PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY

Living in a favela influences how people move around the city

Research using mobile phone data indicates that the living condition reduces the variability of daily movements

Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo

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Sequence of inferred locations (trajectories) of mobile phone users, where each color represents a different individual. This data was used in a study examining mobility variability among São Paulo favela residents 

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Credit: Matheus Henrique Cunha Barboza

A study based on the analysis of mobile phone data reveals that residents of favelas in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, exhibit less variability in their daily travel patterns than residents of formal areas with similar incomes.

The study was published in the journal Transportation and was authored by Matheus Henrique Barboza from the Engineering School of the University of São Paulo (Poli-USP). Barboza’s work was supervised by Mariana Giannotti and co-authored by Anna Grigolon and Karst Geurs. The research is part of Barboza’s doctoral thesis developed through a dual-degree program between USP and the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

The analysis was based on 77 consecutive days of mobile phone records, totaling approximately 30 million events associated with around 6,000 users living in areas within or around São Paulo’s favelas. The study focused on intrapersonal mobility variability, or how much a person’s routes change from one workday to the next.

“Most transportation studies look at a single day in people’s lives. What we explored is the fact that phone data allows us to observe behavior over several weeks, something traditional research can’t capture,” Barboza explains.

The results show that income and living in a favela are not equivalent variables. Even after controlling for factors such as average income in the census tract, land use, employment density, and access to public transportation, the “favela” variable remained significant. In practical terms, this means that two people with similar incomes living in nearby areas may have different movement patterns simply because one of them lives in a favela.

According to Giannotti, the lower variability observed among favela residents should not be automatically interpreted as a sign of greater stability or choice. “An initial, generic hypothesis would be that favela residents face additional challenges compared to people with the same income who live in urban areas outside of favelas. Among these challenges, infrastructure bottlenecks related to mobility – such as narrow, steep alleys; distance to bus stops; and lack of adequate sidewalks – can impact access and consequently the variability of movement patterns,” she says.

The researchers used call detail records (CDRs), which are records of calls, messages, and internet connections automatically generated by cell phone operators. By identifying the antennas used over time, the researchers were able to reconstruct users’ daily movements and infer their places of residence based on their nighttime patterns.

They cross-referenced this information with data from the Demographic Census of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), land use databases from the City of São Paulo, and estimates of accessibility to jobs via public transportation. To measure mobility variability, the authors created a specific indicator: the total number of distinct locations among the three most frequent destinations each workday over four weeks.

Two results stand out. First, people with higher incomes tend to have less variability in their daily movements, indicating more stable routines. Second, favela residents also exhibited less variability despite being associated with more precarious economic conditions.

“Although informal workers tend to show greater variability because they work in multiple locations, living in a favela can impose additional limitations that reduce this fluctuation,” Barboza notes.

Giannotti points out that the data used in the study are from 2016 and cannot be directly extrapolated to the present. “It isn’t possible to extrapolate over time, especially considering the effects of the pandemic on people’s behavior. On the other hand, we understand that the results remain relevant from an analytical and conceptual point of view because the study investigates the mechanisms and structural relationships between mobility, income, informality, and residential status associated with more persistent characteristics of urban structures,” she says.

In addition to its academic contribution, the work has direct implications for urban planning and public policy formulation. “The research provides methods for exploring telephone data to support the development of Mobility Plans, which are mandatory for municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants according to the National Urban Mobility Policy,” Giannotti points out.

According to her, traditional origin and destination surveys are expensive and impractical for many municipalities. “If municipalities can advance in using this type of telephone and ticketing data for their plans, it’ll be a huge step forward in having public policies that are more data- and evidence-informed,” she says.

According to the researcher, analyses such as those carried out in the study can support policies such as ensuring adequate transportation in peripheral areas, designing fares and subsidies that align with work routines, and prioritizing infrastructure and service investments in areas with restricted daily mobility.

