Instructions for authors
Thank you for considering submission to The Journal of Architecture. The information below is intended to help you move smoothly through peer review, production, and publication. Please read it carefully to ensure compliance with journal requirements. General guidance for every stage of the process is available on our Author Services website.
Content
Architectures of extraction and repair
The architecture of borders
Rural (re)configurations
Beyond the human
Post-architectures
Design as method
(Re)Learning architecture
Appropriating architecture
Taylor & Francis editing services
Using third-party material in your paper
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About the Journal
The Journal of Architecture is published by Routledge, an imprint of Taylor & Francis, for the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Since its launch in 1996, it has become widely recognised as a leading peer-reviewed journal in architecture. The journal appears eight times a year, in a mix of guest-edited special issues and open issues.
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We welcome original submissions across architectural research, including the humanities, social sciences, engineering, and related disciplines. We seek contributions that advance empirical knowledge or theoretical understanding in relation to architecture and architectural design, particularly in the context of global challenges and their local manifestations, including the climate emergency, economic scarcity, new technologies, and sociopolitical transformation.
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The journal publishes in English.
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Article types
The journal publishes peer-reviewed research articles, including visual articles, for a global readership. We also publish review articles and critical reflections on events, exhibitions, performances, buildings, and other spatial or cultural phenomena. Authors interested in proposing guest-edited special issues are welcome to contact the editorial team.
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Original article
Structure
Title page; abstract; main text (introduction; materials and methods; results; discussion); acknowledgements; declaration of interest statement; references; appendices (as appropriate); tables with captions; figures; list of figure captions.
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Word limits
Please include a word count. A typical article is no more than 8,000 words, inclusive of tables, references, figure captions, and endnotes.
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Style guidelines
Please refer to these quick style guidelines. Use British spelling throughout. Use single quotation marks, with double quotation marks only for a quotation within a quotation. Indent long quotations without quotation marks.
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Formatting and templates
Submit manuscripts in Word format. Save figures separately from the text. Word templates are available for this journal. If you cannot access the template via the links provided, please contact the editorial office.
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References
This journal uses the MHRA referencing format: http://www.mhra.org.uk/style
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Visual article
For queries, please contact the Co-Editors, Dr Weije Hu (whu@swin.edu.au) and Dr Christoph Lueder (c.lueder@kingston.ac.uk).
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Visual articles are peer-reviewed submissions that present a clear, original argument through the integrated use of text and visual content. These submissions provide an alternative format for architectural research, offering a visually rich and analytically grounded mode of scholarly communication. Submissions should demonstrate the significance of the visual material to the overall argument and narrative structure.
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We welcome submissions that challenge the norms of architectural scholarship by presenting research in creative and visually compelling ways. We particularly appreciate papers that effectively combine text and images to form a coherent and convincing narrative. However, AI-generated images are not accepted in visual papers, as the emphasis is on original, author-produced visual content that reflects fieldwork, architectural design, or archival research.
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Images and/or videos
Include 10-15 high-quality images and/or videos that are crucial to the argument. These can consist of modern and ancient maps (architectural cartography), architectural drawings and renderings (for architectural criticism), field trip photographs, and other relevant visual representations for architectural studies. The images and videos should be integral to the narrative, playing a key role in driving the argument rather than just serving as illustrations.
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Images must be submitted as high-resolution JPEG or TIFF files. Embedded images in Word or PDF documents are not acceptable. To ensure quality, images should have a resolution of at least 300 dots per inch (dpi) and should not appear pixelated or distorted. If your images do not meet these quality requirements, your manuscript may be returned to you for adjustments. Please see here for details on image and video format requirements. An example for video content can be found here.
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Text
The accompanying text contains context, analysis, and scholarly interpretation, and ranges between 1,500 to 5,000 words. It should include an introduction to the topic, explaining the significance of the visual content, followed by a clear articulation of the argument or research question. The discussion should emphasise the relevance of the images to the argument.
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Review article
For proposals, please contact the Co-Editor, Dr Debapriya Chakrabarti (d.chakrbarti@mmu.ac.uk).
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Review articles provide critical, reflective, and theoretically informed assessments of current debates, developments, or conceptual framings within architecture and cognate fields. They synthesise and interrogate existing literature across disciplinary, geographic, or methodological boundaries and offer original insights that advance architectural discourse.​
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Length and format
Up to 10,000 words inclusive of references, endnotes, and captions. Provide an unstructured abstract of up to 200 words. Use MHRA referencing and British spelling.
