VOGELFREI is a New York nonprofit that makes documentary films, exhibitions, publications, and archival material about how cities and their peripheries are lived in, governed, and imagined. Our projects combine interdisciplinary research, fieldwork, and multimedia approaches to examine spatial issues from new perspectives. These approaches generate richer bodies of evidence and make otherwise neglected dimensions of spatial issues visible.

This project draws, in part, from Georg Simmel's account of the metropolis at the beginning of the 20th century. Simmel described how the restructuring of urban material life also transformed the inner and social lives of its inhabitants. Today, urban and rural space are interconnected and increasingly global. The pace of change has accelerated, and our environments are documented more extensively than ever. Yet these records are fragmented, dispersed, and often inaccessible to the people whose lives they attempt to describe.

Decisions about the future of cities are increasingly made at a distance from the ground, relying on data collection that often lacks historical, social, and cultural context.

VOGELFREI works against that. Our research begins with being present and staying long enough to understand what is being recorded. We combine sustained fieldwork with archival research and evidence gathered across different media in order to examine issues in relation to their contextual frames. Our findings take the form of films, exhibitions, publications, and archives that make this knowledge accessible to the public and open to scrutiny.

Each project begins with extended fieldwork: observation, interviews, surveys, and archival resarch. In most case, our authors practice in the places they document or collaborate with local exports to produce a contextual understanding of a place before undergoing fieldwork. Film, photography, drawings, and mapping are how we investiage a place, not only how we present the results. In our methodology, each record is material evidence that renders unique information that its media is tuned to capture. Together these fragments provide an richer archive from which we generate a fuller readings of spatial issues.

Our dedication to generating contextual documentation relies on the embedded quality of our authors and partners, who engender the work with knowledge specific to the lived realities of those places. Historians, architects, anthropolosits, planners, ethnographers, media theaorists, and artists all contribute the research that places those stories in a wider context.

Although we do accept outside funding and donations, we maintain creative independence in how we conduct ourselves. This indendent process is how we maintain the rigor and integrity of our research questions, methods, and findings.

VOGELFREI was founded in 2026 by Aleksa Milojević, Joseph Reich, and Matthew Wilde. It grew out of the their shared research into media and urban space at the Yale School of Architecture. The team brings backgrounds in urban planning, publishing, curation, environmental research, making, and documentary film. VOGELFREI is a New York City-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.

vogelfrei is is German for "free as a bird." Historically it also described someone placed outside the protection of the law. We take the name in both senses: work that answers to no dogma or outside agenda, and attention to people and places left outside official accounts.