The Journal of Architecture

The Journal of Architecture - Thematic calls

The Journal of Architecture welcomes contributions to a series of thematic calls that mark a strategic shift in how the journal curates and sustains scholarly conversations. These thematic calls are designed to support ongoing engagement with key questions in architectural research that cut across architectural theory, design, history, and practice, while also drawing from and contributing to debates in allied disciplines such as design, urban studies, anthropology, political ecology, and science and technology studies.

Unlike conventional special issues, which are typically defined by a one-off publication cycle and coordinated by guest editors, thematic calls at The Journal of Architecture are open-ended. They form part of the journal’s regular editorial process, allowing contributions to be submitted, reviewed, and published on a rolling basis. This structure enables the journal to respond dynamically to emerging intellectual concerns while offering authors the flexibility to submit work in alignment with their own research trajectories, rather than to a fixed deadline.

Each thematic call centres on a carefully defined concern that reflects the evolving priorities of architectural scholarship, such as ecological crisis, decoloniality, infrastructures of repair, post-disciplinary practice, or more-than-human design. These themes are not narrow or prescriptive. Rather, they are invitations to explore architecture’s conceptual boundaries, methodological possibilities, and socio-ecological responsibilities. The journal seeks work that not only reflects on existing conditions but reimagines how architecture might be understood, studied, and practiced in relation to the complex realities of the world.

Submissions to these calls may take the form of theoretical inquiry, historical analysis, empirical research, or practice-based reflection. We are especially interested in work that challenges disciplinary assumptions, draws from under-represented contexts, or engages architecture through relational and critical perspectives. Thematic calls are open to both established and emerging scholars, and contributions will be reviewed and published as part of the journal’s regular issues, while remaining clearly indexed under the relevant theme.

Thematic calls also reflect the journal’s commitment to long-term intellectual stewardship. They are curated and maintained by the editorial team rather than being tied to specific guest editors or institutional projects. This approach ensures that The Journal of Architecture remains consistent in its editorial vision while continuing to evolve in dialogue with the broader field. We welcome contributions that treat architecture as a process, relation, and proposition.

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Current calls

• Architectures of extraction and repair: material politics, planetary crisis, and the ethics of making
• The architecture of borders: infrastructures, relations, and everyday practices
• Rural (re)configurations: architecture beyond the urban imaginary
• Beyond the human: multispecies and more-than-human architectures
• Post-architectures: rethinking the discipline’s limits
• Design as method: rethinking architectural research through practice
• (Re)Learning architecture: in search of consistency
• Appropriating architecture: owning, commoning, and curating

Architectures of extraction and repair: material politics, planetary crisis, and the ethics of making

Leads: Deljana Iossifova and Christoph Lueder

By consolidating extraction and repair within a single thematic frame, this call interrogates architecture’s material and ethical obligations in a world of limits. It challenges the discipline to move beyond narratives of innovation and growth, offering instead a space for critical reflection on (architectural) survival, endurance, and transformation. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on planetary urbanism, post-growth futures, and the politics of infrastructural life.

Architecture is deeply implicated in both the forces of extraction and the practices of repair. From the territorialisation of resources and labour to the care and maintenance of deteriorating structures, architectural production is entangled in socio-ecological processes that both deplete and sustain. Yet, these interdependencies are rarely addressed together. Architectural discourse often treats extraction and repair as separate domains, one concerned with the frontiers of resource accumulation, the other with post-growth imaginaries of care and endurance. This thematic call seeks to bring these approaches into critical conversation.

What kinds of architectural knowledge and practice emerge when extraction and repair are understood not as opposites – but as relational conditions? How does the architectural lifecycle (materially, economically, and ethically) move between depletion and maintenance, violence and care, abandonment and restoration? How might foregrounding these transitions reshape our understanding of architectural responsibility in the context of climate crisis, economic precarity, and postcolonial dispossession?

By interrogating architecture’s complicities in extractive regimes and its potential as a reparative practice, this thematic call invites contributions that reframe architecture as a site of socio-material negotiation. It seeks scholarship that does not merely document destruction, critique extraction, or advocate for sustainability, but examines the infrastructures, aesthetics, temporalities, and political ecologies that structure how architecture is made, unmade, and remade.

