The research project and network, instigated in 2013 and have traversed urban contexts from Mumbai, Mexico City, Tokyo, Marseilles, London, Berlin to Beijing, questions the assumed opposition between the immateriality of films and the material basis of architecture. It critically unravels a possible shared domain of ‘scenic’ constructs which can be considered both as the material artifice of films and the immaterial confluence of architectural spaces. As a force of subversion, the intrusion of filmic observations and interventions on cities began to provoke and make visible what were deliberately omitted in earlier modes of urbanism. For over a century, possibilities of time-based or durational relations, narrative-driven investigations, immersive and subjective points of view of cities have opened up new, and complicated past, urban knowledge. From ‘City Symphonies’ of 1920s and 30s, post-war visions of ‘Townscapes’ in 1960s and 70s, ‘Megacities’ of 1980s and 90s to euphoric and dystopic speculations of post-humans in post-cities beyond the C21st, these are distinct landmarks in the confluence between cinematic constructs of cities and urbanism through time-based and immersive mediums. 

The project has reached the stage of summarising the extensive collaborative research outcomes in the form of publication as an edited volume. In parallel, it is developing an integrated website that serves as the forum of dissemination of filmic research, set installations and immersive experiments, as well as an ever-expanding data base of confluences between film, architecture and urbanism that would be useful for interdisciplinary approaches to design and research across these fields.

The challenge of this research is to reconsider future models of interdisciplinary practice through a combination of architecture and film in the interrogation and transformation of urban conditions. In particular the research methodology offers a critical and innovative response to contested public spaces in 'global cities' and possibilities for shared, negotiated 'commons' which have been neglected following infrastructural expansion. Experimenting with immersive technologies, including film making, storyboarding, set installations, the critical research plans to reveal a new paradigm of the filmic construct in probing new possibilities for creating cohesive and engaging city spaces which emboldens architecture in the mediation between public and private users, contests of narratives and contingencies of power.