Add your Insight

This call for papers is an extension of the 2020 AHRA International Conference. Conference participants whose papers are shortlisted for the Journal Special Issue will be specifically invited to submit their papers by the end of January 2021; they do not need to resubmit their papers unless invited to do so by the conference organisers.

The question underlying the inquiry of the 2020 AHRA International Conference has been this: what does it mean to be at home in the city in the twenty-first century? Our aim has been to investigate the historical and theoretical genealogy of this question, premised on an understanding that the urban and the domestic, the public and the private, the individual and the collective, the political and the personal, are not opposing concepts but constructions that link the subject to the spatiality of the city.

Francoise Choay posits Ildefonso Cerdá’s Teoriá general de la urbanización of 1867 as the first theory of urbanism, as a ‘science’ that for the first time conceptualised the spaces of the city and its population in conjunction. Since the rise of ‘the urban’ as a field of knowledge linking spaces and the population, our very conceptions of the self, of intimacy and care, have come to be engendered by and to propel our understanding of urban spaces and processes. How to house and group the population, how to ensure its welfare and happiness, and how to optimise the potentials of individuals, families and other segments of the urban population have been central urban questions addressed through the potential of architecture throughout the twentieth century. How to do this in an increasingly explicitly global context, facing global threats, becomes the additional question of the twenty-first.

We seek contributions that explore the interactions between the urban, the home and the self in both material and conceptual terms, in different contexts, and from the rise of the metropolis to the present, but always in order to reflect on the present urban condition. We are keen to discuss projects and theories at a range of scales, from the home to the metropolitan region, from the individual to the collective; we are interested in design projects or design research by architectural practices that showcase the specifically architectural contribution to the question of the urban understood in relation to domesticity.

We invite contributions from a variety of disciplines such as architecture, urbanism, sociology, philosophy, geography, anthropology, as well as written and visual contributions from the arts, such as photography, fiction-writing or film.