Call for Papers: We welcome contributions that critically examine how extraction and repair are co-constitutive in architectural thought and practice. Submissions may draw from historical, theoretical, or practice-based research and may focus on any geographical or temporal context. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• The architectures of resource extraction, including mining settlements, logging infrastructures, and fossil fuel urbanisms.
• The material ecologies of architectural production, from mineral sourcing and deforestation to global logistics and construction waste.
• The labour regimes underpinning both architectural making and maintenance, including informal and racialised economies of care and construction.
• Reparative design strategies, including adaptive reuse, salvage practices, and post-extractive material economies.
• The aesthetics and ethics of unfinished, provisional, or continuously evolving structures.
• Theoretical and historical approaches that trace the longue durée of architectural depletion and repair as entangled processes.
• Indigenous, feminist, or decolonial perspectives on architectural repair as resistance to extractive logics.
• Legal, financial, and governance frameworks that enable or inhibit reparative architectural practices.

The architecture of borders: infrastructures, relations, and everyday practices

Leads: Deljana Iossifova and Debapriya Chakrabarti

This thematic call seeks to reposition architecture as a critical site in the making and unmaking of borders. Drawing attention to the spatialised mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, it challenges the discipline to account for the fine-grained, often invisible ways in which borders are produced and sustained across multiple and nested scales. It also foregrounds architecture’s potential to disrupt and reimagine bordering practices, contributing to broader debates on spatial justice, planetary urbanisation, and the politics of difference.

Borders are spatially and temporally produced through architecture, infrastructure, and everyday life. From fortified boundaries and biometric surveillance systems to informal barriers and symbolic divisions within cities, architecture plays a central role in shaping how borders are enacted, experienced, and contested. Critically, these bordering processes are not confined to the edges of nation-states but proliferate across urban territories, informal settlements, and infrastructures of sanitation, mobility, and care.

We call for contributions that foreground the relational and processual nature of borders, examining how borders are continuously made and remade through the socio-material infrastructures that shape everyday (urban) life, and how architectural practices participate in or resist these logics. The aim is to move beyond securitised or state-centric accounts of border architecture and to interrogate bordering as a dispersed, multiscalar, and contested condition.

How do borders operate within cities, manifesting as differentiated access to infrastructure, housing, and services? How are architectures of division internalised in the urban fabric, and how do they produce exclusions along lines of class, caste, gender, race, citizenship, and species? How do architectural interventions contribute to the reconfiguration of bordering practices, whether through solidarity infrastructures, spaces of cohabitation, or territorial resistance?

Call for Papers: We invite scholarship that critically interrogates bordering as an architectural and infrastructural process. Submissions may explore empirical cases, conceptual frameworks, or methodological interventions that reframe architecture’s role in the spatialisation of inclusion and exclusion. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Architectures and infrastructures of state control, including fortified borders, checkpoints, surveillance systems, and detention architectures.
• Bordering within cities: infrastructural divisions, infrastructural borders, uneven service provision, and spatial segregation.
• Informal and everyday architectures of migration, settlement, and cohabitation in borderland, peri-urban, or fragmented urban contexts.
• Transcalar bordering practices: from urban peripheries to regional corridors and planetary logistics.
• Architectures of solidarity and resistance: cross-border networks, activist infrastructures, and spaces of encounter.
• The legal, economic, and algorithmic governance of mobility and access, and their spatial ramifications.
• Architectural engagements with ‘slow violence’ and ecological bordering, including environmental displacement and territorial degradation.
• Methodological approaches to studying borders through architectural ethnography, material semiotics, or relational infrastructure theory.

 

Rural (re)configurations: architecture beyond the urban imaginary

Lead: Weijie Hu and Deljana Iossifova

Architectural discourse has long privileged the urban as its primary site of inquiry, reinforcing an implicit hierarchy in which the city is seen as the locus of architectural innovation, economic dynamism, and cultural production. The rural, by contrast, is frequently framed as peripheral – either a space of nostalgia, loss, and stagnation or a passive site for resource extraction and urban expansion. Yet, contemporary transformations in rural regions – shaped by shifting economies, climate change, migration, infrastructural developments, and technological interventions – demand a fundamental reconsideration of architecture’s relationship with the rural. How might architecture engage with these processes in ways that do not simply reproduce urban-centric logics? What alternative spatial imaginaries emerge when rural landscapes are understood as generative spaces for architectural thought and practice?

