Calls

A40 (EXTRA) (2025) DOUBLE COLLAPSE: ECOSISTEMIC AND HUMANIST.

Guest Editors:

Manoel Rodrigues Alves, Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Universidade de São Paulo, Brasil

Julio Arroyo, Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina

For the contemporaries of the first 25 years of the 21st century, contemporaneity, understood as a historical condition and cultural pattern, reformulates problems and introduces new subjects of study, conditioning the revision of apparently consolidated procedures and theoretical frameworks. The awareness of living in new eras, such as those of the anthropocene and the digital, opens up hypotheses of transition towards a post-human world in which the city and the territory, public space and social practices, architecture and the aesthetics of everyday life are confronted as the end of a historical cycle, giving rise to a different state. José Luis Pardo (2011) argues that due to the civilisational change we are undergoing; we are in a permanent transition of paradigms: is this the case in the Global South?

The direction taken by the development of technology since modernity affects different disciplinary fields, such as Architecture and Urbanism, which have become a kind of absolute knowledge about the ways of inhabiting the Earth, considered as an available resource to be instrumentalised with the consequent disappearance of biomes and the degradation of landscapes. Urban territories, cities, have been transformed into devices with a high environmental impact. To be a contemporary of these changes means paying attention to concepts such as the Anthropocene, Capitalocene or Chthulucene which, due to their breadth, express the multi-causality of the processes that affect the planet as a whole, opening up the possibility of developing a new ethic in the relationship between humanity and nature.

Likewise, the entrenchment of the digital era promotes informational logic in all orders of existence, facilitates compulsive connectivity between monadic individuals (Sadin, 2020) and expands the application of artificial intelligence, giving rise to crisis phenomena that transcend national boundaries and challenge the power of states. Realities emerge in which subjects develop, by epochal imperative, new sensibilities and cognitive capacities that alter the notion of space and time. The urban locus as a factor of stability in space and duration in time, yields to the volatility and instantaneity of the digital, modifying collective practices in urban public space.

Cities (in the Global South), characterised by their multiple temporalities and spatialities, which in themselves can be explained by their historical complexity, are confronted with the need to process new externalities that are specific to their singularities and to political, economic and cultural globalisation. Thus, the question of our times, of the anthropocene and the digital, constitutes an epiphenomenon that introduces new parameters for thinking the city as a palimpsest of meanings, material elements and social practices.

Are these worlds in ruins, human and non-human worlds produced from a logic of transience and instantaneity, of ephemeral times and amnesic spaces (A. F. Carlos), of forgetfulness and substitution? In this new era, the separation between Nature and Culture, as well as between subject and society, is unsustainable and requires new perspectives and approaches to confront the dualisms, colonialism and hegemony of the Western world.

Starting from the fact that today's city is an expression of the power of globalised capitalism, and that there is a shift from the city-work-politics triad to the city-management-business triad, enhanced by the disruptive presence of technology, we pose the following questions:

- What are the possibilities and limitations of the South in the face of the complexity of contemporary trends that imply a significant civilisational transformation?

- Do these trends constitute new threats or new opportunities for societies marked by acute inequalities?

- To what extent does the Global South propose a situated epistemology, adequate to face the challenges of the contemporary moment?

- What emerges as a development of this epistemology in relation to the values, elements and procedures of design disciplines such as Architecture and Urbanism?

We call for alternative and critical thinking about the material and symbolic processes of our cities and territories through the presentation of cases, reflections or records that give an account of how these tendencies are processed in the Global South, in a time that is experienced as the cause and consequence of a hypothetical double apocalypse: that of environmental and human collapse.

PARDO, José Luis. Disculpen las molestias, estamos transitando hacia un nuevo paradigma. En Arena, L. y Fogué, U. Planos de (inter)sección. Materiales para un diálogo entre filosofía y arquitectura. Lampreave, 2011.

SADIN, Eric. La Inteligencia artificial o el desafío del siglo. Anatomía de un antihumanismo radical. Buenos Aires, Caja Negra, 2020.

