If planetary urbanization has reoriented urban research beyond the city, a key question remains: how are these uneven and often inaccessible territories to be sensed, documented, and understood? We suggest that the answer lies in a co-constitutive engagement between urban theory and sensory registers of film and other media-based practices.
Sensoriums of Planetary Urbanization
While the theory of planetary urbanization has revolutionized the study of urbanization and territory, it has also faced criticism for its lack of engagement with empirical research in territories where extended urbanization is unfolding. This is in part to do with the challenge of sustaining ethnographic research in territories often characterized by their remoteness and inaccessibility. Remote sensing and cartography have deconstructed the “sensory certainty” of urban outsides, but the engagement with the sensoriums of these territories does not go far enough.
The landscapes and territories of extended urbanization beyond the city are also highly mediated environments, documented through sensory investigations by filmmakers, photographers, and artists. Their work produces a sensorium that complements ethnographic and remotely sensed cartographic inquiries into these territories. In this context, our edited volume, ‘Cinema and the City in the Age of Planetary Urbanization’ focuses on films and filmmaking practices that seek engaged and embodied relationships with the environments they explore.
The sensorium is a domain in which urbanism is collectively mediated but also produced. It is a concept that captures the human experience as a whole. As Kanishka Goonewardena has shown, sensorium captures the way in which a certain kind of space relates to a certain ideology, mediating, making visible and sensible the ideology underpinning the spaces we inhabit. As David Howes has further emphasized, sensorium is “the media through which we experience and make sense of gender, colonialism, and material culture.”
Film, we contend, remains the quintessential means of representing such sensoriums, as well as expanding and producing them. Since its conception, cinema as a medium has been interlinked with the city, but contemporary filmmaking helps us understand a condition in which the city can no longer stand alone as the privileged site of urban analysis. The research assembled in our edited volume follows this proposition through critical essays and interviews with filmmakers and artists. A common thread is a commitment to film as a critical tool in exposing structures of exploitation that underpin contemporary society, but also to film’s potential to mediate and co-produce the sensoriums which human beings and other species inhabit.
Nitin Bathla is a researcher working at the intersection of urbanization, the environment, society, and the arts. He is the author of the award-winning book Researching Otherwise and the critically acclaimed documentary Not Just Roads. He serves as an editor for the journal Urban Geography, Shared Habitats, and the Urban Political Podcast, and sits on the editorial board of Urban Political Ecology. He worked for the chair of Prof. em Dr. Christian Schmid.
Markus Lähteenmäki is a historian and curator of architecture working at EPFL, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Architectural Histories, Europe’s leading journal dedicated to architectural history and a pioneer of open access academic publishing.
Silvia Cipelletti holds a Master’s degree from the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, where she is currently undertaking PhD research on border landscapes through video essays. She has also been working as a guest lecturer and teaching assistant for courses and workshops that investigate the interface between architecture and visual media.
Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou is a filmmaker and lecturer specializing in urban and sensory ethnography. His films include The Seven Sisters Indoor Market (with Marios Kleftakis), The Disappearance of Robin Hood (with Urban-Think Tank), Not Just Roads (with Nitin Bathla), and Hot Cold Wet Dry (with Marios Kleftakis). He teaches audiovisual ethnography to architecture students at the ETH Zurich, chair of Prof. Hubert Klumpner, Architecture and Urban Design.
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Cinema and the City in the Age of Planetary Urbanization
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