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Structure
While flexible, submissions should explain the rationale for the selection and organisation of literature, set out a coherent analytical framework, and conclude with implications for architectural scholarship and practice.
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Visual material
Include visuals only where directly relevant to the argument. Submit images as separate JPEG or TIFF files at 300 dpi.
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Other review types
We also consider critical reflections on events, exhibitions, performances, buildings, and other spatial or cultural phenomena. Please contact the Reviews Editor in the first instance.
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Offbeat / Off-beam article
We invite paper submissions for our new feature that critically profiles objects, people, events or other phenomena that have hitherto been misunderstood, undervalued, or overlooked in architectural discourse. Papers might centre on vulnerable or unsung buildings, including the common or garden, the ephemeral and transient, the appropriated and the undesigned. Papers might otherwise focus on practitioners, educators, thinkers et al. who have made a distinctive contribution to built environment fields, but who have so far lacked chroniclers. “Offbeat / Off-beam” also offers space for foregrounding marginalised constituencies, overlooked events, publications and exhibitions. The feature gives space to subjects, objects and phenomena deserving of a critical champion — and a new audience.
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Feature lengths vary from c. 1,500–5,000 words; albeit we are open to alternative formats. Illustrations should be used decidedly as argumentative aids. References and image captions, if used, should follow the Journal of Architecture’s house style.
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To pitch a feature please contact Dr. Joshua Mardell (Co-Editor) in the first instance at joshua.mardell@rca.ac.uk explaining the suitability of the subject apropos of “Offbeat / Off-beam”. If suitable, you will be asked to submit the paper for double-blind peer review through the journal’s submission dashboard. The feature will run indefinitely; there is no fixed deadline for submissions or expressions of interest.
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Thematic calls
Unlike one-off special issues, thematic calls are open-ended and form part of the journal’s regular editorial process. Submissions are reviewed and published on a rolling basis and are indexed under the relevant theme. Each call centres on a defined concern in architectural scholarship and invites theoretical inquiry, historical analysis, empirical research, or practice-based reflection. We particularly welcome work that challenges disciplinary assumptions, draws from under-represented contexts, or engages architecture through relational and critical perspectives.
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Current calls:
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Architectures of extraction and repair: material politics, planetary crisis, and the ethics of making
Leads: Deljana Iossifova (deljana.iossifova@outlook.com), Christoph Lueder (c.lueder@kingston.ac.uk)/
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This call brings extraction and repair into a single frame and interrogates architecture’s material and ethical obligations in a world of limits. It asks how architectural lifecycles move between depletion and maintenance, violence and care, abandonment and restoration, and how this reconfigures responsibility amid climate crisis, economic precarity, and postcolonial dispossession.
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Call for Papers – indicative topics
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Architectures of resource extraction and their urbanisms.
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Material ecologies of production, logistics, waste, and salvage.
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Labour regimes in making and maintenance, including informal and racialised economies.
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Reparative design strategies and post-extractive material economies.
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Aesthetics and ethics of unfinished or continuously evolving structures.
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Longue durée histories of depletion and repair as entangled processes.
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Indigenous, feminist, and decolonial perspectives on repair.
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Legal, financial, and governance frameworks enabling or inhibiting reparative practice.
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The architecture of borders: infrastructures, relations, and everyday practices
Leads: Deljana Iossifova (deljana.iossifova@outlook.com) and Debapriya Chakrabarti (d.chakrbarti@mmu.ac.uk).
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This call repositions architecture as central to how borders are made, maintained, and unsettled across scales. It foregrounds the dispersed and processual nature of bordering in cities, infrastructures, and everyday life, and invites contributions that examine how architectural practices participate in or resist mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.
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Call for Papers – indicative topics
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Architectures and infrastructures of state control, including fortified borders, checkpoints, surveillance systems, and detention architectures.
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Bordering within cities: infrastructural divisions, infrastructural borders, uneven service provision, and spatial segregation.
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Informal and everyday architectures of migration, settlement, and cohabitation in borderland, peri-urban, or fragmented urban contexts.
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Transcalar bordering practices: from urban peripheries to regional corridors and planetary logistics.
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Architectures of solidarity and resistance: cross-border networks, activist infrastructures, and spaces of encounter.
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The legal, economic, and algorithmic governance of mobility and access, and their spatial ramifications.
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Architectural engagements with ‘slow violence’ and ecological bordering, including environmental displacement and territorial degradation.
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Methodological approaches to studying borders through architectural ethnography, material semiotics, or relational infrastructure theory.
