Acknowledgments
We are grateful to the contributors for their work. Thank you to the students of MSc Urban Studies 20/21 who took the initiative to begin the Urban Miscellanea project, and to the UCL Urban Lab for their help in getting it off the ground.
Urban Miscellanea 21/22 was organised by: Mia Foley Doyle (MSc Urban Studies) Rup Priodarshini (MSc Environment, Politics & Society)
Cover image: Chup Priovashini.
What is Urban Miscellanea?
Urban Miscellanea was initiated by the 2020/21 cohort of MSc Urban Studies students where, in the context of distance learning, chances were restricted for both academic and creative in-between engagement with the urban.
Urban Miscellanea emerged from this as a student-led anthology project, creating works which explore urban life through the lens of an annual theme. This year, a pair of themes were chosen: emergency urbanism and urban rhythms.
In part inspired by the Urban Lab’s 2020-22 theme of emergency, we selected these two complementary themes to encourage engagement with not only these themes in their own rights but to examine the ways in which emergencies permeate urban life and can both disrupt and create new rhythms.
The creative works in this collection explore the sensory experiences of the city, the urban rhythms constructed in COVID-19 lockdowns, everyday encounters with emergency in the built environment, the climate crisis, and the potential that exists within all crises for solidarity and the construction of new, sustainable urban rhythms.
[Urban] emergency is…
- snippets from a visual diary
Nikolett Puskás
[Urban] emergency is everywhere. Please open your eyes and acknowledge, be aware of your environment, choose to have feelings, compassion, solidarity - for the nonhuman too. We should not ignore the emergencies all around us - which are present with increasing frequency. We can choose to acknowledge that we are all in this together, and address them together.
I am an activist, researcher, human being... - I could put here many labels, but I would prefer not to. Please visit nikipuskas.com.
Multimediascape Composition
Diego Bottaro
The study of urban space and place is a crucial point of investigation for the social sciences. Recent research has encouraged founding such investigations on sensorial experiences and creative practices. My project further develops the experimentation of these practices through the testing of multimediascape composition. Multimediascape composition is a methodology that I propose, which utilises a multimedia creative approach for the research and representation of multisensorial experiences of urban space and place.
Its outputs are a written and photographic analysis and a multimedia environment depicting Pepys Estate, in southeast London. Furthermore, multimediascape composition focuses on the emplaced relation between humans, non-humans, technologies, ideas, discourses, and their interactions, with particular attention to multisensorial experiences of urban space, and multimedia creative doings for the creation of emplaced knowledge.
Moreover, this methodology emphasises the relation between a multisensorial and multimedia approach to research. That is because the utilisation and combination of several media permit to evoke and attend to the multifaceted concentrations of sensorial stimuli offered by urban spaces.
Finally, multimediascape composition promotes novel ways to research and represent urban space, which lead to new knowledge on the topic and the fostering of critical thinking for the advancement of this methodology and social science scholarship concerned with urban space and place.
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I am Diego, urban researcher with a particular interest in the multisensorial interrelation of space, technologies, humans, and ideas. Having a background in photography, I value creative practice within research.
Boxed in or out?
Lara Adamczyk
I am a queer geographer and poet who sometimes takes silly little photos on my phone and edits them.
Routines
Chup Priovashini
These three connected landscape studies represent the 'urban rhythms' of my regular lockdown walks in the summer of 2020. The first painting is of a path I have tread many times, in my preferred medium of acrylic paint. The next two present increasingly unfamiliar routes which I sought out at the outskirts of the edges of my home city, Oxford. As the relentlessly repetitive days of lockdown wore on, I pushed the boundaries of my usual routes further and further in search of some kind of novelty, unfamiliarity and stimulation.
This was mirrored by the urge I felt to branch out from my usual painting methods and styles - the second painting is in watercolour and ink, while the third, my newest route, was created in an agitated jumble of media - acrylic paint, graphite pencil, gel and ballpoint pens, and markers.
I am a geographer and artist based in Oxford.
A Mixed Bag
Mia Foley Doyle
I made this drawstring bag using scrap fabric, ribbon, spare buttons and embroidery thread. I collected the fabric after reworking some of my t-shirts to fit better, making this bag in part an engagement with the crisis of the fast fashion industry, but my prime motivation was wanting to create something useful with these scraps.
A bag is an essential for my day to day. I spend a lot of time travelling by foot and on public transport, which means I have to carry anything I need with me, for both the everyday and in case of emergency. The process of hand sewing and embroidering this bag provided a chance to take a pause from the rapid, 24/7 pace of urban life to make something amateur and haphazard but still useful, even just for myself.
I‘m an Urban Studies graduate interested in walking and trying different crafts.
The Harringay Passage
Dan NicholsonThis submission contains a series of photographs taken in the Harringay Passage in North London. This alleyway is the longest in London and therefore the pictures taken there offer a glimpse into the heart of the neighbourhood and the variety of characteristics it holds. The chosen photos represent various motifs relating to the themes of emergency and urban rhythms, while also reflecting the aspects of day-to-day life in the area. Some of the subthemes within this submission are security, dilapidation, creativity and the illicit.
The images reflect my own daily rhythms as I pass through the space on a daily basis albeit at different times of the day, reflecting how the space holds different atmospheres depending on temporality.
The inspiration for these photographs comes from my intrigue in the alleyway as a space that is reflective of the identity of the neighbourhood. Furthermore, as the area is experiencing rapid transformation, the alleyway can be seen as a microcosm of these changes The transformations of the space are also at the heart of my dissertation which attempts to examine how the changing space relates to changing local identities and wider transformations in the area.
I am a MSc Urban Studies student who has interests in microspaces, marginal spaces and urban transformations. My photographs show my perception and viewpoint of these ideas.
Nephelococcygia
Uchercie
In Aristophanes's comedy “The Birds,” an imaginary city is built in the clouds by the birds at the instigation of two Athenians, and represented both as a fantastic caricature of Athens in the poet's day and as a sort of Philistine Utopia full of gross enjoyments.
This is one clip of the series.
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Uchercie graduated with a MFA degree in Fine Art from the Goldsmiths, University of London. Their artworks have been exhibited in Arles photography festival, Art Basel, Somerset house, Saatchi gallery and other places.
Contact: Uchercie@gmail.com www.uchercie.com
At Every Turn
Nailah-Amandla James
I decided to interpret 'urban rhythms' to mean the visual and auditory stimuli that overwhelm my autistic brain. This embroidery represents 'urban rhythms' circumscribing my experience of urban spaces; the noises, lights and crowds give me anxiety. Aspects of urban spaces that are trivial to others, are significant aspects in my day. It feels like a pressure inside my mind, although I am the one inside the shop, the restaurant, the city. I have to find or force gaps in the overwhelm in order to focus on errands and conversations. The only helpful, calming rhythms come from my stims and music through earphones.
