Digital Enclosure: Tanka People and Smart Fishing Port in the Pearl River Delta

Zhang, Wendy Wenxin

June 25, 2026<June 25, 2026

Digital Enclosure: Tanka People and Smart Fishing Port in the Pearl River Delta

Wendy Wenxin Zhang

Wendy Wenxin Zhang, the 2026 recipient of the SCMS Urbanism/Geography/Architecture SIG’s annual Graduate Student Essay Award, deploys multifaceted research methods in a Deep Dive on the mediated and technological facets of fisheries in China.

June 15, 2026<June 15, 2026

Revisiting Lists in a Time of Neutrality

Malini Guha

Malini Guha contributes a reflective Deep Dive that revisits her previous essay about anti-racist list-making during the summer of 2020. Along with analyzing artist Cauleen Smith’s drawings of book covers in her Human_3.0 Reading List (2015-2016) project, Malini contrasts the 2020 list-making moment with the absence of topical lists about Palestine during a current “time of neutrality.”

July 7, 2025<July 25, 2025

Using Art as Inspiration: Bringing Mars to Nuns Island in Galway

Patrick Collins

Drawing on UrbanLab Galway’s collaboration with the Galway International Arts Festival, Patrick Collins explores how large-scale artistic intervention can reframe a forgotten industrial site and invite public engagement with urban space, memory, and speculative futures.

July 7, 2025<July 14, 2025

The Montage of Authenticity: Voyage and Voyeurism in Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que Viva Mexico!

Emmanuel Ramos-Barajas

Reconstructing Sergei Eisenstein’s travels in rural Mexico for the unfinished project, ¡Que Viva Mexico!, Emmanuel Ramos-Barajas argues that the filmmaker's theories of montage were shaped by ideas about tourism, authenticity, and ethnography.

November 23, 2024<November 23, 2024

Bologna and its Computing Centers: An Archaeology of Urban Media (1961–2022)

Stefano Corbo

Bologna is one of the main data processing hubs in Europe. Stefano Corbo traces the infrastructural and architectural development of the city’s computer centers, arguing that to understand the recent history of the city, we must pay attention to the material history of data.

November 23, 2024<November 25, 2024

Marketing Nation: The Spectacular Outdoor Advertisements of Douglas Leigh in Postwar America

Jane Zhang

From electronic billboards to spectacular dirigibles, the outdoor advertising of Douglas Leigh incorporated theatrical techniques into the urban landscape. Jane Zhang shows how Leigh’s corporate campaigns mediated the relationship between individual and national identity in postwar America.

April 8, 2024<April 8, 2024

Tokyo Sanitization: Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days and the Discourse of Public Cleanliness in Japan

Hao Wen

Perfect Days (Wim Wenders, 2023) was commissioned to promote the image of public hygiene as part of the Toyko Toilet project. Yet, as Hao Wen argues, the film develops a reflexive critique of the discourses of urban “cleanliness” in Japan.

November 28, 2023<December 4, 2023

The Instagram Pier: Negotiating Public Space in Hong Kong

Grace Yixian Zhou

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.

June 14, 2023<September 7, 2023

Piazza Navona’s Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: Cinema, Peirce, Lynch, and the Dynamicity of Spatial Perception

Hamed Goharipour

Hamed Goharipour uses personal experiences at Rome's Piazza Navona and its depiction in the film Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow to explore how cinema shapes our perception and experience of urban space.

March 31, 2023<April 3, 2023

Gaza’s Shadow: Israel’s Urban Imaginary of the Gaza Strip

Yulia Gilich

Yulia Gilich is this year's graduate student essay winner for the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Urbanism, Geography, Architecture Scholarly Interest Group. They examine how Israeli and Western media primarily depict Gaza as a site of destruction and violence, which naturalizes this perception of the Gaza Strip and absolves Israel and its allies from responsibility for the suffering caused there.

November 30, 2022<January 25, 2023

Wanghong Urbanism: Towards a New Urban-Digital Spectacle

Amy Y. Zhang, Asa Roast, and Carwyn Morris

What happens when a place achieves celebrity status on social media? Amy Y. Zhang, Asa Roast and Carwyn Morris introduce the term “wanghong urbanism” to theorize the construction of urban-digital spectacle and discuss the implications of the phenomenon for cities in China and beyond.

September 21, 2022<September 22, 2022

“Authentic” Cityscapes and Violence in The Last of Us Part II

Ryan Banfi

Ryan Banfi examines how The Last of Us Part II creates authentic city spaces by reimagining urban environments as spaces of gamified violence that represent humanity's dystopian decline.