A lone Ukrainian park bench has become the unlikely star of a decade-long drama, much more by chance than by design, thanks to a photographer’s unplanned project to document the lives of those who use it.

Yevgeniy Kotenko never meant On the Bench to be a series or body of work. He simply began to take pictures of people on and around a bench outside his parents’ window, capturing everyday scenes — people picnicking, children playing and old men sitting. He also photographed more fraught encounters —  lovers quarreling, drunks passing out and emergency service workers tending to an injured man.

“I wasn’t thinking of making a series or a project,” Kotenko told Colossal. “I didn’t select any particular time frame or set of situations to capture. Not until 2012 did my friends tell me that I should put together an exhibition of these photos.

“I never invested the photos with any particular intention or idea of what I wanted my audience to see,” Kotenko says. “They will see what they want to see. These photographs are more like a documentary.” And they document everything under the sun (and moon), showing what Kiev life is like from day to day and season to season.

In a way, the project recounts works of found or everyday-object art, or series like People of New York, where normal passersby become parts of a grander narrative about city life. Kotenko has since moved out of the neighborhood, but says that his experiences looking at the window and documenting life shaped his perspective growing up, showing him examples of who he might want to become, or not become.

In a series of six superb videos, Al Jazeera explores the gritty reality of architects and urban designers as activists in destinations from Vietnam and Nigeria to Pakistan and Brazil. Five of these 25-minute episodes are embedded in full as videos below, with summaries to let you see which you may wish to view – each is well worth watching.

In Guerrilla Architect, Santiago Cirugeda, an architect from Seville who has dedicated his career to reclaiming urban spaces for the public, deals with difficult realities in “austerity-hit Spain, where the state has retreated and around 500,000 new buildings lie empty.”

Fortunately, he notes: “In times of crisis, people come together to find collective solutions.” One of his challenges, as covered in this mini-documentary, is converting an abandoned half-finished factory into a vibrant new cultural center.

In The Architecture of Violence, Eyal Weizman “explains architecture’s key role in the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the evolution of urban warfare.” He explains that “architecture and the built environment is a kind of a slow violence. The occupation is an environment that was conceived to strangulate Palestinian communities, villages and towns, to create an environment that would be unliveable for the people there.”

In this episode, local Israelis and Palestinians explain in candid interviews “how it feels to live in a landscape where everything, from walls and roads, terraces and sewage, to settlements and surveillance are designed to ensure the separation of the two peoples, while simultaneously maintaining control.” The stories told reference strange inversions of public and private space, with soldiers using homes to move secretly and circumvent streets. 

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Rebel Architecture 6 Part Series On Global Guerilla Urbanism

It is a fantastic endeavor and nearly finished – a movie made up of 56,800 stop-motion paintings, all presented in the style and told by the characters of the tale’s protagonist: Vincent van Gogh.

The first full-length feature of its kind, Loving Vincent uses van Gogh’s own techniques to explore the life and death of the artist, “through his paintings and by the characters that inhabit them.”

As its creators explain, “the intrigue unfolds through interviews with the characters closest to Vincent and through dramatic reconstructions of the events leading up to his death.”

This production by Breakthru Films features 120 of the artist’s paintings and draws its plot from 800 letters, using them to flesh out a deeper picture of this often-misunderstood painter whose work goes well beyond his famous works, such as Starry Night.

In van Gogh’s own words: “Well, the truth is, we cannot speak other than by our paintings” – these industrious filmmakers are taking him at his word, and animating his images and subjects to tell his story.

Breakthru was founded by Oscar award-winning animator Hugh Welchman. Fortunately the project raised sufficient funds on Kickstarter, so given how far they have come one can only hope that (unlike the life of the painter featured) this work will not end in tragedy.

Bustling hubs give way to spindly spokes, infrequently taking locals to particularly distant destinations and often entirely unseen by tourists and other travelers. In the city business or pleasure and lost your way? Sorry, last stop, folks – everybody out.

German video journalist Janosch Delcker has created two short documentaries (End of the Line parts 1 and 2) exploring the terminal points of public transit lines in Berlin and New York, respectively. These locations are off the beaten path for most urbanites, and are primarily known as end stops that indicate you are taking the train in the right direction.

His short films are simple documentaries of the mundane, harshly-lit reality of unloved subway tunnels, stops and stations far from metropolitan centers. Per Pop-Up City, “Delcker’s short, atmospheric documentaries draw upon French anthropologist Marc Augé’s concept of the ‘non-place’ — ‘a space which can not be defined as relational, or historical, or concerned with identity’.” Beyond impersonal spaces, though, Delcker’s urban work also features personal stories:

In his Urban Observations series, Deckler features “A drag performer, a cartoonist, a curator, a filmmaker, an author and a painter.” The series “followed 6 artists through New York City and 6 through Berlin. Each one has a story to tell. Each one has a past. Each one has dreams.”

“The 12 videos of the series form a mosaic; a portrait of New York City and Berlin in the age of recession. Episodes of Urban Observations were screened at festivals and events in Berlin, London, and New York City. The series was awarded with the 2012 Mulert Award on Mutual Understanding.”

Fascination bleeds into fixation in this wonderful ongoing series of illustrations by a graphic designer who enjoys the nuances of fenestration in his favorite city.

Each piece in the series specifies not only the neighborhood (Hell’s Kitchen, West Village, East Village, Lower East Side, Alphabet City, SOHO, Williamsburg and more) but the actual address so truly curious fans can map out routes to find the source material.

From creator Jose Guizar, “The Windows of New York project is a weekly illustrated fix for an obsession that has increasingly grown in me since chance put me in this town. A product of countless steps of journey through the city streets, this is a collection of windows that somehow have caught my restless eye out from the never-ending buzz of the city. This project is part an ode to architecture and part a self-challenge to never stop looking up.”

There is a consistency to the visual language (from shapes to color palette) employed in each piece, which only serves to highlight the surprise differences between the various windows featured. Hacks and modifications make their way into the images as well, from protective metal grating and air conditioners to window-hanging flower boxes and curious cats. Even former windows, now filled in with bricks, or covered by doors, are candidates.