Debates continue about the positioning of design within research-driven universities. While the idea of autonomy has had a strong appeal, it is the bridging across established academic cultures that has proved especially effective for legitimizing design research and research education. Revisiting a conception of design as a ‘Third Space’ and drawing on a case – the Swedish Faculty for Design Research and Research Education (2008–2015) – we discuss what ‘thirdness’ can entail in context. Our account of this case reveals the unsettled dynamics of navigating in, between and across academic cultures. Design research education, we argue, has prospects to cultivate a critical space within academia, in which its ‘thirdness’ entails sensitization and agitation of the territorial conditions of knowledge. There is a need for a reconsideration of design – and academia more generally – not as a static disciplinary order but as a contested archipelago that opens for alternative orientations.

The Future of Design Education working group on doctoral education included doctoral supervisors from nine programs around the world and addressed the indeterminacy of standards for the PhD in Design. Internationally, “contributions to knowledge” under the PhD degree title range from evidence-based investigations documented in a dissertation to personal reflections on making artifacts. In some programs, quantitative and qualitative research methods are taught; in others, there is no instruction in methods. The working group suggested that reflection on one’s own creative production is the role of the professional master’s degree and recommended standards for two doctoral programs—the PhD and the Doctor of Design (DDes). The group defined the PhD as addressing unresolved problems with the goal of generalizable knowledge or theory for the field. It described the DDes as a professional practice degree in which research is done in a practice setting to frame a specific opportunity space, guide in-process design decisions, or evaluate outcomes. DDes findings do not claim generalizability and result in “cases.” The working group discussed methods, sampling, standards of evidence and claims, ethics, research writing, and program management.

What does it mean to act – and to design – in times as dark and obscure as the current? This is the troubling question raised in the Bloomsbury Visual Arts book series Designing in Dark Times. In their contribution to the series, Eduardo Staszowski, associate professor of Design Strategies at Parsons The New School of Design, and Virginia Tassinari, post-doctoral fellow at Politecnico di Milano, turn to the political philosophy of German-American philosopher Hanna Arendt (1906-1975). Taking an increasingly self-destructive and distressed humanity as their point of departure, the two design researchers have invited a wide range of design scholars and practitioners to “adopt” one of Arendt’s concepts to reconsider the status and role of design today. The result is An Arendtian Lexicon, an edited volume featuring fifty-five short essays that in different ways engage terms from Arendt’s oeuvre. While alphabetically structured, the line-up of entries is not exhaustive, nor is it to be understood as a set of dictionary definitions. Instead, it constructs a clustering of Arendtian terms, central also to the contemporary design debate. Yet apart from being introduced in the editors’ introductory essay, the clusters remain opaque until the end of each entry, where they present as suggestions for cross-reading.  

When the edited volume Site Matters was first published in 2005, it was at a time when the meaning of the word site had just passed what we in hindsight may describe as the real/virtual tipping point. Having fulfilled its duty as a progressivist signpost in the zoning of the modern cityscape, the word was already back then fully registered as a basic staple of the network technology and the World Wide Web. If the word used to have certain concrete environmental referentials, according to the editors it had become increasingly ‘disassociated from the considerations of physical conditions’ (Burns &amp, Kahn 2005: ix) reflected in increasingly lofty and speculative, computer-aided urban design proposals, furthermore often projecting settings meant to be mediated rather than experienced ‘live’. Over less than a decade, the morphological and experiential variety previously implied in the word site—building sites, campsites, landfill sites, landing sites, nesting sites, picnic sites, or archeological sites, just to mention a few—had merged to form a generic, informational and communicative web-site, a mere placeholder for a mesh of interlinked, stacked and exchangeable content. When the editors of Site Matters, Andrea Kahn and Carol J. Burns, now return to the topic in a significantly revised second edition, the ‘mattering’ of site is of a totally different magnitude. While their initial holding on to site might have been motivated by its material and analog qualities, the rationale behind their updated attempt to gather site insights and know-how is much more existential in kind.

Om det under vintern uppstått turbulens på den svenska konstens innanhav, med Konstfackskolan som epicentrum, så har det i de danska konstkanalerna rörts upp häftiga svallvågor. Upprinnelsen är en aktion som genomfördes i det fördolda i höstas av Anonyme Billedkunstnerer, en grupp kopplade till Kunstakademiet i Köpenham. En vit gipsbyst föreställande 1700-talskungen och akademins grundare Fredrik V, för övrigt Gustav III:s svärfar, skruvades loss och enleverades från sin nisch i skolans festsal, för att sedan rituellt dumpas i hamninloppet utanför. I början av november offentliggjordes aktionen, genom en video publicerad på sajten idoart.dk, vilket väckte omedelbar indignation.

This chapter draws on experiences and lessons learned from a process of hands-on, reflective game co-designing. The case is from the Urban Transition Öresund project (2013-14) which involved co-design and urban researchers, professional game designers, and civil servants working with complex, cross-sector sustainable urban planning in threemunicipalities in Scandinavia. The process included framing, co-designing, testing and playing what came to be called the “Urban Transition” game – explored in various real-world urban planning processes. By dissecting four co-design and play testing situations of this serious, dialogue game, the chapter aims to elucidate the inherent abilities of games as formats for collaboration, negotiation and mutual learning. The main claim is that games are practically “political” – in the sense that they can re-open taken-for-granted urban planning themes by emphasizing details and holistic views; can reveal assumptions about others by actualizing conflicts and can challenge current and possible future municipal, situated socio-material collaborative practices. Therefore, in urban planning processes[F1]  aimed at sustainable development, games and game co-designing should not be seen as de-politicized quick fixes but rather as highly “political” platforms for negotiation.

The present report is an attempt to provide an overview over intersecting beginnings,

emergencies, and prolongations that reinforces a theoretical reflection on contemporary

cultural debate and its repercussions on societal development. With the current research

overview, we want to draw attention to assumptions about culture(s), as they are played out in

the intersection of migration and sustainable urban development. Multi-layered and doubleedged,

‘culture’ often comes with territorial postulates and implicit ideas about belongings and

borders, movements and rights of priority. The report approaches these entangled issues from

several angles. With the point of departure in current environmental policy, the first section of

the report, therefore, approaches ideas of “sustainability” via the notions of “culture” and

“locality”. A second section briefly discusses the methodological challenges of researching

emergent cultural phenomena across both geographical and disciplinary borders. In a third

section, we turn to three research reports, a sampling of the report literature, but representative

of how global, regional and local perspectives on culture today are ‘scaffolded’ in relation to

mobility and migration. A fourth section introduces emergent transversal, i.e. non-categorical,

approaches to cultural research, primarily focusing on how notions such as transnationalism

and translocality may inform new modes of research and urban development. A fifth section

finally, articulates some recommendations about how to relate to translocal space and

translocal subjectivities in practice and how to craft research approaches that not only involve

interlocutors but also answers to and actively engage in current spatial and cultural changes.

