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Urban Transcripts

We accompany urban development actors and communities in the journey towards socially just cities in a sustainable world

Urban Transcripts is an international network of experts on cities and their development coming from architecture, planning and the social sciences. Our work is driven by a vision to make our cities more socially just in a world that is sustainable. In partnership with urban development stakeholders we have over the last 10 years undertaken a diversity of work including urban laboratories, program

me design and training for local and metropolitan government, research and policy work for trans-national partnerships, and awarded urban design proposals. We consult on and proactively initiate work we believe can have a transformative impact on our cities. We publish The Urban Transcripts Journal.

23/12/2022

Our of is now out!
Vol.5 no.2, Jul-Dec 2022: Emotions and the City

“ are far more than subjective experiences, private anecdotes or personal memories. In fact, they are always expressions of power relations, social hierarchies and thus "

Read the at: https://journal.urbantranscripts.org/article/emotions-and-the-city-editorial-nina-margies/

Keep updated with our new issues and calls for submissions by subscribing to our newsletter at: http://eepurl.com/LgJPv

Emotions play a role in the way we see, inhabit and build cities. Whenever we avoid walking through dark parks at night, design uncomfortable benches to scare homeless people away, cheer or suffer collectively at the city’s football stadium or when we get desperate about the impossibility to move ...

29/09/2022

📢
Housing for a Fairer and Greener World
Deadline extended: Closing 30 November 2022

How can we reclaim housing as the fundamental act of dwelling in a fairer and greener world? An act of fair redistribution and regeneration of humanity’s and our planet’s resources.

The Urban Transcripts Journal is calling for submissions that critically review housing models, policies, projects and processes, and radically reimagine how we dwell in our cities.

There is no denying the fundamental role of housing as a guarantor of human development. Yet, we are nowhere near guaranteeing humanity’s fundamental housing need. While in the Global North housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable, commodified and financialised to such an extent where in citi...

04/08/2022

Closing the first part of our participatory game development Carolina Vasilikou from the University of Reading and Yiorgos Papamanousakis from Urban Transcripts spoke to Leyla Saadi from the The Design Museum's Future Observatory about our collaboration, the motivations behind developing ZeroCityPlus together with Felipe Lanuza Rilling, the experience of the first pilots, and our ambitions for the future. Check it out!

is a between Urban Transcripts and University of Reading part of the programme funded by The Design Museum, UK Research and Innovation, and Arts and Humanities Research Council - AHRC

Future Observatory is a new national  programme for design research that will drive the UK’s response to the climate crisis.

18/06/2022

📢
Housing for a Fairer and Greener World
Closing 30 June 2022

How can we reclaim housing as the fundamental act of dwelling in a fairer and greener world? An act of fair redistribution and regeneration of humanity’s and our planet’s resources.

The Urban Transcripts Journal is calling for submissions that critically review housing models, policies, projects and processes, and radically reimagine how we dwell in our cities.

13/06/2022

* London workshop Sunday 19 June *

Can playing a help us raise awareness of the climate crisis, adopt a more sustainable way of life, and create plans and strategies for cities that can regenerate the ecosystems we all depend on? Read more about our work for and join our upcoming game development in this Sunday 19 June at Garden of Earthly Delights.

Update: ZeroCityPlus London Workshop Sunday 19 June Can playing a game help us raise awareness of the climate crisis, adopt...

27/05/2022

Just on time for your weekend read - we invite you to skim through UTJ's current issue "Righting the City". From creative writing, to reportages, to articles, to book reviews, to videos, a lot of urban-related content to explore - Enjoy!

