Framing London: Vernacular Photography and the Playable City in Student Life

Over the past decade, the UK has experienced a dramatic rise – nearly 75 percent – in its international student population, cementing its status as a global hub for higher education.¹Paul Bolton, Joe Lewis and Melanie Gower, International Students in UK Higher Education (Research Briefing No. CBP 7976, Commons Library, UK Parliament, House of Commons, London, 2024). Many of these students are drawn to London’s vibrant urban scene, where universities pulse with cultural diversity and youthful energy. Yet settling into a new cultural context remains a well-documented challenge.²Ayantunji Gbadamosi, “The Anatomy of International Students’ Acculturation in UK Universities,” Industry and Higher Education 32, no. 2 (2018): 129–38. Increasingly, international students turn to digital photography not just to document, but to explore, connect with, and claim a sense of belonging in the city. In cities like London, where public spaces double as digital landscapes, smartphones become more than communication channels; they serve as informal guides, helping students navigate unfamiliar environments, build social networks, and “play” their way into belonging.³Shazia Hamid, Syed Bukhari, S. D. Ravana, Ahmad A. Norman and Mohd T. Ijab, “Role of Social Media in Information-Seeking Behaviour of International Students: A Systematic Literature Review,” Journal of Information Management 68, no. 5 (2016): 643–66.

As part of our investigation into how photographic practices contribute to the lived experience of the playable city, we invited students to curate a small collection of three to five photographs that encapsulate their personal experiences and understanding of London. Using play as method, this exercise shifted focus from the iconic to the atmospheric, prompting students to engage with the multisensory, affective layers of place and reflect on how these spaces shape their sense of the city – what visual, auditory, olfactory, or tactile cues mark them as distinctly “London”? We asked students to consider: What makes this place feel like London to them? Who uses the spaces they are photographing, and how does it shape their experience of the city? What unnoticed or overlooked details can they capture? Students were also reminded to approach the city ethically and with awareness of context: to avoid capturing individuals without consent, especially in vulnerable settings, and to remain mindful of restrictions in private or security-sensitive areas. During the subsequent workshop, students were encouraged to articulate the different “playable” layers of their images, drawing connections between photographic practice, urban atmosphere, and the co-creation of London as a space of play.

The process of capturing, printing, and physically engaging with photographs ahead of and during the workshop served to foreground the material dimensions of photographic practice as a critical component of urban play. While digital media often stress the ephemeral and immaterial qualities of image circulation, this workshop demonstrated that the tactile, situated encounter with printed photographs can activate a different mode of engagement, one rooted in physical presence, spatial arrangement, and embodied interaction. The session transformed the classroom into a participatory and affective landscape by mounting students’ submitted images on boards distributed across the classroom and organising small group discussions. Here, the act of looking became social, dialogic, and exploratory, echoing Elizabth Edwards and Janice Hart’s assertion that materiality “matters,” particularly in studies of play where objects mediate relationships, provoke reflection, and stimulate creativity.⁴Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images (Routledge, 2004). In this context, the printed photograph functioned not only as a representation of urban space but as a playful, co-constructed artefact that shaped the rhythms and relational dynamics of the workshop itself. In the words of Helen Davis, Larissa Hjorth and Sybille Lammes, “play provides possibilities for reimagining the city and nurtures creative connections between people, things, buildings, and places. Playgrounds, rather than being defined borders separating play from nonplay, serve to remind us of the importance of play within the rhythms and social fabric of healthy cities.”⁵Helen Davies, Larissa Hjorth and Sybille Lammes, “Introduction to the Special Issue: Cities as Playgrounds/Playgrounds as Cities: Rethinking Urban Play, Civic Engagement, and Socio-Spatiality,” Space and Culture 27, no. 2 (2024): 132–36. The material encounter with images thus opens new avenues for reflecting on the role of photography in making cities both knowable and playable.

