Cities are developing into increasingly complex systems. This is giving rise to new scales of risk, making preparedness measures and resilience planning more challenging to formulate and implement.
Large urban populations growing directly over major fault lines in Iran, infectious disease epidemics becoming endemic in Hong Kong, flooding threatening the UK’s coastal towns, and China’s unique aging population issue exemplify how 21st century urbanism is becoming defined by our relationship to risk. We therefore question how prepared our urban lifestyles and urban forms are for these inevitable threats.
This is a call for an international and interdisciplinary perspective on risk within the built environment from students, academics, and professionals. Our goal is to collect worldwide research and extrapolate valuable lessons learnt that can be used in future architectural and urban design education and research.
Urban Emergencies : Emergent Urbanism is seeking papers and projects in a variety of fields which discuss the implications of emergent risks on the built environment and its inhabitants. In addition to architects and urbanists, we welcome submissions from all disciplines including anthropology, geography, history, economics, psychology, political science, etc. Threats are never purely an urban or human issue when it comes to the complexity of cities; risk and resilient solutions lie somewhere in between and cross-collaboration is key.
More information can be found here.
