The Journal of Architecture

Lead: Weijie Hu and Deljana Iossifova

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Architectural discourse has long privileged the urban as its primary site of inquiry, reinforcing an implicit hierarchy in which the city is seen as the locus of architectural innovation, economic dynamism, and cultural production. The rural, by contrast, is frequently framed as peripheral – either a space of nostalgia, loss, and stagnation or a passive site for resource extraction and urban expansion. Yet, contemporary transformations in rural regions – shaped by shifting economies, climate change, migration, infrastructural developments, and technological interventions – demand a fundamental reconsideration of architecture’s relationship with the rural. How might architecture engage with these processes in ways that do not simply reproduce urban-centric logics? What alternative spatial imaginaries emerge when rural landscapes are understood as generative spaces for architectural thought and practice?

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Call for Papers: What does it mean to think architecturally about the rural? How can architecture move beyond the tendency to frame rural space either as a disappearing landscape or as a future urban frontier? This thematic call invites contributions that critically examine architecture’s engagement with rural and peri-urban territories, asking how processes of spatial reconfiguration – whether through infrastructure, land use, migration, or governance – reshape the architectural possibilities of the rural.

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We seek scholarship that interrogates the architectures of rural transformation, including but not limited to:

• The politics of infrastructure in rural regions and the spatialisation of large-scale infrastructural projects (energy transitions, transportation networks, telecommunications).

• Architectural mediations of agrarian change, from industrialised agriculture to alternative food systems.

• The rural as a site of experimentation for architectural materialities, construction techniques, and ecological design strategies.

• The role of architecture in migration, displacement, and the reconfiguration of rural social and spatial networks.

• Architectural responses to the climate crisis in rural landscapes, including adaptation, retreat, and resilience strategies.

• Theoretical and methodological approaches that challenge urban-biased conceptual frameworks and propose new ways of thinking about rural-urban interdependencies.

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By bringing architecture into direct dialogue with contemporary rural transformations, this thematic collection works to unsettle architecture’s urban-centric epistemologies.