The control of the environment – which in the physical, institutional, education or even imaginary realm in turn shaped the decisions and activities happen within the environment. Architecture holds an uncertain position in the fight for the control over the environments, it can be employed for different means by various stakeholders. Through architectural research, we ask not only how the environment(s) are controlled but also what it means to be a “controlled environment”
Potential topics include:
- Environmental imagination and its architectural / artistic relevance.
- Resistance towards the state / capital/ power’s control over the environment, with architecture as either a part of the resistance or a structure to be challenged
- How the notion of the environment(s) in architecture uses (and abuses) knowledge from the humanities and sciences?
We invite individual paper submissions that address the issues/topics above, or one of the thematic sessions below.
Beyond Repair: Postcolonial Architectures of Decay
Convenor(s): Émélie Desrochers-Turgeon (Dalhousie University)
Architectures of empire—designed to uphold racial capitalism and colonial hierarchies—are often crumbling, caught in cycles of maintenance and crisis. Their fragility exposes the limits of their permanence, revealing both the inequities they sustain and the possibilities for their collapse.
In the context of growing scholarship on repair and maintenance, we are inspired by scholars such as Ozayr Saloojee, Jennifer Newsom, Tom Carruthers, and Zoe Rivera, who argue that care must engage with the conditions of “how and why it broke” (2024). Building on this, we critically examine the notion of maintenance, suggesting that decay reveals not only the vulnerabilities of empire but also possibilities for abolitionist and decolonial futures.
We invite scholars to examine spatial histories of failure, friction, and decay in postcolonial and architectural history. How do inequities in the built environment persist, erode, or collapse? How might decay refuse maintenance and open pathways for radical world-building? Contributions may explore decay as a political condition, considering what ruins reveal about the endurance or failure of empire, or investigate the labor of maintenance by asking who repairs, sustains, or dismantles imperial infrastructures. We also welcome reflections on the postcolonial afterlives of architecture and how colonial infrastructures continue to haunt the present, as well as analyses of the aesthetics of ruin—how decay is mobilized, commodified, or resisted. Additionally, we encourage discussions on abolitionist design histories alongside inquiries into residual governance, questioning what refuses to decay and what its endurance signifies.
By addressing the politics of decay, we hope to foreground pathways for land justice and collective political projects that build worlds beyond empire. We invite contributors to theorize decay not as an endpoint but as a space of potentiality—an opening for radical refusal and transformative futures.
Format: In person paper session
Exposing the Environments of Warfare: On the Permanency of Defence Epistemologies
Convenor(s): Elif Kaymaz (Middle East Technical University), Caner Arıkboğa (Middle East Technical University)
Military architecture is a spatial paradox—designed for permanence yet subject to decay, built for impenetrability yet frequently abandoned, and if in use, strictly controlled within yet completely opaque to the public. Positioned along frontiers and strategic landscapes, defense as an architectural program does not merely occupy space but actively transforms the environment—land, sea, and air—into a strategic asset, controlling movement, visibility, and access. This antagonistic relationship with the environment depends on an extensive apparatus of surveying, mapping, and appropriate scientific research, embedding military logic into both material and epistemic domains. (Weizman, 2007)
Materially, military infrastructures operate outside conventional planning constraints, unbound by legal, economic, or civic oversight. Fortifications, bunkers, and surveillance networks inscribe power onto terrain, engineered to dominate their surroundings while resisting adaptation. Unlike civilian architecture, which evolves through cycles of occupation and repurposing, military structures are designed for durability yet often rendered obsolete by shifting geopolitical conditions. Their presence lingers beyond their function, shaping landscapes through exclusion, secrecy, and contested access. Epistemologically, the tools developed to control and comprehend these spaces—satellite imaging, aerial reconnaissance, classified cartographies—are not merely instruments of representation but extensions of warfare itself. The archives we rely on to write environmental histories are often militarized, structuring how landscapes are perceived, classified, and remembered. (Ashworth, 1991).
Yet deciphering architectural and geographic knowledge from the material legacies of defense remains an unresolved challenge. This session invites scholars to examine how military infrastructures endure beyond their strategic purpose, shaping not only physical terrain but also the frameworks through which built environments are conceptualized. How do these spaces continue to govern movement, memory, and materiality long after their operational use has faded? What alternative methodologies might unsettle the militarized epistemologies embedded in architectural humanities research through archives, maps, and images? Overall, this session explores how military environments have been tamed into disciplinary knowledge while leaving behind untamed traces that shape epistemologies.