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A41 EXTRA (2026) Decolonizing Spatial Justice from Palestine: Spaciocide, Resistance, and Resonant Geographies of Struggle

Guest Editors - Short Bios

Shaden Awad

Architect and Associate Professor at the Department of Architectural Engineering and Planning at Birzeit University. Her work focuses on spatial politics under settler colonialism, decolonial urban studies, and feminist and indigenous epistemologies of space. She has published on urban transformations and contested geographies, the social construction of home, and socio-spatial resilience, situating Palestinian space as a theoretical ground for rethinking global geographies of injustice.

Mohammed Abualrob

Architect and Lecturer at the Department of Architectural Engineering and Planning at Birzeit University. His work examines the intersections of infrastructure, spatial practices, and local knowledge within colonial and historical contexts. He explores material, environmental, and social networks that shape architectural and spatial formations, and engages in critical initiatives reimagining mapping and documentation through community practices, oral histories, and situated perspectives.

Introduction

Spatial justice, as theorised by Lefebvre, Harvey, and Soja, links the production of space to struggles over rights, participation, and redistribution. Yet such approaches largely presume a legitimate state capable of ensuring justice. In settler colonial conditions, this assumption collapses. Spatial injustice is not a deviation but the governing logic itself: a tool for erasure, fragmentation, and dispossession.

In Palestine, spatial violence manifests as zoning, militarized infrastructures, land confiscation, siege urbanism, control of mobility, and the engineered precarity of life. This systematic destruction of indigenous presence—what Palestinian scholars have theorised as spaciocide—renders liberal frameworks of inclusion or democratic reform structurally incapable of producing justice. The question is not how the colonized may gain “access” to the state, but how liberation, land-based sovereignty, and everyday practices of resistance rupture colonial spatial orderings.

For this reason, Palestine is the central epistemic and political grounding of this issue. It is not merely a case study but a vantage point from which to rethink spatial justice itself. Palestine forces us to confront the limits of rights discourse, the fiction of neutral planning, and the complicity of architectural and infrastructural regimes in colonial domination.

However, the forms of spatial control deployed in Palestine resonate widely. The infrastructures of enclosure, securitization, resource extraction, and displacement echo across other territories shaped by settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and militarized development. From indigenous struggles in the Americas, to urbanized refugee containment in Lebanon or Jordan, to extractivist frontiers in the Global South, similar regimes of dispossession—though not identical—produce comparable architectures of vulnerability.

This special issue therefore welcomes contributions that foreground Palestine while also building intellectual and practical solidarities with other geographies of struggle—not to universalize Palestine, but to connect situated knowledges and comparative forms of resistance that exceed the nation-state.

We seek contributions from architecture, urbanism, geography, political ecology, history, artistic practice, and interdisciplinary research that interrogate how spatial justice must be redefined when sovereignty itself is denied, contested, or collectively reimagined.

Development of the approach

Lefebvre’s notion of the right to the city positioned spatial production as a political act— one that reflects power hierarchies, economic systems, and social control. These capitalism-oriented discourses critique inequality and exploitative urban structures, they tend to assume a nation-state capable of enforcing rights and mediating class conflicts. Spatial justice, therefore, has often been framed as a reformist project—one of redistribution, inclusion, and democratization without questioning the legitimacy of the nation-state itself. In settler colonial contexts like Palestine, the logics of inclusion, reclamation, and democratization of the city fail to achieve spatial justice. While theoretical frameworks rooted in civic rights and class struggle discourses are insightful, they can inadvertently legitimize an illegitimate state and settler presence, obscuring the distinction between the colonizer and the colonized. Spatial injustice cannot be separated from the question of whose sovereignty and whose land a city stands on. In this context, spatial injustice is not merely the outcome of economic inequality, but is the foundational tool of colonial domination through the erasure or displacement of indigenous peoples and ongoing colonial relations and spatial violence that engineer the space.

