City Debates 2025 Abstracts

Nour Abuzaid – A Cartography of Genocide

Since the onset of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza in October 2023, Forensic Architecture has collected, mapped, and analysed data documenting attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure by the Israeli military. Our research is compiled into a publicly accessible web platform that visualises the physical reshaping of Gaza according to strategic design. This includes the destruction of agricultural fields, orchards, greenhouses, and vital water infrastructure; systematic targeting of hospitals and healthcare workers; deliberate attacks on public utilities, roads, schools (including those designated as shelters), religious and governmental buildings; and sustained attacks on infrastructure and personnel essential for the transport and distribution of humanitarian aid and food.

We have further gathered and scrutinised evacuation orders issued by the Israeli military, directing Palestinians towards areas of Gaza deemed ‘safe’. Analysis reveals that these orders have caused repeated, large-scale displacements of Palestinian populations, often directing them into zones subsequently targeted in attacks, thus exposing the performative and deceptive nature of Israel’s claimed ‘humanitarian measures’.

To identify patterns within this violence, our web platform transforms thousands of datapoints into an interactive, navigable cartographic interface. Users can filter data by regions, temporal periods, and categories of events to reveal trends and correlations—for instance, linking the military ground invasion to the targeted destruction of medical infrastructure.

Critical to our analysis are testimonies and visual documentation sourced directly from Gaza. These firsthand accounts and images are essential for interpreting and contextualising cartographic data, bridging the distance between aerial, colonial perspectives and lived, on-the-ground realities. This methodological approach mirrors earlier work by Forensic Architecture investigating massacres and mass graves from the Nakba, notably in Tantura, where survivors’ testimonies and memory sketches provided critical insights linking British and Israeli aerial imagery to the oral history archives of the Nakba.

Overall, our findings reveal a systematic, organised effort to destroy life, the conditions necessary for life, and life-sustaining infrastructure in Gaza.

Pablo Ares – Tools for Collaborative Research

Iconoclasistas develops methodologies that combine participatory approaches and graphic resources to analyze and represent social realities. Their work focuses on critical cartography and the use of collective visual representations to synthesize knowledge and promote transformative actions. Among their key tools is collective mapping, a technique that helps visualize territories, experiences, and conflicts, fostering dialogue and critical thinking. They also create cartographic devices, graphic resources that organize and communicate information in an accessible way. Through creative workshops, they integrate theoretical reflection with hands-on exercises to encourage active participation. Additionally, they offer open-access materials, such as templates and methodological guides, enabling communities to adapt these tools to their needs. These strategies facilitate knowledge exchange, strengthen collective agency, and help uncover power structures, inequalities, and alternative narratives. Applied in various regions, their methodologies turn research into a tool for resistance and social transformation.

Nishat Awan – Atlas Otherwise: Mapping Location Beyond Geolocation

While there have been many attempts to think and make maps differently, the atlas is usually understood as merely a compendium of maps rather than a form of knowledge production. How can we rethink and remake the atlas otherwise to tell stories that do not follow the logic of colonization and of property? These topics will be discussed through the long-term project, Topological Atlas, which developed a methodology for producing visual counter-geographies of borders. In following journeys of forced migration, the geographies addressed in this project are often places that are difficult to spend time in because of conflict, or they are places that have been constructed as out-of-bounds by states and other actors. These conditions provoke a different understanding of both location and distance, key terms for mapping displacement in relation to planetary phenomena. The recent forensic or evidentiary turn in the arts has been ushered in through the scopic view of satellites and the ubiquity of image material across digital platforms. Such practices of digital witnessing allow us to ‘see’ further and deeper into places that are at a distance from us, but at the same time create the conditions that make certain subjects recede from view. Thus, for spatial practitioners, there is a need to consider location beyond mere geolocation in our practices of mapping and modelling that are often also central to forms of intervention. How might we rethink notions of testimony and evidence in relation to the digital, knowing also that the witnessing of violence requires forms of empathy and affectivity that are not always readily available within computational forms of knowing? How can we think the digital not only as a tool or a method, but as a realm of possibility that may allow certain lives and worlds to become (il)legible, mourn-able and addressable on their own terms?

