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Cities Remember What We Try to Forget

Posted by Santosh Kumar Ketham on 2025-12-04

There’s a sound beneath every city, a kind of heartbeat we pretend not to hear. It hums through pavement cracks and lingers in dust swept from demolished doorways. We call it progress when the skyline rises. But I keep wondering: progress for whom, and at what cost? While editing this special issue of Socio-Cultural Theory, I wasn’t just reviewing articles. I was walking through a chorus of [...]

Reading Cemeteries as Urban Interiors: New York City and Istanbul in Dialogue

Posted by Alison B. Snyder and V. Şafak Uysal on 2025-10-14

What happens when two urban walkers (and interior design professors) – one in Istanbul, one in New York City – start visiting cemeteries, not to mourn but simply to walk, observe, and listen? Our awareness and approaches began to shift as we studied our interests. As designers, we pushed ourselves to consider the subject of death and burial well beyond typical aspects of mourning or visiting the [...]

Nostalgia through Cinematic Space: The case of Kung fu Hustle

Posted by Xiaoyu Chen on 2025-04-02

Twilight of the Warriors: Walled In, a Hong Kong film released last year, achieved extraordinary popularity and box-office success. This action film, which revolves around gang conflicts in the Kowloon Walled City—a lower-class enclave in 1980s Hong Kong—prompts us to recognize that cultural nostalgia for Hong Kong’s past persists as an undiminished collective sentiment within Sinophone [...]