CALL FOR PAPERS; Nº 34- JOURNAL "PROYECTO, PROGRESO, ARQUITECTURA"

2020-06-10
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  CALL FOR PAPERS PpA ISSUE 35: HYBRID TERRITORIES: BEYOND THE PERIPHERY

 

Publication "Call for papers issued on": NOVEMBER 3rd, 2025

Dead Line: FEBRUARY 6th, 2026

Publication nº 35 PpA: NOVEMBER, 2026

In October 1991, Casabella magazine featured an essay by Bernardo Secchi titled La periferia (The Periphery). In it, the Italian urban planner reflected on the evolving nature of the contemporary metropolis, arguing that the periphery could no longer be seen as a simple divide between the rural and the urban. Drawing on the concept of città diffusa—introduced some years earlier by his compatriot Francesco Indovina—Secchi described the modern city’s sprawl: a form of anthropised territory defined by the absence of both centre and edge, where residential, productive and agricultural functions coexist in a dispersed and fluid manner.

Three decades on, that reflection remains strikingly relevant, taking on new dimensions.The expansion of infrastructure, the reach of mobility, the transformation of productive and logistical systems, and the emergence of new ways of inhabiting have given rise to territories where the urban and the rural no longer stand apart but coexist. These hybrid territories—neither wholly urban nor purely rural—where the city fragments and the countryside grows denser, have been described through notions such as suprarurality, diffuse territory, urban territorialisation, and urbanised ruralities. They can also be read as the third landscape evoked by Gilles Clément. Such territories reveal not only a crisis of categories but also the urgent need for new theoretical, projective and critical frameworks capable of addressing the complexity of these evolving environments.

In this context, architecture is challenged to think and act beyond the traditional boundaries of city and countryside. How is space constructed within these hybrid territories where urban form becomes diffuse? Which disciplinary instruments enable us to interpret them and design within them? What roles do architecture, landscape and planning play in shaping these intermediate realms?

This issue of PpA explores contemporary modes of inhabiting, designing and representing hybrid territories. We aim to bring together theoretical reflections, territorial research, architectural practice and experimental work that engage with this phenomenon across multiple scales and perspectives, analysing its many frictions and possibilities: between nature and technology, production and dwelling, ecology and economy, memory and design.

We welcome contributions that address themes such as:

  • Post-metropolitan urbanisation, territorial fragmentation and formless expansion.
  • Tensions between extractivism, conservation and inhabitation in rural–urban interface areas.
  • Projects exploring new modes of occupation across the rural–urban continuum, dismantling the traditional city–countryside binary.
  • Policies, infrastructures and planning frameworks responding to territorial indeterminacy.
  • Cartographic representations, critical narratives and analytical tools for reading the hybrid territory.
  • Architectural practices operating on the fringes of the urban system, testing design strategies within hybrid contexts.

Drawing —the discipline’s essential medium— should hold a central role within the contributions, articulating ideas and discoveries through plans, maps and photographs.

With Hybrid Territories: Beyond the Periphery, PpA invites reflection on the architectural project as a practice capable of reading, interpreting and transforming the new edge landscapes of the contemporary condition, where boundaries dissolve and conventional spatial categories yield to emerging forms of territorial urbanity.

 

Author of the call for papers:

Guillermo Pavón Torrejón, dr. en Arquitectura, profesora de la ETS de Arquitectura, Universidad de Sevilla.
Email de consulta sobre la convocatoria: gpavon@us.es