Ahmad Barclay – Surfacing Localised Stories: Mapping, Scrollytelling and (Semi)automation

A detailed map, or geo-visualisation, may contain hundreds or thousands of individual stories and narratives, yet it is near impossible to communicate these through this single, static visual. A map of 1940s Palestine conceals the fate of a thousand individual towns, villages, and cities. A 2020’s map of income in the UK hides disparities between two adjacent urban neighbourhoods. Based on nearly a decade of interactive mapping and geo-visualisation work, starting with Palestine Open Maps and continuing with the Office for National Statistics in the UK, this talk explores different ways to surface these kinds of localised and hyper-localised stories. Through a series of example projects, a number of different techniques will be explored including mapping data at different scales, utilising “scrollytelling” to highlight curated stories and narratives, and the use of “semi-automated” journalism techniques to create localised data-driven stories for hundreds of individual locations. The talk will also look at the impact of these projects, and how they have impacted discourses and offered people a tool to communicate their own individual stories.

Nadine Bekdache – Spatializing Loss, Delineating Recovery

Public Works Studio’s recent mapping initiatives spatialized the ongoing Israeli aggression, employing manual data aggregation and place-based narratives. By visualizing and reading across weapon deployment, threatened geographies, actual targets, timeframes, and attack intensity, these maps challenge dominant discursive imagery that reduce space to battlefields, revealing the aggressor’s intent to eradicate viable spaces and preclude return. Simultaneously, they serve as blueprints for future recovery and reconstruction. As we experience countless losses, the act of mapping offers the opportunity to engage in the now, whilst keeping track of the colonial impact and threat and identifying varied landscapes of destruction.

This mapping, rooted in past local collective efforts, facilitates weekly war accounts, contextualizes concepts like domicide and ecocide, and documents neighborhood losses. It constructs political stances and reimagines possibilities by meticulously recording time, place, and colonial aggression, ultimately centering daily struggles against colonial normalcy.

Gautam Bhan – New Directions for Southern Urban Praxis

The rise of theory from the global south has disrupted much of what was considered the ‘canon’ of urban studies. The southern shift in urban studies has given us a larger vocabulary with which to think about all cities with concepts and questions that come from cities of the global south. It has, to a lesser extent, also given us new forms of practice that emerge from an expanded understanding of urban lifeworlds.

Two decades later, this talk offers a reflective pause. It returns to the original impulses of southern urban theory – as an ethos of inquiry to ask questions from relational and moving peripheries while insisting that place matters in the production of thought – to assess what set of questions and practices should define future directions of southern urban thought. What does thinking from place, from cities of the global south, tell us to look at and do in such a dramatically re-arranged world?

Southern urban thought needs new directions. This talk offers one set of possibilities for this direction in three forms: new conceptual vocabularies, an emergent set of questions rooted and offered from place, and provocations on new forms of practice. In doing so, it offers an invitation to collective thinking and reflection at a time of deep global and local uncertainties, arguing that newer relationships to knowledge are urgently needed in this geohistorical moment.

Martina Bovo – Pilot Books and Landing Spaces: Navigating Plural Urban Experiences

