This conference aims to investigate bureaucracy as a site of struggles for spatial solidarity and, as such, as an essential part of the architecture discipline. To establish and secure a democratic and solidary society, it needs law and bureaucracy. As the historian Reinhart Koselleck shows, in processes of emancipation, the principle of self-liberation is always entwined with the socio-regulatory framework of law. Highlighting an intermediary sphere in the production of architecture, bridging from the first ideas to the architect’s design phase and the construction site, this conference aims to theorize and map a space of radical bureaucracies in architecture.
“Radical” here refers to advocating social change, while “bureaucracies” are understood as regulatory techniques that often covertly control the built environment. The conference will investigate radical bureaucracy as a practice that endeavors to change the control mechanisms of the built environment – architecture’s invisible infrastructure. Instead of following Max Weber, who held bureaucracy to be a “rational institution” and the opposite of the aesthetic, imaginary, and emotional, the project takes it to be a site of speculation, experimentation, and the creation of alternative lifeworlds.

This EAHN Thematic Conference invites papers examining emancipatory work in architectural bureaucracy – in the state apparatus and the private sector – and welcomes papers that take a longer historical perspective. In a time of deregulation of the built environment diminishing spatial democracy, architectural history gains new urgency in providing examples and perspectives that risk falling into oblivion. The conference aims to investigate the theme from a global perspective, drawing on examples from diverse geographical contexts in the global south and north. Situated studies that explore original archives (digital media, protocols, and other forms of bureaucratic documentation) and use experimental methods such as oral history, witness seminars, or other performative techniques are welcome. Empirical case studies, artistic research, and innovative theoretical implications are encouraged.

Key dates:

Call for papers launch: 24 August 2026
Call for papers deadline: 15 November 2026

For more information and updates, please visit the conference website: https://radicalbureaucracy.com