Thematic Areas

The 2020 EAAE-ARCC International Conference and 2^nd Valencia International Biennial of Research in Architecture encourage the submission of papers concerning the hereunder thematic areas:

Devising, representing and narrating the city

Graphic expression has always appeared as a stimulating field for architectural experimentation and research in synergy with many other disciplines within architecture. The way in which cities have been drawn along history and the techniques employed for depicting all their actors and activities play a fundamental role when it comes to understand and apprehend the underlying values that each society prioritized when designing and managing the locations where population would concentrate. Likewise, the actual graphical expression trends are reflections of our interests and inevitable have an influence on our architectural production in the city. This thematic area welcomes papers and posters from different fields of graphic expression which focus on new methods for conceiving and narrating the city, such as new graphic techniques, new modelling and representing methods, and even new ways for depicting urban flows and city dynamics.

 

 

Living in urban landscapes

People living in the city spend most of their time in anthropised environments. Urban landscape takes center stage and has an undoubted influence on the quality of life. The different scales of urban landscape along with its own internal and external dynamics offer interesting research scenarios to be tackled from multidisciplinary points of view. Among these contexts, urban fabrics and public space constitute a base for research from morphological, functional, social and environmental perspectives. This thematic area encompasses papers and posters on the landscape and urbanistic side of the city, also including those tools for its analysis and interpretation such as cartography. Among many others, topics to be addressed may include human scale, morphology and activity in the city, occupation, sustainability, permanence, transformation, mobility, and obviously landscape as cultural heritage and daily life stage.

 

 

The new faces the old

Cities are living organisms in constant renovation. With the exception of the less and less cases of new neighborhoods developments or occasional brand new cities, isolated replacement of buildings, the renewal of public spaces and their continuous updating and maintenance constitute the biggest percentage of an architect job. Therefore, it is very easy to find cases were a new intervention should meet previous or even historical elements. These encounters should be designed carefully in order to warrant that the different physical and cultural layers that have built our cities live together in harmony. This thematic area welcomes papers and posters on theories and examples about the coexistence of old and new actors in the urban context as well as the results of this cohabitation in the quality of the city. Topics might address not only current cases but also how this matter has been addressed during different periods of the history.

 

 

 

Restoration, conservation and renovation

The interpretation of history has traditionally opened new ways to build the future. That fact is especially undeniable in cities, having been the stage of most of the historical facts that constitute our cultural heritage. The geographical and timescale framework is vast enough to cover stages which comprise from ancient cultures to contemporary times. A transversal and multidisciplinary approach to these issues is an interesting endeavor. Likewise a meaningful percentage of contemporary cities do not expect a meaningful growing, and even those which do have a large number of neighborhoods which are already built but need to be fixed and updated. This thematic area encourages papers and posters on restoration, conservation and renovation as a matter of research. Architectural heritage and conservation constitute an amazing window of opportunity in modern practice that has induced the development of many fascinating research lines.

A future based on technology

City life is increasingly synonym of technology. The quick development experienced by cities during the last centuries cannot be explained without a vast range of technology advances which enabled not only more population in less space but also better living conditions. The desire of accessing this technology benefits is one of the most relevant reasons for more population moving to the city. Innovative building systems and evolved materials are making possible to satisfy the ever more demanding comfort levels and social ambitions. It is absolutely undeniable that the city is being the stage of this continuous evolution and these advances are shaping it. This thematic area welcomes papers on innovative building materials, building techniques for a better building and better living, energy efficiency, renewable energy systems, continuous innovation and improvement in conditioning techniques, and new methods and building techniques in structures for architecture.

 

 

Smart cities vs. Tech cities

Data have an amazing and increasing importance in today’s world. A correct collection and subsequent processing can guarantee a more efficient management of assets and resources. This smart use of the information is providing the inhabitants of smart cities a better and often more sustainable quality of life. But the necessary use of technology for the collecting and processing the data doesn’t necessary mean that technology will also be used to implement improvements or that technology has a strong presence in daily life or the employment context. This second step that some cities have already taken, but there are others that might be rather reluctant since their concept or quality of life differs.  This thematic area encompasses papers and posters which are focused on smart cities, tech cities and the thrilling dichotomy of assuming naturally both roles or consciously and deliberately having chosen one option since some aspects of the refused one are understood as a loss of welfare. Big data influence on urban life as a topic will also be welcome.

 

 

 

New professional practices and research practices

Despite this process had already begun much before for many practitioners, the long reflection imposed by the scarcity of commissions produced by the financial crisis of the beginning of the century in many countries led architects massively to look for new professional practices. Curriculums in schools of architecture endow their graduates with knowledge and skills that qualify them for developing much more than the traditional professional practice. Likewise, the importance of research nowadays across disciplines has revealed that most of architecture daily practice is an exercise of research itself since each project constitutes a unique result for solving needs in a specific after a thorough process. This awareness has propitiated the awakening of a new generation of architects which is exclusively focused on research for improving human built environment. Cities have been the scenario of these trends and have been substantially influenced by them. This thematic area welcomes papers and posters on new professional practices, research practices and their influence on the city.