From a Deleuzian perspective, the Zionist settler colonial spaciocidal ideology, established since 1948, aimed at the de-territorialization and re-territorialization of the indigenous people. This ideology has been in existence since the late 19th century, even before the Palestinian Nakba and continuing till know as it is clear in the ongoing Genocide in Gaza. From this perspective, spatial justice in Palestine cannot be understood through liberal or reformist frameworks of inclusion. It demands a decolonial rethinking—one that foregrounds collective liberation, indigenous spatial knowledge, and everyday acts of resilience against spaciocide. Therefore, this issue goes beyond simply ensuring inclusion within existing spatial and political structures. It aims to challenge dominant notions of spatial justice and consider contexts beyond the nation-state.

The settler colonial context also reveals the limitations of citizenship as the primary framework for rights in the dominant notions of spatial justice. Being under occupation, a refugee or displaced person, a resident or second- class citizen, or stateless, renders citizenship either unattainable or weaponized. This issue invites reflections on rupturing the notion of spatial injustice in the Palestinian geography and exploring alternative forms of belonging and political community—such as community stewardship, cooperatives, transnational solidarities, and communal infrastructures—that subvert state-defined identities.

At the same time, the retreat or fragmentation of the settler colonial apparatus does not necessarily yield spatial justice. Across the world, the nation state has been paralleled by the rise of corporate power, infrastructures, and financial systems that now shape territory and subjectivity. In Palestine, as elsewhere, spatial governance is increasingly privatized. The question of who controls space—and through what economic, legal, or digital apparatuses—demands urgent scrutiny.

Target

We invite contributions that challenge the inherited frameworks of spatial justice, sovereignty, and citizenship, envisioning alternative worlds beyond both the colonial and corporate state. This special issue of Astragalo aims to explore critical, de-colonial readings of spatial justice through the contested settler colonial context of Palestine. We welcome contributions that question the concept of spatial justice and seek to understand community agency, explore alternative forms of communal sovereignties, and rethink practices of belonging beyond citizenship. We particularly encourage contributions that also seek to look into how architecture, spatial practice, and design enable these emergent forms of collective autonomy.

Although this issue primarily focuses on Palestine, we also encourage contributions from other geographies connected to or resonant with the Palestinian experience. We welcome explorations of alternative sovereignties and forms of spatial agency that challenge and transcend the dominant frameworks of the nation-state and colonial power, offering insights into shared struggles for justice, belonging and collective transformation.

Thematic Axes

Spatial Justice in Settler Colonial Context

• Decolonial readings of Lefebvre, Harvey, and Soja in non-state contexts.
• The architectural and infrastructural dimensions of spaciocide.
• Corporate Sovereignty as a form of spatial injustice.

Alternative Sovereignties and Forms of Spatial Resistance

• Indigenous systems of land stewardship and communal sovereignty.
• Cooperatives, mutual care networks, and autonomous infrastructures.
• Feminist and ecological governance models as spatial practices.
• Memory, narrative, and the reclamation of erased geographies.
• Art, architecture, and pedagogy as tools of decolonial spatial justice.

Beyond Citizenship: Practices of Belonging and Collective Rights.

• Everyday citizenship and spatial agency among displaced or unrecognized communities.
• Hospitality, refuge, and care as political spatial acts.
• Reimagining borders, identity, and movement through architecture and art.

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A42 (2026) Rewilding Cities: Valuing the Urban Wilderness

Guest Editor: Carlos García Vázquez. Department of Architectural History, Theory and Composition. Higher Technical School of Architecture, University of Seville.

Submissions deadline: 15 June 2026
Peer review: until 20 July 2026
Publication: September 2026

The concept of “renaturalisation,” or “rewilding”, emerged in the 1990s in the environmental sciences. It referred to a strategy involving the reintroduction of wild plant and animal species into a given ecosystem and the restoration of its abiotic factors. Today, what unites the various versions of the concept is its identification with self‑sustainability and self‑regulation, and the consequent rejection of continuous, intensive human management of natural spaces.

