A conversation around the newly published book Cinema and the City in the Age of Planetary Urbanization (eds. Nitin Bathla, Silvia Cipelletti, Markus Lähteenmäki, Klearjos Papanicolaou). The book is presented by its editor Markus Lähteenmäki with responses by Lieven Ameel, Kaisa Karvinen, Leonard Ma, Anu Pennanen and Nitin Sawhney. The event is held on Monday 17.8.2026, 16:00–18:00 at Kulttuurisauna, Helsinki.
Cinema and the City in the Age of Planetary Urbanization brings together scholarly essays and conversations with critical voices in present-day urbanism and film-making. The book asks what cinema means for the city, and vice versa, what the city means for cinema, today. This event and conversation continues in the same sprit, bringing together critical and creative voices to debate these questions.
Lieven Ameel is a professor of literary studies at the University of Helsinki. His work deals with the intersections of literature and urbanism, narrated experiences of space, and rhetorical structures in urban planning. He is the co-author of Narrative in Urban Planning: A Practical Field Guide (Transcript 2022) and author of the forthcomingCoastal Cities of the Future in Contemporary Literature: Literary and Urban Form in Times of Climate Uncertainty (Bloomsbury, 2026).
Kaisa Karvinen is an architect and curator whose work explores the boundaries between the built environment and the arts. She was the curator of Teo Ala-Ruona and his team’s exhibition Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture (2025) for the Nordic Countries Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale and is currently working on the exhibition for the Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2027.
Leonard Ma is an architect whose work moves between design practice, teaching and urban political economy. At the Estonian Academy of Arts, he teaches studios in architectural design, and Urban Studies research. He is the co-editor of the Urbanizing Suburbia: Hyper-gentrification, the Financialization of Housing and the Remaking of the Outer European City (Jovis, 2023), and a co-organizer of the New Academy.
Anu Pennanen is a visual artist and filmmaker working at the intersection of moving images, architecture and social awareness. Her work contextualises and critiques public space and how it is planned and used through portrayal of people who inhabit it amidst social and emotial tensions. Her recent works include Itä-Pasila (2024) and her upcoming exhibitions include a newly commissioned work for Simian art center in Copenhagen and a solo show in La Trobe Art Institute, Bendigo, Australia.
Nitin Sawhney is a media theorist and film-maker, whose work explores the intersection of technology, civic agency, human-computer interaction and contested spaces and he has published widely on all these topics. As a film-maker his work has spanned from documentary films on contested Palestinian spaces to developing new trans-medial approaches to urban environments.
The book is available for order and download at https://www.jovis.de/en/book/9783986121624
The event is part of the New Academy Lecture Series on Architecture and Urbanism. It is organised in collaboration with Markus Lähteenmäki´s Postdoctoral project at Department of Cultures, University of Helsinki.