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Rural (re)configurations: architecture beyond the urban imaginary
Lead: Weijie Hu and Deljana Iossifova (deljana.iossifova@outlook.com)
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This call asks what becomes possible when rural and peri-urban territories are treated as generative sites for architectural thought and practice. It invites work that interrogates infrastructures, land use, migration, governance, and ecological change, and that challenges urban-centric frames in architectural scholarship.
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Call for Papers – indicative topics
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The politics of infrastructure in rural regions and the spatialisation of large-scale infrastructural projects (energy transitions, transportation networks, telecommunications).
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Architectural mediations of agrarian change, from industrialised agriculture to alternative food systems.
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The rural as a site of experimentation for architectural materialities, construction techniques, and ecological design strategies.
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The role of architecture in migration, displacement, and the reconfiguration of rural social and spatial networks.
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Architectural responses to the climate crisis in rural landscapes, including adaptation, retreat, and resilience strategies.
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Theoretical and methodological approaches that challenge urban-biased conceptual frameworks and propose new ways of thinking about rural-urban interdependencies.
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Beyond the human: multispecies and more-than-human architectures
Lead: Deljana Iossifova (deljana.iossifova@outlook.com) and Debapriya Chakrabarti (d.chakrbarti@mmu.ac.uk).
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This call challenges anthropocentric assumptions and explores architecture as an entanglement of human and nonhuman beings, materials, and flows. It welcomes conceptual, methodological, and empirical work that positions design within broader conversations on environmental justice, climate precarity, and multispecies cohabitation.
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Call for Papers – indicative topics
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The spatial politics of cohabitation between humans and other species: urban biodiversity, shared habitats, ecological corridors, and conflict ecologies.
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Infrastructures as multispecies mediators: water, air, waste, soil, light, and heat as sites of cross-species interaction and regulation.
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The political ecologies of architectural materials, including the extraction, transformation, and use of organic, bioengineered, or so-called ‘living’ materials.
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Architectural responses to environmental instability, extinction, and climate breakdown: designing for ecological resilience, retreat, or repair.
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Indigenous, animist, and decolonial ontologies of space and life: how alternative cosmologies might reframe architectural purpose and responsibility.
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The ethical, aesthetic, and epistemological challenges of designing with more-than-human life: from speculative ecologies to care-based design practices.
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Methodologies for studying more-than-human design: multispecies ethnography, ecological sensing, biomimicry, or interspecies mapping.
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Histories of nonhuman presence in architectural theory and practice: domestication, sanitation, urban pest control, and zoonotic design legacies.
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Post-architectures: rethinking the discipline’s limits
Lead: Debapriya Chakrabarti (d.chakrbarti@mmu.ac.uk) and Deljana Iossifova (deljana.iossifova@outlook.com).
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This call investigates architectures that exceed canonical boundaries of object, author, and building. It examines distributed, processual, and often ambiguous practices that emerge through infrastructures, maintenance, informality, media, and collective authorship, and invites reflections on the epistemologies required to study them.
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Call for Papers – indicative topics
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Architectural knowledge beyond design: infrastructures, protocols, platforms, maintenance, or everyday dwelling.
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Ephemeral, mobile, or residual architectures: from refugee shelters to protest spaces and informal urbanism.
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Rethinking authorship and expertise: collective, anonymous, or distributed practices of spatial production.
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The aesthetics and ethics of non-permanence: provisional, contingent, or unfinished architectures.
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Feminist, decolonial, and posthuman critiques of architectural boundary-making.
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Pedagogical or methodological approaches to architecture as process or relation rather than object or outcome.
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Interdisciplinary approaches that complicate architectural categories through media, performativity, or affect.
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Design as method: rethinking architectural research through practice
Leads: Deljana Iossifova (deljana.iossifova@outlook.com) and Christoph Lueder (c.lueder@kingston.ac.uk).
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This call treats methodology as a critical terrain for architectural research and positions design as a mode of inquiry in its own right. It invites contributions that clarify how projects generate situated knowledge and how design can operate at the interface of ecological thinking, social engagement, and theoretical experimentation.
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Call for Papers – indicative topics
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Design-led research: How can architectural projects serve as structured, reflective modes of knowledge production? What protocols, standards, or narratives emerge when design is the research vehicle?
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Situated methodologies: Research methods that are grounded in context, materiality, temporality, or relational practice – particularly in response to ecological or social complexity.
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Speculative and experimental practice: Approaches that mobilise architectural design as a speculative or projective method, whether through drawing, prototyping, simulation, or narrative construction.
