Urban Territories as Malleable Matter for Negotiating Urban Futures - Anchors, Assemblages, Antagonisms

Call for Abstracts – Urban Creativity Conference 2025, 3-5 July 2025, Lisbon
Philipp Schnell & Vera Penz, Co-Editors of UXUC – User Experience and Urban Creativity Scientific Journal

NEW DEADLINE - 20 April


Territories have traditionally demarcated spheres of political influence and translated power relations into physical spaces. The delimitation of territories separated friends from foes and ensured that policy and polity infused the places of everyday life of citizens – consequently structuring individual lifeworlds and embodied environments. The states’ legal systems have been an indispensable building block of territorialized power systems that culminated in supranational entities such as the European Union. These vast organizations of supranational metagovernance changed the scales of mediated power relations and resulted in abstract political constructs, whose inner workings are often hard to grasp. Responsibilities and competencies at the level of nation states seem to have been diluted, as decision-making power moved away from national governments. At the same time grassroots organizations and political activists of all colors are gaining traction and are searching for answers to pressing issues and problems by re-posing a centuries-old question: Whose territory?

 

Especially in urban spaces, as the supposed centers of political, economic, and cultural life in society, these developments resonate strongly and prepare the playing field for future struggles for power. The sturdy materials of the territorialized nation state seem to crumble in the face of political turmoil, environmental catastrophes, and social crises. At the same time citizens are increasingly taking an active role in society and try to counteract current societal problems. Cities and urban centers often are the places, where struggles for power are fought and where political counter-positions are articulated. Here, change is initiated and the revolution festers on the ground, while political adversaries jostle for the possibility of collective futures in the abstract spaces of metagovernance. Hence, territories are challenged from the ground up: in the spaces of everyday life of citizens. What better place to start looking for answers to the questions: How is power over political, emotional, or imaginary territory articulated in urban spaces today? Which are levers of territorial power, media of revolution, and actors that keep the struggle for urban spaces alive? Which role can creative approaches to urban studies, artistic and arts-based research as well as urban planning, architecture, and social design take in the (re-)definition of collective urban territoriality?

 

We invite contributions from all authors that want to take part in a (re-)rendering of our collective understanding of urban spaces and their territorial implications, not only as places of power and political decision-making, but as places of empowerment, co-creation, and the collective redefinition of urban lifeworlds.

Please submit conference abstracts at https://journals.wisethorough.com/index.php/uxuc/about/submissions until April 20 2025. All selected authors will be invited to submit an article for the upcoming issue of UXUC – User Experience and Urban Creativity Journal (http://uxuc-journal.org) co-edited by Philipp Schnell & Vera Penz. For direct questions to the Co-Editors please contact us via: philipp.schnell@oeaw.ac.at or verapenz@gmail.com