eFEMeral cities | a research group established at UCL

Ephemeral Cities

The Ephemeral Cities Research Group is an interdisciplinary community of graduate students, writers, artists, and filmmakers formed in 2014 in London. We research and write about the urban condition by reading cities both in, and as, texts and cultural representations.

How do buildings change us as we live with them, in them, on them and move among them? What do visual practices do for us as we seek to navigate and make our way through the material environment of the city? What are the marginal spaces of this city and how do they shape their inhabitants? How can marginalised space/place be transformed through representation?

The city is not etched in stone. It is in a constant state of negotiation, reconfiguration, and transformation. Through the study of film, photography, painting, architecture, sculpture, and other visual media, we seek to grasp the ephemeral which, in its lack of permanence, is often prone to evade attention, yet which forms a crucial part of urban life.