2025 Symposium on Urban Design History and Theory

SUDHT is a worldwide forum with an expansive interest in the past. As such, we invite session and paper proposals that address all geographic settings and time periods. As urban design is inherently interdisciplinary, scholars are welcome from various fields, including (among others) urban design, architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, heritage studies, geography, environmental studies, history, art history, political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, design studies, and digital studies. Prior editions at TU Delft (2023) and ETH Zürich (2021) have convened hundreds of global scholars and formed a growing community based on shared interests.

SUDHT defines urban design broadly, to refer to the spatial and morphological qualities of cities, towns, suburbs, rural areas and other human settlements. These spatial characteristics can be intentionally designed or have evolved from other forces, yielding specific urban morphologies.

The next SUDHT will be held on September 18-21, 2025, in-person, at the University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning. At the crossroads of the United States and Canada, Buffalo reflects a wealth of American design history and theory, from Joseph Ellicott’s Baroque city plan and Frederick Law Olmsted’s parkway system, numerous works by Frank Lloyd Wright to the post-industrial inspiration for Reyner Banham’s Concrete Atlantis. Once coined “America’s Best Designed City”, Buffalo represents many of America’s contemporary urban design challenges and opportunities.

SUDHT is supported by the Rudy Bruner Center for Urban Excellence, as the symposium aligns with the Bruner Center’s legacy as one of the world’s foremost urban design awards and archives, representing nearly a thousand design projects spanning nearly four decades.

Scholars of urban design are invited to present their work at the 2025 Symposium of Urban Design History and Theory (SUDHT) at the University at Buffalo, which will be held in person on September 18-21, 2025.

SUDHT is a worldwide forum with an expansive interest in the past. As such, we invite session and paper proposals that address all geographic settings and time periods. As urban design is inherently interdisciplinary, scholars are welcome from various fields, including (among others) urban design, architecture, urban planning, landscape architecture, heritage studies, geography, environmental studies, history, art history, political science, sociology, psychology, anthropology, design studies, and digital studies. Prior editions at TU Delft (2023) and ETH Zürich (2021) have convened hundreds of global scholars and formed a growing community based on shared interests.

SUDHT defines urban design broadly, to refer to the spatial and morphological qualities of cities, towns, suburbs, rural areas and other human settlements. These spatial characteristics can be intentionally designed or have evolved from other forces, yielding specific urban morphologies.

The next SUDHT will be held on September 18-21, 2025, in-person, at the University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning. We intend to have an opening evening on Thursday, September 18, full-day parallel sessions on Friday and Saturday September 19 and 20, and optional tours on Sunday September 21.

At the crossroads of the United States and Canada, Buffalo reflects a wealth of American design history and theory, from Joseph Ellicott’s Baroque city plan and Frederick Law Olmsted’s parkway system, numerous works by Frank Lloyd Wright to the post-industrial inspiration for Reyner Banham’s Concrete Atlantis. Once coined “America’s Best Designed City”, Buffalo represents many of America’s contemporary urban design challenges and opportunities. SUDHT is supported by the Rudy Bruner Center for Urban Excellence, as the symposium aligns with the Bruner Center’s legacy as one of the world’s foremost urban design awards and archives, representing nearly a thousand design projects spanning nearly four decades.

Abstract proposals are invited through the ExOrdo system, and these submissions may be for individual papers or sessions of four papers. A submission for an individual paper should include separate author details and short bios and a 300-word (maximum length) abstract. Besides separate author details, a submission for a session should include all four paper titles and brief description, along with a brief description of their cohererence into a session into a 600 words maximum abstract. For session submissions, it is strongly encouraged that at least one of the papers is by someone whose work concentrates on an understudied location and/or at least one of the papers is by someone who is an ’emerging scholar’ (PhD student, post-doc, or comparable).

All presentations should be based on original, properly documented research. Papers may not be previously published or presented in public except to very small audiences (of fewer than 20 people).

The deadline for the submission of abstracts, whether for individual papers or sessions of four papers, is 30 November 7 December 2024. Those whose submissions are accepted to SUDHT will be notified by early February 2025. Final papers will be due on August 31, 2025 to your session chair. Those presenting papers must register for the symposium via the conference website. Registration will open in spring 2025. We are aiming for affordable registration rates, including a special rate for students, presenters not affiliated with an institution, and presenters not from a country listed as “Upper Middle Income” or higher by the World Bank.

This symposium is convened by Conrad Kickert and Kelly Gregg at the University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning. The symposium is supported by the Rudy Bruner Center for Urban Excellence.

Conrad Kickert is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University at Buffalo and the Director of Programs at the Rudy Bruner Center for Urban Excellence. Dr. Kickert has degrees in urbanism and architecture from the TU Delft and holds a PhD in architecture from the University of Michigan. His research studies the evolving relationship between urban form, urban life and the urban economy. Dr. Kickert has authored award-winning articles and books on these topics, including Dream City – Creation, Destruction and Reinvention in Downtown Detroit with MIT Press, Streetlife – Urban Retail Dynamics and Prospects with the University of Toronto Press, and Street-level Architecture – The Past, Present and Future of Interactive Frontages with Routledge. Among others, his work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ax:son Johnson Foundation, UBER, the Haile/US Bank Foundation and the Mellon Foundation. 