This contribution reflects on the kind of knowledge to be deployed to ‘see’ and represent migration landing processes, through a parallelism with pilot books. To do so, it presents a mapping experience of landing spaces emerging from refugees and asylum seekers’ arrival in Palermo, Italy. Recent migration and arrival processes across the Mediterranean have been challenging phenomena for territories and cities, implying new temporalities, mobilities, and subjectivities. Spatial transformations, however, are often hard to grasp; arrival places are not always concentrated within a single neighborhood and may not imply physical transformation of spaces but rather of their uses. There is a need to assume a phenomenological approach to research and policy making, namely, to ‘learn from’ spaces, practices, and uses to fully understand arrival and urban transformation and think of new ways of organizing the city. The contribution discusses the importance of mobilizing a certain type of knowledge in the study of urban spaces and particularly in the production of descriptions and representations, arguing for their transformative potential. To this aim, the contribution proposes a parallelism with a non-urban, non-planning object: the pilot book, a handbook for along-shore navigation. Such a reference allows for the discussion of at least three points: the importance of an experience-based knowledge, the focus on the interplay between people, places, and practices, and the possibility of building a less-normative knowledge. Drawing from research conducted in Palermo, this work presents a qualitative mapping of landing spaces developed through the reference to pilot books. Mapping gradually unveiled and represented the plurality of landing populations and the relative geographies of spaces in the city, their features and organizational settings. The knowledge mobilized, allowed to grasp the type of spatial transformations involved, while making space to imagine a city ‘otherwise’.

 Imani Jacqueline Brown – Fractal Catastrophes Generate New Solidarities

All along the Mississippi River in Louisiana, my homeland, groves of trees interrupt a seamless tapestry of sugarcane plantations and petrochemical plants; they are the remnants of the bottomland hardwood forests in which historically enslaved people interred their loved ones. Forming the outer edge of antebellum sugarcane plantations, these “backswamps” stretched for hundreds of miles, opening each parcel of carceral property onto a vast, communal terrain of freedom. Recognized as ungovernable, these backswamps were hated and feared by the colonists; for enslaved Africans, they were a lifeworld in which they could steward their own ways-of-being. Trees were valued as ecological anchors tethering life and death, spirituality and political resistance, Africa and the Americas. Today, our surviving burial groves have reemerged as the frontlines of local resistance to the petrochemical industry. Through cultural practice and exchange, as well as research in newspaper and activist archives, I have traced genealogical threads of extractive ruptures and ecological resistance from Louisiana to West Central Africa. With our burial groves as portals, I take a quantum leap from Louisiana to the Maiombe Rainforest, which has been protected by enduring eco-cultural values and where 20th-century anticolonial resistance movements established their guerilla bases. I was surprised and humbled to locate the people’s struggle of a third, seemingly “unrelated” geography at the heart of this genealogical quest across spacetime: Palestine. In mapping the fractal ruptures of extractivism, this paper will reveal the constellations of ecological integrity that hold our struggles, along with the possibilities for our liberation, together.

Joelle Deeb – Cartographies of Water Commons: Fluid Ecologies and Disrupted Landscapes

Water resources have never been passive. In the Middle East, rivers have long been transient sites of conflict and negotiation, shaped by shifting ecological conditions and the imposition of modern infrastructure. Conventional cartographies, in turn, usually tend to oversimplify shared waters, obscuring the political, cultural, and ecological complexities they embody. Drawing from The Water Commons Archives — an open-source research endeavor that critically looks into shared water resources beyond imposed boundaries — examines how the Orontes, An Nahr al Kabir, Al-Queiq, the Euphrates basins, and the Yarmouk Sub-basin, emblematic of the region’s contested water systems, have been diverted, exploited, and at some point, reclaimed, revealing the spatial complexity and shared knowledge embedded in these waterways that extend beyond boundary lines. Moving beyond static, resource-based frameworks, The Water Commons Archives repositions shared resources as fluid ecologies and spaces of collective knowledge, ecological interdependence, and contested governance, confronting the conventional authority of top-down cartography and foregrounding the perspectives of local communities whose water knowledge systems resist hegemonic control, allowing to perceive rivers as living systems, fluid, and contested commons, subverting the colonial models of control that have long attempted to reshape the region. Through understanding participatory mapping and speculative cartographies, this talk examines how mapping waters can be perceived as a tool of resistance while centralized cartographic processes have sought to impose rigid territorial logic, damming, diverting, and enclosing water. Vernacular mapping strategies of river ecologies reveal how local knowledge continues to shape and reclaim these waterways as living, dynamic commons that bind people to the land and each other.

Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein – Data Feminism book talk screening

As data are increasingly mobilized in the service of governments and corporations, their unequal conditions of production, their asymmetrical methods of application, and their unequal effects on both individuals and groups have become increasingly difficult for data scientists – and others who rely on data in their work – to ignore. But it is precisely this power that makes it worth asking: “Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind?” These are some of the questions that emerge from what we call data feminism, a way of thinking about data science and its communication that is informed by the past several decades of intersectional feminist activism and critical thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, this talk will show how challenges to the male/female binary can help to challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems; it will explain how an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization; how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems; and why the data never, ever “speak for themselves.” The goal of this talk, as with the project of data feminism, is to model how scholarship can be transformed into action: how feminist thinking can be operationalized in order to imagine more ethical and equitable data practices.

Sophie Dyer and Sasha Engelmann – The Year of the Weather

The Year of Weather is a durational project activating a planetary network of DIY Satellite Ground Stations to capture the last transmissions of three weather satellites as the planet exceeds 1.5 C. Led by open-weather (Soph Dyer and Sasha Engelmann) the Year of Weather is the first cultural initiative to document earth’s changing weather and climate through volunteer-led satellite imagery and a participatory methodology. At a moment in which publicly funded infrastructures for earth observation are increasingly threatened, the project asserts public ownership and access to environmental knowledge. In this talk, open-weather will explore the emerging Year of Weather infrastructure and share key contributions from ground station operators, from Los Angeles to Phnom Penh and Cornwall. Beyond a politics of environmental sensing and knowledge, key to this collective mapping effort is the building of transnational networks that at once grapple with the unevenness of climate catastrophe as well as the interconnections and solidarities that bind local struggles.

Jadd Hallaj – Aggregating Power: Mapping Territorial Orders in Syria

Maps are proscriptive instruments far more than descriptive ones. They play a dual role in both depicting and shaping territories and should be interpreted within their historical context. In Syria, maps have contributed to shaping the country’s territorial orders throughout the last century and will no doubt continue to influence the emerging landscape of post-war Syria. By drawing on recent projects and research, this presentation begins with an overview of the role of mapping in shaping structures of power in Syria. It traces the social demarcation of land during the Ottoman era, the use of precision technologies for social control during the French Mandate, and the unspoken territorial system of the Baath party. These historical mapping practices are critically linked to enduring spatial divisions, asymmetries, and centralities. By scrutinizing the logic behind spatial data models, this presentation reveals how mapping not only depicts but actively contributes to the aggregation and contestation of political authority. It will explore the underlying spatial dynamics that have defined Syria’s governance structures, and their potential future evolutions. It will question how maps adapt to modern imperatives, while offering new avenues for understanding local socio-economic realities.

The presentation will open on the potential of alternative mapping techniques for re-imagining spatial governance in post-conflict Syria and the future challenges mapping initiatives might face. Emphasizing the promise of participatory mapping and digital mediation, it argues for the map’s role in empowering local communities, enhancing service delivery, and promoting inclusive development by bridging the gap between state-centric and grassroots approaches to mapping.

Nityanand Jayaraman – Counter-mapping as Insurrection of Subjugated Knowledges: How Subaltern Fishers and Activists are Saving the Ennore Wetlands in Chennai, India