The data is anonymous and does not allow for direct identification of individuals. According to Barboza, access was obtained through a formal agreement with the operator. “We don’t have names, CPFs [Brazilian taxpayer identification numbers], or anything like that. What we were provided with were geographic coordinates, date, time, and an anonymized code that can’t be linked to personal information. But, of course, this is sensitive data, and therefore all use follows strict ethical protocols. The General Data Protection Law [LGPD] allows this type of research when conducted by universities and with anonymized data.”

The work was supported by FAPESP through a Doctoral Scholarship and a Research Internship Abroad Scholarship, both awarded to Barboza. It was also supported by a Research Grant to the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM), where Giannotti is one of the principal investigators. The CEM is one of FAPESP’s Research, Innovation, and Dissemination Centers (RIDCs).

About São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)
The São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) is a public institution with the mission of supporting scientific research in all fields of knowledge by awarding scholarships, fellowships and grants to investigators linked with higher education and research institutions in the State of São Paulo, Brazil. FAPESP is aware that the very best research can only be done by working with the best researchers internationally. Therefore, it has established partnerships with funding agencies, higher education, private companies, and research organizations in other countries known for the quality of their research and has been encouraging scientists funded by its grants to further develop their international collaboration. You can learn more about FAPESP at www.fapesp.br/en and visit FAPESP news agency at www.agencia.fapesp.br/en to keep updated with the latest scientific breakthroughs FAPESP helps achieve through its many programs, awards and research centers. You may also subscribe to FAPESP news agency at http://agencia.fapesp.br/subscribe.

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Journal

Transportation

DOI

10.1007/s11116-025-10695-6 

Article Title

Mobility variability of favela residents of São Paulo based on mobile phone data

PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY FOR THE MASSES

'The urban space has a subconscious': a tour of Marseille’s colonial history

In the port city of Marseille in the south of France, a local artist is leading tours that shed light on the city's colonial past – a history little known today.


Issued on: 20/07/2025 - RFI

The former Grand Hôtel du Louvre et de la Paix in Marseille, bought in 1984 by the brand C&A. © Wikimedia/CC

One morning on Marseille’s main shopping street, Rue Saint-Ferréol, a group of around 20 people gathered around the artist Mariam Benbakkar for what she calls a "colonial downtown walk".

This neighbourhood, with its grand, imposing buildings, was constructed in 1848, when, after 20 years of war, Algeria was divided into three French departments.

"All the resources exploited in Algeria, but also in other colonies, arrived through the port of Marseille. This neighbourhood became a showcase for ship owners," explains Benbakkar.

She passes around a photo book ... Marseille, the first city to organise a colonial exhibition in 1906 ... Marseille and its colonial museum ... Marseille, the "gateway to the Orient".

The night of rebellion that changed France and Algeria forever

'History made invisible'

Colonial history remains almost hidden in the city of Marseille. A small stained-glass window with a ship here, a faded pediment there – but no plaques or explanations.

Benbakkar leads the small group into the flamboyant Uniqlo store, whose dome is as high as that of the prefecture.

The reason for the building's grandeur? It used to be a branch of the Compagnie Algérienne, a French investment bank with operations in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Lebanon.

The letters C and A embedded in the wrought iron railings, and a heavy armoured door in the fitting rooms provide clues to the building's past, but this isn't explicitly acknowledged.

"There used to be a magnificent painted ceiling, showing the colonised cities, but it was covered up by Uniqlo’s air conditioning," Benbakkar told RFI.

"This is knowledge that has been made completely invisible," notes Anne, one of the participants on the tour. Despite having grown up in these streets, she admits: "I know little about the hidden stories behind these buildings."

T

he building that now houses the Uniqlo clothing store on Rue Saint-Ferréol in Marseille is a former colonial bank. © Sophie Bourlet/RFI

For Pauline, another young woman in the group, the tour is an opportunity to reflect on France's colonial past. "I’m not from an immigrant background, but I still feel it concerns me," she says.

