Sensorial Methodologies, Extended Urbanization

WORKSHOP / Film Screening + Book Launch + Panel Discussion 

Organised by the Urban Institute, Sheffield Urbanism and the Global Corridor project

Register here

The maximum number of attendees is 40. This is open to all. 

This workshop, incorporating film screening, book launch and panel discussion, brings together urban researchers exploring the geographies of extended and planetary urbanization through visual based methodologies. Drawing from data visualisation to photographic archives, cinema and artistic practice, the event aims to develop reflections and openings into how the visual becomes critical to how we understand massive urban transformations and the systems through which it is produced. 

The workshop aims to develop a collective and collaborative process of learning, investigation and presentation that looks towards the sensorial as key orientation in our urban practice.

2.00pm / Film Screening

“Not Just Roads” 

70’, DCP, Colour (India, Switzerland, Germany)

Nitin Bathla and Klearjos Eduardo Papanicolaou

An ethnographic documentary film that narrates the story of a massive urban transformation underway in India. Highways are being constructed at an unprecedented rate of 23 kilometers per day under the Indian government's Bharatmala (‘Glarland of Limitless Roads’) program. The program aims to open new territories for the emerging Indian middle class. Currently, the territory is inhabited by villages, working class neighbourhoods, and nomadic herders. It is criss-crossed by native trails and vital ecological commons. This film captures the story of one such highway outside Delhi, from the perspective of human and non-human actors.

3.30pm / Book Launch

“Cinema and the City in the Era of Planetary Urbanization”

Nitin Bathla / Silvia Cipelletti / Markus Lähteenmäki / Klearjos Papanicolaou (eds.)

This book talk explores how cinema can function not only as a medium of representation but as a method of urban research. Discussing Cinema and the City in the Era of Planetary Urbanisation (2026, JOVIS), Nitin Bathla examines how film opens alternative ways of sensing, documenting, and analysing contemporary urbanisation across urban centres, infrastructural corridors, and extended urban landscapes. The talk reflects on cinema as a situated and embodied practice of inquiry that intervenes in how urbanisation is made visible and intelligible, and will be accompanied by the screening of selected excerpts from the open-access film Not Just Roads.

• Nitin Batlha

• Junia Mortimer 

• Olivia Casagrande

• Juan Miguel Kanai

• Jonathan Silver 

Nitin Bathla is Group Leader in Infrastructure Geography at the University of Zurich, and Lecturer in Urban Studies at ETH Zurich. He is the author of the award-winning book Researching Otherwise: Pluriversal Methods for Urban and Landscape Studies and the critically acclaimed documentary Not Just Roads. He serves as an editor at Urban Geography and the Urban Political Podcast. His research is situated in the field of urban political ecology, with a focus on infrastructure, environmental governance, and the socio-ecological dimensions of urbanization. His work combines transdisciplinary academic inquiry with artistic practices.