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Ecological epistemologies: Methodological innovations that embed ecological principles into design processes as generative epistemic frameworks, rather than technical add-ons.
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Socially engaged methods: Participatory, co-design, and narrative-based approaches that position architectural research within wider social struggles or collective imaginaries.
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Temporal and iterative design: Reflections on methodologies that account for change over time, whether through adaptive design, maintenance-oriented thinking, or feedback-based practices.
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Pedagogical implications: How are methodological innovations in research through design transforming architectural education, studio practice, and the training of researchers?
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(Re)Learning architecture: in search of consistency
Lead: Pari Riahi (priahi@umass.edu) and Doreen Bernath (doreenbernath@aaschool.ac.uk).
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This call reflects on teaching and learning architecture amid intersecting crises and asks how a meaningful ‘consistency’ can be sustained as curiosity, responsibility, and transformative possibility. It invites analyses of structures, epistemologies, and practices that reconfigure architectural education while remaining attentive to plural contexts.
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Call for Papers – indicative topics
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Disciplinary boundaries in curricula and how conviction is challenged, altered, or maintained as possibility.
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Qualities and aptitudes that sustain curiosity and make space for difference while engaging demands for proficiency.
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Expanded architectures of imagination and action that enable inclusive dialogue across fields and communities.
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Interdisciplinary pedagogy and degree pathways that support co-learning and co-teaching.
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In-situ knowledge and skills from practice tied to school-based learning, addressing the education–practice divide.
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Collaborative structures and forms of advocacy that uphold ethical and imaginative consistency in times of change.
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Appropriating architecture: owning, commoning, and curating
Lead: Christoph Lueder (c.lueder@kingston.ac.uk) and Debapriya Chakrabarti (d.chakrbarti@mmu.ac.uk).
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This call examines culturally bound concepts of belonging and the politics of commodification that shape architectures of ownership, commoning, and curation. It seeks scholarship and practice that articulate alternative spatial imaginaries and demonstrate how shared arrangements reconfigure design, use, and value.
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Call for Papers – indicative topics
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The architect as enabler and/or the inhabitant as curator within hybrid ecologies of spatial production.
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Multiplayer cities, urban ecologies constituted through heterogenous models of ownership, curating and commoning, their spatial manifestations, their resilience, and the transformative potential of tactics such as meanwhile programming.
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The spatialisation of co-operative models of ownership and their architectural potential.
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Learning from culturally and historically rooted practices of commoning and communal curation in the Global South, learning from tactics of resistance against neoliberal spatial politics.
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Themed towns (e.g. China’s Simulacra Cities), constructing identity, hybrid identities, and reclaiming authenticity as a sense of belonging to a place.
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The emergent shift from financial markets to techno-oligarchies, its threats, opportunities and spatial manifestations (e.g. Google, Meta, and Tesla’s corporation-controlled towns).
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Policies and processing
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Taylor & Francis editing services
To help you improve your manuscript and prepare it for submission, Taylor & Francis provides a range of editing services. Choose from options such as English Language Editing, which will ensure that your article is free of spelling and grammar errors, Translation, and Artwork Preparation. For more information, including pricing, visit this website.
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Checklist: What to include
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Author details. Please ensure all listed authors meet the Taylor & Francis authorship criteria. All authors of a manuscript should include their full name and affiliation on the cover page of the manuscript. Where available, please also include ORCiDs and social media handles (Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn). One author will need to be identified as the corresponding author, with their email address normally displayed in the article PDF (depending on the journal) and the online article. Authors’ affiliations are the affiliations where the research was conducted. If any of the named co-authors moves affiliation during the peer-review process, the new affiliation can be given as a footnote. Please note that no changes to affiliation can be made after your paper is accepted. Read more on authorship.
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Should contain an unstructured abstract of 200 words.
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You can opt to include a video abstract with your article. Find out how these can help your work reach a wider audience, and what to think about when filming. Taylor & Francis Editing Services provides a video abstract creation service for a fee.
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Do not include keywords. Read making your article more discoverable, including information on choosing a title and search engine optimization.
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Funding details. Please supply all details required by your funding and grant-awarding bodies as follows:
For single agency grants
This work was supported by the [Funding Agency] under Grant [number xxxx].
For multiple agency grants
This work was supported by the [Funding Agency #1] under Grant [number xxxx]; [Funding Agency #2] under Grant [number xxxx]; and [Funding Agency #3] under Grant [number xxxx].