Rather than treating the smartphone as a neutral recording device, this task foregrounded the smartphone’s role as a tool for embodied exploration and sensory mapping. Following the principles of sensory ethnography⁶Sarah Pink, “Ethnography of the Invisible,” Ethnologia Europaea 41, no. 1 (2011): 117–30. and theories of mediated urban experience,⁷Larissa Hjorth and Jean Burgess, “Intimate Banalities: The Emotional Currency of Shared Camera Phone Images during the Queensland Flood Disaster,” in The Routledge Companion to Mobile Media, 499–513 (Routledge, 2014). the smartphone photographs attend to fine-grained details — textures, shadows, patterns of movement, ambient sounds, or ephemeral traces of human presence — that often go unnoticed. These fragments of urban life, once framed and shared, participate in the social production of place and offer insight into the fluid relationship between students’ personal narratives and public spaces.

London as a Playable City

This article critically investigates this role of digital photography in advancing the conceptual and experiential dimensions of the playable city. Traditionally viewed as visual records, photographs have increasingly been theorised as socio-material objects that participate in the shaping of urban experience, identity, and relationality.⁸Pink, “Ethnography of the Invisible,” 122; Edwards and Hart, Photographs Objects Histories, 57. Within the framework of playable cities —urban environments designed or reimagined to encourage creativity, exploration, and spontaneous interaction⁹Michiel de Lange, “The Playful City: Using Play and Games to Foster Citizen Participation,” in Social Technologies and Collective Intelligence, ed. Aelita Skarzauskiene (Mykolas Romeris University, 2015), 426–34; Anton Nijholt, Playable Cities: The City as a Digital Playground (Springer, 2017). — photographic practices emerge as key mediators of playful urban engagement. Digital photography, particularly when shared, operates not only as a tool for documentation but also as a participatory act that reconfigures public space and social dynamics.¹⁰Ben Highmore, “The Politics of Aesthetics,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 45, no. 4 (2005): 454–56. It enables individuals to inscribe meaning into everyday urban settings, transforming mundane environments into interactive, performative spaces. By producing and disseminating images, users engage in what could be termed a form of ludic spatial authorship, wherein cities are reimagined through affective, aesthetic, and social lenses. This perspective challenges reductive interpretations of images as passive reflections, instead positioning them as active components in the co-production of urban life.

The proliferation of smartphones and the ubiquity of internet connectivity have reshaped photography into an everyday media practice, which is no longer confined to specialists or formal occasions but embedded within the routines of ordinary life across diverse spatial and temporal contexts. By inviting students to select, print, and reflect on three to five photographs from their experience of London, the workshop engaged directly with what Jesper Falkheimer and André Jansson (among others) term the “spatial turn,” a shift that underscores how space is experienced, mediated, and represented.¹¹André Jansson and Jesper Falkheimer, Geographies of Communication: The Spatial Turn in Media Studies (Nordicom, 2006). Within this framework, photography is reconfigured not solely as visual documentation but as a playful, participatory process that unfolds across both time and space. The act of photographing becomes a mode of sensing and making sense of urban environments, while the printed image serves as a site for reflective storytelling and social interaction.

This investigation identified two interrelated dimensions of photography in the context of student life in London: playful and spatial affordances. Playfully, photographs function as fragments that capture fleeting moments, sensations, and rhythms, producing a retrospective interface through which past experiences can be revisited, reinterpreted, and shared. Spatially, images locate and anchor personal meaning within the broader geography of the city, transforming urban space into a canvas for subjective expression and ludic exploration. As such, vernacular photography emerges as a hybrid practice, at once documentary and playful, where everyday users deploy image-making not merely to record but to engage, to relate, and to play.¹²Jean Burgess, “Remediating Vernacular Creativity: Photography and Cultural Citizenship in the Flickr Photo-Sharing Network,” in Spaces of Vernacular Creativity, 130–40 (Routledge, 2009); Susan Murray, “New Media and Vernacular Photography,” in The Photographic Image in Digital Culture, 165–81 (Routledge, 2013). These images operate at the intersection of private affect and public expression, forming a visual language through which individuals negotiate their relationship with the city and with one another.