The Urban Transcripts Journal | Volume 3, no. 3 Autumn 2020

23/05/2022

“In the case of I am a tool of Gentrification (2019) my real-life situation really set the project in motion. It started with a wish to understand gentrification processes in Amsterdam. I ended up really diving into it and adopting a journalistic/documentary method. However, it was not plain documentary research, I collaborated with performers and included performances with masks and costumes that reflect the topic of the movie. The result, an experimental documentary series, was my reply to the precarious life of the artist: a reaction to my eleven months long desperate house search and feeling of being used as a tool of gentrification. I interviewed more than 35 people, from municipality officials and urbanists to individual artists and artist run spaces. I wanted to create a platform for discussion, and I found it very important that everyone who worked with me had a similar attitude: nuanced, really searching for insight and looking at the issue in a constructive, solution-oriented way.[...]"

“I Am a Tool of Gentrification: An Experimental Documentary Series”, by Lyubov Matyunina
Image: Screen capture from “I am a tool of gentrification: Amsterdam-West” video
Featured on Urban Transcripts' new issue - RIGHTING THE CITY
Watch it in full at: https://journal.urbantranscripts.org/article/i-am-a-tool-of-gentrification-an-experimental-documentary-series-lyubov-matyunina/
The entire issue is available at:⁠ https://journal.urbantranscripts.org/contents/?issue=volume-5-no-1-jan-jun-2022
Thank you for reading the Urban Transcripts Journal. If you want to support our work, please consider becoming a Urban Transcripts Patron at:⁠ https://www.patreon.com/theurbantranscriptsjournal

Lyubov’s work is inspired, often indirectly, by her personal life or everyday life events. As she tells us “in the case of I am a tool of Gentrification (2019) my real-life situation really set the project in motion. It started with a wish to understand gentrification processes in Amsterdam. I e...

20/05/2022

"[...] In reaction to the massive protests, subway stations were closed, train schedules were adjusted and train frequency reduced. As public transport service was temporarily reduced bikes started to emerge, people forgot the underground world and started walking the streets, appropriating bus lanes and car lanes. Due to the COVID19 pandemic that started shortly after, the city slowed down even more and urban mobility came to a halt in many ways. Paradoxically, once mandatory quarantine ceased, the dynamics of transport were re-established. The uncomfortable daily ride that was a topic of demonstrations has been resumed unchanged, in the same inhumane fashion already perpetuated for decades. The only appreciable post-COVID19 and post-demonstrations transformation is the obligation to wear face masks, as a new addition in people’s outfits. [...]"

“Crowded but With Masks: On the Resilience of an Unfair Mobility, Reflections From Santiago, Chile”, by Fernando Campos-Medina, Iván Ojeda-Pereira and Josefa Mattei
Image: Resonance. Source: Authors
Featured on Urban Transcripts' new issue - RIGHTING THE CITY
Read it in full at: https://journal.urbantranscripts.org/article/crowded-but-with-masks-on-the-resilience-of-an-unfair-mobility-reflections-from-santiago-chile-fernando-campos-medina-ivan-ojeda-pereira-and-josefa-mattei/
The entire issue is available at:⁠ https://journal.urbantranscripts.org/contents/?issue=volume-5-no-1-jan-jun-2022
Thank you for reading the Urban Transcripts Journal. If you want to support our work, please consider becoming a Urban Transcripts Patron at:⁠ https://www.patreon.com/theurbantranscriptsjournal

The present photo essay seeks to visualize the resilience of a transport system and how it exposes deep social differences in Chile. On the 18th October 2019 a social outbreak started, first in Santiago of Chile, to then expand the rest of the country. This seemed a moment of transformation, a turni...

18/05/2022

"Living in a black place mattered to me, the granddaughter of black southern migrants who had left homes in Louisiana to make new homes out west. Monroe, Lake Charles, Gary, Marin City. All of these cities were intimate coordinates on a family map. Soft-breathing places where children and elders and married people made their beds, ate supper, played records, told stories, said their prayers, and left kinfolk behind when it was time to pick up and leave. This was migration. A great train moving toward bigger and brighter cities. A river of black folks flooding into previously all-white towns and streets, wading after jobs, new adventure, greener pastures, a reprieve from the noose despite never learning how to swim.[...]"

