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How were the concepts of the observer and user in architecture and urban planning transformed throughout the 20th and 21st centuries? Marianna Charitonidou explores how the mutations of the means of representation in architecture and urban planning relate to the significance of city's inhabitants. She investigates Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's fascination with perspective, Team Ten's interest in the humanisation of architecture and urbanism, Constantinos Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti's role in reshaping the relationship between politics and urban planning during the postwar years, Giancarlo De Carlo's architecture of participation, Aldo Rossi's design methods, Denise Scott Brown's active socioplactics and Bernard Tschumi's conception praxis.

How were the concepts of the observer and user in architecture and urban planning transformed throughout the 20th and 21st centuries? The author explores how the mutations of the means of representation in architecture and urban planning relate to the significance of city's inhabitants. She investigates Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's fascination with perspective, Team Ten's interest in the humanisation of architecture and urbanism, Constantinos Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti's role in reshaping the relationship between politics and urban planning during the postwar years, Giancarlo De Carlo's architecture of participation, Aldo Rossi's design methods, Denise Scott Brown's active socioplactics and Bernard Tschumi's conception praxis.

The article presents the reasons for which the issue of providing housing to low-income citizens has been a real challenge in Addis Ababa during the recent years and will continue to be, given that its population is growing extremely fast. It examines the tensions between the universal aspirations and the local realities in the case of some of Ethiopia's most ambitious mass pro-poor housing schemes, such as the "Addis Ababa Grand Housing Program" (AAGHP), which was launched in 2004 and was integrated in the "Integrated Housing Development Program" (IHDP) in 2006. The article argues that the quotidian practices of communities and their socio-economic and cultural characteristics are related to the spatial attributes of co-housing practices. Drawing upon the idea that there is a mutual correspondence between social and spatial structures, it places particular emphasis on the analysis of the IHDP and aims to show that to shape strategies that take into account the social and cultural aspects of daily life of the poor citizens of Addis Ababa, it is pivotal to invite them to take part in the decision-making processes regarding their resettlement. Departing from the fact that a large percentage of the housing supply in Addis Ababa consists of informal unplanned housing, the article also compares the commoning practices in kebele houses and condominium units. The former refers to the legal informal housing units owned by the government and rented to their dwellers, whereas the latter concerns the housing blocks built in the framework of the IHDP for the resettlement of the kebele dwellers. The article analyzes these processes of resettlement, shedding light of the fact that kebele houses were located at the inner city, whereas the condominiums are located in the suburbs. Despite the fact that the living conditions in the condominium units are of a much higher quality than those in the kebele houses, their design underestimated or even neglected the role of the commoning practices. The article highlights the advantages ...

The point of departure for this paper is the idea that Europe as a concept is related to the project of thinking and accomplishing universality. It represents the potential for an enlightened resistance in a world that is progressively becoming dominated by the mono-perspectivism of globalism. In this sense, Eurocentrism is specifiable only within the context of modernity and is crucial for thinking modernity. The tendency of architectural historiographies to place Eurocentric narratives under critical scrutiny since the dissolution of colonialist models is accompanied by the questioning of the earlier Zeitgeist theories, which had served to legitimize modernism. During the last four and a half decades, in many cases, the endeavors to incorporate postcolonialist criticism into architectural discourse failed to go beyond the peril of "provincializing" Europe. By depicting Europe and the West as a homogeneous power of domination over the rest of the world, postcolonial criticism turns Europe into the blind spot of its own discourse. The fallacious character of dichotomies, such as western/nonwestern or Eurocentric/non-Eurocentric, becomes evident if we bear in mind that various societies have adopted aspects of western modernity without fully adopting them, fitting them into the indigenous culture. The tension between the scientific ethos of the historian's task, which demands a commitment free of preconceptions and value judgments, and the political function of the project of history, which is based on a certain social order, has always existed since the emergence of the profession of the historian. The objective of the paper is to explore the place of the aforementioned tension within the framework of the efforts of architectural historians to shape models of architectural historiography that manage to challenge the western canon, it is indispensable to avoid labels such as "other" or colonial. Particular emphasis is placed on the complicity of architecture with structures of power and dominant ideological ...

