Non-Philosophical Encounters with Built Environments

Guest Editors: Hannah Hopewell & Yehotal Shapira

Submissions due: November 8, 2021

Cities and their design are loci for re-imagining ways of relating and living together. The city and urban space also bring systemic challenges into sharp focus, such as accelerating spatial injustice, climate change induced effects and capitalist exploitation. The current Covid crisis intensifies this imperative by demanding reevaluation of how the city and its design might be presently approached. Taking this provocation further, we seek to consider how the current epoch shakes the very ground of philosophical thought substantiating notions of the city, and in turn, its attendant imaginative possibilities?

This special-themed issue examines ways François Laruelle’s non-philosophy and non-standard theory bears upon concerns within practices and theories associated with city making. Non-philosophy opens a space for radically immanent, democratic experiments with thought without subservience to the particular philosophical circularity upon which city-thinking is found. Analogous to how Laruelle (2012) posits non-philosophy as, “…not a conceptual art but a concept modelled by the art, a generic extension of art”, could we consider “generic extensions” of how the city is thought?

We suggest non-philosophical encounter in this context performs a critical spatial practice potentially relating the built environment to a mode of “decolonised thought”. We seek to critically explore what and how this non-philosophical agency is performed or demonstrated within the built environment fields and related spatial arts and practices. We are therefore interested in how non-philosophy is used, or what it can do. Accordingly, this issue gathers ways spatial practices experiment with the modelling of concepts, and performing non-standard thought in the context of various urban histories and places. Concurrently, occasions of non-philosophy’s transmutation is of interest.

Track I — Non-philosophy and disciplinary knowledge: Limits and Borders

How spatial relationships can be re-evaluated beyond any common regulation, as well as the situated meaning and expression of a heretic position within each of the fields of built environment practices.
How this affinity plays out to extend the capacities of creating new theoretical knowledge in this context that is indifferent to philosophy or theories external to them.

Track II — Non-Philosophical humanity: Ethico-ecological comportment

Occasionings of non-philosophical humanity and non-ecological thought in built environment practices opened to questions of relationality and nature beyond anthropocentric humanisms.
Laruelle writes: “It is urgent that we test with new principles the knowledge we are able to have about life and recenter ethics and epistemology on the “encounter,” as we now say, with the animal and plants.” What might non-philosophical encounters avail for architectural and related practices in addressing forms of exploitation of the earth, plants and animals?

Track III — Non-philosophy as method: Thinking writing knowing designing with

Non-philosophical practice offers a method of bringing the real—pure immanence—into built environment thought, whereby the real is never claimed but is, rather, cloned.
Submissions may include methodological strategies to “think-with-write-with-live with-design-with” the city immanently, thereby triggering reimaginations of the city and forms of the human that exceed the possibilities of self-reflective consciousness and free-will.

Accepted formats

We welcome contributions from academia, professionals and practitioners across architecture, landscape architecture, architectural history, urban design, urban planning, environmental studies, geography and related spatial arts.

Refereed Articles/Essays (4000–6000 words)
Provocations (~1000 words)
Visual Submissions (~300 word explanation)

How to submit

Please submit your paper to oraxiom@isshs.edu.mk (original guest-editor contacts: Hannah.hopewell@vuw.ac.nz, yehotal3@gmail.com).

Submissions →