Call for Papers

ZARCH is currently accepting the submission of articles for their consideration, following the external Peer Review process as described on this website. They should address the topic for the upcoming issue.

Issue 27 "Beyond Urban Green: Symbiosis between Vegetation and the Built Form"

Deadline for submission of articles: January 30th, 2026
Expected publication date: December 2026

Call Text:

 

The need to reconsider the relationship between nature and architecture has become increasingly urgent in today’s context. The climate crisis, the loss of biodiversity, and the depletion of natural resources demand new ways of inhabiting and designing. According to projections from the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT), by 2050 two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities. At the same time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that without substantial changes to current emission policies, global warming will surpass the critical threshold of 1.5°C.

In response, we must redefine the models of our cities to make them not only more livable, but fundamentally more efficient from the environmental and biodiversity preservation point of view. In this context, vegetation plays an essential role. One of the key challenges in architectural and urban thinking today is rethinking the presence of vegetation in urban environments and how it might transform our way of life.

In contrast to the modernist paradigm, often based on the separation and domination of nature, we are witnessing a progressive reintegration and reinvention of nature. It is increasingly being understood as a key structuring element in architectural and urban design. Vegetation in our surroundings is no longer an immutable scenic backdrop or a reserve for evasion. We must approach its character from a new perspective that goes beyond the purely aesthetic and functional, shaping plant systems capable of generating ecosystem services in urban and peri-urban areas. This implies opening our eyes to new ecosystems emerging spontaneously within parks and gardens, or vacant lots, residual spaces, and post-industrial fragments.

Over the years, ZARCH has demonstrated a strong commitment to environmental concerns, recognizing its vital place within architectural and urban thought. These concerns have been addressed in both individual articles and thematic issues such as No. 7 (Landscape Perspectives), No. 15 (Urban Processes, Water Dynamics, and Climate Change), or more recently, No. 23 (Peri-Urban Landscapes).

Continuing along these lines, the present issue aims to further explore, debate, and highlight the potential of the symbiosis between vegetation, architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism. We welcome proposals and investigations that go beyond treating vegetation as a mere add-on in urban design, inviting instead a reconsideration of how we inhabit, design, and relate to plant life. This must be addressed through a transversal lens that promotes both conceptual and functional integration: conceptual, by fostering collaboration across disciplines; and functional, by establishing new interconnections between urban planning, architecture, and vegetation itself.

At the territorial and urban scale, mapping takes on a strategic dimension. Mapping the presence —or absence— of vegetation in cities and their surroundings, through analytical and representational tools capable of visualizing biodiversity, seasonal dynamics, ecosystemic flows, or multi-species relationships, can contribute to the elaboration of diagnostics and strategies. At the same time, works that explore critical re-readings of the binomial vegetation/architecture, whether from a historical or projective, political or sensorial, material or symbolic approach, can be insightful. The cartographic tool can reveal hidden potential in the territory and simulate the dynamic processes of the living landscape.

At the project scale, we are particularly interested in examining how architecture and landscape architecture might function as ecological infrastructure, not only through technical solutions. This includes buildings and public spaces designed to host non-human life forms, thresholds conceived as biological corridors, or typologies inspired by biophilia that merge with vegetated systems. These approaches offer the opportunity to rethink construction and urbanism through more inclusive and adaptive logics. In this context, we seek to investigate the role vegetation might play in shaping urban structures through richer and more complex frameworks: its integration into the built environment, its influence on urban fabrics, its contribution to spatial quality, its role in thermal comfort, and its pedagogical, productive, and social value.

Equally important is the inclusion of ruins and derelict, dismantled, or transitional structures-spaces that today offer fertile ground for both ecological and cultural regeneration. Urban planning must be capable of recognizing and incorporating these pre-existing conditions, whose symbolic, aesthetic, and functional value lies in their potential to form new ecosystems both within cities and in peri-urban territories. Hence, a territorial perspective becomes essential, opening new possibilities between interior and exterior, urban and natural domains. We especially encourage contributions that address edge spaces where biodiversity thrives. Zones where opportunistic vegetation, native or spontaneous, shape hybrid landscapes that function as ecological buffers.

Within this framework, we are also interested in research on artistic practices, community actions, and alternative pedagogies that promote the collective reappropriation of green spaces in the city. From public art to environmental activism, from self-managed parks to community gardens, from the artwork to the new perception of plant aesthetics, such initiatives generate a new urban ecological imaginary, one in which the city is no longer understood as the negation of nature, but rather as its potential ally.

From the vernacular to the visionary, from infrastructure to the sensory, from the urban core to the periphery. This issue invites transversal and multi-scalar contributions that approach vegetation and the ecosystems it embodies, not as passive resources, but as active agents that challenge our ways of designing, building, and inhabiting. The goal is to rethink our cities, considering the social and environmental challenges that lie ahead.

Carlos Ávila, Anna Laura Jeschke and Isabel Ezquerra 

 

ZARCH is currently accepting the submission of articles for their consideration, following the external Peer Review process as described on this website. They should address the topic for the upcoming issue.