The article examines the impact of the virtual public sphere on how urban spaces are experienced and conceived in our data-driven society. It places particular emphasis on urban scale digital twins, which are virtual replicas of cities that are used to simulate environments and develop scenarios in response to policy problems. The article also investigates the shift from the technical to the socio-technical perspective within the field of smart cities. Despite the aspirations of urban scale digital twins to enhance the participation of citizens in the decision-making processes relayed to urban planning strategies, the fact that they are based on a limited set of variables and processes makes them problematic. The article aims to shed light on the tension between the real and the ideal at stake during this process of abstracting sets of variables and processes in the case of urban scale digital twins. ; ISSN:1478-0771 ; ISSN:2048-3988

Under the headers of 'advocacy planning', 'collaboration', 'participatory design', 'co-production', 'commoning' and 'negotiated planning', participation is, nowadays, at the centre of the debate on urban design. Architects and urban designers are developing new concepts, tools and roles to comply with these new participatory modii operandi. The participatory concern in the urban design process has not only a long history in practice but also in urban design education. Various experimental initiatives with participation emerged in the domain of architectural pedagogy in the late sixties, often starting from student initiatives. Representative cases are The Architects' Resistance (TAR) - a group formed in 1968 by architecture students from Columbia GSAPP, MIT Department of Architecture, and Yale School of Architecture, - the National Organization of Minority Architecture Students (NOMAS), the Black Workshop, the City Planning Forum, and Associazione Studenti e Architetti (ASEA). Many of these groups emerged within the context of the struggles for civil rights and thus made a plea to have non-hegemonic or 'other' voices heard in the urban design process. These initiatives explored how new concepts, roles and tools for participation could become part of the education of the architect and urban designer. The paper investigates an ensemble of counter-events, counter-publications in the US and Italy during the sixties, shedding light on their impact on the institutional status of academia and on how activism can reinvent the relationship between architecture and democracy. Its objective is to reveal the tensions between enhancing equality in planning process and local bureaucracy in the case of advocacy planning strategies, on the one hand, and to reflect upon the necessity to reshape the urban planning models in order to respond to the call for a more democratic society, on the other.

The paper presents the reasons for which the question of providing housing to low-income citizens has been a real challenge in the case of Addis Ababa during the recent years and will continue to be, given the galloping growth of its population. It examines the tensions between the universal aspirations and the local realities in the case of 'Addis Ababa Grand Housing Program' (AAGHP) launched in 2004 and integrated in the 'Integrated Housing Development Program' (IHDP) in 2006. The paper draws upon the idea that there is a mutual correspondence between social and spatial structures, placing particular emphasis on the analysis of the IHDP. It aims to render explicit that, in order to shape strategies that take into account the social and cultural aspects of the quotidian life of the poor people in Addis Ababa, it is pivotal to invite them to participate to the decision-making processes regarding their resettlement. Departing from the fact that a large percentage of the housing supply in Addis Ababa consists of informal unplanned housing, the article also compares the commoning practices in kebele houses and condominium units. The former refers to the legal informal housing units owned by the government and rented to their dwellers, whereas the latter concerns the housing blocks built in the framework of the IHDP for the resettlement of the kebele dwellers. The paper analyzes these processes of resettlement, shedding light of the fact that kebele houses were located at the inner city, whereas the condominiums are located in the suburbs. It highlights the advantages of commoning practices in architecture and urban planning, and how the implementation of participation-oriented solutions can respond to the difficulties of providing housing. It argues that urban planning and architecture in Addis Ababa should be based on the principles of "negotiated planning" approach, which implies a close analysis of the interconnections between planning, infrastructure, and land.

The paper compares Cornelius Castoriadis and Henri Lefebvre's approaches. It places particular emphasis on "the imaginary" in the politics of self-governance, rendering explicit how the imaginary accompanying self-governance revive the tension between State reason and human reason and. Castoriadis, in The Imaginary Institution of Society, emphasizes the internal relation between what is intended – the development of autonomy – and that through which it is intended – the exercise of this autonomy. According to Castoriadis, these are two moments of a single process and defines as revolutionary politics "a praxis which takes as its object the organization and orientation of society as they foster the autonomy of all its members and which recognizes that this presupposes a radical transformation of society, which will be possible, in its turn, only through the autonomous activity of individuals." My paper intends to present which would be the implications of such revolutionary politics for urban studies. Henri Lefebvre, in "Theoretical Problems of Autogestion", underscores that autogestion introduces and stimulates a contradiction with the State. Lefebvre believes that autogestion calls into question the State's functioning as a constraining force erected above society as a whole, capturing and demanding the rationality that is inherent to social relations and practice. He considers that autogestion tends to resolve contradictions by subletting them into a new totality. In parallel, he wonders whether the principle of autogestion is an ideal whose rational core and content is ultimately derived from the democratic ideal. The paper revisits this question, juxtaposing it to the following question raised by Castoriadis, in The Imaginary Institution of Society: "Does not the critique of rationalism exclude the possibility of establishing a destructive and constructive revolutionary dynamics?" The objective is to relate the "practical way to change life" in Lefebvre's thought to Castoriadis's understanding of praxis.