From a Euro-colonial frontier that was transformed by East India Company’s industrialisation of salt production to generate revenue, the once diverse habitats and interwoven histories of the tidal wetlands of Ennore in the south Indian coastal metropolis of Chennai began to unravel after independence as they became a site of internal fossil colonialism. Government-owned coal and petroleum infrastructure began encroaching into and polluting the wetlands, erasing the animated life world that was the source of livelihoods, identities, and meanings for local communities who came from the lowest rungs of India’s caste hierarchy. Neither land nor water, the wetlands were seen as non-conforming in-between spaces and treated as valueless, wild, and begging to be civilised and turned into property. Places with deeply layered meanings for local communities were abstracted into governable and tradable spaces to facilitate capital flows and accumulation. But this is not a story about oppression and defeat; rather it is a narrative about how local fishers recruited solidarity to fight back in a campaign to reclaim and restore the wetlands. Drawing on decolonial and ignorance studies literatures, this presentation critically analyses the creative counter-mapping campaign launched by fishers and activists as cartographic, performative, and affective insurrections of subjugated knowledges and histories. We show how the campaign used the colonisers’ tools of mapping and devised their own ways of mapping back to un-make state’s plans and maps and present geographical knowledge from the margins as a way of remaking reality and opening possibilities of alternative futures. This presentation is based on a co-authored paper written by Nityanand Jayaraman, Lindsay Bremner, Karen Coelho, and Pooja Kumar.

Omar Khaled – Mapping to Instigate Action, Mapping for Interaction

In contested urban environments, where cities are continually expanding within and beyond the formal radar, mapping serves as a critical and dynamic tool for engagement with the city, moving beyond mere documentation or archiving. The role of mapping, particularly reflecting on CLUSTER’s work, can be positioned as a dialectic mode of interaction; to interact with the city and its stakeholders, to critically research, and to co-create a framework for intervention. Over the past decade, CLUSTER has been developing frameworks to address urban informality and issues of public space through critical mapping, action research, and creative design interventions. This multifaceted approach aims to reflect on mapping’s potential to intervene, both physically and intellectually, and expand its base of action to include diverse stakeholders. Mapping in this sense not only documents but also analyzes both tangible and intangible urban elements, for instance, cognitive mapping, crafts and creative initiatives, sound mapping, and stakeholder relationships. Through the creation of interactive online maps, publications, urban tours, and thematic itineraries, CLUSTER seeks to establish a comprehensive, accessible platform for researchers, designers, policymakers, and engaged citizens. The talk will first engage with this expansive database that serves as a tool for critical reflection and the development of alternative urban narratives to the city along with modes of intervention. Further, the talk reflects on another positioning of mapping as an in-parallel inferred process with the design, implementation and activation of design-build projects, most of which are pilot interventions in public space. In order to navigate the multiplicity of relevant parties and individuals, making sense of the networks of relevant authorities, potential partners, complementary initiatives, suppliers, and craftspeople both propels and records an interchange. Through its dialectical and critical engagement approach to mapping, CLUSTER presents a framework for urban documentation, intervention and dialogue.

Nikolas Kosmatopoulos – MAPPING INSURGENSEAS, Part I: The Oceans of Palestine Solidarity

Currently, a renewed drive is transforming oceans from a site exterior to our terrestrial designs to one where new forms and modes of knowledge, extraction, valuation, control, securitization, and governance are emerging. Geo-locating technologies are fixing oceanic landscapes once unmanageable and unimaginable; remote sensing devices are chronicling the oceanic more-than-human as accessible resources; mechanical, biological, and aqua-cultural advances are assembling into new foundations for corporate investment and state-sponsored “blue growth”. Indeed, where the oceans were once mere surfaces across which terrestrial productions, forces, and

bodies flowed, it is now an emerging territory/terrain for a range of entanglements, productive and otherwise. Taken together, there is a clear “great appropriation” of the planetary seas. Faced with these emergences, communities around the world often rise against them or engage in multiple forms of contestation, adaptation, and negotiation. The relationship of these communities to the sea also varies extraordinarily. Some are coastal communities affected by extractivism; others might be activist communities moving against sieges and borders; others might be insurgent communities that tackle oceanic memories of repression. A starting point of Insurgensea project is the acknowledgment that a diverse and dynamic politicization of the global oceans is currently emerging beyond the shores of the nation-state. The project addresses the world seas as one socio-political ecosystem – emerging, essential, and frequently insurgent. It aims to explore how community-mobilized ships/ports/regions move across and shape this space, investigating the causes and consequences of a rising politics at sea that remains largely uncharted. One of the aims is to create empirically informed mappings of community activism and sea-related insurgencies using interdisciplinary and participatory methods (mapping, modelling, archives, interviews, audio-visual material, open science).