Thoroughly shaped by an industrial past, Sweden’s third largest city, Malmö, has always prided itself on its many lush and accessible public green spaces. Historically significant, centrally located, and generous in size, the numerous green areas still lead some to characterize Malmö as “the city of parks” (Pehrsson 1986, Malmö Stad 1994). However, although parks have played an important sociopolitical role in the city, their current function, especially given an increasingly important climate-conscious urban agenda, is less clear. As an example, a recent survey by Statistics Sweden of green areas in Swedish municipalities with more than 30,000 inhabitants showed the labeling of Malmö as a park city to be much exaggerated, if not downright misleading. Of the thirty-seven municipalities analyzed in 2010, Malmö was the city with the lowest ratio of publically accessible green area per capita, less than 100 square meters, as compared to the 350 square meters per capita in the city with the highest proportion (Statistiska Centralbyrån 2015). The study also showed Malmö to be a city still influenced by heavy industry and infrastructure, with a very high ratio of paved areas and with the second-highest percentage of inhabitants completely lacking accessible greens within reasonable distance. While the 2015 survey gives valuable indications about differences in land-use patterns, it focuses primarily on urban green spaces from a structural and quantitative point of view. In the survey, the functional value of urban green spaces and their importance as interwoven, balancing, and restorative elements are implicit. The idea of green structure thus also reflects an ongoing reconceptualization of a former nature-culture divide, now in terms of connectivity (Hellmund and Smith 2006; La Point et al. 2015). No longer seen as an enclosed park—and thus as a sociopolitically motivated discontinuity, correcting and reoxygenating the urban corpus—urban greenery is now seen as one of several support systems, not least from an urban ecological point of view. Yet, despite emergent green structuring, the public urban park lingers, presenting an intricate and unsettling otherness reflective of ideological currents, fluctuating common resources, and social mobilization. As a manifestation of a distinct and complex spatiotemporality, the urban public park might—more or less accidentally—constitute a sustained critique of an increasingly structured urbanity. Using as a point of departure the planning and execution of a park in “the city of parks”—the Emporia Rooftop Park in the smart city district of Hyllie in Malmö—this article discusses the park as a networked yet unsettling materialization in an increasingly “connected” process of urbanization. Suspended between different interests and conceptions of urban growth, this process could potentially provide room for a radicalizing of urban imaginaries. However, it also lends itself to compensational, aestheticizing, and increasingly instrumentalized justifications, thus emptying the park of its divergent, and therefore political potentials. As a new and highly visible eco-engineering arena, the urban park is instead rapidly converted into a privileged minion in a new, green, design-driven, and future-oriented environmental joint venture, the political positions of which are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish.

In recent times, the design of technology platforms has been largely driven by the optimization of data flows in large-scale urban initiatives. Even though many platforms have good intentions, rising expectations for data efficiency and reliability, the configuration of users and user’s interactions inevitably have ethical consequences. It has become increasingly difficult to foresee how a wide diversity of users fares against a spatially complex and materially incomplete management and distribution of data flows. Through the logic of platformization, we explore how this plays out in the context of open mapping platforms - in the case of an individual elderly street-mapper, Stig. Drawing from design anthropology, we present an anecdotal account of Stig’s experiences of street mapping, showcasing his attempts to adapt to the demands of the mapping platform sometimes at the expense of his own wellbeing. Opening up to the complexity of the situation, we discuss the ethical dissonances of platforms, hence questioning the role of design in such complex modes of data production and consumption.

With the point of departure in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) – site François Mitterand (Dominique Perrault, 1989–95) and more specifically its central but inaccessible jardin-forêt, this essay problematizes what has been described as the neoliberal shift in architecture and urbanism. The BnF and its garden-forest has been interpreted as a last breath of modernist urbanism and welfare ideas. Yet, rather than dismissing this Grand opération as a tardy spasm of modernism, it is perhaps more productive to consider the ensemble an exponent of the derivative, or spin-off, spatial logic currently sustaining the fiction of urban fertility and growth.

There we were, engaged participants, entering the circle, prepared to sharpen our attention, to adjust our bodies, to interact and respond to the situation. We started to play, committed to follow the jerky wanderings of the first ball. Then the second ball entered the circle, and with it came a new rule for throwing it, challenging our coordination and signalling skills. When the third ball came into play, intersecting in a new way with the trajectories of the first two, the calls, glances and moves across the field of interaction intensified into a palpable present, frequently interrupted by thudding and bouncing—sounds of misjudgement, friction, or misalignment. As a fourth ball was introduced into the circle, along with yet another set of throwing instructions, the communicative tension reached its breaking point, or its point of implosion, manifested in reflexive, collaborative laughter. We had played, hesitatingly at first, but soon with increasing enthusiasm. And as the game progressed, balls had travelled faster, accompanied by more and more imperative shouts, growing agitation and intensified responses. Finally, as the gameplay was broken, the balls rolled away, leaving us with an awareness of the fragility of collaboration, but also with an appreciation for concerted juggling. Flexibility, timing, spatial understanding, expressivity, alertness, foresightedness: these are all social skills most clearly revealed precisely at the point of miscarriage, insufficiency, or breakdown.

Plats och platslöshet är ett återkommande landskapsarkitektoniskt tema. Allt sedan 60-talet har ”icke-platsen” figurerat både som ett cybernetiskt frihetsideal och som ett avskräckande exempel på en avhumaniserad supermodernism. Tidigt ställdes den teknikoptimistiska passionen för stationer, växlar, rondeller, omkopplingar och noder mot en lika stark vurm för den sammanhållna, historiskt förankrade, materiellt artikulerade och sinnligt upplevda handlings- eller samlingsplatsen. Den här polariserade diskussionen om platsens vara eller inte vara, om dess position och dess öde, dröjer sig kvar. Kanske speglar den också en efterhängsen och tilltagande osäkerhet om vad det lokala står för. För på bara något decennium nu har informationsteknologins utbredning, de globala nätverkens translokalitet och medieflödenas sociala kapacitet överträffat alla förväntningar. När det gäller möten och utbyten, för att inte tala om gemenskaper, så tycks de idag obekymrade om det lokala, lika oberoende av relationen kropp-plats som frenetiskt upptagna av att återuppfinna densamma. Därför har profetiorna om den fysiska platsens försvinnande inte infriats. Tvärtom tycks platsen nu genomgå en paradoxal renässans, som händelse, som rumsligt kapital, som löfte. ”Platsen”, och kanske i ännu högre grad ”mötesplatsen”, är en av den expanderande samtidens mest centrala figurer.