This paper takes as its point of departure advocacy planning approaches' consideration that urban renewal is incompatible with any kind of socially effective urban planning. It focuses on analysing the Architects' Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH), the first organisation solely devoted to advocacy planning in the United States, and places particular emphasis on the critiques of urban renewal strategies in the late 1960s in the North-Eastern American context, and on the emergence of groups that aimed to struggle for the civil rights of African Americans. It closely examines how the Architects' Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH) provided technical and design advice to communities who could otherwise not afford it, aspiring to democratize urban planning. It pays special attention to the analysis of ARCH's program entitled "Architecture in the Neighborhoods" (1970), which aimed to recruit local black youth to become architects. In parallel, the paper compares the strategies of the Architects' Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH) with those of other groups struggling over the rights of minorities and the democratization of urban planning, such as The Architects' Resistance (TAR), and National Organization of Minority Architecture Students (NOMAS). The Architects' Resistance (TAR) was a group formed in 1968 by architecture students from Columbia GSAPP, MIT Department of Architecture, and Yale School of Architecture and was "concerned about the social responsibility of architects and the framework within which architecture is practiced." The National Organization of Minority Architecture Students (NOMAS) played a major role in the struggle over civil rights for African Americans in the United States. It was founded by a group of African-American architects in Detroit, Michigan in 1971 during the AIA National Convention and aimed to defend the rights of minority design professionals. The paper presents how the above-mentioned groups aimed to reshape urban planning models in order to respond to the call for a more democratic society. It sheds light on how they reinvented the relationship between architecture and democracy.

This paper examines the impact of the virtual public sphere on how public spaces are experienced and conceived in our data-driven society. It takes as its point of departure six principles: all data are local; data have complex attachments to place; data are collected from heterogeneous sources; data and algorithms are inextricably entangled; interfaces recontextualize data; and data are indexes to local knowledge. Paying particular attention to Yanni Loukissas's analysis in All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society and Anita Say Chan's approach in Networking Peripheries Technological Futures and the Myth of Digital Universalism, it aims to reveal the myths upon which the idea of so-called "digital universalism" is based. A first case that is closely examined in the paper is that of Zillow, an online real estate marketplace that seeks to make available information about "all the homes" in the United States. The paper begins with Loukissas's remark that "Zillow […] cultivates a perception of their map as a virtual public space", and sheds lights on the processes of merging of the physical and digital layer of public space in the case of Zillow. The main argument of the paper is that all data have complex attachments to place. Two characteristics of Zillow that are explored are the facts that "everyone has access [to the data], but no one is equal", and that while the space of data on Zillow is public, the journey through that space is private. The navigation in this online real estate marketplace is guided by individualized interests as opposed to the public good. A second case that is explored is that of "digital twins", which refers to digital representations enabling comprehensive data exchange and can contain models, simulations and algorithms describing their counterpart and its features and behaviour in the real world. The term "digital twin" was first coined in the early 2000s by Michael Grieves and refers to digital simulation models that run alongside real-time processes. "Digital twins" are conceptualised as digital replicas of physical entities. Despite their aspirations to enhance the participation of citizens in the decision-making processes and to incorporate their input to urban planning strategies, the fact that digital twins are based on a limited set of variables and processes makes them problematic. Because of the way they abstract sets of variables and processes, they cannot take into consideration the social aspects of urban contexts. Manuel Castells' approach is useful for deciphering the tension between the real and the ideal at stake during this process of abstracting sets of variables and processes in the case of "digital twins". Castells argues that the societal system corresponding to the digital era is based on two key features: informationalism and globalism. He also claims that societal processes cannot be understood or represented without the underlying technology. My objective is to present to what extent the above-mentioned cases fail to provide an understanding and experience of public space from a democratic perspective.

