This article examines how sacred landscapes are created, contested, and reimagined within the Deori community of Assam, Northeast India, focusing on the rituals and memory surrounding Goddess Kesaikhaiti. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, oral traditions, and spatial analysis, the study investigates how sites such as the bolisaal (sacrificial space) and the Tamreswari temple ruins serve as focal points for negotiating indigenous, Vedic, and modern influences. Situating the analysis within the frameworks of cultural geography, spatial memory, and political ecology, the article demonstrates how sacredness is actively formed through ritual practice, landscape symbolism, and collective memory. The research highlights how sacred spaces serve as arenas for the ongoing assertion of cultural identity and community resilience amid historical disruption and change. By foregrounding the intersections of spirituality, ecology, and group belonging, the article offers new insights into the territoriality of faith and the politics of sacred space within evolving cultural landscapes.

This article examines how urban imageability operates in cinema through Kevin Lynch’s approach, focusing on three Paris-set films. It investigates how cinematic representational strategies and narrative structures reorganize paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks to construct the on-screen urban image. The findings show that cinematic imageability is not a direct reflection of form but a product of how these elements function as representational agents with differing narrative weight. A comparative reading identifies two modes of cinematic imageability: a relational, movement-based mode in which elements are integrated into lived spatial experience, and a spectatorial, postcard-like mode in which isolated and aestheticized elements are visually consumed. Overall, the study argues that cinematic images depend less on which elements are present than on how distance, movement, bodily engagement, and framing are organized within narrative structures, extending Lynch’s framework into cinematic mediation and clarifying how cities are experienced or staged on screen.

This study examines the relationship between urban space and collective memory through an in-depth analysis of the Fener neighborhood in Zonguldak, a historically significant urban space in Turkey’s industrialization process. Drawing on archival research and semi-structured interviews, the study explores how urban collective memory is shaped by spatial transformations, everyday practices, and socio-political narratives. It emphasizes the role of urban landscapes in embedding memory and identity, highlighting how place-based experiences and symbolic landmarks contribute to the construction of shared meaning. The findings demonstrate that urban memory is not merely a passive recollection of the past but a dynamic process actively reproduced through lived experiences and emotional attachments to space. The case of Fener reveals how nationalist-modernist planning, industrial work, and cultural institutions coalesce to create a unique memoryscape that continues to influence residents’ sense of belonging and identity.

Street art muralism is currently being mobilized in North American cities as a form of urban branding, playing a significant role in transforming urban economies and infrastructures, making cities more enticing, diverse, tolerant, and entertaining. With the help of funding and support from both public and private organizations, street art muralism has swiftly become the most popular type of urban visual art that can be found in cities today. At the same time, it is also developing into a unique form of practice and knowledge that has a distinct emancipatory potential. This article explores these two projects, arguing that socially engaged street art mural projects are more effective than street art interventions from both an emancipatory and political perspective. Emphasis is placed on the values and contradictions of institutional partnership, the importance of mentorship, urban arts cadres, and critical artistic practices for developing new ways of engaging with democratic institutions.

This study examines the phenomenon of informal urbanization in the municipalities of Soacha (Colombia) and Monterrey (México) through a comparative methodological approach, building on Dovey’s morphogenic logic and field data, which enable the analysis of the spatial and morphological dynamics structuring informal settlements. The study also examines the provision of basic services and housing materiality, underscoring the challenges posed by insufficient infrastructure and precarious materials. Through a comparative approach, the research seeks to characterize the growth patterns and challenges associated with informal urbanization in these areas, highlighting both the similarities and contextual particularities of each case. The findings suggest that while informality is driven by similar socioeconomic factors, the geographic and political contexts of Soacha and Monterrey shape distinct urban forms and challenges. Through a situated approach, our work foregrounds the importance of supplementing morphogenetic approaches with outreach to community and territories, to deepen the understanding of informal urbanization that resists dichotomic approaches and recognizes its different gradients.

