Colombo on a Motorcycle: Unravelling Wellbeing in a City through the Cinematic Everyday

Abstract

Cinema inhabits urban culture and often represents and narrate urban space through its visual multi-dimensionality. This paper discusses the various degrees of cityness present in films and argues that notions of the Everyday connect cinema, urbanity, and wellbeing. As a holistic parameter of health that captures both psychological and physiological wellness, wellbeing is posited an excellent all-encompassing determinant of how cities are appropriated and experienced. Subjective wellbeing—rooted in the everyday constructs of feeling good (hedonic wellbeing) and functioning well (eudaimonic wellbeing)—is shaped by circumstantial factors, activities, and practices. This paper links the everydayness of wellbeing with cinema, proposing film as a potential medium to discern the wellbeing conduciveness of cities. It investigates cinema’s capacity to generate objective knowledge (raw material), semantic knowledge (the spectator’s interpretation), and cinematic intelligence (a further interpretation of the spectator’s interpretation), to derive a holistic understanding of wellbeing. The psychogeography of a selected film is traversed, leveraging cinema’s ability to direct the voyageur ’s gaze. Thus, as a pilot study, this paper confirms cinema as a promising tool for architects and urban designers to evaluate wellbeing in cities, transcending mere technical awareness.