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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Eva Tisnikar
2020/21




Sonus Urbana


Poetry; audio


Bio

Eva Tisinkar is a Slovenian filmmaker and researcher based in London with a background in interdisciplinary architectural research. 

In her creative, as well as academic, work she interrogates the inherently spatial relations between technology, gender, and urban environment, and critically attunes to their intersections through experimental writing, photography, sound art and film.

She is interested in an interdisciplinary approach to architecture, art and writing, as well as combining digital design with philosophy and critical writing. She has also focused on theoretical and practical investigations of space with a through sound - employing a site specific approach for spatial analyses of layered sonic landscapes.
The everyday we live in is a world where knowledge formation as well as its transmission are inherently visual - to see means to understand. To focus on hearing then is to imagine, to wonder, to speculate, and to question. 

Listening is a useful investigative tool for the built environment, especially in time of ecological crises and increasingly polarising attitudes in political discourse. Sonus Urbana is a project that establishes the act of listening as an affirmative attuning to the world, establishing the city as a living organism.

A short sound composition engages with sounds of public spaces in London before it was silenced due to the pandemic. A vertical cross-section of the seemingly unstoppable machinery of the city - the cars, underground trains, and airplanes - intertwined with bustling crowds of people, now takes on a new role.

The recording functions as an artefact of the everyday that had been lost in the world tackled by ecological and health crises. Each distinct sound carries within itself human, less-than and more-than human relations with the environment. 

A short poem accompanying the drawn score further explores the positionality of the listening subject and the issues around agency. How do we rebuild the city after the crisis, and who or what do we include in the process?






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