CALL FOR PAPERS MATERIA ARQUITECTURA N°27

CONSUMABLE CITIES

MATERIA ARQUITECTURA is a bi-annual publication on architecture, published since 2009 by the School of Architecture of the Universidad San Sebastián. As a documentation, dissemination and reference tool, the magazine aims to broaden knowledge of the discipline from a critical perspective, with the aim of opening new discourses on contemporary architecture.

MATERIA ARQUITECTURA is open to the entire academic and professional community, both national and international. The journal has a special interest in publishing works related to the theoretical research and practical production of contemporary architecture.

CALL FOR PAPERS The editors invite you to submit papers reflecting the state of art in the discipline, preferably derived from academic research.

MATERIA ARQUITECTURA N°27

Publication date: December 2024

Submission deadline: September 25, 2024

Guest editor: Liliana De Simone

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What impacts do the global processes of production, transportation, storage, logistics, sale, consumption and postconsumption have on urban territories? How do these impacts have repercussions on territories outside the cities? Consumable Cities aims to gather new readings, critiques and projects about the place of consumption in the production of the urban sphere and its repercussions beyond said sphere.

Jean Baudrillard's initial works on the consumer society laid the foundations for a symbolic and physical interpretation of the act of buying since the second half of the 20th century. The new post-capitalist logic that emerged after the post-war political, economic and social restructuring radically changed the understanding of commodities and their symbolic value, as well as the material and logistical organization of commerce in the city. In this socio-spatial context, the physical infrastructure for retail consumption of goods and services is positioned as an iconic element of the new society and its urban form.

Consumable cities and spaces for consumption are phenomena that reflect changes in the modes of urban production. Their emergence as icons of the tertiary sector has been pointed out as a characteristic of the new “post-metropolis”, as symptoms of “postmodern urbanism” and as artifacts of “neoliberal urbanism” or globalization, to name a few approaches in recent literature that address these phenomena from the context of a new planetary urbanization.

This discussion focuses on a shift in focus from the city to the urban sphere as a fundamental element for understanding the new territorial processes. What happens outside the city can no longer be considered alien to its own urban processes. Everything is a product of and produced by urban consumption: the desert polluted by discarded clothes, the islands of single-use plastic in the ocean, the satellite garbage of obsolete technologies that prowl the Earth, etc. Thus, the exploitation and denigration of non-urban territory, whether to extract raw materials or discard by-products, is another face of the symbolic and cultural process that turns the wheel of consumption as a constitutive act of the human being in the Anthropocene and that is fundamentally based in cities.

Traditional shopping districts replaced by new stores with kitsch aesthetics, Chinese shopping centers installed in small towns and rural areas, the impact of retail mega infrastructures on the urban fabric, the emergence of darkstores inside disused heritage spaces, the construction of huge warehouses for the storage of global data in peri-urban territories, the dynamics of relocation, storage and distribution of delocalized food, are all possible starting points to elaborate new views of the geopolitics of consumption, to understand its relationship with the city and its extended cultural landscapes.

This 27th issue of MATERIA ARQUITECTURA calls for contributions that address, from a contemporary perspective, the relationship between consumable cities and consumed territories in order to explore the interactions of global processes of production, distribution and consumption with their impacts in and from urban environments.