The apprehension of any field of practice requires overview, today more than ever. Inundated with information, we are obliged to constantly browse, search, or roam, relentlessly seeking out patterns solid or sustainable enough to stand out as coherent identities, areas, professions, discipline or categories. As design theorist Clive Dilnot has pointed out (Dilnot 2009:377), this is ‘the stated ethos’ of the survey, also within the increasingly diversified design field: to provide an inventory, to register what and how, where and when, to pedagogically make sense of a vast expanse of multifarious practices. As a systematic collecting of facts, the survey situates and captures relations, it enables identification of successive orders or traditions, it allows for recognition of characteristics and clusters, it permits the tracing of processes, both backwards and forward. And perhaps this latter aspect is the most decisive: the fact that as the careful assembling of a data set, the survey does not simply provide a record or blueprint of a situation, but constitutes itself a mapping practice, which ‘allows a trajectory to be formed in the mind and that historical trajectory is (or so we assume) the basis of beginning to know in relation to a field’ (Dilnot 2009: 377).

This article is a collaborative work focused on the critical question of whether new types of contemporary public parks can emerge from designers’ engagement with dynamic processes. Rather than giving prominence to the exclusive use of stable patterns of landform and vegetation that largely have characterized past parks, we are interested in the lessons learned from practices trying to conflate theories of aesthetic experience with ecosystem dynamics in order to influence urban trends and climate change. Our compilation of texts highlights questions and recognizes scenarios of conflict and opportunity. We describe places and sites where a temporal dimension accentuates or dramatizes socio-material sensitivities, and where a dynamic condition generates more or less informal commons and wildlands, or in other words, emergent parks taking into consideration the limits of human control.

‘“It’s absolutely amazing!” The first visitor to the new shopping centre cannot hide her enthusiasm, her eyes sparkling at the shower of golden discount coupons’ (Sydsvenska Dagbladet, 25 October 2012). The new commercial facility presents itself as part of a natural circuit, its elevators embedded in lush greenery, its open spaces framed by rippling waterfalls. Even the public lavatories express the same environmental concern, with bird tweets and other animal sounds activated as you lock the cubicle door, all according to one early reviewer whose inaugural visit to the privy was greeted by an intimate ‘cock-a-doodle-doo’ (Fürstenberg 2012). The impressive opening of Emporia took place in October 2012 in Malmö, Sweden. Located close to the Öresund Bridge, in the transnational metropolitan area often referred to as Greater Copenhagen, the new shopping destination is one of the most extravagant and extensive in Europe. Architectonically spectacular and environmentally certified, the three-storey complex is an award-winning piece of green investment. 1 Access is easy; you can arrive at the site by public transport or even by bike if you wish; most likely you enter from the new station square through the imposing ‘Amber Entrance’, or, if you still prefer coming here by car, the glimmering blue ‘Sea Entrance’ facing the main parking will provide as grandiose an ingress; a deep, translucent cavity in the sienna-coloured glass facade, an enticing orifice, exerting a centripetal force. The most idiosyncratic mode of entry, however, is via the six-acre public rooftop park, which can be accessed by either car or foot via an exterior stairway. While the park allows for a more relaxed passage into the emporium and its 200 stores and restaurants, it also buffers the consuming experience, making clear that consumption is only one part of the Emporia vision.

“The City At Play” displays parts of how co-design researchers in collaboration with civil servants practically have engaged in exploring urban ecologies by challenging current collaborative municipal mapping and transition processes through game development. The exhibit is a narrative installation of tangible traces from the participatory prototyping sessions and “animating” interventions into municipal planning contexts - in this case climate transition in the Öresund region. It is argued that a game inspired co-designing mind-set – rather than a problem-solving approach – presents ways to explore and critically reflect upon dynamic urban complexities as eco-political contexts of competition and collaboration across competencies and administrative units.

In discussing a major public video installation, Elsewhere/Annorstädes/Ailleurs by Tania Ruiz Gutierrez, the present article seeks to address what is referred to here as ‘mobility ex situ’— the unsettling aspects of a mobility culture that is both ubiquitous and at the same time exorbitant, never simply ‘in place’. Commissioned for one of the stations along the Øresund Link between Denmark and Sweden, this world-embracing cinematic montage is an integrated part of an expansive connectivity infrastructure. Yet, while providing site-specific motion captures of a translocational world, the work not only actualises a radically transformed sense of presence. Randomised and disjointed, the flow of imagery also draws attention to the territorial incoherencies and asymmetries of a mobility culture, which, despite increased site sensitivity, does not manage to shake off its constitutive ‘elsewheres’. The artwork thus provides an opportunity to unfold the ‘mobility script’ from an aesthetic—but also political—point of view, and this in three consecutive steps: the first, an introductory presentation of the art work as situational stammering; the second, a critical reflection through the work on nomadic or dispersed geographies; and the third, a discussion of the work as an expression of a cosmopolitical aesthetics.

Certain landscapes come with a certain aura. The pastures of Tuscany, the Mongolian steppes, the Aegean archipelago or the delta of the Nile; these are just some samples of geomorphological excisions which, even though we may never have set foot on these grounds, do not leave us unaffected. Perhaps “the Nordic landscape” belongs to this category of territories beyond time and space, these canonized outlooks, so fully charged with meaning. Or perhaps it is the very the labelling of a piece of land in terms of “landscape” that calls forth a specific spatial radiance. But what do such landscape imaginaries convey? What kind of narratives do they nurture? And what are the implications of this landscaping? With the point of departure in the piece of land that could be described as my own native grounds, the potentially cool, virgin, free and allowing North, which, despite its peripheral situation has provided and is still offering a model for a modern, convenient and environmentally sane life, I will discuss these issues.