The paper examines how architects and urban planners shape connections between European land-based mobility, cities and landscapes. It investigates the development of spaces aiming to link auto mobility to the everyday experience of European citizens in different countries, adjusting their interventions to local sensibilities. For over half a century, politicians have promoted transportation and transnational mobility for commodities and individuals by planning and funding the E-road network. This attempt to link the different European nations and overcome their separate plans has reshaped the urban landscape and the territory at large. The paper also explores the role of urban planning and architecture in implementing new types of mobilities promoting environmental sustainability. At the centre of the paper lie the imaginaries produced by architects and urban planners, and their vision for highways in different national contexts and for their connexions to planned new towns. Taking into account that the EU and its nations aim to overcome regimes of petroleum-based mobility and associated architectures, the paper demonstrates how the land-based transportation of both individuals and commodities in the E-Road network functions as an actor of planetary urbanization, investigating three kinds of nodes within the E-Road network: the nodes encountered on the E-Roads, those to be found at the gates to cities, and the new structures aiming to imitate the urban dimension but proposing a novel articulation of pedestrian and automobile circulation. It relates the expression of the three nodes-typologies in various national contexts to overarching approaches concerning urban transformation within a trans-European network.

The phenomenon of using digital materials provokes a democratization of access to primary sources, transforming museums' relations to the public. Digitization does not have an impact only on the access to artworks through digital collections but is also related to the emergence of new art forms known as "digital-born media art". Both phenomena – the artworks' democratization due to the prolif-eration of digital collections and the emergence of various forms of digital-born media art – foster new demands in the design of art museums. The paper examines these new demands, diagnosing the current tendencies concerning the aforementioned phenomena, which are related to the trend of ap-pointing "digital directors" in art museums, and to the overgrowing role of digital curatorship in museum studies. The common denominator of the new demands related to these phenomena is the intensifi-cation of interactivity. Since the mid-1990s, digital technologies such as tracking and mapping have been used not only in the spatial organisation of exhibitions, but also in media art, making interactive media a com-monplace. Interactive digital interfaces are major components of this reorientation in the design of art museums. The design of interactive interfaces has contributed to the enhancement of art gallery ex-periences, as it becomes evident in cases as ARTLENS Gallery at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) (2017-), Asymptote's Guggenheim Virtual Museum (GVM) (1999-2002). The latter was conceived as a virtual museum dedicated to the display of internet art, providing an online digital archive for all the forms of new media art as well. is A recent case where Augmented Reality (AR) plays a major role is the over 107,000 square feet "Mori Building Digital Art Museum: TeamLab Borderless" in Tokyo's Odaiba district, which opened on 21 June 2018. Thanks to the use of 520 computers and 470 projec-tors, which produce various simulations, "Mori Building Digital Art Museum: TeamLab Borderless" offers to its visitors a multisensory experience (fig. 1). Space syntax methods, such as Bill Hillier's theory, are useful for understanding the implica-tions of the use of interactive digital interfaces in the design of art museums, and for analysing the spatial patterns that emerged due to the interactive digital interfaces. Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson, in The Social Logic of Space, aimed to present a general theory of how people relate to space . In Space is the Machine: A Configurational Theory of Architecture, Hillier's objective was to "outline a configurational theory of architecture and urbanism" . Bill Hillier claims that "[c]onfiguration seems in fact to be what the human mind is good at intuitively, but bad at analytically" . Taking as a starting point the incorporation of the space syntax concepts in the museological studies, my aim is to shed light on how the interactive digital interfaces have influenced the way the exhibition spaces are expe-rienced. Regarding this issue, Kali Tzortzi, in her paper entitled "Spatial concepts in museum theory and practice", has reflected upon the case of the "interactive experience model" , drawing upon the space syntax theory. Sharon Macdonald, in "Interconnecting: Museum Visiting and Exhibition Design", analyses the different trends in the so-called museum visitor research. She focuses her analysis on the so-called "directed behavioural studies", which focus on the investigation of "specific aspects of visitor behaviour in exhibitions" . Useful for comprehending how space syntax research can serve as a tool for explaining the ways in which the incorporation of interactive digital Interfaces in exhibition design affects the visitor's perception are the most recent studies on how "the visitor's perception is 'staged'" . A topic that the space syntax analysis has not addressed comprehensively is the impact of interactive technologies on how the visitors experience exhibition spaces. The paper examines the implications for exhibition de-sign of a new direction for the space syntax research concerns the investigation of "how physical spa-tial layout—and perhaps matters such as the perceived boundaries of an exhibition or its sequenc-ing—might be mediated by technologies such as interactive computer guidebooks" . The concept of "spatial configuration", which is central for the space syntax approach, is pivotal for better grasping the relationship between new media art and the architecture of exhibition spaces, and their respective use of augmented and virtual reality. The paper explains in which sense an analysis of exhibition spaces based on space syntax theory would focus on the connectivity of the different spatial components and the use of patterns concerning the ways of experiencing the 'spatial configuration' of the exhibition spaces.