At the start of this century, the concept entered urban studies. Here it is necessary to distinguish between the strategy —urban renaturalisation— and the places where it is applied: areas that the English‑language literature calls the urban wilderness. Regarding the former, Nausheen Masood and Alessio Russo define it as “an idea, an initiative or an ecological strategy to bring greater diversity to an urban area by introducing native flora and fauna into the urban infrastructure,” emphasising that the goal of urban renaturalisation is to enhance cities’ biodiversity. As for the places where it is implemented, the urban ecologist Ingo Kowarik describes the urban wilderness as “places characterised by a high level of self‑regulation in ecosystem processes, including population dynamics of native and non‑native species with open‑ended community assembly, where direct human impacts are negligible.” In other words, as in the environmental sciences, the basis of urban renaturalisation is self‑sustainability and self‑regulation.

To specify which urban natures can be considered “urban wilderness,” Kowarik identifies four categories corresponding to different degrees of human interference: “Nature 1 represents remnants of pristine ecosystems (e.g. forests, wetlands); Nature 2 patches of agrarian or silvicultural land uses (e.g. fields, managed grasslands, cultivated forests); Nature 3 represents designed urban green spaces (e.g. parks, gardens); and Nature 4, novel urban ecosystems (e.g. wastelands, vacant plots, spoil heaps) that can emerge after a rupture in ecosystem development, e.g. in the wake of building activities.” According to Kowarik, the natures with the highest level of self‑sustainability and ecosystem self‑organisation are the first and the fourth: urban areas that have been abandoned for a long period and colonised by spontaneous vegetation and wildlife. These may be patches of scrub along the edges of roads; undeveloped plots; abandoned infrastructure; post‑industrial areas dotted with derelict factories and warehouses; or peri‑urban spaces that are neither built upon nor cultivated.

In the 1970s, urban ecologists began to value the urban wilderness, where they discovered ecosystems far more biodiverse than those found in agricultural areas (second nature) or traditional urban parks (third nature), where plants and animals adjust to the functional specificity of their setting. Twentieth‑century planning policies, however, regarded these zones as “weeds” and therefore “anomalies” to be corrected. This is hardly surprising. Defending the preservation of the urban wilderness implies a paradigm shift: it requires extending the idea of the city beyond the built – the result of planning – to embrace the network of relationships that humans, animals, plants and minerals establish in the urbanised environment. This poses a difficult challenge to planners: it urges them to step back and leave part of the city’s definition in the hands of nature. Over the past decade, numerous theorists and practitioners have taken up this challenge, convinced that the wave of urban decline that began in the 1970s, leaving countless abandoned areas behind, was not a passing phase but has become a structural component of contemporary cities. Urban wilderness is no longer seen as an anomaly, but rather as an integral part of the city that can deliver many benefits in terms of biodiversity.

This issue of Astrágalo invites reflections on the valorisation of the urban wilderness and on urban renaturalisation policies that aim not only to achieve cities’ sustainability but also to repair some of the damage they have inflicted on nature. The issue also seeks critical, post‑urban and de‑hierarchising readings of the concept of renaturalisation: contributions that question the nature–city dichotomy and analyse feral, residual or abandoned spaces as sites where new social, material and symbolic ecologies emerge. Proposals may explore how these disruptive urban natures alter traditional planning frameworks, challenge the extractive, neoliberal logic of urbanisation, and allow us to imagine more open, hybrid ways of inhabiting that are not exclusively anthropocentric.

[1] Nausheen Masood y Alessio Russo, “Community Perception of Brownfield Regeneration through Urban Rewilding”, Sustainability, 15 (4), 2023, 2.

[2] Ingo Kowarik, “Urban wilderness: Supply, demand, and access”, Urban Forestry and Urban Greening, 29 (enero), 2018, 336-47.

[3] Kowarik, “Urban wilderness”, 337.

[4] Kowarik gives the second nature, rural areas, a medium level, and the third, traditional parks and gardens, a low level.