How do various design games format and stage different collaborative inquiry, learning and reflection? At this hands-on workshop, we will collaboratively explore, relate and meta-reflect upon how different design (and learning) games can form part of experimental, co-design (research) processes and practice. Some shared playing of mainly analogue games brought by the workshop organizers and participants will provide the basis for engaging in a game-inspired experiment of collaboratively relating and reflecting upon qualities and controversies of different design games. This reflection experiment will be shaped around predefined and emerging topics.

The Öresund Region, which encompasses a population of 3.5 million across Southern Sweden and Eastern Denmark, aims to be a regional ”powerhouse” in Europe for sustainability, innovation and clean-tech. It can therefore provide a ”laboratory” by which to experiment, implement, examine and evaluate the progress of (local) transition governance and infrastructural investments. The Urban Transition Öresund project (2011-2014) is a cross-border cooperation between Swedish and Danish partners (including academic institutions, local governments, regional authorities, and clean-tech businesses) in the Öresund Region to evaluate and improve collaborative efforts to promote sustainable urban transformation. The working approach is the co-exploration of case studies – encompassing existing and planned buildings and districts in the Öresund Region – from which essential lessons are being extracted and subsequently tested on further projects in order to obtain general lessons. Importantly, the case studies from the Öresund Region are being supplemented by research on international experiences with a particular focus on new forms of collaboration, specifically the format of Living Labs, which can be simply described as a concept to integrate research and innovation processes within a public-private-people partnership. This paper presents a discussion of how the concept of Living Labs can support (local) transition governance towards sustainable urban transformation in the Öresund Region and beyond.

This report is produced within the Urban Transition Øresund (UT) project (2011–2014), and it is part of the subtask Collaborative Methods and Tools for Urban Transitions (UT CoMeT). The goal of the UT project is to promote sustainable growth and advance sustainable urban transformation in the Øresund region by gathering municipalities, universities and businesses in cross-border cooperation. The subtask UT CoMeT has a special focus on tools and methods for working that allow and promote greater collaboration between various actors in a transition process towards sustainability.The initial phase of the UT CoMeT activity consists of mapping existing experiences of forms of collaboration and cross-boundary working formats in urban transition processes. This includes examples of methods and tools utilised within the Øresund region, but also beyond, on international areas, focusing on Europe. The mapping process takes its point of departure in results from earlier reports, and it was completed in two steps: (I) mapping of methods and tools currently used by the UT project partners in the Øresund region; and (II) mapping of international cases and examples in Europe.

Historically, the emergence of “the urban park” in the 19th century constituted a point of transition in the development of public space. A favourite topic of modernist art, the park has been frequently mythologized, but also challenged. In Seurat’s famous painting of Grand Jatte, the park emerged as the sum of a multitude of colourful and expectant impulses, furthermore enveloped in sparkling backlight. In contemporary works of art, however, like that of Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, the park instead provides ”a plan for escape…a catalogue of seemingly unrelated parts…anti-landscapes for micro-events…” As an urban architectural type, the public urban park is ambiguous: Is it to be considered a space for the re-creation of social orders? Or does it rather provide a space for the transgression of preordained urbanity?

Is there a logical relationship between ethics and aesthetics? Or perhaps even a natural link between practical reasoning, ‘common sense’ and the sphere of sensuous judgment? Propelled by an increasing environmental engagement and landscape awareness, these and similar philosophical questions again incur interest, motivating commentators to talk about ‘an ethical turn’. However, it is a ‘turn’ that gives rise to supplementary questions concerning the role of aesthetics and the conditions for creativity, contestation and change. Revisiting earlier ethico-aesthetic turns and twists, from modernist anti-aesthetics to contemporary neo- and onto-aesthetics, the essay aims to historicize the relationship between ethics and aesthetics, including the effect on landscape in these polemics. Ultimately, the ethico-aesthetic conjuncture constitutes the structural paradox of a ‘modernity’, which simultaneously expands horizontally and elevates vertically, consensually interlocking assumptions of commonality, subjectivity and reality. The critical alternative, it is argued, is to consider the aesthetic as a political site, where the distribution of the sensuous is a dissensual matter of (landscape) concern.

It seems like we are now rapidly leaving the galaxy of printed matter. As screen-based media is making its entry into our everyday lives, it is pushing aside an object – the book - that has structured our forms of being together for almost six hundred years. This shift is not absolute but successive, and it raises a lot of questions. What kind of mediating practices are developing beyond printed media? And how do these practices structure and organize common spaces and publicities? Even though today, we are far into the electronic age, in a way we are still suspended in between modern individualized life and new, more floating societal formations. Therefore, rather than presupposing the disappearance of the book, this paper approaches the idea of the book as an expanded and inter-medial “boundary object” (Star and Griesemer 1989). In this respect, the point of departure is the expanded book project Roma Europa Fake Factory (REFF) (Henderson et. al. 2010) – a platform for global discussion and exchange concerning the management and governance of new public spheres in the electronic age. Playing out the visual authority of the printed text against the flickering of the net through the use of inter-mediating QR codes (Quick Response Codes) and fiducial markers, the project constituted a critical and artefactual intervention, remixing and mashing up the forcible means of the printed word with the intermediary potentials of electronic circuits. In the paper, we discuss the project through one of the contributions – Blind Points of Transition – a combined text- and video-based dialogue; on the one hand an exploration of the book and the net as different locations, and on the other hand a tentative mapping of the intermediary territory between two geographically separate places. Focusing on the transition of text through different media, the paper critically examines the spatial expansion and modifications of the book as it enters electronic circuits, thus proposing a ‘blind and fake’, or in other words a questioning form of boundary modification; dislocating the critical focus from visuality to agency and from permanent property to intermediary production.