Call for Papers: What does it mean to think architecturally about the rural? How can architecture move beyond the tendency to frame rural space either as a disappearing landscape or as a future urban frontier? This thematic call invites contributions that critically examine architecture’s engagement with rural and peri-urban territories, asking how processes of spatial reconfiguration – whether through infrastructure, land use, migration, or governance – reshape the architectural possibilities of the rural.

We seek scholarship that interrogates the architectures of rural transformation, including but not limited to:

• The politics of infrastructure in rural regions and the spatialisation of large-scale infrastructural projects (energy transitions, transportation networks, telecommunications).
• Architectural mediations of agrarian change, from industrialised agriculture to alternative food systems.
• The rural as a site of experimentation for architectural materialities, construction techniques, and ecological design strategies.
• The role of architecture in migration, displacement, and the reconfiguration of rural social and spatial networks.
• Architectural responses to the climate crisis in rural landscapes, including adaptation, retreat, and resilience strategies.
• Theoretical and methodological approaches that challenge urban-biased conceptual frameworks and propose new ways of thinking about rural-urban interdependencies.

By bringing architecture into direct dialogue with contemporary rural transformations, this thematic collection works to unsettle architecture’s urban-centric epistemologies.

Beyond the human: multispecies and more-than-human architectures

Lead: Deljana Iossifova and Debapriya Chakrabarti

This thematic collection challenges architecture to confront the exclusions embedded in its human-centred paradigms and to imagine alternative futures grounded in interspecies responsibility, ecological interdependence, and spatial justice. By extending architecture’s methodological and conceptual reach, it contributes to urgent cross-disciplinary efforts to reconfigure life in a more-than-human world.

Architecture has long taken the human subject as its normative centre, designing for human use, comfort, and control over space. Yet, as environmental humanities, multispecies ethnography, and posthumanist theory have made clear, the built environment is always already co-produced with, and inhabited by, nonhuman others: animals, plants, microbes, minerals, atmospheric and hydrological flows. These more-than-human agents are active participants in shaping material conditions, spatial relations, and ecological outcomes.

This thematic call invites scholarship that interrogates architecture’s entanglement with the more-than-human world and challenges its anthropocentric assumptions. What becomes of architectural categories such as ‘site’, ‘inhabitation’, or ‘function’ when the agency of nonhuman beings and systems is taken seriously? How might architectural theory and practice respond to the ethical, spatial, and epistemological demands of designing with and for multiple forms of life?

By foregrounding multispecies entanglements, this collection positions architecture within broader conversations on environmental justice, climate precarity, and planetary co-existence. It also asks what role design might play in either perpetuating or unsettling extractive and exclusionary regimes that frame nonhuman life as expendable.

Call for Papers: We invite contributions that examine the more-than-human dimensions of architecture in conceptual, methodological, and empirical terms. Submissions may explore theoretical approaches, speculative design, historical perspectives, or grounded case studies that reposition architecture as a multispecies practice. Papers might address, but are not limited to:

• The spatial politics of cohabitation between humans and other species: urban biodiversity, shared habitats, ecological corridors, and conflict ecologies.
• Infrastructures as multispecies mediators: water, air, waste, soil, light, and heat as sites of cross-species interaction and regulation.
• The political ecologies of architectural materials, including the extraction, transformation, and use of organic, bioengineered, or so-called ‘living’ materials.
• Architectural responses to environmental instability, extinction, and climate breakdown: designing for ecological resilience, retreat, or repair.
• Indigenous, animist, and decolonial ontologies of space and life: how alternative cosmologies might reframe architectural purpose and responsibility.
• The ethical, aesthetic, and epistemological challenges of designing with more-than-human life: from speculative ecologies to care-based design practices.
• Methodologies for studying more-than-human design: multispecies ethnography, ecological sensing, biomimicry, or interspecies mapping.
• Histories of nonhuman presence in architectural theory and practice: domestication, sanitation, urban pest control, and zoonotic design legacies.

