Whereas the contours of the kitchen are location–time–culture specific, the kitchen stands as a universal signifier. However, the kitchen manifests diversely across geographies, and its programmatic aesthetics, logics and representation can be read heterogeneously. Dividing the short-article into two parts, namely, the kitchen in the camera and the camera in the kitchen, the article will try to read the leitmotifs of food, filth and fornication in film Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles and film The Great Indian Kitchen , that both thematically and formalistically converse with each other. The techniques of camera movement and stasis not only trace the architectural implications of the kitchens but also teach, by way of comparison, the ethical innovations of ‘capturing’ and archiving the gendered subject in the space of the kitchen.

Metropolitan life is always one of the major concerns of modernity as well as the set for the cinematic art. The critical gaze of cinema throws a light on how cities provide various social and architectural contexts for diversified groups as an indispensable part of the scenario. This study delves into the portrayal of metropolitan life in Zeki Demirkubuz’s 1994 film C Blok (Block-C) through the intertwined concepts of spatial alienation, urban segregation and urban migration. Situated within the context of 1990s Istanbul, the film serves as a microcosm for exploring the social and architectural landscape of Turkish modernity. It scrutinizes the interactions between diverse social classes residing in a suburban apartment complex, offering critical insights into how western-style modernization has shaped urban spaces and individual experiences. In this context, the theoretical foundation of this research encompasses the advent of western-style modernization in Turkey, its permeation into societal realms, and the concept of spatial alienation at the social stratum. Moreover, adopting a critical thinking perspective, this study probes the notions of home and house, elucidating their implications for individuality within the framework of spatial alienation.

Since 1989, and in accordance with the principle ‘the prouder the history, the more powerful the nation’, Polish museums have tended to represent the past through a lens of either idealization or trauma: putting the stress on the multicultural heritage or martyrological sufferings of the nation, urban history is highly focused on manmade input. This article asks about the possibilities of retelling urban history from a post-national angle inspired by the artistic museum exhibition Elbląg reconditus (‘The hidden Elblą g’). The Polish city of Elblą g underwent numerous changes in national affiliation after its foundation by the Teutonic Order in 1227. Following the signing of the Potsdam Agreement in 1945, Elblą g (once again) became part of Poland. German and Polish historiographies usually base their claims to the city on so-called founding myths: alluding to the unique cultural and economic input brought to the city by the respective state, their stories of success hide other people’s stories of oppression. I argue that the narrative shift away from anthropocentric history helps us to reconsider not only national supremacy over other people but also human supremacy over nature, which places the exhibition in alignment with timely questions of ecological and sociopolitical concern.

This article speculates how art in public space might evolve in a COVID-19 world. We examine the complexity embedded within the realm of public space using two public art projects as case studies: an artwork produced as part of an artist residency inside the Parliament of Western Australia and a public artwork commission for a highway interchange at Wanneroo, Western Australia. Both projects are used as examples to speculate on how we might navigate the complexity and possibilities for art in public as a consequence of a refiguration of such public spaces resulting from COVID-19 prevention measures. This article postulates how both projects inform the public pedagogy of alternate venues and the efficacy of art in intervening in often closed spaces to offer altered experiences to existing structures. We then focus on what public art is, does and who the traditional audiences have been and why, questioning the efficacy of this art form. Expectations are then scrutinized, concluding that tools for assessment, while available, are rarely employed.

This editorial for issue 12.1 of the Journal of Urban Cultural Studies takes a look at a twelve-panel comic by New York-based creator Ben Katchor through the lens of spatial theory. Returning to the triad of land, labour, capital, mentioned by Henri Lefebvre in Rhythmanalysis – which is consistent with the thinker’s broader post-war critique of urbanism and everyday life – provides a way of explaining the comic’s significance and social critique. In line with an urban cultural studies approach as developed in these pages (see editorials from issues 1.1 and 1.2), close attention is given to the comic’s artistic properties.

