Urban Maintenance, Environmental Repair / Call for Paper / ISUP

Urban Maintenace, Environmental Repair
22nd and 23rd October 2026
Mendrisio, Switzerland

Symposium

The Institute of Urban and Landscape Studies (ISUP) of the Accademia di architettura, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), is pleased to announce a symposium dedicated to the theme of Urban Maintenace, Environmental Repair. In recent years, scholars and practitioners have increasingly recognised the significance of care, upkeep, and the continuous negotiation between decay and renewal in shaping our built and inhabited environments. This symposium seeks to address maintenance and repair not merely as technical operations, but as socio-political, ecological, and cultural acts that reconfigure landscapes, urban conditions, and societal needs.

While this issue has attracted considerable attention in recent years, we do not regard it as fully addressed. Its relevance is not only sustained but is, in fact, increasing. Significant gaps remain in the scholarship, including the need to integrate maintenance and repair into the very ontology of design, rather than treating them as merely subsequent operations; the importance of fostering a more active dialogue between architectural and urban scales, while simultaneously incorporating landscape and social dimensions; and the call for a more developed theoretical framework that engages with the challenges of climate change and ongoing social transformations.

We invite contributions from academics, practitioners, and researchers from the field of architecture, landscape architecture, planning and urban studies. Papers may address historical, theoretical, or practice-based perspectives and are encouraged to explore urban maintenance and environmental repair as a critical lense through which to understand spatial production and transformation.

The symposium will be organised into four thematic sessions:

1. Landscape
   This session explores maintenance and repair in landscapes both designed and arrived at through more prosaic needs. How do acts of care sustain, alter, or resist natural processes? How do we reconcile cultural, functional, and ecological objectives in the upkeep of public and private realm? 
2. Climate
   The maintenance and repair of cities is an increasingly urgent need in the context of climate change. This session examines adaptation, resilience, and the repair of urban settings and the territories that surround them. What measures need to take place to respond to extreme weather events, rising temperatures, and shifting ecologies, while ensuring that the qualities that are contained in cities is not lost?
3. Urbanism
   Cities are continually repaired, both materially and socially. The cities that we encounter in contemporary terms can be understood as a form of patrimony. Something inherited. This session focuses on urban maintenance as a process that mediates between growth, decline, and transformation. Contributions may engage with infrastructure repair, housing maintenance, or the processes that contribute to urban upkeep.
4. Social Aspects
   Maintenance and repair are not neutral acts: they involve labour, care, social economic dynamics and political processes and agreements. This session investigates who undertakes maintenance, who benefits from it, and whose needs are prioritised.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit an abstract of 300 words, along with a short biography (max. 100 words) and max. 3 images, to [email protected] by 15.12.2025. We ask you to indicate the session in which you would like to take part. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 20.02.2026.

Selected papers will be presented at the symposium and considered for publication in a peer-reviewed edited volume of ISUP Papers

Organising committee

Prof. Jonathan Sergison, Prof. Sascha Roesler, Prof. João Nunes, Prof. Frédéric Bonnet, Prof. João Gomes da Silva, Prof. Martino Pedrozzi, Arch. Enrico Sassi, Dr. Mosè Cometta