For Benbakkar, everyone has, in one way or another, a personal history with the French colonies.

With Franco-Algerian relations at an all-time low, can they get back on track?

She reminds people that she is neither a sociologist nor a historian, but she chooses to talk about the history of her city.

"For me, the best way of changing people's mentality is to pass it on through speaking about it, in the streets," she says.

She has been working with post-colonial imagery for several years, through her feminist collective Filles de Blédards ("Daughters of North African Immigrants") and her Instagram account Marseille Coloniale.

She says she iis fascinated by public spaces, architecture, land registries and private construction.

'These images affect us today'

"Marseille is a key city when it comes to France and migration. It has an extremely rich culture, but it’s not represented in cultural institutions," explains Benbakkar.

She mentions the names of forgotten industrialists and politicians: Jules Charles-Roux, a wealthy ship owner whose granddaughter married Marseille's mayor, Gaston Defferre; Édouard Marie Heckel, the founder of the colonial museum; Paulin Talabot, founder of the Paris-Lyon-Marseille railway and a lobbyist for the creation of the Suez Canal.

"There was a working bourgeoisie that made fortunes from the colonial empire. To this day, the redistribution of looted wealth is still not being done properly," she points out, referring to private enclaves in the city’s wealthy neighbourhoods.

Equatorial Guinea accuses France of 'neo-colonialism' in Paris mansion row

Another stop on the tour is the C&A store – formerly the Grand Hotel du Louvre et de la Paix. It features four massive statues representing four continents.

The figures representing Europe and the Americas, draped in togas, carry a winged machine symbolising progress, while Asia and Africa, bare-chested, carry an elephant and a camel.

"These images, which were installed in the 19th century, still affect us today. It’s as if the urban space has a subconscious – eventually, we internalise those images," says Benbakkar.

"We need reparations for the damage caused by 19th-century capitalism and imperialism, which still impacts the banking, economic and private property systems today. And for that, we need to recognise that we have been robbed of our common property and demand our fundamental rights: access to the sea, to nature, to decent housing, to streets for all."

This article was adapted from the original version in French.

 WORKING CLASS PSYCHOGEOGRAPHY

London cabbies’ planning strategies could help inform future of AI

University of York

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Researchers have measured the thinking time of London taxi drivers - famous for their knowledge of more than 26,000 streets across the city - as part of a study into the future of AI route-mapping.

Unlike a satnav, which calculates every possible route until it gets to the destination, researchers at the University of York, in collaboration with University College London and the Champalimaud Foundation, found that London taxi drivers rationally plan each route by prioritising the most challenging areas first and filling in the rest of the route around these tricky points.

Current computational models to understand human planning systems are challenging to apply to the ‘real world’ or at large scale, and so researchers measured the thinking time of London taxi drivers while they planned travel journeys to various destinations in the capital city.

Previous studies have shown the uniqueness of the London taxi driver’s brain; they have a larger posterior hippocampus region than the average person, with their brain changing in volume as a result of their cab driving experience.

Dr Pablo Fernandez Velasco, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of York, said: “London is incredibly complex, so planning a journey in a car ‘off the top of your head’ and at speed is a remarkable achievement. 

“If taxi drivers were planning routes sequentially, as most people do, street-by-street, we would expect their response times to change significantly depending on how far they are along the route.

“Instead, they look at the entire network of streets, prioritising the most important junctions on the route first, using theoretical metrics to determine what is important. This is a highly efficient way of planning, and it is the first time that we are able to study it in action.”

Researchers showed that taxi drivers use their cognitive resources in a much more efficient way than current technology, and argue that learning about expert human planners can help with AI development in a number of ways.

Dan McNamee from the Champalimaud Foundation said: “The development of future AI navigation technologies could benefit from the flexible planning strategies of humans, particularly when there are a lot of environmental features and dynamics that have to be taken into account. 

