Since the global financial crisis of 2008, a landscape marked by foreclosed homes, empty luxury towers, divided cities, and occupied streets has provoked debates concerning architecture’s relation to political economy. Are those buildings and sites of crisis and domination merely the backdrop to financial capitalism? If not, then this global, increasingly uneven, landscape compels us to recognize the instrumentalities and values that sustain and even augment economic power relations, through architecture’s own workings and operations. The moment is ripe for the reevaluation of old frameworks in order to consider the role of architecture, planning, and development in assembling the political-economic nexus.

We propose that architecture has not only been formed by, but can be seen as productive of political-economic formations throughout the world. We invite bold, exploratory, and provocative papers from not only architectural history & theory but from any discipline that may contribute to the the elaboration of new research projects, methods, theories, and perspectives. Potential themes and topics for this conference include but are not limited to:

  • Architecture and inequality
  • Valorization through/of architecture
  • Temporalities within the built environment
  • Production of territory and/or property  
  • Professionalization of architectural practice
  • Architecture as material and epistemic technique of calculation
  • Resource extraction, accumulation, composition, and design
  • Aesthetics and political-economic subjectivity
  • Political economy and the spatial structuring of race, gender, class  
  • Labour in architectural production
  • Building construction/management cost control
  • Architecture and micro- or macro-economics
  • Space and the business cycle
  • Architectures of trade, exchange, and circulation
  • Material and spatial cultures of currencies, finance, and information
  • Architecture and financial security/securitization
  • Financialization and architectural representation
  • Digitalization in architecture and finance
  • Housing
  • Capitalist growth and ecological crisis
  • Political spaces of economic negotiation and conflict
  • Economies of domesticity
  • The politics of real estate development
  • History of heterodox spatial-economic theory and practice
  • Architecture of revolutionary political struggles
  • Economics and politics of conservation/preservation
  • Architecture and the management of populations
  • Architectures of “the commons”

Submission Info: Please send 250-300-word abstract to avape2016[at]gmail.com