***Apologies for cross-posting***

Dear colleagues,
we are seeking contributions for an upcoming issue of the new Nordic Journal of Urban Studies:
 
Architecture and urban studies – an awkward kinship
Editors: Christina Juhlin (Copenhagen Business School) & Cecilie Sachs Olsen (Oslo Metropolitan University)
 
Deadline for abstracts (optional): October 15 2021 / Deadline for full papers: January 15 2022
Contact: [log in to unmask] 
Submit your manuscript(s) here: https://mc04.manuscriptcentral.com/uf-njus 
 
The Nordic Journal of Urban Studies, a new peer-reviewed journal that aims to provide a Nordic academic arena for interdisciplinary urban studies, welcomes articles for the thematic issue “Architecture and urban studies - an awkward kinship”, edited by Christina Juhlin and Cecilie Sachs Olsen. Authors interested in contributing an article are asked to respond to the following call:
 
From social polarization to environmental degradation, cities are facing a range of complex problems that will require integrative, creative and collaborative solutions to address them. While the field of urban studies has done much to help us understand and analyse these problems, the discipline has been far less successful at imagining just and sustainable alternatives (Braun, 2015). Critics accordingly point to the failure of urban studies to engage with the growing body of socially-orientated, politically-motivated architecture that goes significantly beyond the designing of material objects and individual buildings (see e.g. Lorne, 2017; McFarlane, 2011). Terms such as “spatial agency” (Awan, Schneider and Till, 2011; Doucet & Cupers, 2009) “practising architecture” (Jacobs & Merriman, 2011) and “caring architecture” (Fitz & Krasny, 2019) situate design practices within the social production of space. This expanded architectural practice foregrounds how design intelligence can be deployed in open-ended, progressive ways to challenge the political economic forces that shape the production and commodification of the built environment. Yet, engaging with such practices situates urban studies in what Richard Sennett (2018, p.3) tellingly puts forward as “the ethical problem of cities today: Should urbanism represent society as it is, or seek to change it?” 
 
This question, relating to whether or not urban studies should take inspiration from - and inform - the propositional discipline of architecture in order to turn knowledge about cities into action designed to realize better place-based outcomes, points to the somewhat awkward kinship between architecture and urban studies. While the distinction between architecture and urban studies is by no means clear cut, this is a relationship that seems to be characterised by mutual misapprehension as much as mutual interest (Bille & Sørensen, 2016; Ingold, 2013). Architecture and urban studies have distinct disciplinary origins, divergent practical objectives as well as different modes of operation. The architect, historically and conventionally speaking, works with urban form at the scale of the building or masterplan (LeCorbusier, 1929), but the urban researcher is conventionally the scholar of urban processes in the form of up-scale phenomena like place and space (Jacobs, 1961; Massey, 2005). The difference between these two foci (Haarstad et al. 2021) might relate to how each of these disciplines structure knowledge and labour. Architecture is at core a design-led discipline oriented towards (re)making and (re)shaping space. Urban studies, in contrast, is at core an analytical discipline oriented towards description and diagnosis of already-existing spatial circumstances. To the sceptical architect, the urban researcher may well appear to be locked down to empirical analyses of “why it is like that” without being able to imaginatively consider “what ought to be done” (Macarthur & Stead, 2006; Campbell, 2012). To the sceptical urban researcher, the architect may well appear to be stuck in a rather deterministic micro-scale such that the role of design in itself is overstated at the expense of social, cultural and economic context (Røe, 2017; Till, 2009). More optimistically, yet still perhaps in the zone of mutual misapprehension, the architect might think that the urban researcher offers helpful analyses that can inform their practice, while the urban researcher might admire well-designed urban environments and buildings yet see the architect or architecture as having nothing to say to the ways they conduct their research. But what might the practices of urban studies learn from the speculative and propositional thinking of architecture? What creative, projective, expressive and representational possibilities exist within the methods and visual languages of architecture? And what might architects learn from the social and economic theorizing of urban studies? While critical theory does not automatically lead to a critical architectural practice, what critical approaches from urban studies might have the potential to expand the current practice and politics of architecture?
 
In addressing these questions we aim to explore affinities between the practice of building and wider spatial dynamics, and invite papers that include (but are not limited to) topics such as:
 
• case studies on ‘cross-contamination’ or hybrid practices: Where architectural practices are informed by knowledge generated within the field of urban studies, and vice versa
• case studies on how architecture and social sciences converge or not in urban and regional planning within the Nordic context
• case studies on the rethinking of education as a consequence of blurring the boundaries between architecture and urban studies
• case studies on how architecture and urban studies deal differently with and/or can learn from the ways in which they each deal with already existing environments
• explorations of the intentions and capacities of architecture and urban studies to care for place, and the notion of care as a potential shared space between the two
• the role and power of professions, as well as reflections on de-skilling or unravelling disciplines as ways to make the field of architecture and urban studies meet
• performative urbanism, including case studies on how urban studies seek to intervene in - as opposed to reflect on - space 
• reflections on the potentials and pitfalls of normativity in architecture and urban studies
• the role of critique and disciplinary self-critique in architecture and urban studies
 
References:
Awan, N., Schneider, T., & Till, J. (2011). Spatial agency: Other ways of doing architecture. London: Routledge.
Braun, B. (2015). Futures : Imagining Socioecological Transformation - An Introduction. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 105:2, 239 - 243.
Bille, M. & Sørensen, T. F. (eds.) (2016). Elements of Architecture: Assembling Archaeology, Atmosphere and the Performance of Building Spaces. London: Routledge, 2016
Campbell, H. (2012) Planning to Change the World: Between Knowledge and Action Lies Synthesis. Journal of Planning Education and Research. 
Doucet, I. & Cupers, K. (2009). Agency in Architecture: Rethinking Criticality in Theory and Practice. Footprint, p. 1 - 6. 
Fitz, A. & E. Krasny (2019). Critical care: Architecture and urbanism for a broken planet. MIT Press.
Haarstad, H. et al. (2021). Nordic responses to urban challenges of the 21st century. Nordic Journal of Urban Studies, 1:1, 4 - 18.
Ingold, T. (2013) Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge.
Jacobs, J. M., & Merriman, p. (2011). practising architectures. Social and Cultural Geography, 12, 211–222.
Jacobs, J. (1993 [1961]). The Life and Death of Great American Cities. NY: Vintage Books.
LeCorbusier (1929) The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning. London Architectural Press.
Lorne, C. (2017). Spatial agency and practising architecture beyond buildings. Social & Cultural Geography, 18:2, 268-287.
Massey, D. (2005). For space. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi/Samsung: SAGE.
Mcfarlane, C. (2011). The city as a machine for learning. 360–376. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 36, 360 -376.
Røe, P. (2017). The social context and politics of large scale architecture: Investigating the design of Barcode, Oslo. European Urban and Regional Studies 24(3), 304 - 317.
Sennett, R. (2018). Building and dwelling: Ethics for the City. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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