Issue 26 "The memory, design and construction of the landscape"

Deadline for submission of articles: September 15th, 2025
Expected publication date: June 2026

Call Text:

The landscape, in any of its categories or formulations, and especially in what today we call the cultural landscape, is a common heritage that requires, for its existence and culmination, the gaze and intervention of the individual on nature or on a built heritage in time. Thus understood, contemporary man receives the landscape as a testimony of a legacy on which, progressively and cyclically, his gaze returns. Moreover, it needs it as a necessary stimulus to build its identity in a world in dizzying evolution. Thus, the theoretical and conceptual framework of a reality needs to be reconstructed in continuous transformation, and the anthropological bases of living in which memory and identity are constitutive elements associated with the growing idea of a return to original situations needs to be considered.

The analysis of the idea of return to these forgotten heritages and to the rural world is narrated from a polyhedral and transversal perspective, architectural, landscape, literary, visual, musical, which includes the updating of the bases and demographic, sociological and economic reasons for abandonment and proposes the keys and strategies for its transformation as engines of change in declining assets. Logically, multidisciplinary teams, including architects, urban planners, landscapers, geographers, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and economists, have answered this call.

In this context, those examples in which heritage plays a decisive role in their development are particularly interesting. This is especially the case in areas where there has been a strong demographic imbalance and where the management of this heritage becomes an effective tool against depopulation. Agricultural, forestry, industrial, historical or defensive landscapes, or symbolic landscapes, have become realities that attract the gaze of academics, researchers and professionals in search of new uses and opportunities. Preserving their memory and identity is as much as guaranteeing that the immediate future is built more reliably on the basis of the principle of continuity.

The construction of this memory, which in some cases is at risk of disappearance, requires new mapping and digitization tools. In line with the postulates of James Corner in his “The Agency of Mapping Speculation, Critique and Invention”, the look on a territory or a landscape not only represents reality but, above all, has the capacity to reformulate what it already has unveiled hidden potential. The verification and recovery of the memory of the soil on which every foundational act of man's action takes place is also extremely attractive. New occupation strategies can be derived from critical analysis.

The survival of visual memory is equally crucial. Photographic documentation, both historical and current, plays an essential role since it places us on the stage where new performances are born. This is not only a question of preserving memory but also of establishing the codes and bases for reinterpretation. Hence, there is a need for a modern photographic view of forgotten landscapes and heritages that alerts their presence and promotes their activation.

A careful look at the landscape and the intention to contribute to its construction in time lead to a timeless and universal architecture. Memory, in this way, refers not only to monumental heritage but also, fundamentally, to the domestic structures adapted over the centuries in the construction of the landscape. Hence, interest in studying the practices of reconstruction of both architectural and landscape structures in rural areas is understood as development opportunities. These interventions are often associated with new artistic practices and the promotion of cultural parks that enhance heritage and contribute to sustainable tourism.

In strictly architectural terms, we recall that the evolution of modernity was also nurtured by the tension between the near and the universal, between tradition and revolution, and between the plastic formulations of the new times and ancestral realities. For example, Le Corbusier, at the turn of the decade between the twenties and thirties of the last century, simultaneously built Villa Saboya and drew, in the sketches of the Errázuriz House, Zapallar, Chile, traces of the vernacular. In this tension between apparent opposites, the evolution of the arts germinates. It is enough to recall the trajectories of many modern architects, such as Luis Barragán or Dimitris Pikionis, who, in the encounter with the landscape, radically transformed their work. In the most intense examples, there is a deliberate will of the architect to disappear in favour of the anonymous, the small, even if possible, the innocent.

In keeping with the scale of the landscape, it is pertinent to remember, from a strictly architectural perspective, that the desire to return to the origin prompted a good number of architects and artists to dispense for themselves some spaces in the rural environment that would help them understand domesticity and encounter the essential conditions of living. The idea of refuge prompted, among others, Wright, Le Corbusier, Aalto, Asplund, Erskine, and Murcutt to build a small home in which their innovative architectural approaches not only did not blur but, contrary to appearances, found their true meaning in continuity with the origins. Other teachers, who were geographically closer, felt the same need to build their cabins. It is enough to remember the refugia of Sáenz de Oíza, Coderch, Vázquez Molezún or Fisac. Donald Judd also found the landscape for his work and his home in the desert of Marfa, Texas.

These evolutions had, inescapably, the recognition and support of the subject. Thus, material can be understood as a depository of the memory of the places on which the landscape is built. There are many examples in which the essential construction of the same refers to the memory and the information accumulated in the materials. Not only in the architecture inherited from modernity but also in contemporary practices, we find a turning point from a modification in the perception and use of materials and the significant values emanating from them.

This call for the journal aims to bring together the studies and professional practices that investigate the memory contest and its cartographies, with the breadth of fields and scales previously mentioned, as a reason for the construction of cultural landscapes waiting to be redefined. Studies and works on heritages, both monumental and domestic, and fragile and abandoned spaces that await the gaze of contemporary man are equally welcome to be identified, valued, and qualified and, in this way, contribute to building their identity. Among them, and from the scale of architecture to that of the territory, research can be incorporated, both current and those that show past examples, in rural settings that influence new intervention strategies.

Carlos Labarta Aizpún, Ascensión Hernández Martínez, Alegría Colón Mur