Format: In person paper session
The Future of Extraction: Examining the Environmental, Social, and Architectural Impacts
Convenor(s): Kim Förster (University of Manchester), Luca Csepely-Knorr (University of Liverpool)
In his foreword to Sheila Haywood’s 1974 book, Quarries and the Landscape, Prince Philip, the then Duke of Edinburgh, identified the extractive industries as a prime illustration of the conflict between conservation and the demands of industrial society. The book for him highlighted the potential of landscape architecture to mitigate this dilemma. Haywood, although often overshadowed by Geoffrey Jellicoe in historic accounts, was a leading authority on quarry restoration, particularly through her work at Hope Cement works in Derbyshire, demonstrated long-term landscape restoration, yet the broader environmental and social impact of extraction, and the role of landscape architecture in mediating its consequences, remain largely unresearched.
Contemporary analysis quantifies the extractive nature of architecture along the supply chain, with extraction, construction and demolition activities accounting for 60% of the UK’s total waste (as per “Promoting Net Zero Carbon and Sustainability in Construction,” 2022) and the built environment contributing for 40% of CO2 emissions. The current green transition, driven by the demand for critical minerals used in renewable energy technologies such as solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, and electric vehicles, brings the question of extraction, its mediation, and even concealment to the forefront of environmental policy again. This session invites proposals that explore the future of mining sites from a critical, multi-disciplinary humanities perspective, analysing the architectural, landscape, and ecological histories of extractive landscapes in the UK and internationally.
This session seeks proposals addressing:
- Global networks and territorial impacts of extractive industries;
- Environmental histories of quarries and mines;
- Networks and agents involved in the creation, maintenance and futures of extractive landscapes;
- Conflicts and protests arising from the designation and expansion of mining sites.
Format: In person paper session
The Lamp of Utopia: Re-reading Francoise Choay
Convenor(s): Francesco Zuddas (Architectural Association School of Architecture), Sabrina Puddu (Cambridge University)
With the passing of Francoise Choay in 2025, the world of architectural scholarship loses a voice that has put focus on the urbanistic discourse as made of a necessary mingling of fiction and reality. Her work kept the lamp of utopia on at a crucial historical junction for utopia’s own story. Between the mid 1960s and the early 1980s, books such as Urbanisme: Utopies et Realites (1965), The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century (1969), and The Rule and the Model (1980), charted a trajectory of utopianism at the very time when euphoria about it would soon leave way to accusation: the unbridled imagination of the many radical groups triggered by the promise of postwar freedom and reaching climax in the late 1960s and early 70s, would soon be domesticated by the neoliberal turn and its reality checks.
Choay was not a lone investigator of utopia, a topic, indeed, on many mouths at that time, from urban scholarship – think of Colin Rowe – to literary criticism – the likes of Italo Calvino or Aldous Huxley. Yet, she was the first to reprise an attempt of using utopia consistently to categorise attitudes to the making of cities from where Lewis Mumford had left with his first published book in the early 1920s.
This session aims to celebrate Choay’s contribution to architectural and urbanistic scholarship and theory in both a retrospective and prospective way. This should be done through a close re-reading of her writings, locating them in the multiple contexts in which they emerged as well as reflecting on what could still be learnt from them and their relevance for contemporary discourse. Papers are invited that use Choay’s work (and through comparison that of a broader set of authors working at a similar time) to provide insights into the reasons that make utopianist thought re-emerge cyclically.
Format: In person paper session
Property Claims: Legal Fictions of Environmental Control
Convenor(s): Sina Brückner-Amin (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology),
Chelsea Spencer (Rice University)
Architecture and planning rely on the fiction that land can be made into a controlled, demarcated space—an environment. A key gesture in this operation is the property claim. Sustained through rhetorical power, formal administration, spatial demarcation, architectural inscription, or else physical violence, the redundancy of such claims also demonstrates their inherent fragility. It is through the performance, reiteration, and defense of property claims that land is staked out as a controlled environment. How have architecture, architectural media, and architectural history been mobilized to produce and reproduce the fiction of land ownership and environmental control? Insofar as property claims are narratives about particular places, how might they be understood as architectural histories of environmental control? Or conversely, how might architectural history be read as rehearsing claims to property, to the control of particular environments?
