Urban Subversion and Mobile Cinema: Leisure, Architecture and the “Kino-Cine-Bomber”

Abstract

This article introduces our bicycle-based cinema device—the “kino-cine- bomber”—as a vehicle to re-imagine disused buildings and obsolete urban infrastructure for re-activated public leisure spaces. It is also a vehicle to conceptualize theoretical relations among leisure, architecture, cinematic geographies, and urban spaces. Through these lenses, we focus on a series of Situationist-inspired methods using the kino-cine-bomber to identify buildings that could be removed—as architecture by subtraction—in Coventry, United Kingdom. There, the River Sherbourne flows hidden beneath the city, culverted and capped, a relic of postwar urban planning no longer fit for purpose. We explore river “daylighting” plans by postgraduate architecture students using the kino-cine-bomber, first to trace the hidden river beneath the city streets then to project architectural designs where buildings may be repurposed and the river revealed. We discuss the possibilities of these designs and, befitting a paper celebrating Situationism, we close with a manifesto for urban leisure spaces.

Keywords:

• Architecture
• cinema
• leisure
• river daylighting
• situationism

Acknowledgments

The kino-cine-bomber was funded through an interdisciplinary research cluster project award (Creativity, Protest and the City) from Leeds Beckett University. We’re grateful to Sheffield University (Re)Activist Studio students: Yee Hua Chee, Alexander Craig-Thompson, Abdulbari Kutbi, Chris Jones, Emma Taylor, and Wanqing Wong.