Archi-DOCT 16 | Urbanities

The 16th issue of the ArchiDOCT e-journal welcomes papers that explore the theme of ‘urbanities’ in architecture and the built environment, considering the contemporary need to open up new discussions and critical reflections regarding the condition of the depressed spaces of our cities and the need for catalytic interventions headed towards their comprehension, reconsideration and future reactivation and mobilisation. With the term ‘urbanities’ we anticipate a possible constellation of projects that symbiotically operate to define the future urban environment and to respond to multiple crises associated with intertwined issues such as climate change, flooding, land consumption, but also inequality, gender issues, production processes and geopolitics. At a smaller scale, they own their specific boundaries and peculiarities while, through a progressive blurring of lines of demarcation, at a bigger scale they act as a network of meaningful fragments that creeps into the city and composes infrastructural webs to reactivate our urban fabric. Indeed, these ‘urbanities’ don’t convey only a functional quality to the city, but they also carry within themselves a whole set of social, political, and human values, as well as the nonhuman presence in the form of gaia, nature and data sets that reinforce the sense of citizenship of the dwellers of these places. As a reflection of the IT era, they often inherit the multifunctionality at the core of the digital technologies that allow them to be open to phenomena of people’s appropriation (Dix 2007) and re-semantization, which consequently lead to the rise of new aesthetics. In a city similar to a motherboard, ‘urbanities’ are small strings of codes that, as specific plug-ins, connect to the urban environment and become meaningful narrations. They contribute to creating proper infrastructural networks of information which are incremental (it keeps growing and evolving from the original DNA) and not top-down oriented; they have the capacity to fit within the tangles of the consolidated city and re-active the forgotten and neglected areas generated by the urban sprawl phenomena; they are enriched by injection of information that could foster alternative dynamics of participation and civic engagement and can deliver new values that can give rise to a revised sense of citizenship and, indeed, bottom-up urbanity. With these premises, the 16th issue of ArchiDOCT invites academics, researchers, and PhD students, that can relate their doctoral thesis as solo authors, with their supervisor(s) or with fellow doctoral students or doctoral holders to deliver an essay focusing on any field related to the entanglement within architecture and urban design in the contemporary city. The aim is to explore the theme of ‘urbanities’ in the design process through both a theoretical or practice-based approach and highlight the breadth and scope of the results their possible implementation can bring about. For this reason, and considering the breadth of possibilities contained in the topic itself, we are interested in contributions pervaded by a design’n’built philosophy that could directly illustrate their resonance within the real world. Independently from the scale of the ‘urbanities’ proposed, we invite discussion concerning tangible examples of the implications within architecture, IT, and urban reactivation, and the possible connection within theory and praxis.