This study interrogates the emancipatory potential of urban experience by examining the actions of city dwellers in Beyoğlu, an inner-city neighborhood of Istanbul, Türkiye. It identifies a range of “space–time niches” produced through everyday urban practices and investigates various emancipatory acts and existential niches, such as schoolgirls chatting and smoking in a secluded corner of an alleyway. Despite Western neoliberal claims of expanding freedom, this study finds that urban spatial experience is increasingly constrained and perceived as intimidating and unwelcoming by city dwellers. By defining urban space as a continuous oscillation between freedom and control, this study introduces the concept “existential emancipation” as a unique experience best realized in urban space through diverse positions and acts of individuals across both space and time. Viewed through this lens, the study provides a new reading of metropolitan urban life.

Urban spaces are choreographed orders. This is evident not only in the architecture and infrastructure but also in the organisation of people’s movements. The article explores the question of how public spaces are re-figured through choreographic orders and movement practices. To this end, the concept of social choreography in urban space is outlined. Social choreography describes the relationship between macro- and microstructure, order and practice. On the one hand, it shows social spaces as choreographed spaces. Choreography is understood here as normative and representative. Its order regulates the flow of movement and thus also controls the patterns of social perception and experience. On the other hand, social choreography addresses an emergent order, which develops in social situations. This perspective focuses on the movements and physical interactions that conventionalise or undermine and disrupt the established order. The relationship between macro- and microstructure is illustrated using the example of artistic interventions and choreographed protest cultures.

Hybrid spaces – spatial figurations in which physical and digital dimensions are interwoven – remain conceptually fragmented across disciplines. Drawing on Martina Löw’s relational spatial theory and employing a theory synthesis approach, this paper integrates diverse strands of research on hybrid spaces into a coherent framework. Four interdependent dimensions – physicality, virtuality, sociality and temporality – are used to conceptualize how hybrid spaces are constituted through processes of spacing and synthesis. These dimensions are not additive layers but emerge through situated social practices, producing varying degrees of hybridity that can be described along a spectrum. The concepts of translocalization and polycontexturalization are further integrated to capture how individuals integrate distant, overlapping and temporally dispersed contexts into present spatial arrangements. The resulting framework offers a coherent conceptualization of hybrid spaces, bridging fragmented literature and providing analytical tools for future empirical research on spatial and societal change in the digital age.

While space and anxiety are central elements in the oeuvre of the eminent Austrian writer and Nobel laureate Peter Handke, the function of spatial anxiety in shaping plot and character development remains underexplored. This article examines the first and second sequels of Handke’s Slow Homecoming trilogy and the effect of spatial anxiety on the novel’s protagonist, the geologist Sorger. Sorger’s spatial anxiety is analyzed through Lacan’s concept of anxiety as a “lack of lack,” which, in spatial terms, manifests as the collapse or undistancing of distance. The irresistible formlessness of space transforms the spatial narrative of the novel, from a scientific or rational mode, in which geology initially functions as a form of soteriology used to mask spatial anxiety, into a poetic or imaginative mode that emerges in response to the protagonist’s experience of anxious affect. Homecoming thus becomes a process of poetic sublimation of spatial void.

Lagos, Africa’s most populous metropolis, has long undergone turbulent transformations driven by both economic migrants and internally displaced persons (IDPs) whose rapid inflow to the city has deepened housing shortages and heightened inequality, particularly for low-income groups. This article examines how forced and itinerant migrants from northern Nigeria negotiate home/lessness across public and semi-public spaces of Lagos. Drawing on two qualitative datasets and four case studies, we trace migrants’ trajectories and analyse their homemaking practices through the lens of spatial refiguration. We conceptualise intersections as the cross-points where (a) migration trajectories, (b) infrastructural affordances and (c) networks of belonging converge to shape situated practices of home/lessness. The analysis develops a typology of homemaking under precarity, showing how migrants create provisional forms of presence through infrastructural niches, religious communities and solidarity networks. In doing so, this article shifts focus from the absence of housing to the agentful practices of homemaking that reconfigure urban space. We argue that an intersectional refiguration perspective clarifies how homelessness and homemaking are co-produced, offering new insights into migration and urban transformation in the Global South.