Sophia Journal is currently accepting submissions for its third thematic cycle “Landscapes of Care” focused on “Public housing across multiple geographies: crossing theories and practices”.

Editors: Maria Neto (UBI-FAUP), Paz Nuñez Martí (UAH-ETSAM)
Guest Editors: Igea Troiani (LSBU), Joan Mac Donald (U. Chile), Jorge Tárrago Mingo (ETSAUN)

Open Call Video Presentation

Sophia Journal’s third theme, “Landscapes of Care”, addresses research, projects, experiences, and contemporary photographic and visual practices that focus on how architecture, understood in a broad sense, can help to heal the relationships between man and habitat, as well as the socio-environmental crisis that the planet is experiencing.

The concept of “Landscapes of Care” has increasingly been adopted by diverse areas of study, from health geography to the arts and architecture, transposed here as the action of the social state in the housing sector, which generates a relationship of care between the state and society, framed by economic, social, and cultural rights. In this call, we are interested in investigations and visual narratives that help us understand and document practices outside the dominant narratives, which promote the right to housing but also the right to the city, calling on the city and the territory as living and inclusive organisms, recognizing the importance of public resources and social responses, participatory processes, and co-responsibility, for global sustainability.

This issue, focusing on public housing, allows contributions to be centered on a dynamic reading of the city that is conditional and conditioned by housing typology. Combining architecture, public housing, habitat, and urban planning, we are convoking works that explore an interpretative narrative about housing and those who live in it, pilot projects with communities of practice capable of generating strategic visions about the possible future of city and territory, housing and the lives it (trans)forms, in this ontological relationship between the Man and house.

Public housing should be an example of innovative practices, whether in design or urban and territorial development. However, most interventions carried out through housing policies or specific and isolated actions on public housing need to be sufficiently known and disseminated by authorities, technicians, and researchers to produce broad knowledge and debate. Our objective is to make known and amplify these practices that intertwine theory and action and explore how photography, surveys, testimonies, and documentaries can be used as significant research instruments in the socio-economic, political, historical, technical, and ecological dimensions of social housing, the city and the territory, revealing good practices and models to study. Launching a critical look at city-making from its dominant program – housing – we also intend to establish relationships of continuity and/or rupture, alignments, and/or gaps between housing and urban, socio-political, and architectural thought nationally and internationally.

In this call for articles and visual essays for this issue of Sophia Journal Vol. 9 | Landscapes of Care. Social housing across multiple geographies: Crossing theories and practices, we invite authors to submit theoretical work, records of experiences in social housing programs, and visual essays on initiatives or pilot programs in public housing, where photography, graphic recording, testimony, and the documentary are present in a significant way and allow adding a differentiating layer for its understanding and recording. Descriptive, analytical, and interpretative projects offer a unique perception and new knowledge about housing, its residents, and the city, and its ability to respond to and reflect local conditions and be an element of socio-territorial cohesion. Projects that are critical territories capable of expanding our understanding of architecture and social landscape in terms of their language, location, residents, and neighborhood.

We are also interested in photography and film work that allows us to acknowledge the social and political dimension of architecture and landscape and understand architecture as Alvar Aalto did, “as a great synthetic process of combining thousands of definite human functions,” together with Donna Haraway’s focus on human and non-human interaction – new “nature cultures” capable of contributing to a greater understanding of the potential of architecture and landscape for a more ecological and sustainable balance and interaction between architecture and nature.

Abstract deadline: 1 December, 2023
Selected authors will be notified by 11 January, 2024

1st Manuscript deadline: 11 March, 2024
2nd Manuscript deadline: 1 September, 2024

Deadline for Conference Presentation: 10 September, 2024
International Conference (dtbc): 15 and 16 September, 2024

3rd Manuscript deadline (Journal): 5 October, 2024
Publication date (tbc): December 2024