Post-architectures: rethinking the discipline’s limits

Lead: Debapriya Chakrabarti and Deljana Iossifova

This collection seeks to problematise architecture’s disciplinary coherence and to foreground alternative modes of thinking and practising architecture in a world marked by instability, exclusion, and infrastructural complexity. In doing so, it contributes to wider efforts to provincialise dominant architectural epistemologies and to explore what forms of spatial intelligence are necessary and possible in the face of ecological, political, and ontological transformation.

Architecture has traditionally defined itself through bounded domains: the building, the author, the object, the drawing. Yet these boundaries are increasingly questioned by architectural practices and research that refuse or cannot be contained by conventional disciplinary demarcations. From logistics infrastructures and networks to digital platforms, repair economies, and non-design spatial production, the field now confronts forms of architecture that do not conform to its canonical registers.

This thematic collection explores what becomes visible when architecture is treated as a distributed, relational, and often ambiguous process, rather than a discrete domain of formal expertise. Drawing on emerging intersections with urban studies, feminist theory, political ecology, STS, media studies, and maintenance studies, it interrogates how architecture is constituted through infrastructural, ephemeral, and contested spatial practices. How is the discipline reshaped when it acknowledges its entanglements with temporality, informality, contingency, or care? What alternative epistemologies are required to study architectures that are provisional, residual, or oblique?

Rather than positing a disciplinary crisis, this call approaches post-architecture as a generative site that enables new modes of spatial thought, practice, and pedagogy as they emerge from the very dissolution of conventional boundaries.

Call for Papers: We invite contributions that interrogate the limits and reconfigurations of architectural knowledge, authorship, and form. Submissions may be theoretical, empirical, historical, or practice-led, and should reflect critically on what it means to engage architecture beyond its dominant framings. Themes might include, but are not limited to:

• Architectural knowledge beyond design: infrastructures, protocols, platforms, maintenance, or everyday dwelling.
• Ephemeral, mobile, or residual architectures: from refugee shelters to protest spaces and informal urbanism.
• Rethinking authorship and expertise: collective, anonymous, or distributed practices of spatial production.
• The aesthetics and ethics of non-permanence: provisional, contingent, or unfinished architectures.
• Feminist, decolonial, and posthuman critiques of architectural boundary-making.
• Pedagogical or methodological approaches to architecture as process or relation rather than object or outcome.
• Interdisciplinary approaches that complicate architectural categories through media, performativity, or affect.

Design as method: rethinking architectural research through practice

Leads: Deljana Iossifova and Christoph Lueder

This thematic collection seeks to reposition methodology as a critical concern in architectural research, opening space for reflexivity, experimentation, and theoretical rigour in the study and practice of design. It contributes to ongoing debates about the status of practice-based research, the politics of knowledge production, and the possibilities of design as a critical, situated, and relational mode of inquiry.

Architectural design is not only a form of creative production but also a mode of inquiry: a way of knowing, sensing, and intervening in the world. Yet, despite growing recognition of practice-based research and design-led experimentation, architecture’s methodological foundations remain under-theorised. This thematic call invites contributions that critically examine design as a research method and explore how architectural practices generate knowledge that is situated, processual, and epistemologically distinct.

What kinds of questions can only be asked – or answered – through design? How can architectural research foreground the embodied, iterative, and speculative dimensions of making, and what methodological frameworks are required to support this? How might design serve as a critical interface between ecological thinking, social engagement, and epistemic experimentation?

This call seeks to move beyond instrumental framings of ‘methodology’ as a creative (or, worse, technical) procedure. Instead, it positions methodology as a conceptual and political terrain – implicated in decisions about what counts as knowledge, who produces it, and for whom. We welcome contributions that treat architectural design not as the object of research, but as its medium.

Call for Papers: We invite scholarship that engages with design as method, and that critically reflects on the methodological frameworks, research processes, and epistemological commitments underpinning architectural practice. Submissions may be theoretical, speculative, or grounded in empirical inquiry, and may draw from across the architectural humanities, social sciences, and practice-based research traditions.