“Another way to enhance these technologies would be to integrate the information about human experts into AI algorithms designed to collaborate with humans. This is a very important point, because if we want to optimize how an AI algorithm interacts with a human, the algorithm has to ‘know’ how the human thinks.”

Professor Hugo Spiers from University College London added: “This study certainly confirms what other studies have found  - the London taxi driver’s brain is incredibly efficient and its larger volume is put to good use in making sense of a highly complex city like London.”

The research is supported by the British Academy, the EPSRC UK, and Ordnance Survey and published in the journal PNAS.

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

London taxi drivers have specialized human mental strategies for expertly navigating their city’s streets, scientists find

Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown

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A taxi driver calls out the names of streets and the turns on his path while the traject appears segment by segment on the map.

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Credit: Iva Brunec

An international team of scientists, including a principal investigator in neuroscience from the Champalimaud Foundation, in Lisbon, has analysed the way expert London taxi drivers plan their route in advance every time they pick up passengers. It is the first time a study about human planning has been performed in a real-world, large-scale environment. Their results are published today (23rd of January) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

London’s licensed taxi drivers are not unknown to research: they were found, some 25 years, to have a distinctive brain feature due to their navigation expertise. Indeed, the volume of their hippocampus, a structure in the brain that plays an important role in learning and memory, is different from that of people who do not drive taxis.

The new study focused on their planning behaviour when doing their job. “Expert navigators can plan routes efficiently and quickly in enormous and intricate environments, such as cities”, the authors write in their paper. “[But] most studies to date have employed small-scale and/or abstract environments with naive participants. Here, we surmount these challenges by asking London taxi drivers – famous for their expert knowledge of the London street network, composed of over 26,000 streets – to plan routes through London.”

“Cities epitomize the intricacy of planning in real-world environments”, says Pablo Fernandez Velasco, from the University of York, the joint first author of the study. “If we considered planning a path across a large city that, between start and destination, involved 30 streets, using a minimal tree-search algorithm would involve an evaluation of over one billion potential street sequences.” If anything, this makes it clear that humans do not use such an algorithm to choose their route.

Time to think, time to name streets

The researchers analised the drivers’ response times – “as a proxy of thinking times” – to see how these drivers rationally organised their route-planning process. 

“Our goal was to understand how expert humans make plans in very complex situations”, says Daniel McNamee, Group Leader of the Natural Intelligence Lab at the Champalimaud Foundation and one of the senior authors of the study. “We also wanted to compare expert humans versus AI algorithms. Our hypothesis was that humans were somehow doing something different. AI algorithms couldn't explain the behavior expert humans exhibit in this sort of situation.”

London taxi drivers are a very unique population of humans, in particular because when they train for their licence they are not allowed to use tools such as Google maps to help them; they have to rely solely on their memory storage and retrieval skills to efficiently navigate tens of thousands of city streets.   

“They are a unique group when you want to answer questions such as how do expert humans organize their memory, what internal representations do they use or how do they retrieve pieces of information from their memory”, McNamee explains. “And that gives us a unique window into the highest level of human decision-making, knowledge representation and processing.”

A critical difficulty was getting access to taxi drivers. Hugo Spiers, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London (UCL) – the other senior co-author of the study – has spent 20 years studying their brains, but this is the examination of their planning. “These taxi drivers are famous for their larger posterior hippocampus” says Spiers. “Now, thanks to collaboration across UCL and the Champalimaud, we have revealed how they put that enhanced brain to use.”

The team gave a group of 43 taxi drivers a start location in London and a “goal” location. The drivers were then asked to verbally call out the sequence of turns and streets they would take to go from the route’s origin to destination. “This is a very familiar task for these expert taxi drivers because, during their specialized training for the job, they're tested on many of these start-goal combinations before they get their taxi driver license”, McNamee points out.

For each route (there were 315 such possible “runs”, as they say in taxi driver-speak), the researchers measured the response time between the task presentation and the first call-out of a street name by each driver. This they called the “offline thinking time”: it corresponds to the phase during which the taxi driver silently considers the route. Next, they measured the times between each call-out of street or turns by the drivers, which they called the “online phase”. 

