Urban Assemblies

Urban Assemblies is the first open call zine by narrativeforms, bringing together 14 local and international collaborators in a collective study of how informal systems shape the contemporary city. Framed through five thematic segments, the publication examines the quiet intelligence of “urban assemblies” moments where architecture, improvisation, and social need converge outside formal planning structures.

Across its sections, the zine shifts between the comedic, the observational, and the analytical, revealing how everyday interventions, makeshift structures, adaptive uses of space, and community built environments operate as essential yet often unrecognised forms of civic architecture. These transient formations become case studies in how people negotiate, resist, and reinterpret the built environment through necessity and imagination.

At its core, Urban Assemblies positions itself against the rigidity of highly regulated urban infrastructures within cities like Singapore, where public space is often tightly governed. In response, the publication turns toward subversive bricolage: informal constructions and spatial interventions that quietly reframe how public life is experienced. Rather than treating these as anomalies, the zine validates them as critical expressions of urban intelligence, born from constraint, and shaped by lived reality.

Through photography and illustration, the contributors document these fragmented morphologies of use and adaptation, mapping how territoriality, boundaries, and negotiation manifest in densely structured environments. The result is a visual and textual archive of resistance that operates less through confrontation than through accumulation, small acts that collectively reimagine the cadence of the city.

Featuring work by: Adam Yoon, Chen XingSheng, Chian Ying Xuan, D., Danu Izra Mahendra, Darien Wu Junhan, Hisyam Hadi, Janelle Low Chia Yee, Jeremy Ng, José Enrique Montes Hernandez, Josephine Pun, Lim Lie Hao Jason, Matthew Goh XinZhi, Phoebe Natalie Fong.

Other images by Shawn Lee.
Curated and self-published by narrativeforms.