Key areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Design-led research: How can architectural projects serve as structured, reflective modes of knowledge production? What protocols, standards, or narratives emerge when design is the research vehicle?
• Situated methodologies: Research methods that are grounded in context, materiality, temporality, or relational practice – particularly in response to ecological or social complexity.
• Speculative and experimental practice: Approaches that mobilise architectural design as a speculative or projective method, whether through drawing, prototyping, simulation, or narrative construction.
• Ecological epistemologies: Methodological innovations that embed ecological principles into design processes as generative epistemic frameworks, rather than technical add-ons.
• Socially engaged methods: Participatory, co-design, and narrative-based approaches that position architectural research within wider social struggles or collective imaginaries.
• Temporal and iterative design: Reflections on methodologies that account for change over time, whether through adaptive design, maintenance-oriented thinking, or feedback-based practices.
• Pedagogical implications: How are methodological innovations in research through design transforming architectural education, studio practice, and the training of researchers?

(Re)Learning architecture: in search of consistency

Lead: Pari Riahi and Doreen Bernath

This thematic call invites critical reflection on the conditions, commitments, and contradictions of teaching and learning architecture in a time of intersecting crises. Amid disillusionment with entrenched pedagogies and growing pressures to instrumentalise education, we ask how architectural training might sustain a sense of consistency – understood as an enduring orientation toward curiosity, ethical responsibility, and transformative possibility. Contributors are encouraged to interrogate the pedagogical structures, epistemologies, and practices that shape architectural education across diverse contexts, and to explore how modes of teaching and learning might be reconfigured to respond meaningfully to shifting social, environmental, and disciplinary horizons.

In this time of manifest disenchantment with certain ingrained patterns of work in architecture and the field’s inability or unwillingness to respond to the multiple ruptures and crises, what does it mean to teach and learn architecture today? How can one address the challenges of different geographical and social contexts while considering territorial and global interconnections, upholding a clear sense of knowledge? How does one practice teaching while maintaining a consistency of thought and action? Architectural education is marked by specific components in curricula and settings. The design studio and project-based pedagogy have often been set apart from other essential categories of knowledge to learnings in an environment that call for a mixture of scientific and creative process through drawing and making.

Much has been examined and debated by those directly engaged with architectural education. On the one hand, there are opinions and scholarship that champion pedagogical principles based on the particularity of teaching and learning architecture, which they believe can be applied more as principles of good educational practices in general across disciplines. On the other hand, there have also been persistent voices calling for significant reforms, evidencing the so-called ‘cliff-edge’ moments of the incompatibility of the graduates fulfilling professional demands or societal needs. The latter has grown rapidly in recent times with the surge of problems arising from commodification of higher education, value of learning overridden by employability, and the admittance of professional inadequacy in adjusting architectural practice at large to meet the demands of climate change and spatial justice. The perseverance of the creative genius as a type, authoritative canons and the reductive basis of success hinging on the delivery of specific building types and systems have further exacerbated entrenched social segregation, hierarchies, and ecological detriments. Other experiments, in forms of hands-on, in-situ knowledge and collaborative practices emerge as alternatives to the disciplinary challenges mentioned above. Radical experiments and initiatives in reforms in different contexts across the world continue to reconfigure what it means to teach and learn architecture by reconnecting the multifaceted agencies of our built environments with the reciprocity of roles and relations.

This thematic call is intended to acknowledge the complexity of current debates and to instigate conversation about how we can maintain a sense of consistency in our educational endeavours. How can we engage and negotiate amidst the imaginative, ethical, environmental, and technological forces in architecture today with consistency in principle and in effect? ‘Consistency’ was the final and unfinished memo in Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium.  Clues in the other five memos suggest that consistency is to be understood as the condition of mutual awareness between makers of possibilities. We see this sense of consistency as a plane of possibilities that learning and teaching open up, where pedagogy is, in the best sense, not the certainty of knowledge or controlled outcome, but the anticipation and sustaining of the state of ‘yet-to-become’. Bernard Stiegler refers to the ‘plane of consistency’ that connects to the ‘plane of the extra-ordinary’ and with what Gilles Deleuze proposes as the ‘belief in the world’, which is sustained by philia, or love, of what does not yet exist, as ‘intrinsically doubtful and improbable’. With this prompt we wish to rethink an architectural education, where the passing on of knowledge is one of thinking of new possibilities, oscillating between teaching and being taught, learning and relearning.