Organising decisions about a route

One of the things the team wanted to study was what decisions the drivers made about their route during their offline thinking time. “One possibility”, says McNamee, “was that they organise their decisions in the sequence of streets and junctions that they are actually going to physically encounter during the ride – that the first thing they think about is the first street they're going to take, then the second street, the third street, and so on and so forth.” This means they will be slower in naming subsequent streets as they go along the route.

The results contradicted this hypothesis. What the results suggest is that “during the offline thinking time, the taxi drivers prioritize high-complexity, non-local parts of the London space”, McNamee continues. “It seems that they immediately jump to figuring out a higher-order global structure [of the route], based on critical junction states, using the physical structure of London.” The technical expression for this is “non-local precaching of critical junctions”. And then, “once they've done that, they start verbalizing and filling in the rest of the details”.

The drivers also took longer to think about longer streets in London. “This suggests they have spatial awareness of the actual physical structure of London, as opposed to a more abstract kind of representation where distances are not taken into account”, McNamee points out. 

“I was surprised by this result”, he says. “I expected the taxi drivers would have a less spatially embodied sense of the London state space. I did not expect that the length of the street in the real world would slow them down, but that they would have a more abstract notion [of their city]. But maybe the fact that they have this more embodied spatial awareness is useful for more flexible planning, where they can take into account if one street is usually more busy than another at a given time of day, and they're also encoding all sorts of additional spatial variables and integrating them into their thinking. However, this is not something we specifically addressed in our study.”

“This result is consistent with reports from previous research” says Pablo Fernandez Velasco. “Taxi drivers have reported that when they have to plan a route, they sometimes imagine going through it, both from an aerial and from a first-person perspective. If they imagine the physical space to some degree, it makes sense that the length of the street segment impacts the length of their street planning”.

A different order of priorities in “London space”

In sum, expert London taxi drivers prioritize important streets and junctions in order to determine a more global structure of the run. “What we see with the taxi drivers is that they consider space out of the order in which they would actually experience them in the real world”.

“If they first take time offline to think about it differently, then they'll be much faster to call out streets during the online phase”, adds McNamee. This is clearly a much more efficient way of thinking than a simple sequential strategy. 

What does McNamee think is the most interesting result of this work? “I think it is the fact that we were able to identify and predict that, during the offline thinking time, when the taxi drivers are in deep silent thought, they prioritize highly complex, and spatially remote junctions and streets in London”, he answers. “That had never been shown in human experts – decision makers or planners – in what I would refer to as an ecologically valid task for them, that is, a task they accomplish every day.” 

“In fact, what we were studying here is a kind of expert human intuition, an innate sense of what to think about before you even start thinking about it, in a sense”, he ponders. “That's a key area of interest in other work we do in my lab: intuitive human reasoning.”

One thing seems certain, according to McNamee: human experts have a qualitatively different algorithmic strategy to AI systems. Nonetheless, AI algorithms could benefit, in the future, from results about how human experts think. “They could benefit in, I'd say, two ways”, he explains. “One has to do with more flexible planning, particularly when there are a lot of environmental features and dynamics that have to be taken into account.” 

“The other would be to integrate the information about human experts into AI algorithms designed to collaborate with humans. This is a very important point, because if we want to optimize how an AI algorithm interacts with a human, the algorithm has to ‘know’ how the human thinks.”

“And that's something to consider”, McNamee concludes.

All the routes planned by the taxi drivers across London

Credit

Pablo Fernandez Velasco et al., PNAS

A figurative depiction of the mental representation of London in the minds of expert navigators. The height of each yellow "building" depicts the thinking time of taxi drivers at that location.

