If the first two issues of this trilogy on housing approached their subject from self-contained scales—the domestic unit and its relationship with ways of inhabiting; collective housing and its relationship with urban form—this third issue proposes to linger in the ambiguity that exists between them. Not quite the home, not quite the city, the in-between is a deliberately provisional category: a space of negotiation amid the private and the public, the individual and the collective, political intention and built form.
The existence of this ambiguity should not be taken for granted; it was something won rather than a given. In late nineteenth-century London, reformer Octavia Hill worked to improve the living conditions of nearly 2,000 working-class dwellings over five decades. She did so not by pushing for new construction alone but by managing and transforming what already existed: introducing shared gardens, collective spaces, and the systematic improvement of common areas in rental buildings. She fought for the provision and protection of public open space. Her work was simultaneously a spatial practice and a social one, inseparable from a conviction that housing was a social and urban responsibility before it was an investment. Dolores Hayden has shown how spatial form and political program are often hard to disentangle: the socialization of domestic work—communal kitchens, shared childcare, cooperative laundries—driven in the 1860s by reformers like Melusina Fay Peirce in the U.S. was inseparable from new collective housing forms, like multifamily buildings and houses without kitchens, that redistributed domestic labor across shared infrastructure. In both cases rather than an amenity the in-between was a political claim: a demand that the space between the front door and the street be taken as seriously as what lies on either side.
To look at these spaces is also to look at the agents who produce them—and by this we don’t mean design alone. Who underwrites, manages, or demands in-between space? What role have promoters, institutions, organizations, or individual advocates played in shaping the collective dimensions of housing—and what can these histories tell us about the present? How do journalism, literature, and activism participate in making the case for spaces that markets tend to minimize and policy tends to undervalue? And conversely: when do in-between spaces serve not as sites of collective life but as instruments of control, surveillance, or exclusion? We are interested in readings that complicate the category— that ask not only what in-between spaces or the “grey zones” of housing are, but what they do and for whom.
We invite contributions that problematize, propose new readings of, or recover historical proposals for the spaces between housing and the city—entries, thresholds, corridors, communal gardens, semi-public courtyards, collective programs, or ambiguous zones that resist easy categorization. We are particularly interested in work that reveals how these spaces are designed, negotiated, and inhabited—not as amenities for sale but as open questions about what could and should occur between intimate and public life.
About ARQ
ARQ, a peer-reviewed academic journal focusing on architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Published three times a year by Ediciones ARQ of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (UC), ARQ is indexed in several academic databases including WoS, DOAJ, Scopus, Avery Index, SciELO, and Latindex. Articles are published in English and Spanish.
Submission formats
We encourage contributions from emerging and established scholars, practitioners, and researchers. Submissions are accepted in various formats, including interviews, academic papers (approximately 6,000 words), critiques (1,500 words), and projects—built or unbuilt, including a special section for master thesis or diploma projects. Material should be previously unpublished, or at least not have been published in Spanish. For detailed submission guidelines, please visit: https://edicionesarq.com/Open-Call.
Calendar
Submission Deadline: July 31, 2026
Publication Date: December 2026