Taking as its starting point the increasing importance of the role of digital curators within institutions holding architectural archives, the article aims to elaborate tools coming from intersectional theory and practice in order to produce an understanding of how women and black men are represented in teaching architectural history in an ensemble of emblematic schools of architecture. More specifically, the paper, through the elaboration of concepts and tools coming from the theory of intersectionality, examine how aspects concerning gender and race can be taken into account when establishing a curriculum of teaching architectural history. It is based on the hypothesis that visualisation strategies can show the evolution of the role of women and black people in architectural discourse. Drawing upon Kimberlé Crenshaw's work, and on the impact of the theory of intersectionality on digital humanities and digital labour studies, the project aims to shape a method of digital curation able to conjointly address issues of race, gender, class, ability, sexuality, or other categories of difference while interpreting the primary sources. Particular emphasis is placed on the fact that the intersectional perspective is the endeavour to interrogate its own positionality and the very processes of knowledge production, the project also explores how visualisation strategies can show the evolution of the role of women and black people in architectural discourse. A seminal text by Crenshaw, which is of great significance for the project, is her article entitled "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color", published in Stanford Law Review in 1991. In this article, Crenshaw argued that "both women and people of color" are marginalized by "discourses that are shaped to respond to one [identity] or the other" (Crenshaw 1991), rather than both. Most recently, the theory of intersectionality was introduced into the digital humanities in order to address issues regarding gender and race conjointly. As far as the field of architecture is con-cerned, the question of race is becoming more present in ongoing debates, as is evidenced by the recently published book Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (2020), edited by Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II and Mabel O. Wilson, and projects such as the Black Architects Archive (BAA) by Jay Cephas, whose aim was to collect and display the work of Black architects across history in an effort to bring to light underrepresented practitioners in architecture. The same is valid for the question of gender, as appears through the organisation of events including the symposium "The Fielding Architecture: Feminist Practices for a Decolonised Pedagogy", which took place at the University of Brighton in June 2019, and the emergence of collectives such as Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative, which in its manifest published in the Harvard Design Magazine describes itself as "a transnational coalition of feminists, awake to […] [their] positioning as "Others" within the patriarchy; awake to […] [their] exclusion from unmarked norm(s), awake to [their] […] emergence from a history of subjugation, subordination, and colonization" (FAAC 2018). Starting out from the hypothesis that it is becoming increasingly necessary to address these issues conjointly in the ongoing architectural debates, the paper presents certain methods of teaching architectural history that intend to bring the aforementioned aspects together. An important benefit of tackling gender and race issues simultaneously is the capacity to "address the structural parameters that are set up when a homogeneous group has been at the center and don't automatically engen-der understanding across forms of difference", as Moya Bailey has argued (Bailey 2020). Another noteworthy characteristic of the intersectional perspective is the endeavour to interrogate its own posi-tionality and the very processes of knowledge production. Selective References Bailey, Moya, "All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave", in Barbara Bordalejo, Roopika Risam, eds., Intersectionality in Digital Humanities (Amsterdam: Arc Humanities Press, 2020) 9-12. Bilge, Sirma, "Intersectionality undone: Saving intersectionality from feminist intersectionality studies", Du Bois Review, 10(2) (2013): 405-424. Carastathis, Anna, Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2016). Cheng, Irene, Charles L. Davis II, Mabel O. Wilson, eds., Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical Histo-ry from the Enlightenment to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 2020). Collins, Patricia Hill, Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Cambridge: Polity Press: 2016). Cooper, Brittney, "Intersectionality", in Lisa Disch, Mary Hawkesworth, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Crenshaw, Kimberlé, "Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color", in Stanford Law Review, 43(6) (1991): 1241-1299. Doyle, Shelby, Leslie Forehand, "Fabricating Architecture: Digital Craft as Feminist Practice", the Avery Review, 25 (2017): 1-10. FAAC, "To Manifest", Harvard Design Maganize 46: No Sweat (2018): 182-189. Harris, Jessica C., Lori D. Patton, "Un/Doing Intersectionality through Higher Education Research", The Journal of Higher Education, 90(3) (2019): 347-372. Marie, Jakia, Donald "DJ" Mitchell Jr., Tiffany L. Steele, Intersectionality & Higher Education: Research, Theory, & Praxis (New York: Peter Lang, 2019). Romero, Mary, Introducing Intersectionality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018).