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Disclosure statement. This is to acknowledge any financial or non-financial interest that has arisen from the direct applications of your research. If there are no relevant competing interests to declare please state this within the article, for example: The authors report there are no competing interests to declare. Further guidance on what is a conflict of interest and how to disclose it.
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Supplemental online material. Supplemental material can be a video, fileset, audio file or anything which supports (and is pertinent to) your paper. We publish supplemental material online via Figshare. Find out more about supplemental material and how to submit it with your article.
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Figures. Figures should be high quality (1200 dpi for line art, 600 dpi for grayscale and 300 dpi for colour, at the correct size). Figures should be supplied in one of our preferred file formats: PS, JPEG, TIFF, or Microsoft Word (DOC or DOCX) files are acceptable for figures that have been drawn in Word. For information relating to other file types, please consult our Submission of electronic artwork document.
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Tables. Tables should present new information rather than duplicating what is in the text. Readers should be able to interpret the table without reference to the text. Please supply editable files.
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Equations. If you are submitting your manuscript as a Word document, please ensure that equations are editable. More information about mathematical symbols and equations.
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Units. Please use SI units (non-italicized).
Open access
You have the option to publish open access in this journal via our Open Select publishing programme. Publishing open access means that your article will be free to access online immediately on publication, increasing the visibility, readership and impact of your research. Articles published Open Select with Taylor & Francis typically receive 45% more citations* and over 6 times as many downloads** compared to those that are not published Open Select.
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Your research funder or your institution may require you to publish your article open access. Visit our Author Services website to find out more about open access policies and how you can comply with these.
You will be asked to pay an article publishing charge (APC) to make your article open access and this cost can often be covered by your institution or funder. Use our APC finder to view the APC for this journal. Please note that only the corresponding author is eligible to request funding from their institution, and it is not possible to change the corresponding author to achieve eligibility after submission. For further information, please see details here.
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Please visit our Author Services website if you would like more information about our Open Select Program.
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*Citations received up to 7th August 2024 for articles published in 2019-2023. Data obtained on 7th August 2024, from Digital Science's Dimensions platform, available at https://app.dimensions.ai
**Usage in 2021-2023 for articles published in 2019-2023.
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Peer review and ethics
Taylor & Francis is committed to peer-review integrity and upholding the highest standards of review. Once your paper has been assessed for suitability by the editor, it will then be double blind peer reviewed by independent, anonymous expert referees. If you have shared an earlier version of your Author’s Original Manuscript on a preprint server, please be aware that anonymity cannot be guaranteed. Further information on our preprints policy and citation requirements can be found on our Preprints Author Services page. Find out more about what to expect during peer review and read our guidance on publishing ethics.
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Using third-party material in your paper
You must obtain the necessary permission to reuse third-party material in your article. The use of short extracts of text and some other types of material is usually permitted, on a limited basis, for the purposes of criticism and review without securing formal permission. If you wish to include any material in your paper for which you do not hold copyright, and which is not covered by this informal agreement, you will need to obtain written permission from the copyright owner prior to submission. More information on requesting permission to reproduce work(s) under copyright.
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Submitting your paper
This journal uses Routledge's Submission Portal to manage the submission process. The Submission Portal allows you to see your submissions across Routledge's journal portfolio in one place.
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Please note that The Journal of Architecture uses Crossref™ to screen papers for unoriginal material. By submitting your paper to The Journal of Architecture you are agreeing to originality checks during the peer-review and production processes.
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On acceptance, we recommend that you keep a copy of your Accepted Manuscript. Find out more about sharing your work.
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Publication charges
There are no submission fees, publication fees or page charges for this journal.
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Colour figures will be reproduced in colour in your online article free of charge. If it is necessary for the figures to be reproduced in colour in the print version, a charge will apply.
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Charges for colour figures in print are £300 per figure ($400 US Dollars; $500 Australian Dollars; €350). For more than 4 colour figures, figures 5 and above will be charged at £50 per figure ($75 US Dollars; $100 Australian Dollars; €65). Depending on your location, these charges may be subject to local taxes.
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Copyright options
Copyright allows you to protect your original material, and stop others from using your work without your permission. Taylor & Francis offers a number of different license and reuse options, including Creative Commons licenses when publishing open access. Read more on publishing agreements.
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My authored works
On publication, you will be able to view, download and check your article’s metrics (downloads, citations and Altmetric data) via Authored Works on Taylor & Francis Online. We are committed to promoting and increasing the visibility of your article. Here are some tips and ideas on how you can work with us to promote your research.
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Queries
Should you have any queries, please visit our Author Services website or contact the journal.
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