Years of development boom on both sides of the Oresund, the strait separating Sweden and Denmark, has resulted in an urban landscape of great wonder. On the Swedish side, in Malmö, the new talisman, the twisted high rise of Santiago Calatrava, towers behind old wharfs and docks. Erected by a labour movement housing association, it signals a new era and a new way of manifesting the spatial relationship between individual and group. With promises of both comfort and participation, the spiralling edifice has not only settled in with the surroundings, but also developed into a symbol for a welfare society keeping abreast of the times. Concurrently, on the Danish side, metropolitan Copenhagen expands. Its latest ramification, Ørestad, provides a new arena for the social manifestations of the new, entrepreneurial class. In the enchanting gleam from Jean Nouvel’s concert hall cube, Henning Larsen’s new IT University building market its tantalizing choices, and further down along the driver-less infrastructural artery, BIG’s terraced mountain capriciously challenges the Danish flatlands. Daniel Libeskind has similarly responded to the call, in a posh marketing video presenting a series of welcoming public spaces for the new Ørestad Down Town. ‘For me,’ Libeskind says while finishing his Espresso ‘architecture is all about people – architecture without human beings to enjoy it is meaningless. Marketing the urban landscape as a hotbed not only for technological innovation and economic development but also for the development of new life styles, today’s developers whole-heartedly adopt what may be interpreted as a radical urban rhetoric of the transformative and alternative. Nevertheless, just off the new and abundant urban landscape, you still find alternative, aberrations, suckers shooting off from the recognized multiplicity. One such offshoot is the Free Town of Christiania. In the beaming light of the new and semi-transparent developments, this threadbare, self-governed settlement in central Copenhagen, now in its forties, may seem more wicked than ever. Yet, at the same time, its special anthem Christiania – You Have My Heart, still hovers in the air. For if Copenhagen has a heart, it is likely to be found somewhere close to the appropriated military barracks in Bådsmansstræde, Christianshavn. And the localizing of this heartfelt site was always easy: ‘You simply take Bus no 8 to Princess Street. Cost: One token’.

On the district council web site of Thanet, a peninsula in Southeast England, one can learn that painter William Turner, when sketching in the environs in the 1820s and 30s found the skies over the area to be “the loveliest in all Europe.” A bit further down, the same website tells us that today, the coastal skies are being mediated in new ways: “From Film Noir, Dogma and horror to TV – the bright lights are shining for Thanet.” The Isle of Thanet is one example of how regions today expectantly redefine themselves in relation to a new cultural landscape. Cities and municipalities worldwide today compete in presenting themselves as “film friendly” environments offering an abundance of fertile and favourable grounds for media production. Through the establishing of funding platforms and location databases or through the setting up of special ‘codes of practice’, ample room is provided for new spatial actors with new claims to unveil, characterize, program and direct sites and spaces. In the present essay, English Thanet; a tourist destination past its time now aiming for a comeback; will be compared with the recently so successful crime film location of Ystad, Sweden, similarly a coastal municipality defending its position within the framework of a new ‘experience economy’. The comparison will fall in to a discussion, on the one hand about how the new media practices and professions affect the popular imaginary of sites and spaces, and on the other hand how they impinge on spatial discourse and policies of spatial reproduction. What are the determining criteria for new spatial actors? What kinds of sites are being targeted and how are they being administered and maintained? Surfacing in the media surge is the old spatial dichotomy between permanence and production, but also a new and contested kind of site – the ‘location’ – a temporary merger of authenticity claims, productivity demands and material conditions.

Artistic research covers a broad spectrum of investigative, academically reflective practices with an artistic grounding in visual art, music, theatre, film, dance, performance, architecture, design, literature etc. The research methods are most often action-oriented, performative, and include their own artistic production in terms of material concepts (artefacts, exhibitions, concerts, performances, films, sound recordings, literary works) as a key part of the problematisation, reference frames, argumentation and presentation. The aim is often to reveal hidden concepts, critically examine social phenomena or highlight alternative values, perspectives and scenarios. Apart from the notion artistic research, other terms used are practice-based or design-based research, research by design, performance-based research, and research in the making disciplines. The article reflects both on the potential forms of artistic research and the possible directions, primarily in relation to future funding policies.

How do we conceive of a cultural landscape already stratified by diverse and conflicting practices of cultivation? How do we relate to an everyday environment already thoroughly planned and permeated by information? Broad yet pertinent, these questions constituted the point of departure for Land Use Poetics, an arts-based and inter-disciplinary project, addressing issues of spatial documentation and projection. Structured around two intense workshops or field operations in two different North European everyday locations, the Malmö-Lund area in Southeast Sweden and the Isle of Thanet in Kent, England, it brought together a diverse group of researchers, architects and artists with the common objective to explore and challenge spatial practices, technologies and imaginaries from an arts-based point of view. The result is a collection of combined visual and textual essays and reports, in different ways actualizing the everyday drama of land use and the poetics resulting from the attempts to map it out. Maria Hellström Reimer is a visual artist and landscape architecture scholar based in Sweden; Nigel Green and Robin Wilson are…. The volume also presents contributions by Melissa Appleton and Rosy Head, Kerstin Ergenzinger, Rona Lee, Gunnar Sandin, Staffan Schmidt, Meike Schalk and Apolonija Sustercic.

One of the dates of faith in the history of Christiania is April 1st, 1976. After some years of vacillating in the so called Christiania question, in the spring of 1975 the Danish Parliament had finally set the deadline for the clearance of the Free Town. Some three months before the planned clearing, however, a documentary entitled Dagbog fra en fristad (Denmark, 1971; English translation Diary from a Free Town) was broadcast on national television. This documentary by Danish filmmaker Poul Martinsen followed the ‘typical’ Danish family Hansen from Hedehusene, a suburban city between Copenhagen and Roskilde, on their visit to Christiania. Featuring Eli Hansen, an unemployed construction worker in his forties; Lise Hansen, a cleaning assistant in her late thirties; and their two sons, Morten, eleven and Jesper, sixteen years old, as they agreed to spend a week in the Free Town, the documentary provided a combined insider/outsider perspective of the contested area. While the family initially held the view that the community should be closed, by the end of the week Mr and Mrs Hansen and their two sons had changed opinion. Having shared the daily life of the Christianites, the family was much closer to the view that Christiania presented an alternative that should remain. Transmitting a shift in attitude, the televised stay of the Family Hansen eventually made the liberal government understand that a clearance was politically impossible, and only two days before the planned closure, the government launched the idea of a ‘soft landing’, changing the demand for immediate closure to a closure ‘without unnecessary delay.’ When the Danish broadcasting company through Poul Martinsen twelve years later staged a revisit, Gensyn med Christiania (Danmark, 1988; English translation Return to Christiania), the Hansen Family was confronted with an equally contested, yet perhaps even more precarious situation. While everyday life in the mid seventies was a self evident public and political concern, it had by the late eighties become harder to locate and picture. Taking the point of departure in Martinsen’s project about the Hansens’ sojourns in the Free Town, this chapter will address the composite relationship between social experimentation, documentary practice and the ambiguous and yet politically charged notion of ‘everyday life’.

