Nostalgia, Scentscapes, and Urban Resilience: Cinematic Explorations of Memory in the City

This chapter examines how memory, sensory practice, and cinematic method shape urban belonging in contexts of displacement. Drawing on participatory projects and film analysis, it conceptualises kitchens, tastes, and scents as infrastructures of continuity, where the artistry of everyday cooking transforms rupture into forms of home-making. It reads sea crossings as liminal thresholds that inscribe vulnerability and resilience onto the body and into filmic form; mobile phones as prosthetic archives that circulate recipes, voices, and images across borders; and urban soundscapes as emotional topographies through which absence and longing are made habitable. The chapter advances the notion of aesthetic effectivity to argue that film does not merely represent these textures but produces knowledge of them- cartographies of emotion, haptic proximities, and atmospheres of dwelling- thereby reframing resilience as a relational capacity, not a state of stability. In attending to scentscapes, kitchens, phones, and sounds, the chapter shows how migrants weave sensory fragments into durable practices of belonging that reconstitute the city as a place to live.