Apparently, in some cities in Germany a person can get a ticket for forgetting to lock their parked car. Such laxness is deemed a poor contribution to the collective drive to control the urban landscape and safeguard its public image. And image, it seems, has become everything in these times of Millennium Dome urban politics - the monumental mounting of symbolic big events which become points of crystallisation in an urban development determined by global economic forces. Against such growingly vociferous transparency, the 45th International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen hummed a soft-spoken ode to the delicate and dangerous smallness of broken glass. While this provincial German town is being given a would-be glamorous facelift in the shape of the Neue Mitte (the New Centre) - a giant complex consisting of a shopping arcade, multiplex cinema and theme park - the festival moved back to the local Filmpalast cinema in the old city centre, to concentrate on alternative micro-moments in its special programme "Cities, Territories".

Besieged though they may feel by the impending "Disneyification" of their local landscape, the programme curators, lead by festival director Lars Henrik Gass, were wary of engaging in reactionary nostalgia. Instead, they were interested in exposing and analysing the ever more complex, decentralised, and thus less vulnerable power structures which Bigness tends to camouflage. The visible presence of marginal groups in the newly incorporated cities is considered a smear on their high-profile ‘visiting card’ centres. Like Hollywood films, these cities try to design a risk-free, over-exposed form, a cul-de-sac of normality. They do not leave any room, beyond that which is comprehensible, for deposits and disappearances that could feed memories. That they increasingly do that through procedures of confinement and exclusion can serve only as additional fodder for a growing megaphobia, a growing urgency to make politics ‘on location’.

And so in the tiny Gloria theatre, as most of the festival delegates congregated in the adjacent Lichtburg hall, where the international and German competitions were under way, we were treated to a plethora of possible user’s manuals to life in the big city. How can urban politics which are focused on security and hygiene become dirty? Where are the local niches that can be occupied in the global geography of control? A rich programme of short films from different eras, countries and genres, accompanied by a catalogue full of Virilio-like texts of soaring techno-poetry and informative detail, attempted to tackle these questions...