Zine

Urbinary Encyclopedia

The Urbinary Encyclopedia explores the urban world through creative, experimental, and collective perspectives. 

Following the idea of planetary urbanisation, which invites us to look beyond the usual divide between “urban” and “rural,” we understand the urban as a condition that extends across territories, well beyond the city as we usually imagine it. Urban space includes the spaces lived, traversed, shaped, and imagined by humans, and inhabited by non-humans too. The Urbinary Encyclopedia takes the form of a living urban dictionary. Every letter of the alphabet opens a doorway inviting us to reinterpret the concepts that shape cities and territories, and to expand the ways we read, represent, and imagine them. At the same time, this dictionary works like an encyclopedia. Following Umberto Eco, every contribution traces its own pathway of meaning and the definition stays open. Knowledge here is non-linear and continuously expanding, grounded in relations, cross-references, and multiple interpretations. The alphabet becomes a rhizomatic structure in which each letter generates new connections and unfolds possible worlds for a plural reading of the urban.

Each issue of the zine revolves around a single letter, in alphabetical order, and gathers critical reflections, short poetry and poetic prose, photography, drawing, painting and collage. The zine is bilingual, in Italian and English, because moving between two languages is a way of reading the city twice and of noticing what is lost, or found, in translation.