From “Black at Home in the Bay Area”, by Wendy M. Thompson
Image: Redfin listing | house sold for $838,000 | 3 Beds, 2 Baths | 1,100 Sq. Ft., Newark. Source: Redfin
Featured on Urban Transcripts' new issue - RIGHTING THE CITY
Read it in full at: https://journal.urbantranscripts.org/article/black-at-home-in-the-bay-area-wendy-m-thompson/
The entire issue is available at:⁠ https://journal.urbantranscripts.org/contents/?issue=volume-5-no-1-jan-jun-2022
Thank you for reading the Urban Transcripts Journal. If you want to support our work, please consider becoming a Urban Transcripts Patron at:⁠ https://www.patreon.com/theurbantranscriptsjournal

Living in a black place mattered to me, the granddaughter of black southern migrants who had left homes in Louisiana to make new homes out west. Monroe, Lake Charles, Gary, Marin City. All of these cities were intimate coordinates on a family map. Soft-breathing places where children and elders and....

16/05/2022

The Pain of Others is an intervention that consists of photos, collages, posters, and banners which at first sight resemble memorial sites spontaneously arising in public space following accidents, terrorist attacks, disasters, or other tragic events. Sasha Kurmaz uses this form deliberately in order to reflect the problems he is addressing in the most accurate and expressive way. Such spontaneous objects are always anonymous and do not have a specific author or ‘artistic value’.
“The Pain of Others”, by Sasha Kurmaz
Image: The Pain of Others, 2017. Source: Author
Featured on Urban Transcripts' new issue - RIGHTING THE CITY
Read it in full at: https://journal.urbantranscripts.org/article/the-pain-of-others-sasha-kurmaz/
The entire issue is available at:⁠ https://journal.urbantranscripts.org/contents/?issue=volume-5-no-1-jan-jun-2022
Thank you for reading the Urban Transcripts Journal. If you want to support our work, please consider becoming a Urban Transcripts Patron at:⁠ https://www.patreon.com/theurbantranscriptsjournal

The Pain of Others is an intervention that consists of photos, collages, posters, and banners which at first sight resemble memorial sites spontane...

13/05/2022

"We speak. Whether with our voices, our hands or through technologies, speaking is inseparable from being human. When do our words become political? Politics can be in what we say, but it can also be in the places and ways in which we speak. If the same words are delivered from a pulpit or over a kitchen sink, they don’t carry the same meaning. Cities have speech too – they translate what we say via their own language, each having a unique syntax made up of its particular configurations of spaces, cultures, infrastructures, and technologies.

So, what kinds of spaces make our words political? Who has access to them? And how do those excluded from those spaces find ways to amplify their voices? [...]!"

From “Infrastructures for Voice”, by Fani Kostourou and John Bingham-Hall
Image: Stencil on a marble in Monastiraki, Athens, reading “λεσβίες, τρανς, ιέρειες του αίσχους, είμαστε υπερήφανα η ντροπή του έθνους”, translating in “lesbians, trans, priestesses of disgrace, we proudly are the shame of nation”. March 2020. Source: Angeliki Tzortzakaki
Featured on Urban Transcripts' new issue - RIGHTING THE CITY
Read it in full at: https://journal.urbantranscripts.org/article/infrastructures-for-voice-fani-kostourou-and-john-bingham-hall/
The entire issue is available at:⁠ https://journal.urbantranscripts.org/contents/?issue=volume-5-no-1-jan-jun-2022
Thank you for reading the Urban Transcripts Journal. If you want to support our work, please consider becoming a Urban Transcripts Patron at:⁠ https://www.patreon.com/theurbantranscriptsjournal

We speak. Whether with our voices, our hands or through technologies, speaking is inseparable from being human. When do our words become political? Politics can be in what we say, but it can also be in the places and ways in which we speak. If the same words are delivered from a pulpit or over a kit...

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