Laura Kurgan – GPS for the Brain: Cognitive Mapping Revisited

Navigation has typically involved something more technical than biological, especially in relation to traversing and remembering spaces. From compass, map, and astrolabe to GPS, humans have relied on a variety of devices to get themselves or their projectiles from here to there. But these tools are not the only game in town – biological navigation, in fact, is crucial for the everyday life, movement, and survival of a myriad of species. Nowadays, this interplay between technical and biological navigation is increasingly blurry – every living thing that moves navigates with biological and technical sensors. What are the characteristics of navigation that we encounter along the gradient between the technical and the biological, between positioning and memory? Laura Kurgan will put the discourse of cognitive mapping into dialogue with advances in neuroscience and artificial intelligence, where scientists now routinely speak of “GPS for the brain”. The goal is to account for a few important misalignments in the metaphors used to describe how the brain works, as well as revisit and critique the influence of “cognitive mapping” in architecture and urbanism today.

Ana Méndez de Andés – Mapping in Common: Tactical Cartographies and Collective Action

From the first wave of tactical cartographies in Spain in 2004 to more recent research-action projects related to municipalist movements, urban social movements have used collaborative mapping as a tool to activate processes. These are activist and activating processes in which maps are not simply technical documents that – more or less – accurately represent a given territory, but material and conceptual re-presentations of the interests of the actors who produce them, challenging the perspectives, track points, nodes, vectors and tools of analysis they use. As methods of co-production, tactical cartographies and relational maps question the way we perceive and re-present the material and immaterial spaces we inhabit with the interactions that shape them, as well as the basic operations on which representation depends. Mapping ‘in common’ is therefore “an act of creation [that] is not simply a tracing of territory, but a revelation of previously invisible or unimaginable realities; it does not [re]produce reality, but a way of looking at it. Although the map is not the territory, mapping is a way of self-organising, generating new connections, and transforming the material and immaterial conditions in which we find ourselves. [The map] is not the territory, but it certainly produces territory.” [1] [1] Car_Tac definition of tactical cartographies in Fadaiat, Centro de Ediciones de la Diputación de Málaga, 2007, p. 157.

Batoul Yassine – Archiving Gaza Towards the Production of Recovery Imaginaries

This paper reflects on the project “Tracking the Urbicide in Gaza” by the Beirut Urban Lab. It discusses the modality of digital tracking as “archiving” and investigates the role of “archiving” within participatory recovery processes. Since October 7, 2023, the densely populated and besieged Gaza Strip has endured devastating military operations, reducing entire neighborhoods to rubble and shattering countless lives. Informed by its long-standing engagement with conflict-affected sites cross the Arab region, the Beirut Urban Lab responded to the war in Gaza despite the challenge of working remotely and the limited access to reliable information. The Lab produced a digital platform entitled “Tracking the Urbicide in Gaza” which documents the various layers of the built environment, as well as green and open spaces, and tracks the damage that followed since October 7. The project involved extensive data consolidation from multiple sources, which were cross-referenced, verified, and continuously updated. The platform shows that by September 2024, 49.6% of buildings in Gaza had sustained damage, 71.6% of agricultural fields had been destroyed, and 82.4% of greenhouses had been eradicated. This paper argues that the work is not merely a documentation of the urbicide but an act of archiving Gaza—a process that not only preserves records but facilitates the crafting of narratives, both historical reflective narratives and future imaginaries for its recovery. The aim was therefore focused on the notion of egalitarian archiving that is accessible to local actors and the people of Gaza, one that encourages multiple engagements and interpretations to counter dominant or privileged singular narrative.