Urban Miscellanea
2020-2022 2025-2026
Urban Miscellanea is an experimental multimedia anthology that celebrates creativity situated within the urban.
2020/21: States of Apprehension
2021/22: Urban emergency / urban rhythms
2025/26: Archiving
Urban Miscellanea:
Five years on
Urban Miscellanea was a creative anthology imagined and developed by six MSc Urban Studies students and one MSc Environment, Politics, and Society student, all enrolled at UCL between 2020 and 2022.
It emerged as an ode to creative expression and its ability to open spaces for meaning-making within the urban. We began curating these anthologies during the Covid-19 pandemic as a means to connect with our community of geographers and students, inspired by bell hooks’ concept of ‘engaged pedagogy’. As we studied online, mainly from home, we attempted to recreate the moments of serendipitous exchange that we would have had in university corridors, sharing thoughts about our ongoing projects in between lectures.
In each iteration, we made use of the Urban Lab’s annual theme as a thread to tie the submissions together: ‘urban emergency’ for 2020/21, then both ‘emergency’ and ‘urban rhythms’ in 2021/22. To have come together during the first years of the pandemic and respond to it through creative expression was ultimately a labour of love, and to return to Urban Miscellanea years later to archive our work is the same.
Five years on, our world has moved forward in ways that continue to call for us to respond, creatively or otherwise. We see continued austerity, war, genocides, a deepening of climate chaos, and a global ramping up of state repression. A state of ‘urban emergency’ certainly persists, but so do we.
The process of archiving Urban Miscellanea found us reflecting on our collective work from years ago, as we gathered the fragments that we needed to form a coherent archive. We did not create our platform with long term preservation in mind, nor did we record every detail meticulously for posterity. Perhaps this was because, as we all know, during the pandemic time became very weird; everything felt simultaneously completely transient and like it would last forever.
The original 20/21 anthology format certainly reflects this mindset most accurately: as an interactive digital platform, it was highly creative, but it was also complicated to load and maintain. The simpler 21/22 anthology likewise speaks to the period it was curated in: a PDF that never saw the print run intended for it, amidst pandemic restrictions lifting and the priorities of ‘normal times’ returning to front and centre.
Urban Miscellanea’s new archive weaves together the submissions across the two years of the project, retrieved across our working platforms, alongside records of the original anthology formats. In deciding on a platform for this archive, we decided to strip things to the bare essentials in order to focus more on showcasing respondents’ works.
It should be noted that our process of archiving Urban Miscellanea has coincided with two important landmarks in UCL’s history: the 20th anniversary of the UCL Urban Lab, and the 200th anniversary of UCL itself. Considering the pressures bearing down on students and staff today, and the threat that higher education is under, it felt crucial that we play our part in archiving the good of these institutions: the spaces and opportunities that we carve out within them for genuine creativity, investigation, and self-expression.
We hope that Urban Miscellanea will inspire future students to also engage in their degree in the same way as we tried to: not just as an instrumental means to an end, but as a chance to explore, question, learn, create: as a chance to engage fully with the world around us.
Mia, Nikos, and Prashansa
London, Brussels, and Vancouver
March 2026
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States of Apprehension2020/21
States of Apprehension
Urban Miscellanea 20/21 was organised by:
- Alex
- Mia
- Nikos
- Ollie
- Prashansa
- Xiaowei
URBAN MISCELLANEA: STATES OF APPREHENSION
Over the past year we have lived through empty cities with extraordinary temporary emergency measures taken to protect public safety. Urban centres teeming with epidemics and overwhelmed medical services became a common reality. Around the world we witnessed fluvial destruction with water pushing through the built environment, and fire tearing through urban peripheries in a crimson inferno. Whether they stem from an explosive moment of violence or an endemic degradation of living conditions, emergencies require a reaction from the social order to avoid leaving broken fragments that are difficult to piece back together. The impact of every crisis is exacerbated by existing states of inequality widespread in urban environments, with the managerial responses of governments raising debates about the increasing instruments for control and surveillance used in neoliberal societies. Within this context of cities, crises, and responses, we ask: what does urban emergency mean to you? This creative anthology collects responses across different mediums by a diverse group of practitioners, including artists, designers, architects, musicians, and writers.