Photography, particularly within vernacular contexts, can be understood as a spatial practice entailing moving through, engaging with, and responding to the physical and affective dimensions of place. Drawing on spatial theory, Sarah Pink contends that the making, collecting, and sharing of photographs constitutes a form of perceptual and experiential activity, in which “the experience of place can be seen as the experience of moving through and participating in an environment.”¹³Pink, “Ethnography of the Invisible,” 93. From this perspective, students’ photography is not merely a representational act but an embodied mode of dwelling in and making sense of the world. It is through the act of image-making that individuals navigate and enact their relationship with the environments they inhabit, transforming the ordinary into the meaningful, and the transient into something narratively and materially grounded. The resulting photographs, then, function as both artefacts and practices, simultaneously capturing and constituting experience within a specific physical, social, and cultural milieu. In the context of the playable city, this process reveals how photography mediates a dialogue between subject and space, enabling urban landscapes to be inhabited not only physically but also emotionally and imaginatively.

There exists a compelling intersection between vernacular creativity and the playful dimensions of contemporary media culture. In particular, the digital turn has recalibrated the dynamics of authorship and publication, lowering the barriers to creative expression and enabling ordinary users to participate in the production and circulation of media content. Central to this transformation is the quotidian – the domain of everyday life – as a site where creativity is not only enacted but embedded within the structures of contemporary social and cultural existence.¹⁴John Hartley, “Creativity as Emergence: Policy Issues for Creative Cities” (paper presented at the 5th Creative China Harmonious World International Forum on Cultural Industries, Beijing, September 2010). The affordances of digital photography have facilitated new forms of self-authored visibility, where playful engagements with media, whether through image-making, captioning, or sharing, constitute meaningful modes of cultural participation and belonging. This vernacular creativity, expressed here through spontaneous and informal practices, challenges traditional hierarchies of media production and invites renewed attention to how play operates within the rhythms of everyday life. In the context of urban environments such as London, these practices reveal how students creatively reimagine space, identity, and connection through the playful and reflexive use of photography.

Recent scholarship calls for greater attention to how creative uses of digital media contribute to the spatialisation of agency — how individuals locate themselves, and are located, within digitally mediated environments. Germaine Halegoua and Erika Polson’s work is particularly instructive in tracing the interplay between bodies, technologies, and the urban landscape, illustrating how digital tools do not simply overlay space but actively shape the ways in which everyday life is perceived, navigated, and enacted.¹⁵Germaine Halegoua and Erika Polson, “Exploring ‘Digital Placemaking,’” Convergence 27, no. 3 (2021): 573–78. Their analysis raises critical questions about the technological conditions that underpin our assumptions about the “everyday” and the often-invisible infrastructures that mediate urban experience. Jordan Frith similarly posits that smartphones, as locative media, embed location-awareness into the fabric of everyday life, reconfiguring how individuals navigate and assign meaning to urban space while simultaneously subjecting them to new forms of datafication and surveillance.¹⁶Jordan Frith, Smartphones as Locative Media (Polity, 2015). At a different scale, Nanna Verhoeff’s analysis of urban screens highlights how large-scale public displays function as media-architectural interfaces, not only communicating content in space but actively producing space by shaping collective interactions, visibility, and participation in the city.¹⁷Nanna Verhoeff, Mobile Screens: The Visual Regime of Navigation (MIT Press, 2012). Together, these perspectives underscore that spatial experience is mediated both at the intimate, embodied level of mobile navigation and at the collective, architectural scale of the urban screen, raising critical questions about the technological conditions that underpin our assumptions about the “everyday” and the often-invisible infrastructures that mediate urban experience. Such experiences are situated within what Koen Leurs refers to as the “media-architecture complex”¹⁸Koen Leurs, “Social Media as Contact Zones: Young Londoners Remapping the Metropolis through Digital Media,” in Postcolonial Transitions in Europe: Contexts, Practices and Politics, ed. Sandra Ponzanesi and Gianmaria Colpani (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015). — a dynamic entanglement of digital networks, built environments, and communicative practices — or what André Jansson conceptualises as the ‘communicative sense of space.’¹⁹André Jansson, “Critical Communication Geography: Space, Recognition, and the Dialectic of Mediatization,” in Communications/Media/Geographies, 107–43 (Routledge, 2016). Such frameworks help unveil the uneven distribution of access, digital literacy, and experiential mobility that structure how urban inhabitants interact with their environments. In this context, the playful photographic practice we facilitated here can be seen as a creative intervention that not only reflects but also reconfigures spatial agency, allowing individuals — particularly students as urban newcomers—to reimagine their place within the city through the known, the functional, and belonging.

