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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Jasmine Abu Hamdan
2020/21


The Hakawati Forum


Video


Bio

Jasmine Abu Hamdan is a Lebanese-Palestinian architect who grew up in Jordan. She graduated from the Architectural Association and currently lives and works in London. 

Her work focuses on reconstructing places of cultural heritage destroyed by conflict through intangible media, experimenting with narrative and broadcasted spaces. 

Her reconstructions capture the narratives of marginalised voices struggling with issues around social and political structures. She creates spaces that build agency from intimate revelations to policy change, and ultimately question how we reconstruct and interpret heritage.

Within the context of cultural heritage being destroyed by conflict, citing Aleppo as a recent case, the Hakawati Forum focuses on using tangible and intangible media to construct events that condense and overlay spatial narratives onto new contemporary contexts. It looks at heritage as a prospective activity to understand the different forces at play in urban spaces and make counter forms of testimony audible. By broadcasting events and narratives around Aleppo's social and political conflicts, the Forum focuses on building discourses around these conflicts.

The Forum builds with the intangible. The event is built around an augmented soundscape that revives the lost spaces of Aleppo, bringing about many voices and building new pathways for the recollection of memories. The accumulated layers of the city are condensed into an arbitrary hangar in Amman to shape a narrative that puts different aspects of the city in dialogue.

The Hakawati Forum aims to capture the narratives of marginalised voices struggling with issues around social and political structures, build agency from intimate revealing experiences to policy change, create a space that allows people to interrogate dominant political and social constructs, and ultimately question how we reconstruct and how we deal with heritage.






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