The title States of Apprehension refers to the collectivity of perspectives gathered here, which are reactions to situations that may induce anxiety or distress, but also compassion and recognition. A focus on the theme of emergency sheds light on a variety of events - past, current, and future – which play a role in moulding the fabric of civil society through interactions that range from the conflictual to the humanitarian. The etymology of the word apprehension has roots in the Latin verb apprehendo, which has meanings related to control (to seize), but also to grasping a subject with the mind (to comprehend). This duality of a possession or seizure with an embrace or inclusion is a fitting framework to think through the subject of urban emergency, with its ensuing power struggles and behavioural adjustments. The participants in this creative anthology share a part of their own states of apprehension through efforts to understand the implications of different crises that are placed in relation to each other.
This presentation marks the first public output of Urban Miscellanea, a student-led curatorial collective developed in collaboration with UCL’s MSc Urban Studies program and the UCL Urban Laboratory. We developed this initiative during an academic year riddled with uncertainty to create a space for interdisciplinary exchange that would bring together practitioners across institutions despite physical distance, but also bridge different levels of study and engage in interactions within and outside of academia. Taking the annual theme of the UCL Urban Laboratory on ‘emergency urbanism’ as a starting point, we invited practitioners from all backgrounds to join us for a reflection on this multifaceted subject, bringing disparate bodies of work into contact and engaging in discussions about our individual understandings of emergency. Urban Miscellanea became a space for exchange about variegated fragments of thought and practice, a platform for the in-between moments of interaction that we treasure on and off the campus, for our whispered conversations and solemn chatter making meaning across difference.
2021 marks the first edition of our collective’s public output, presenting the contributions of 22 participants from several perspectives on a digital platform created by BSNL studio. Reflections about the Covid-19 pandemic are placed alongside explorations of urban spaces as arenas of emergency and manifestations of the environmental crisis which lead to destruction and displacement. The different mediums employed by participants have led to an audio-visual anthology with a broad reach, reflecting the variety of situations elicited by the theme of urban emergency. They are a collection of stories that were shared to be placed together, in the hope that their juxtaposition might elicit new connections between practices and subjectivities. The wide range of contributors brought together here have disparate points of entry to the same end: viewing urban emergencies as productive events that are conducive to the advancement of epistemic thought and interdisciplinary connections.
A review of this anthology only highlights the interrelation between the emergencies that are approached in different responses. Epidemics of illness and racism, the pain caused by displacement and abuses of power, or the mourning for the destruction of the environment all follow a common thread: they highlight the human condition of fragility and connectedness. The anthology emphasizes the importance of community-oriented responses to urban emergencies, and the primary importance of citizen rights in the face of injustice. With this spirit in mind, we would like to invite you to share your responses to this anthology with us and join the preparation of our upcoming public outputs for 2022. Urban Miscellanea has now begun a second academic year under the theme of urban emergency, with presentations and activities to be planned throughout the coming months. We want to use the opportunities offered by interdisciplinary exchange in and between institutions, using formal and informal modes of address to discern the links between conditions that affect us all. So, we return to our initial line of questioning: what does urban emergency mean to you?
-Nikolaos Akritidis
With responses by: Jasmine Abu Hamdan, Hakeem Adam, Aisha Altenhofen, Prashansa Atreay, Jhono Bennett, Abiba Coulibaly, Carlos de la Cerda, Mia Foley Doyle, Ares Kagiafas, Manana Kobakhidze, Lia Mazzari & Ben Parry, Johara Meyer, Richard Morgan, Sadia Munye, Quince Pan, Rup Priodarshini, Chup Priovashini, Nikolett Puskas, Jessi Rodoshi, Madeline Routon, Eva Tisnikar, Emilia Weber
Digital platform designed by BSNL Studio (Felix Ansmann & Maurice Wald) in response to the theme.
Urban Miscellanea was launched and carried to its first public presentation by Prashansa Atreay, Nikolaos Akritidis, Mia Foley Doyle, Oliver Kirman, Alexander Salem, and Xiaowei Zou
With special thanks to the staff of the UCL Urban Laboratory and the MSc Urban Studies programme!