podcast series, Julia Stolyar, Darshana Mini and Jaana Serres discuss with Scott Rodgers their research on the locality of different media industries in South Korea, India and Nigeria.
Melanie Wilmink explores how a Seoul-based residency created by the car company Hyundai has enabled artists to interrogate the ways automobile technologies are impacting human engagement with urban environments.
Jack O’Dwyer theorizes the expressive and functional roles of car journeys in one-take films, reading these examples of audiovisual automobility in relation to risk, contingency, dead time, and emotion.
Lu Zeng untangles the complex interplay between automobility and professional women’s work-family balance in recent Chinese television drama.
Danielle Childs explores the transformation of the motel in American cinema from a temporary pit-stop to a post-recession purgatory that epitomizes marginalization and social immobility.
Michael Dwyer re-examines the 1980s Chicagoland teen films Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Adventures in Babysitting as commuter narratives that speak to the city’s emerging postindustrial identity.
From children’s television to images of Spaghetti Junction, Birmingham has been represented as a motor city. Jemma Saunders’s video essay explores screen representations of the city and its automobile-centered identity.
Erik Florin Persson and Per Vesterlund analyze how commissioned films and TV dramas both promoted and critiqued car-centric urbanism in Sweden during the 1960s.
Exploring three experimental city symphony films made between 1958 and 1972, Cortland Rankin looks at the fraught and shifting relationship between New York City and the car.
Judith Nicholson examines the importance of depictions of African American automobilities to Walter Mosley’s detective fiction and its screen adaptations.
Michael Stock develops a phenomenological reading of automobility in film noir, arguing that the contradictory space of the car – “a nest within a shell” – is frequently depicted as destabilizing the family home.
In his introduction to the dossier, Cortland Rankin considers the roles media has played in reflecting, interpreting, and shaping the relationship between automobility and urbanism.
