Reflecting on urban forms, their politics and possibilities
Shapes and the City Symposium | Held on 09 June 2025 at UCL
UCL Urban Laboratory hosted the Shapes and the City symposium as part of its 20th anniversary series of events.
The event provided a space for researchers to think seriously and playfully about the geometries that make up urban life. Co-organised with the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences, where UCL Urban Lab was founded in 2005, the one-day symposium brought together staff and student researchers across UCL to ask: what can shapes tell us about power, memory, resistance and imagination in the city? What do they hide and what do they hold?
This blog post was written by Devi Divija Singal Reddy (Urban Studies MSc)
Opening the symposium, Urban Lab Co-Director Andrew Harris (UCL Geography) reminded the audience that urbanism is inherently multi-sided. Shapes, he argued, are tools of legibility and control, but also of rupture and possibility. And so urban form is not just a technical outcome of planning or design, but also a social and political terrain. Using the square form of UCL Urban Lab’s logo as a metaphor, he highlighted how different disciplinary lenses offer varied understandings of urban shapes, from spatial syntaxes to cultural imaginaries, to popular visual culture. This framing set the tone for a day of rich interdisciplinary dialogue.
Session One: Lines, Triangles and Polyhedra
Farbod Afshar Bakeshloo (The Bartlett School of Architecture) opened the morning by mapping Tehran’s shifting morphology — a city shaped by overlapping logics of colonial planning, commercial expansion and state-led reform. Using spatial syntax and historical analysis, he revealed that Tehran never followed a single geometric pattern. Instead, its growth has been a negotiation between grid and alley, boulevard and bazaar, state and everyday life. These intersecting lines weren’t just physical; they encoded political histories and urban desires.
Hanxi Wang (Geography) turned our attention to the margins, where the spaces resist formal order. Her research on agricultural remnants in post-socialist Chinese cities traced how planning attempts to impose grids, only to be met with unruly geometries of survival and cultivation. Through careful visual analysis, she showed how allotments, vegetable patches and weeds refuse erasure. Her work asked us to take these “feral” forms seriously, not as anomalies, but as part of how the city lives beyond its plans.
Maria Ilia Kastrouni (Planning) stayed with this tension between formal shapes and everyday life, focusing on the “commercial triangle” in Athens. Her work dissected how regeneration projects idealise triangular forms — clean, geometric, investment-ready — but produce messy, violent realities on the ground by pushing out those who do not fit within that vision. Her analysis exposed how these urban forms are privileged over the irregular, unregulated geographies of everyday life. Through interviews and spatial analysis, she unpacked how urban design becomes a way to redraw the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion.
Sidra Ahmed (Geography) challenged the symbolism of height and visibility in London’s skyline, asking what kind of presence skyscrapers demand and at what cost. Her reading of the Shard moved beyond critique to reflect on the affective weight of vertical dominance. These landmark buildings, she argued, monopolise what is visible, and in doing so, erase the horizontal layers of life around and beneath them. The question, therefore, was not just what makes a building iconic, but who gets to iconise and who is made invisible in the process.
In Warehouses in the Sky, Kwang Lin Wong and Lily Flashman (UCL Urban Lab) shifted the focus to the logistics architectures along the M1 motorway — vast, blue, often unnoticed. Their film offered a different kind of attention: slow, observational, attuned to repetition. These buildings, they suggested, are deliberately unremarkable. It becomes clear that these blue boxes, designed to be forgotten, hold within them the invisible networks of late capitalism, where visibility is managed, labour obscured and logistics made to seem seamless. As their camera refuses spectacle, we dwell in their monotony, confronting the quiet violence of architectures designed to be overlooked.
Session Two: Polygons, Circles and Slices
Sophie Chauhan’s (SELCS-CMII / Sarah Parker Remond Centre) presentation offered a visceral ethnography of getting lost in Manhattan’s Chinatown, a disorientation shaped by the neighbourhood’s divergence from the city grid. But this irregularity, she argued, is not incidental. It is sedimented with histories of settler colonialism, racial violence and carceral infrastructure. Through spatial excavation, she traced how fractured forms such as the filled-in Collect Pond, the African Burial Ground and the Five Points slum converge in the present, shaping how the neighbourhood is experienced and resisted. Her work reminded us that spatial form is never separate from racialised urban struggle.
Said Mahathir (Development Planning Unit) offered a layered reading of religious spatiality in London. Working across macro (hotspot mapping), meso (ethnic and sectarian mosque types) and micro (corridors, routes, nodes), his work showed how Muslim communities shape territory not only through construction, but through presence, connection and ritual. What stood out was how “infrastructure” moved beyond buildings: it became social, spiritual and relational. Religious shapes, in his analysis, emerged not just through formal boundaries, but through the movement and memory of bodies across space.
Hanadi Samhan (Development Planning Unit) introduced the concept of “deep cuts” — sectional drawings made in collaboration with residents of Beddawi refugee camp in Lebanon. These weren’t just architectural tools, but diagnostic and political acts. By cutting through walls, voids and stairwells, she surfaced how power moves vertically in the camp: not just through height, but through tension, improvisation and care. Her focus on verticality reframed refugee camps from flat spaces of exception to dense, contested territories shaped by volume and force. Drawing became not just a method of representation, but a way to inhabit and interrogate spatial injustice.
Young Hyun Lee (History of Art) closed the day with a look beneath the city, literally. Focusing on interwar cutaway illustrations of the London Underground, often dubbed “stomach diagrams,” her work explored how these images visualise the city’s interior as organic, intestinal and strange. The act of drawing tunnels like digestive systems wasn’t simply functional. It reflected a broader attempt to make sense of subterranean life in an era of rapid urbanisation. Her precise reading of these diagrams drew out how even technical representations carry metaphorical weight.
More Than Just Form
Across each presentation, a theme echoed that shapes are not passive. They are strategies. They can structure violence or make space for resistance. They can obscure histories or unearth them. They do not just organise the city, they narrate it. Whether in the form of a vertical refugee camp, a camouflaged warehouse, a submerged pond, or a cutaway tunnel diagram, each shape we encountered pointed to something deeper — a contested history, a displaced community, a hidden infrastructure, or a fragile solidarity.
‘Shapes and the City’ was not about celebrating form for form’s sake. It was about recognising that every triangle, every grid, every cutaway or void carries the imprint of decisions, desires and struggles. To pay attention to shape is to pay attention to politics. And perhaps, to imagine how the urban might be shaped otherwise.
