urbz Paris, is the newest addition to the urbz collective, set up in 2022, it combines ethnographic participation with visual storytelling to accompany, facilitate, or initiate urban planning, heritage, and transformation projects. It also organizes the creative documentation of ongoing urbz projects and research and makes its own interventions by providing new commentaries and interpretations to topics and places.

Endorsing the belief that “documentation is intervention”, it looks at every locality and neighbourhood as an interconnected universe of its own while documenting its many narratives through multimedia projects.

urbz Paris makes videos, films and graphic narratives that spark a larger public discussion around projects and places that have a tangible impact on the neighborhood and locality itself. It does so by involving local stakeholders within the creative process - writers, filmmakers, narrators, technicians… - and by screening and sharing films and videos with both a local and larger audience.

In a social media-saturated world, where narratives are increasingly dispersed and fragmented, even as they connect people by dissolving distances, it is context and local dimensions that tend to get lost. For those involved in urban practice, or any place-related engagement, there remains a need for a dedicated method of relating to localities and contexts through such documentation.

In creative terms we believe that every locality has an invisible spirit, expressed in the imaginaton as an unseen totem -connected to geography, the environment, specialization of products, services or histories. These are rooted and mobile at once, always connected to regions and networked with the world at large. It is this complexity that flows through every locality and neighbourhood and animates a place. urbz Paris aims at documenting such themes and generating discussions and projects through them.