Credit

Iva Brunec

Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2407814122 

Method of Research

Observational study

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Expert navigators deploy rational complexity–based decision precaching for large-scale real-world planning

Article Publication Date

23-Jan-2025

Nazis and normality: UK directors unsettle Cannes with films tackling ‘unseen’ evil

Steve McQueen and Jonathan Glazer separately confront the Holocaust with themes prompted by a resurgence of the far right


Vanessa Thorpe

CANNES

THE OBSERVER

Sat 20 May 2023 

STEVE MCQUEEN

Steve McQueen and Jonathan Glazer, two of Britain’s most admired and daring film directors, have disturbed Cannes audiences with a pair of extraordinary films that confront Europe’s murderous fascist past.

The directors, working independently on different projects about Nazi atrocities, both say they were prompted by the growth of political extremism and prejudice.

Glazer, best known as director of the sci-fi dystopia Under the Skin and the admired gangster film Sexy Beast, says he wants The Zone of Interest, which premiered to acclaim on Friday evening, to address “the capacity within each of us for violence”. He believes, he said this weekend, it is too easy to assume such brutal behaviour is a thing of the past.

“The great tragedy is human beings did this to other human beings,” he said. “It is very convenient to think we would never behave in this way, but we should be less certain of that.”

His unflinching look at the proximity to mass genocide in which German domestic life went on is set in the home of Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss.

McQueen’s documentary, Occupied City, also turns to historic detail to lay out the unpalatable facts that lie in the landscape of modern Amsterdam.

A scene from the film The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer, which portrays domestic life alongside the Auschwitz death camp. 

Photograph: AP

Speaking to the Observer in Cannes, McQueen said: “People aren’t stupid. They do realise on one level what happened, but somehow we need to smack ourselves out of this amnesia.”

The Oscar-winning director and his Dutch wife, Bianca Stigter, who wrote the script, were also prompted by the rise of the new right and Europe’s increasing political polarisation.

“The past can’t be on the surface all the time,” said Stigter, “but some things should not be forgotten. In today’s climate, with antisemitism and racism on the rise, it is good to be reminded of that moment of history.”

Both directors have turned to face Nazi horrors partly because witnesses to the Holocaust are no longer so numerous. Speaking to the press on Saturday, Glazer, who is a Jewish Londoner, said he felt it was vital to keep telling the story, despite the advice his own father gave him to just “let it rot”, and leave it to history.

“It is very important we do keep bringing it up and making it familiar; to keep showing it so that a new generation can discover it in film. The Holocaust is not a museum piece that we can have a safe distance from. It needs to be presented with a degree of urgency and alarm,” he said.

The two British films concentrate with forensic intensity on what people are capable of ignoring. While neither film portrays Nazi violence directly, both contain elements that will make difficult viewing for a mainstream audience, and not just because of their bleak focus.

Glazer’s film, made on location near the site of the former death camp in occupied Poland, is made in German. McQueen and Stitger’s documentary lasts four hours and deliberately has no narrative structure.

In each case there are few concessions to the world of popular entertainment. Glazer’s film has a lurid, deadpan mood, while McQueen’s relies on the build-up of appalling crimes recounted over footage of modern Amsterdammers going about their lives during the pandemic lockdown.

The Zone of Interest director Jonathan Glazer with cast members Sandra Hüller and Christian Friedel at Cannes 2023. Photograph: Sarah Meyssonnier/Reuters

“It is about evidence of things unseen,” said McQueen. “Meandering through one of the most beautiful cities to ramble in, so there is the perversity of the fact all these things happened in such a beautiful city.

“Our film is not a history lesson, it is an experience.”

In The Zone of Interest Glazer portrays domestic life alongside the Auschwitz death camp. It has an almost surreal tone as it juxtaposes the quotidian concerns of the Höss family with the mass torture, starvation and killing going on next door. Glazer loosely based his film on the Martin Amis book and developed it after spending time at Auschwitz.

The audacity of looking at Nazi atrocities afresh has been applauded by one of Germany’s great directors, Wim Wenders.