In relation to the city, the cinema may be regarded as a revelation. Cinema brings to light what used to be contained in adumbration. Cinema holds an almost uncanny ability to deliver exhaustive representations of composite urbanity. Cinema unmasks metropolitan monumentality. Yet, as a medium with the ability not only to capture motion but to mobilize, film also appears as a life-bringing force, exposing but also igniting what has shown to be the dormant potentials of the urban web. If before, as Walter Benjamin expressed it, "[o]ur taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our factories appeared to have locked us up hopelessly", the filmic medium changed all this, releasing us from incarceration, "so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling." What comes through in this quote is the bio-political aspect of cinematic urbanism and the mutual dependency between film and city life. In a situation where power is no longer absolute but continuously exercised through mass-mediation, and where the distance between monitoring and mobilizing has diminished, the inter-mediality between film and urbanity has gained both in importance and in ambiguity. While cinema may transgress the representative limits of the urban order, revealing to each and every one of us a more performative than contemplative potential, it does at the same time propose new regimes, offering an adventurous, yet calm and controlled ride through life. The paper will address such life-governing aspects of cinematic urbanism and especially what could be described as its double agenda of revelation and mobilization, addressed from within the filmic medium as such through different forms of self-referentiality. On the one hand side, this referentiality has been supplemented with claims to greater authenticity and more far-reaching representativity as concerns real life. On the other hand side, it has evoked what could be seen as an anagrammatic actualization of conditioning forces, playfully recombining the basic components of both filmic and urban life. As an urban anagram, cinema presents a performative capability capricious enough as to challenge what has become the increasingly powerful bio-political aggregate of life, knowledge and subjectivity.

BLIND POINTS OF TRANSITION is an ongoing location based dialogue including two European artists, Maria Hellström Reimer and Milica Lapčević, both in different ways somewhat peripherally located. Initiated in April 2010, the transitional project takes as its starting point two mundane public parks, one of which is situated in Malmö, Sweden, on the shores of the Öresund; and the other in Belgrade, Serbia, on the banks of the Sava and Danube Rivers. While the location in Sweden forms part of a meticulously designed upmarket waterfront development called the Western Harbour, the first phases of which were laid out only ten years ago in connection with a large housing expo, the Serbian location constitutes the recreational part of the similarly planned but modernist Novi Beograd or New Belgrade; a post‐World War II project with buildings organised in blocks and large empty areas in between. And while the Swedish waterfront, despite the presence of a trendily twisted Calatrava tower, remains quite desolate most of the year, the Serbian location, with its entirely dishevelled atmosphere and rich greenery presents a more popular and populated space. The dialogue started with concurrent and inter‐locational field observations in Malmö and Belgrade on April 17, 2010. The close on‐site notations have since then been followed up by intertextual interventions or re‐visits, where the sites have been subjected to a dialogic reinterrogation of the objective of challenging gaps in time and space.

“Landscape”, the European Landscape Convention tells us, “an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors”, irrespective of whether “natural, rural, urban [or] peri-urban.” Yet, the vast major- ity of the areas referred to in the Convention are designed, organically evolved or asso- ciative cultural landscapes outside of an urban context. This induces us to ask how people may perceive and interact with the urban cultural landscape and how this may influence the Convention’s aim of promoting landscape protection, management and planning. As an important part of recent identity politics, cultural landscapes are often associated with more or less stable communicative contents, symbolisms and messages (Inglis, 1987; Lo- wenthal, 1991; Daniels, 1993). In popular discourse, they are often romanticized and consid- ered natural assets, affecting also the development of professional normative frameworks, whether in the field of cultural heritage, environmental planning or design. Even though there is a significant research on the complexity of meanings that landscapes involve (Daniels & Cosgrove, 1988; Schama, 1996), as well as a considerable critique associated with the social processes behind these complexities (Barthes,1957/1993; Mitchell, 2002); the active ‘read- ing’ of landscapes as a basis for landscape architectural operations remains an exception. Yet, landscapes, and especially urban landscapes, have continuously been encoded as eve- ryday as “meta-texts” to operate and govern multiple interacting layers of economic, politi- cal, ecological, cultural and psychological realities of life. Many phenomena and problems emerging through landscape as multilayered power structure are usually not comprehended and touched by landscape architecture. There is thus a necessity to read and expose these complexities in order to find original, critical and reflective planning and design interventions that answer to the problems and realities emerging in and as urban landscapes. To question and re-construct the role of landscape architecture is necessary, requiring a critique of its knowledge construction and the conditioning of its cognitive, critical and creative skills ulti- mately defining the profession. This study will attempt to present some critical viewpoints, highlighting the theoretical debates on the ‘reading’ of ‘cultural landscape’. It will elaborate the subject asking following questions: - What could be learned from the landscapes emerging outside of the frameworks of the normative values and codes of the environmental planning and design disciplines? - What could be derived from critical theories of landscape as for the development of a reflexive landscape architecture? - How could the role of landscape architecture in the larger context of geographical realities be analysed, criticized and re-envisioned? - How should landscape architectural education be reconstructed/deconstructed ac- cording to the arguments of this study? These questions form the core argumentation along with theoretical arguments and exempli- fications from different cases.

Published on the occasion of the first graduation from the Design & Visual Communication bachelors degree at Malmö University. The book contains articles on design research by some of Sweden's leading scholars, as well presentations of the individual students and their final projects or portfolios. This book is the students' definition of what Design & Visual Communication means.

While the current climate crisis tightens its stranglehold on contemporary society, many are those who put their faith in groundbreaking design and artistic innovation. As a side effect of the climate threat, this renewed celebration of creative agency may be welcome, not the least from a landscape architecture perspective, since in the context of sustainable development every design action is also a landscaping gesture with environmental implications. Nevertheless, isolated from a broader societal context, these new eco-scapes risk ending up as nothing but attractive emerald patches disguising a sprawling global ‘junkspace’. As an expanded field of aesthetic and political agency, however, the emerging sustainability culture offers new perspectives on creative spatial practice. Approaching the environmental issue from the perspective of contemporary landscape related art practices, this article seeks to contribute to the articulation of a landscape aesthetics that would meet the requirements of our agitated time. Such articulation, however, requires a reconsideration of landscape aesthetics beyond the consoling and beautiful, as well as a fundamental shift in landscape thinking from representation to agency. The future eco-scape is not necessarily a sphere where you feel ‘at ease’, but a performative and unsettled space in constant transformation and change.