The Known City

By “known” we refer to the understanding that cultural production does not emerge in isolation or ex nihilo, but is instead assembled through novel re-combinations of pre-existing, culturally familiar elements. In the workshop context, the London narratives articulated through students’ photographs were necessarily shaped by their prior experiences, perceptions, and cultural reference points of London. It is well documented that international students often arrive in global cities carrying preconceived notions shaped by cinematic, digital, and cultural representations.²⁰Wen Guo, “Navigating Cultural Integration: The Role of Social Media among Chinese Students in the UK,” Journal of the Knowledge Economy (2024); Scott McQuire and Sun Wei, eds., Communicative Cities and Urban Space (Routledge, 2021). These mediated imaginaries play a significant role in shaping initial perceptions of place, often constructing an idealised, romanticised vision of the city that foregrounds iconic landmarks and stylised urban aesthetics as emblems of Western modernity and cultural aspiration. As students noted, their digital encounter with London before arrival was deeply imbricated in a network of visualisations, ranging from film and television to curated social media content, which framed the city as both spectacle and symbol.²¹Gillian Rose, ed., Seeing the City Digitally: Processing Urban Space and Time (Amsterdam University Press, 2022), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv2j6xrs3. This mediated familiarity not only influenced their expectations but also structured how they initially engaged with urban space, often privileging highly visible, photogenic locations over the everyday city’s more nuanced, lived textures.

While individually grounded, these visual stories also became part of a collective discursive space within the workshop, where meaning was negotiated and shared. Using the workshop to understand what surrounds us as these narratives circulate, they did more than reflect personal perspectives; they contributed to forming a shared cultural framework that inclusively or exclusively shaped participation. In this sense, the stories embedded in the students’ photographs both reflected and produced cultural affinity, increasing the likelihood that certain individuals identified with the emerging themes and felt compelled to participate, while others perceived dissonance and disengaged. This dynamic highlighted how even playful, creative practices such as vernacular photography are implicated in broader social processes of inclusion, recognition, and cultural reproduction of knowledge. In this context, the workshop’s emphasis on vernacular and sensory photography can be seen as a playful intervention — a method for disrupting dominant visual tropes and encouraging students to reorient their gaze toward the overlooked, the mundane, and the experientially rich aspects of urban life.

The Functional City

The first element concerns the cultural capital that students carry with them as they arrive in London — shaped by prior education, social background, and mediated representations of the city. This background frames their initial ways of seeing and interpreting urban space, often privileging certain symbols, locations, or aesthetics over others. The second element pertains to the relational nature of photographic narratives: the meaning of the images and the stories attached to them are not fixed, but contingent on the group dynamics and discursive context in which they are shared. As students presented their photographs in the workshop setting, it became evident that the significance of these visual artefacts was shaped collaboratively through discussion, negotiation, and recognition within their peers. In this way, each photograph operated not only as a personal expression but also as a social object, whose interpretive possibilities were co-constructed through interaction.

For instance, students offered evocative reflections on the sensory and material dimensions of photographic practice, noting their preference of a digital camera than of a phone camera. Their comment gestures toward the embodied engagement with photographic tools, where the physicality of the camera and the aesthetic quality of its images shape both the process and outcome of image-making. Beyond the technical, students addressed the symbolic and emotional significance of using a dedicated camera to capture special moments, suggesting that this practice was bound up with a desire for permanence, quality, and affective resonance. Indeed, such perspectives foreground how photographic choices are embedded in broader aesthetic, social, and affective fields — including influences from peers and partners — where “artistic” sensibilities and practices are affirmed, negotiated, and shared.

