Middle East Technical University Graduate Program in Architectural History organizes a series of symposiums bi-annually, open to graduate students and researchers who have recently completed their Ph.D. studies. The fourteenth meeting of the symposium series will take place on December 18- 19, 2025, focusing on the theme of “Spaces / Times / Peoples: Future and Architectural History.”
As climate change, pandemics, geopolitical instability, and technological acceleration reshape public life, they unsettle our sense of the future. Architectural history confronts these pressures not only in the past it studies but also through the concepts and tools with which it works. Concerns with risk, resilience, heritage, and planetary scale belong to our present vocabulary, yet they also open new ways of revisiting how earlier societies projected possibilities via precaution or negligence. Emerging tools, from digital archives and GIS mapping to environmental modelling and AI, further transform how such pasts and futures can be traced. This connection between history and futurity is not new. Histories of the built environment have long been written with horizons to come in view: operative narratives intervened in the present, preservationist accounts sought to secure what might otherwise be lost, and visionary projects imagined transformation. The archive acts where aspirations and anxieties were contested, recast, or erased, beyond the repository of evidence (Vogiatzaki, 2025).
Conceptual frameworks help make this position explicit. Reinhart Koselleck described historical time as the tension between the “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectations” (2002). Mihai Nadin, drawing on Heinz von Foerster, inverted causality with the provocation that “the cause lies in the future” (2010), reminding us that anticipation organizes imagination and action, shaping institutions, practices, and environments in advance of their realization. Horizons are always political and ambivalent: they may open or close possibilities, appear utopian or dystopian, calculative or charismatic, public or secret (White, 2024). Imaginaries of risk generate regimes of governance (Beck, 2013), yet they can also produce practices of resilience and solidarity. The foreclosure of possibilities may signal ethical theft across generations (Ahmed, 2004), but hopes of prosperity and collective responsibility have likewise animated visions of the built environment. Architecture and urbanism provide the terrains where these tensions became material, as progress and modernity, fear and catastrophe, expertise and imagination all found expression in plans, infrastructures, regulations, and designs.
We invite contributions from graduate students and early-career researchers that explore the intersections of architectural, urban, and planning history with the problem of futurity. Possible directions include case studies of how the future shaped architectural or urban practices; analyses of crises, risks, and emergencies as temporal conditions of the built environment; reflections on historiography and how our discipline has been written with futures in view; or methodological explorations of how emerging tools and technologies expand our temporal and spatial horizons. We welcome papers across geographies and periods that examine not only how the built environment was mobilized in the name of worlds-to-come, but also how the writing of history itself has been directed by futures imagined, threatened, or lost.
Eligibility: The symposium is open to graduate students and researchers who have received their doctoral degrees within the past 5 years.
Language of the Symposium: Turkish and English
Submission of Proposals: Abstract and information sheets should be sent to the e-mail address given below.
– Abstract Sheet: Including the abstract (300 words) of the proposal, title of the paper and five keywords. There should not be any information about the identity of the participant on the abstract sheet.
– Information Sheet: The participant’s name, short biography, address, e-mail, and phone numbers should be written on a separate sheet. The information sheet should include the title of the paper.
Deadline: November 1, 2025
The symposium will be held in person at Kubbealtı, METU Faculty of Architecture, and the virtual
presentations will be considered upon request. The symposium fee is 900 TL for students, 1000 TL for
academic/employed researchers and 50 € for international participants.
Scientific Committee: T. Elvan Altan, Lale Özgenel, Ali Uzay Peker, Ekin Pinar, Belgin Turan Özkaya, Pelin Yoncacı Arslan
Organization Committee: Elif Kaymaz, Nesrin Erdoğan, Gizem Güner, Orçun Sena Saraçoğlu
Website: http://archist.arch.metu.edu.tr
E-mail address: metu.harch.symposium@gmail.com