Today it is more difficult than ever to isolate the reproduction of the built environment from what has been called ‘the economy of images and signs’.1 Inevitably inscribed in ever more all-embracing circuits of communication, architecture and urban planning are practices in transformation, in search of both their societal function and their inner logic. Nevertheless, repeated attempts are being made from within the spatial professions to develop a tectonically or historically formulated immunity to this shift, or to dismiss it as superficial aestheticization. Yet, what characterizes the change is perhaps not so much the transformation of urban space into a matter of visual representation or more or less pleasant sceneries. Rather it is its mediatization that is conspicuous; the integration of architecture with new, distributed and extra-architectonical forms of spatial reproduction; a process of convergence which, as far as architecture is concerned, constitutes a destabilizing of grounds. One of these destabilizing forms of spatial reproduction is film. As pointed out already by Kuleshov in the 1920s, film is not only a moving representation of modern and fragmented urban space, but on a more fundamental level unfolds as its ‘creative geography’.2 As an emergent geographical arena, film production also gives rise to new bodies of agency. Today, the emerging film commissions play an active role, engaging not only in the promotional care-taking of an already existing architectural environment, but also in its continuous assessment and alteration. As such, these new agents play an important role in problematizing the distinction between representation and reproduction, or in other words, between curatorship and authorship in the spatial domain. What we have to ask, however, is what the premises are for this new spatial commissioning, and how it affects the further intermediation of architectural knowledge. Through a case study of the Öresund Film Commission and its web-based ‘location database’, this chapter aims to discuss these and related issues. A compilation of more than 500 still images of potential locations for film production, covering anything from ‘fairytale scenery and medieval villages tucked in lush fields’ to 62 378_06_Curating Arch 22/1/09 1:39 pm Page 62 ‘contemporary European settings’,3 the database provokingly actualizes the ambiguities of, on the one hand, architectural typologization and archival practices and, on the other hand, a proliferating branding culture. Together with a number of similar place collections, this cinematographically oriented location database actualizes the changing conditions of a mediatized architectural arena, as well as the expectations, both for adaptation and change, to which it gives rise. The argument developed is that rather than simply sustaining and caring for a pre-defined architectural narrative as a spatial commissioning practice, architectural curatorship has in itself a central say in the mediation and transformation of the architectural landscape.

År av byggboom på båda sidorna om Öresund har resulterat i ett stadslandskap att förundras över. På den svenska sidan reser sig sundets nya amulett, den skruvade skyskrapan, signerad Santiago Calatrava. Uppförd av ett kooperativt arbetarrörelseföretag signalerar den en ny tid och en ny syn på relationen mellan individ och kollektiv. Med löften om både bekvämlighet och delaktighet har den inte bara sjunkit in i var mans hjärta, utan också utvecklats till en vertikal symbol för en sinnligare och mera vågad välfärd. Inte långt därifrån, på kanten av Malmös Grand Canyon, Limhamns kalkbrott, utvecklas en ny men mera horisontell boendegemenskap – Victoria Park – ett ”livsstilsboende” med semester-”resorten” som förebild. Sydafrika, Mexiko, Malmö – det spelar mindre roll; tryggheten är densamma, liksom den avkopplande atmosfären i loungen eller vid poolen. Till ackompanjemang av mjuka bossa-nova-toner och i en massmedialt inspirerad design växer ett nytt folkhem fram. På den danska sidan skjuter den nya storstaden i höjden. Med sina arkitektoniska utropstecken och sina flexibla projektionsytor utgör dess nya förgrening, Ørestad, en arena för den kreativa klassens sociala manifestationer. Här sprider Jean Nouvels konserthuskub sitt förtrollande sken, här exponerar terassvåningarna sina sällskapliga förtjänster och här saluför de nya kunskapsfabrikerna sitt utbud. Och som kronan på verket lägger Daniel Libeskind sista handen vid det som ska bli Ørestad Down Town, en ny serie inbjudande offentliga stadsrum, som enligt entreprenörerna rent av kommer att föra tankarna till det medeltida Köpenhamn. I den påkostade videon som presenterar projektet möter vi den världsberömde arkitekten någonstans i det urbana vimlet: ”För mig”, säger han och avbryter för ett ögonblick läsandet av New York Times, ”handlar arkitektur helt och hållet om människor – en arkitektur utan människor som uppskattar den är meningslös”.

Right next to Pusher Street, in “The Freetown of Christiania,” in Copenhagen, on one of the walls there is a painting. It shows a young guy, greatly enlarged. He appears in semi-profile, from the shoulders upwards, the dark blue hood of the parka slightly raised. Exposed to the elements, out in the open, with his eyes shut, his front somewhat folded and the cheeks faintly rosy from exhaustion, he voluptuously thrusts out a big bluish cloud of smoke. That cloud has always startled me. I still dodge before its obstinacy, its importunate emergence out of a shapely, still enigmatic oral cavity. The mural is well executed in a virtuously pursued photographic realism, thus destabilising the heavy brick façade in a different way than the surrounding graffiti and flower power paintings. Clouds are complicated also in terms of painting technique; it is tricky to represent blurriness in detail, difficult to create that much coveted “trompe l’oeil” effect which seduces the eye to accept the three-dimensionality, suspending even the tiniest touch of disbelief.

Not untouched by a wider philosophical discourse, the design professions have over the last decades gone through what is often referred to as a “linguistic turn” (Rorty, 1967). A move away from foundationalist assumptions about ‘reality’ towards a recognition of the generative importance of signs and symbols, the turn has also involved what used to be spatial margins and borderlands. Not only has it brought into focus the everyday landscape of consumerism or suburban housing, but furthermore the more general spatial polemics of contemporary urbanity. Discussing three filmic interventions into urban discourse, the paper aims to bring out the rhetorical aspect of the turn, as it moves from signs to polemical agency. Actualizing a more agonizing, ‘in-yer-face’ communication, the paper also draws attention to the rhetorical and political implications of the turn, as a “thinking of the new disorder” (Rancière 2006:88).

Bauhaus – det ansvarsfulla allkonstverket – grunden för det moderna formtänkandet. Vid Bauhaus förenades sociala, politiska och kulturella ansatser i en enda harmoniskt organiserad huskropp. Byggnad, verkstad, utbildningsmiljö och konstinstitution i ett. Det hela kan liknas vid en målning av en av Bauhaus-skolans banbrytande företrädare, Josef Albers, en enkel målning, där de olika färgfälten samsas så fint, där det varma och kalla samspelar, där gränserna mellan olika kulörta kvaliteter vibrerar av ömsesidighet. Den estetik Bauhaus byggde på och utvecklade kan sammanfattas i en sådan målning – självklar, vetenskapligt underbyggd, modern och visuellt tilltalande. Och inte nog med det, Bauhaus gör också på att vara en vardagens estetik, en estetik, i vilken också de smutsiga färgerna fyller en funktion, framförallt i fråga om att skapa djup och rumslig dynamik.