This dynamic underscores how photographic storytelling is embedded within social processes of meaning-making and belonging, influenced by both individual dispositions and the collective cultural field in which it is situated.²²Bourdieu, Pierre, “La représentation de la position sociale,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 52, no. 1 (1984): 14-15. From this perspective, the use of photography in the workshop is not merely a methodological choice but a form of visual inquiry that operates at the intersection of personal expression and collective cultural negotiation. Visual methods, particularly those rooted in participatory and sensory ethnography, allow researchers and participants to engage with the experiential and affective dimensions of space that are often overlooked in traditional textual analyses. In this sense, photographs become what Gillian Rose refers to as “visual objects-in-relation”²³Rose, ed., Seeing the City Digitally, 11. — artifacts whose meanings are constantly reconstituted through the contexts in which they are produced, viewed, and discussed.

Belonging in the City

This notion of relationality has important implications within the field of cultural geography, where increasing attention has been given to how urban space is both imagined and inhabited through representational practices. The act of photographing, especially in a global city like London, becomes a spatial practice through which students navigate unfamiliar environments, claim presence, and articulate belonging.²⁴Rose, ed., Seeing the City Digitally, 11. As such, vernacular photography emerges not just as a record of experience but as a mode of spatial authorship — one that allows individuals to participate in the symbolic construction of place. In our workshop, the images students produced and the stories they attached to them revealed both the continuities and tensions between personal narratives and dominant visual cultures of the city, providing a lens through which to critically examine how mediated urban imaginaries are reinforced, challenged, or reimagined.

Stories shared through the photographs bound students to one another as they recognised shared experiences, challenges, and affective responses to the urban environment, collectively shaped their emergent identities and imaginings of their futures. In fact, students described how photography supported a slower, more reflective engagement with the urban environment, countering the overwhelming and often commercialised experience of “digital London.” For example, one student expressed a growing appreciation for the city that emerged from simply spending time “looking up,” observing architectural forms, and wondering about the histories embedded in the built environment. This deliberate attention to detail, the “disconnectedness” from digital distraction, fostered a sense of curiosity and attachment, turning the city into an open text to be read, interpreted, and appreciated through both embodied experience and visual documentation.

As a result, the workshop space became more than a site of academic reflection; it evolved into a platform for community formation, where storytelling through images facilitated affective solidarities and a sense of mutual recognition. This underscores the role of visual storytelling not only in individual self-expression but also in fostering a community, wherein collective narratives are forged through shared spatial and emotional touchpoints. In this context, the photographic image operates as a mediating device, linking personal memory to communal meaning, and enabling students, many of whom are navigating transitional or transnational identities, to anchor their experience of London within a relational, co-constructed urban imaginary.

Conclusion

When situated within participatory and sensory ethnographic frameworks, vernacular digital photography constitutes a critical mode of spatial engagement and cultural production within the context of the playable city. Far from operating solely as instruments of visual documentation, students’ photographic practices emerged as embodied, affectively charged acts that mediated their negotiation of knowledge, functionality, and belonging in London’s complex urban fabric. The workshop revealed how these images functioned as socio-material artefacts, simultaneously individual and collective, ephemeral and enduring, through which students inscribed meaning into the city and articulated their presence within it. In this way, the project foregrounds the significance of play as a method in reconfiguring urban imaginaries, challenging dominant representational tropes, and enabling emergent forms of relational and situated knowledge.

Photini Vrikki

Photini Vrikki is a Lecturer in Digital Methods at the Department of Information Studies, University College London. Her work often explores how digital technologies intersect with urban life, social justice, and public spaces. Vrikki’s research includes participatory methodologies and collaborative projects, investigating how digital media reshapes spaces and communities online and offline.

Giota Alevizou

Giota Alevizou is a Lecturer in Digital Culture scholar at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. Her research focuses on paradigms and methods that incentivise participation in public knowledge, education, and urban spaces. She has published widely in interdisciplinary fields including knowledge representation, collective intelligence, educational commons, platformization, data ethics, civic media and digital cities.

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