We believe that the recursive and reciprocal relation between teaching and learning needs to be addressed and reinvented with a sense of audacity and hope towards the future of the field. Disciplines, architecture included, have inner and outer modes of operations. Each discipline’s inner modes keep them consistent in their daily acts and life-long convictions, while their outer modes signal their ability to converse and intersect with others. How does consistency, in the present call's context, express itself in the continuum of teaching and learning architecture? Consistency is a complex word, even possibly a problematic one. It can imply rigidity, an adherence to things known and tested. It can also be misconstrued as resistance to the new and unfamiliar. We envision consistency as nurturing qualities and aptitudes that will keep the next generation of architects curious, invested, and fully present within the discipline. Consistency is the ability to make space for difference, for opposition, for undoing all and everything, only to remake, reconfigure, and reimagine them. Consistency includes edges, peripheries, and intersections of architecture with other fields, capable of enduring contaminations, erosions, and shifting horizons.

We seek contributions that explore:

• Debates on disciplinary boundaries as manifested or instrumentalised in architectural education, and how such consistency of conviction can, on the one hand, be challenged and altered, and, on the other hand, be maintained as possibilities and alternatives.
• Diverse qualities and aptitudes that can be consistently nurtured in modes of teaching and learning of architecture to sustain curiosity, hold plurality and make space for difference, either resisting the relentless demands of proficiencies, precisions, and obligations or responding to them in unexpected and innovative ways.
• An expanded sense of nurturing architectural imagination and future actions, which can be consistently encouraged and constructed in architectural training to enable recognition of (and across communities) inclusive dialogues and modes of working with other fields and disciplines.
• Possibilities of interdisciplinary pedagogy in architectural curriculums and degree pathways to enable consistent means of co-learning and -teaching for students and staff with different knowledge bases and specialties, and between subjects and disciplinary structures in current higher education systems.
• Transmissions of in-situ knowledge and skills from practices that can be mutually and consistently tied in to school- and programme-based learnings, challenging the persistent divide between education and practice.
• Structures of collaboration and active advocacy as crucial values and abilities that are developed in the teaching and learning of architecture, that which to maintain the ethical and imaginative consistency of the field to inevitable paradigm shifts in the discipline and the world at large.

Appropriating architecture: owning, commoning, and curating

Lead: Christoph Lueder and Debapriya Chakrabarti

By highlighting culturally bound concepts of belonging, this thematic collection challenges the politics of commodification and makes space for discourse about emergent architectures and multiplayer ecologies of owning, commoning and curating.

The seemingly unstoppable momentum of global neoliberal politics and commodification transforming buildings, places and cities into assets for financial exploitation obscures the fact that property is as much a cultural concept as it has legal and economical dimensions. The words and concepts describing relationships of control, mythical and feudal bonds, or emotional belonging between people and things have co-evolved with architectural and urban typologies along distinct paths in each culture. Likewise, continual rethinking of communal resources as commons, socialist state property, council estates, patronage, societal and co-operative ownership is manifest in distinct spaces, places and architectural opportunities. What alternative spatial imaginaries emerge when inhabitants, activists, citizens and architects collaboratively design new relationships between people and architecture? What paths to inclusive and equitable futures are being unlocked by housing co-operatives, by planning for appropriation over time, by informalisation and informal settlements?

Call for Papers: What does it mean to co-design alternative models of ownership? How can historical and emergent, culturally rooted notions of owning, curating and commoning inform shared imaginaries and shape urban and architectural space? This thematic collection seeks scholarly work that critically examines architecture’s entanglements with politics, economics, regimes, geographies and cultures of belonging. We are also interested in architectural practice and case studies that demonstrate the spatial potential of sharing, commoning and designing for time.

We seek contributions that examine what it means to appropriate architecture, including but not limited to:

• The architect as enabler and/or the inhabitant as curator within hybrid ecologies of spatial production.
• Multiplayer cities, urban ecologies constituted through heterogenous models of ownership, curating and commoning, their spatial manifestations, their resilience, and the transformative potential of tactics such as meanwhile programming.
• The spatialisation of co-operative models of ownership and their architectural potential.
• Learning from culturally and historically rooted practices of commoning and communal curation in the Global South, learning from tactics of resistance against neoliberal spatial politics.
• Themed towns (e.g. China’s Simulacra Cities), constructing identity, hybrid identities, and reclaiming authenticity as a sense of belonging to a place.
• The emergent shift from financial markets to techno-oligarchies, its threats, opportunities and spatial manifestations (e.g. Google, Meta, and Tesla’s corporation-controlled towns).