Before watching either film, Wenders, in Cannes for the premiere of his film Perfect Days this week, told the Observer that tackling the Holocaust in film is risky, but it remains important to try.

“We should be capable of looking back at war. If we can stand the ugliness of staring it in the face and if we can then stand doing it with actors … then we can learn for the present and for the future. But it is a painful process and it can also go damn wrong.”

Occupied City review – Steve McQueen’s moving meditation on wartime Amsterdam

The monumental film which tracks day-to-day life in Amsterdam under Nazi rule asks hard questions of what we think about the gulf between past and present


Peter Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1

THE GUARDIAN

Wed 17 May 2023 

Steve McQueen’s monumental film is a vast survey-meditation on the wartime history and psychogeography of his adopted city: Amsterdam, based on his wife Bianca Stigter’s Dutch-language book Atlas of an Occupied City, Amsterdam 1940-1945.

With a calm and undemonstrative narrative voiceover from Melanie Hyams, the film tracks day-to-day life in Amsterdam under Nazi rule. It spans the invasion in 1940; the establishment of the NSB, the collaborationist Dutch Nazi party; the increasingly brutal repression and deportation of Jewish populations to the death camps; and then the “hunger winter” of 1944 to 1945 as food and fuel became scarce in the city and the Nazis displayed a gruesome mix of panic and fanaticism as the allies closed in.

What McQueen does is effectively represent the maps and figure legends of the book on screen: the camera shows us the modern-day indoor and outdoor scenes on individual streets, canals, squares, buildings and jetties where the barbarity unfolded – but shows them as they are now, with 21st-century people going about their business while Hyams’ narration coolly summarises what happened in each particular spot, sometimes adding that the original building has been “demolished”. A prison yard where Jews were forced to parade around chanting: “I am a Jew, beat me to death, it’s my own fault” is now an open space overlooked by the Hard Rock Cafe. The headquarters of the secret police was on the site of what is now a school.

Occupied City lasts a little more than four hours, with an intermission, and the effect is something like an huge cinematic frieze or tapestry, or perhaps an installation. But it is also like an old fashioned “city symphony” movie, and, in its approach, perhaps bears the influence of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. It asks hard questions of what we think about the gulf between past and present. When we think about Nazi rule in Amsterdam, we think of … what? Flickering black-and-white newsreel footage, semi-familiar landmarks in monochrome, images of swastikas, an alien display of history, vacuum-sealed in the past. But McQueen shows us the modern world, in 4K resolution and there is a gradual realisation that for those involved in 1940, the Nazi occupation of Amsterdam happened just like this: in living colour in the here-and-now, with modern hairstyles and clothes.

Sometimes there is a disconnect between past and present. The site of a bygone horror might in 2023 be a scene of happiness: people ice-skating on a frozen canal and having innocent fun. At some other place we see a commemorative event: the laying of wreaths. At other times, there will be a parallel: in Dam Square the Nazi occupiers erected a bandstand; now we see a stage for outdoor performance. And then there are other, serious engagements with history and politics. We see an official statement of apology for colonialism and slavery; we see a huge and boisterous “climate strike” by young people and an event for the murdered Dutch investigative journalist Peter R de Vries. The effect is to show us that the past and present are not clear, with distinct layers of old/significant and new/insignificant: it is more fluid than that.

Occasionally, there is a weird frisson. Some of McQueen’s footage was shot during the Covid lockdown and the juxtaposition of this with Nazi oppression takes us – unintentionally – perhaps a little close to GB News territory. And audiences might be surprised at how little emphasis is placed on Anne Frank: it could well be that McQueen wanted to take us away from well-trodden arguments, and certainly to move away from the modern tourist cliches of coffee shops and sex worker windows. Although on that last point there is another eerie historical echo in the way in which sexual activity between occupier and occupied was variously policed, tolerated and punished.

In its scale and seriousness, Occupied City allows its emotional implication to amass over its running time. The effect is mysterious and moving.

Occupied City screened at the Cannes film festival.