It is today more difficult than ever to isolate the reproduction of landscapes from a growing and ever more all-embracing “economy of images and signs” (Lash and Urry, 1994). Even though repeated attempts are being made from within the spatial professions to develop a tectonically or geo-morphologically formulated immunity to these changes, ‘landscape’ appears as a subject matter in an increasing number of fields, from trend analytics and economic forecasting to environmental science and health care. One of these new and increasingly important fields of landscape practice is film production. As a “micro-environment with global span” (Sassen 2003), this spatio-temporal domain has developed its own platforms and tools for commissioning, managing and evaluating environments, thus also providing a new and increasingly important cartography of contemporary space (Abbas, 2003). Here, the emerging film commissions play an active role, engaging not only in promotion of landscapes and places, but furthermore also in its categorizing, assessment and reproduction. What we have to ask, however, is what are the premises for this new spatial production, and how does it affect the further intermediation of architectural knowledge? Through a case study of the Oresund Film Commission and its web based “location database”, this paper aims to discuss these and related issues. A compilation of more than five hundred still images of potential locations for film production, the database provokingly actualizes the ambiguities of spatial categorization and its dependency upon an often unarticulated expectation for timely and fitting narratives. The paper interrogates and examines this new ’locality production’, as well as the expectations, both for adaptation and change, to which it gives rise. The argument developed is that although landscape practice is one of intermediation, the purpose is not to provide an increasingly powerful media industry with a legitimizing voice-over. What is needed is rather a critique of landscape narratives that goes beyond passive commentary, activating the discursive potentials that the global and intermediary landscape eventually holds.

Frågan om historisk förankring har blivit allt viktigare inom såväl arkitektur och landskaps- arkitektur som planering. Men att förankra en rumslig intervention bakåt i tiden, att motivera en förändring som historiskt relevant och där- för kvalitativt oklanderlig, är inte oproblema- tiskt. Ofta är en förankring förknippad med ett territoriellt hävdande av ett ursprung, en geo- grafisk ”vagga”, vars fortsatta existens anses nödvändig för utvecklandet av en etnisk eller nationell identitet. Ursprungsmiljöer, hembyg- der och historiska minnesmärken upplevs av många som hotade och måste återerövras, försvaras, skyddas. Som en rumslig problema- tik är ’förankringsrätten’ – möjligheten att inte bara historiskt knyta an till en plats utan också att kontrollera dess fortsatta betydelse – därför en av huvudorsakerna till territoriella konflik- ter, ett tecken på vad den amerikanske kultur- antropologen Arjun Appadurai kallat för en ”terminal crisis”:1 Det förflutna, som en svun- nen varaktighet, är idag inskrivet i en vidare berättelse av upplösning, hot och förlust, något som i sig tydligt markerar att det förlorat sin självklara entydighet.

Today it is more difficult than ever to isolate the reproduction of buildings and landscapes from a growing and ever more all-embracing “economy of images and signs” (Lash and Urry, 1994). Even though repeated attempts are being made from within the spatial professions to develop a tectonically or geo-morphologically formulated immunity to these changes, the built environment appears as a subject matter in an increasing number of fields, from trend analytics and economic forecasting to environmental science and health care. One of these new and increasingly important fields of architectonical practice is film production. As a “micro-environment with global span” (Sassen 2003), this spatio-temporal domain has developed its own platforms and tools for commissioning and curating architectural environments, thus providing a new and increasingly important cartography of contemporary space (Abbas, 2003). Here, the emerging film commissions play an active role, engaging not only in promotion of the architectural environment, but furthermore also in its categorization, assessment and reproduction. What we have to ask, however, is what are the premises for this new spatial production, and how does it affect the further intermediation of architectural knowledge? Through a case study of the Oresund Film Commission and its web based “location database”, this paper aims to discuss these and related issues. A compilation of more than five hundred still images of potential locations for film production, covering anything from “fairytale scenery and medieval villages tucked in lush fields” to “contemporary European settings” (www.oresundfilm.com), the database provokingly actualizes the ambiguities of architectural typologization and archival practices – on the one hand its dependency upon an often unarticulated aesthetic narrative or naturalized voice-over and on the other hand its inclination to blend with a global branding culture. Together with a number of similar location databases, it is, however, also an example of the changing representational and reproductive conditions characterizing a mediatized architectural arena, rendering to the place-specific and local a new and extended role as enunciative entrances in a geo-political play. The paper interrogates and examines this new cinematographically driven locality production as well as the expectations, both for adaptation and change, to which it gives rise. The argument developed is that neither urban design nor architectural curatorship can consider themselves independent of processes of mediatization. Nevertheless, it is not a curatorial assignment to uncritically provide an increasingly powerful media industry with a legitimizing voice-over. Instead, what is needed is rather a new attention to the urban narrative that goes beyond passive commentary, taking into account the discursive potentials that an expanded architectural media-geography eventually holds.

Today, an increasingly tense political climate raises new questions as for the referent and role of ‘urban space’. An imperative rather than a representation, the concept of ‘city’ evokes so much more than architectonic order; it gives rise to commercial or relational expectations, prospects of citizenship, social mobility, empowerment and change – shortly, to the concrete, yet incoherent dimension of ‘everyday life’; a large and unrestrained (urban) body of intermediation. Therefore, an enquiry into contemporary urban space has to actualize not only the representative outcome – the physical structure – but also the mediating regimes, or power structures, upon which it depends. One such regime is film production. In this paper, I will focus on the performative rather than the representational aspects of filmic agency in urban space. I will argue that the representational mutuality between city and cinema has its performative correspondence in the reciprocity between panoptic CCTV actualizations of power aiming at a ‘closure’ of representative circuits and the counter-actualizations of, on the one hand the cinéma verité attempts to conflate cinema with ‘true’ reality, and on the other hand alternative attempts to develop a cinematic situationism of curiosity and reconfiguration. The relationship will be exemplified through an analysis of the films “I am Curious – Yellow” (1967) and “I am Curious – Blue” (1968) by Swedish director Vilgot Sjöman – films that in a provocative way examined the topology of the cinematic performance. Fuelled by a composite political and erotic desire, the films presented a blatant and self-reflective counter-actualizing of the regimes of social mobility and utterability organizing urban space.