The industrial mill towns of Pittsburgh along the Monongahela River were once celebrated as America’s ‘Steel Country’ and its ‘Arsenal of Democracy’. However, the collapse of the steel industry in the 1980s and the subsequent deindustrialization of the region left the towns in ruins. This article turns to a diverse set of cultural artefacts to explore the narratives of industrial heritage, deindustrialization and post-industrialism that in the twenty-first century have emerged from the towns of Rankin and Braddock, PA. These cultural texts include the promotional material for the Carrie Blast Furnaces (a National Historic Landmark) in Rankin, Scott Cooper’s film Out of the Furnace (2013) set in Rankin and Braddock, and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photos about living in the shadow of the Edgar Thomson Steel Works in Braddock. These texts tell divergent stories of the region, which underscore the racial and class struggles over the industrial past and deindustrialized present in the urban imaginary.

The aim of this contribution is to help develop a new model of the use of storytelling in planning. To this end, it draws on media studies research as well as literary studies that examine so-called transmedia storytelling devices. The authors use this method to examine the communication strategy around the 2030 Cantonal Master Plan of the Republic and Canton of Geneva (Switzerland). This communication strategy, which attempts to construct the reception of development projects, mobilizes practical regimes that can strengthen the engagement of different audiences with the process of giving narrative form to future urban developments. Communication and public participation in an urban project tend to hybridize, thereby complexifying debates on the use of storytelling in planning, which often contrast its educational use (explain projects to the general public) with its manipulative use (make projects desirable so they may be accepted). By conducting an analysis through the prism of transmedia storytelling, we can simultaneously consider these two aspects of communication in planning.

The way urban spaces are imagined has significant implications for the way cities are developed and redeveloped. In 2017, Jacobs Entertainment announced the development of the ‘Neon Line District’ in the western portion of downtown Reno, Nevada. To develop this space, Jacobs purchased and demolished many of the neighbourhoods’ historic motels, which had become a stock of housing of last resort for the city. The purpose of this research is to interrogate that space between the discursive representations of the Neon Line neighbourhood and the material spaces constructed and deconstructed based on those imaginaries. Drawing on literatures on the production of urban space, urban semiotics and urban imaginaries, I developed a multi-method approach to compare the content of the texts of the urban landscape to the social texts produced about it. I found that parallel representations of the space were presented to the public, with representations of the neighbourhood as a site of urban decay being amplified and the new ‘Neon Line’ imaginary being presented as a solution. The developers use of Reno’s historic neon and art from Burning Man suggests the new arts district created has been so for the purposes of attracting tourists with representations of ‘Reno-ness’, while the construction of hostile architecture amidst the Neon Line highlights the reconfiguring of who and what gets to be the public in this neighbourhood meant to revitalize the city. This research highlights the potency of urban imaginaries in shaping the urban material through practices of urban revitalization and the ways that social space is constructed simultaneously through the material and the discursive.

This article analyses the complete seasons of the Danish noir television series, Forbrydelsen (2007–12), to examine the uncanniness of the urban built environment in Nordic noir television. Of the crucial actors for the Nordic welfare state model to guarantee a good life for its citizens, a large-scale urbanization drive is one. So, while urban space is an outcome of human activities of the postmodern, globalized, technologized world, such transformation also produces spaces that are bleak and unsafe, invoking the rhetoric of the uncanny architecture in the places that were once regarded as reliable and unassailable. This article explores the conjunction of architecture, crime and criminality on the one hand and the liminality and uncanniness of space on the other. It investigates the uncanny infiltrating both the public and the domestic realms when space and crime negotiate at the most intimate level. Using the aesthetics and the narrative complexities of television, this article argues that these moments of uncanny implicate a different kind of spatiality in the crime television genre.

Electrical distribution cabinets are a regular feature on the streets of Helsinki. The surfaces of these boxes are often decorated with stickers, graffiti, event posters and art works which compete for attention and offer clues to a plurality of discourses that signify much about the contemporary life of the city. This article discusses the significance of these cabinets in relation to a series of paintings made for the research project ‘Urban Atlas Helsinki’ during the author’s Fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (2022–23). The importance of painting as a research method is emphasized due to the visual nature of the subject matter. Through a close reading of a particular cabinet, insights are offered as to the nature of the discourses contained, and what they signify about Helsinki as a contemporary urban culture.