We seek papers that investigate architecture’s role in the rhetoric, performance, and mediation of immovable property claims, as well as the legal fiction of land ownership and environmental control more broadly. Papers may present case studies from any geographic, cultural, or legal context or, alternatively, theoretical or methodological reflections on questions related to the relationships between property, land development, and architecture.
We are particularly interested in work that explores the ambiguity, multiplicity, and fragility of claims to property and environmental control. Topics might include agricultural and real estate improvement; media and legal techniques of settler colonialism; the role of architectural media in title registration and deed transfers; mutual privileges and obligations arising from land tenure; and architectural inscriptions of ownership, or belonging, both past and present.
Format: In person paper session
The Planet, its Political borders and its Architectures
Convenor(s): Kevin Donovan (Technological University Dublin), Brian Ward (Technological University Dublin), Marcin Wojcik (Technological University Dublin)
In May 2022 the five schools of architecture in the Republic of Ireland were awarded funding of almost four million euro to implement climate-oriented curricula across the nation’s undergraduate architecture programmes. Under the project, led by TU Dublin and entitled Building Change: Designing a Resilient Future through Architectural Education, each school developed and shared new approaches to the teaching of architecture, centred around the natural environment. The two schools in Northern Ireland were not included in the scheme; and, although it lies roughly the same distance from Dublin as the schools in Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Sligo, neither was the University of Liverpool School of Architecture.
The nation state, central to the creation of the global carbon economy, is deeply embedded within the emerging system of agreements and targets being assembled to limit and mitigate global warming, and supports initiatives such as Building Change. While the climate crisis necessitates architects to reconceptualise their relationship with the earth and its environments, national (and colonial) politics continue to influence and structure the methods and epistemologies through which any re-alignment might be effected.
Ideas of identity attached to the nation state have long influenced the reading and production of architecture. This session invites presentations that reflect on the tensions between these ideas and the new geographies emerging in architectural discourse and education as the discipline confronts climate change. New structures of mapping, designing and making architecture (relating it to its bioclimatic region; understanding it according to globalised supply chains; etc.) often transcend national borders, erasing cultural and social differentiations. These methods are emerging at the same time that borders and the distinctions they construct have become increasingly politically potent – due in part to climate migration. How are the new structures, geographies and imaginaries of environmental architecture determined by national boundaries or, conversely, how do they challenge them?
Format: In person paper session
PhD Work in Progress Workshop : Infrastructural Environment(s)
Convenor(s): Josephine Sweeney (University of Liverpool), Peter Williams (University of Liverpool)
Infrastructural projects such as motorways, power stations and reservoirs involve monumental transformations of landscape. However, Brook and Csepely-Knorr highlight that such infrastructures can become “cognitively invisible” due to their functional status (2021). Infrastructural environments bring local identities and interests into dialogue with national ideology and objectives (Cosgrove et al., 1996), they shape and are shaped by environmental imaginaries (Alsayer, 2022), and they offer striking case studies for considering the intersections between landscape architecture and environment(s).
This workshop brings together researchers exploring these often-overlooked environments. Its objective is to tackle a range of challenges faced in the field of infrastructural landscape studies, including:
- What conceptual frameworks support understanding of how state ideologies and local identity and interests intersect?
- How might we include multispecies perspectives and account for more-than-human actors?
- Understanding the reciprocal relationship between architecture and political, societal, and technological developments.
- The role of environmental imaginaries – conceptualisations of ‘rural’, ‘countryside’, ‘urban’ and ‘environment’.
- How might we engage with the non-terrestrial, including sea, sky and sonic infrastructural environments?
- The influence of activism and opposition.
- How are infrastructural environments planned, anticipated, used, decommissioned, and understood?
- How infrastructure projects relate to various land uses and stakeholder concerns such as recreation and rewilding.
- Situating infrastructural environments within a shifting context of national, regional and local governance and planning.
- Use of archival sources: who and what is visible in the archive?
- Fieldwork and research challenges, difficulties and tensions.
This workshop welcomes scholars situated within and outside of built environment departments and hopes to bring together an interdisciplinary network of scholars researching infrastructural environments through written and visual media.
Format: PhD Student Workshop