Space as Experiment – Experimenting with Space
NEW - Webinar, 17 June 2026
hosted by the Lisbon Faculty of Fine Arts, CIEBA / Thematic line in Exploratory Projects and Society / Systemic City - Interdisciplinary Practices group* in cooperation with the Institute for Urban and Regional Research (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Space as a Medium for Organizing Collective Realities & Transforming Social Environments
Calls are now open.
Proceedings are to be published in:
User Experience and Urban Creativity journal
Submission of abstracts (300 words max.) until April 30, 2026.
Submission of full papers until July 30, 2026.
Publication of UXUC Special Issue: November 2026.
Submissions should be made through the UXUC journal publishing platform.
Please indicate the thematic call you are submitting to in the “Comments for the Editor” field.
For all accepted submissions, publication costs will be waived for this thematic issue. Article Processing Charges (APCs) will be covered by the Institute for Urban and Regional Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), a partner institution of the Urban Creativity/ Wisethorough Support Program.
Description
Common perspectives on urban spaces are strongly influenced by collective knowledge, shared mental concepts, as well as practices and rhythms of everyday life. These basic structures of lived urbanity in turn shape the material form of urban environments and provide the basic tenets of research on urban spaces in multiple disciplines. However, recent advances in technology, science, and cross-cultural communication challenge traditional understandings of urban spaces in favor of multidimensional, multilinear, and malleable spatialities. We are pushed to understand space as a multidimensional matrix that can be accessed from multiple starting points, described from different perspectives and analyzed towards various outcomes. These new understandings of urban spaces and their inherent potentialities affect collective realities and spatial environments alike.
Consequently, researchers working on and with spatial conceptions of urban spaces are challenged to address these transformations in their research, to adapt their methods to new urban realities, and to discuss new forms of coexistence in the city. Likewise, new media of spatial research, new technologies, and new urban collectives create innovative pathways for spatial research that can revolutionize our understanding of contemporary urbanity. In this sense, space serves as the basis, as the medium, and as an outcome of spatial research in various intersecting disciplines. At the same time, we are asked to consider multiple pathways towards knowledge creation to take different aspects of shifting urban realities into account. To address these challenges, we invite artists, architects, designers, urban researchers, urban planners, scholars, and decision-makers to share current research, inspiring results, methodological advances, as well as new conceptual approaches on urban spaces in a Webinar hosted by the Lisbon Faculty of Fine Arts* co-organized by the Institute for Urban and Regional Research (Austrian Academy of Sciences).
The Webinar focuses on innovative concepts and methods of spatial research and how they can create new perspectives on urban spaces, revolutionize common understandings of everyday urban environments, and create new urban communities across human and non-human actors. This online event features presentations, and discussion panels aiming at sparking dialogue between researchers, practitioners, creatives, and decision-makers to re-think concepts, methods, and practices of research on urban spaces. Topics revolve around creative and emergent methods of spatial research, fresh approaches to pressing issues and problems, as well as new conceptions on urban space and contemporary urbanity.
The following questions serve as a guiding framework for the upcoming Webinar: How can new concepts of space change our understandings of urban (co-)existence and our perspectives on spaces of everyday life in the city? How can innovative emergent, arts-based, and artistic research methods transform common understandings of ‘the urban’ in spatial research? How can new conceptual and methodological approaches revolutionize our vision of urban spatiality and address current issues and problems?
We welcome submission from a wide range of disciplines such as urban studies, urban planning, systems development, artificial intelligence, architecture, design, artistic and arts-based research, but also sociology, spatial planning, and urban geography.
Submissions should be made through the UXUC journal publishing platform.
Please indicate the thematic call you are submitting to in the “Comments for the Editor” field.
For all accepted submissions, publication costs will be waived for this thematic issue. Article Processing Charges (APCs) will be covered by the Institute for Urban and Regional Research at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), a partner institution of the Urban Creativity/ Wisethorough Support Program.
Format: Webinar with presentations, panel discussions and keynotes.
Editor: Pedro Soares Neves, Researcher collaborator CIEBA/FBAUL; ITI/LARSyS/IST Lisbon University; CIDEHUS/UEvora Évora; Portugal / Publisher Editor WT/ UC
Co-editor: Philipp Schnell, Institute of Urban and Regional Research, Austrian Academy of Sciences
In case of questions please contact: philipp.schnell@oeaw.ac.at.
Image Credits: Silas Lundquist in Unsplash
* via CIEBA / Thematic line in Exploratory Projects and Society / Systemic City - Interdisciplinary Practices group / research collaborator Pedro Soares Neves.