Kelly Gregg is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning at the University at Buffalo. Dr. Gregg has an undergraduate degree in landscape architecture from Pennsylvania State University, graduate degrees in urban planning and urban design from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in Planning from the University of Toronto. She pursues place-based research at the intersection of planning, urban design, and landscape architecture. Specifically, her work focuses on street design and pedestrian environments in both an historic and contemporary context. She has published peer-reviewed articles on the history and idea transfer of pedestrian environments in journals such as Planning Perspectives, the Journal of Planning History, Cities, and the Journal of Urban Design.

The full conference scientific committee consists of:

Tom Avermaete, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Heraldo Borges, Mackenzie Presbyterian University, Brazil
Jiaxiu Cai, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China
Kelly Gregg, University at Buffalo, United States
Janina Gosseye, TU Delft, The Netherlands
Matthew Heins, Independent Scholar, United States
Paul Hess, University of Toronto, Canada
Luna Khirfan, University of Waterloo, Canada
Conrad Kickert, University at Buffalo, United States
Hannah Le Roux, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa, and University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
Cameron Logan, University of Sydney, Australia
Faiza Moatasim, University of Southern California, United States

Thursday, September 18

5:00pm – 8:00pm – conference registration in Hayes Hall Atrium

5.30pm – Opening reception in Hayes Hall Atrium with light bites

6:30pm – Conference opening in Hayes Hall 403

7:00pm – Opening keynote in Hayes Hall 403: Dr Robert Fishman – The future of the Urban Past: the paradox of urban design history

Friday, September 19

8:00am – 4:30pm – conference registration in Hayes Hall Atrium

8:30am – 10:30am – first parallel sessions in Hayes Hall and adjacent Crosby Hall

• Typology, morphology, and mapping 1: Crosby Hall 116
  • Urban Memory and Identity – Chair: Jiaxiu Cai
    • Pentelic Marble in Neoclassical Athens – Crafting Identity Through Materiality and Urban Form – Angelos Chiotis (virtual)
    • How framing history can transform an historic urban centre: the case of Ouro Preto, Brazil – June Komisar
    • Tabula-rasa in the City: Ankara Atatürk Cultural Center and Hippodrome – Anıl Yavuz
      
• Environment, ecologies, and extraction 1: Crosby Hall 120
  • Ecological Practices in Urban Design – Chair: Robert Fishman
    • Enriching the Concept of Biophilic Design Through Richard Neutra’s Theory of Biorealism – Dorian Bianco (virtual), Marco Carlotti
    • Ecological urbanization regimes. Comparative urban theory and the renegotiation of urban nature in Rome and Berlin – Koenraad Danneels (virtual)
    • A “Science of Settlement” for Canada: The Urban Climatology of Thomas Griffith Taylor – Stéphane Gaessler (virtual)
      
• Agency, transfer, and disciplinarity 1: Crosby Hall 107
  • Histories of Urban Design as Cultural Practice – Chair: Erkin Özay
    • Echoes through Technē: The Architecture of the Heidelberg Thingstätte and the Romanticism of Martin Heidegger – Taisuke Wakabayashi (virtual)
    • The Marquee as Radical Expression of Cultural Freedom: Critiquing the Narratives of American Expansion in “Indian Territory” – Jared Macken
    • Crossed Histories: The Women who Built the Postmodern City – Léa-Catherine Szacka
    • Shaping France during the Enlightenment: Provincial Drawing Academies and Urban Design – Pierre Marty (virtual)
      
• Technology, infrastructure, and modernity 1: Hayes Hall 403
  • Global Urban Planning Movements – Chair: Victoria Jolley
    • Urban Design’s Lost Generation: Urban Design during the time of “Contemporary Architecture” – Peter Laurence
    • For a History and Theory of Urban Design in Brazil – Heraldo Borges (virtual)
    • Re-exploring historic urban layers of the center of Ulaanbaatar: Traditional vs. Modernist urban design – Munkh-Erdene Togtokhbayar (virtual)
    • Urban Processes and Public Spaces in the ‘End of the City’ – Lívia Zanelli (virtual)

10:30am – 11:00am – coffee break in Crosby Hall Lobby and Hayes Hall in front of 403

11:00am – 1:00pm – second parallel sessions in Hayes Hall and adjacent Crosby Hall

• Typology, morphology, and mapping 2: Crosby Hall 116
  • Housing and Social Justice – Chair: Janina Gosseye
    • Urban Housing and Temporal Justice: a Re-Reading of Red Vienna from a Chronopolitical Perspective – Jerome Becker
    • Black Spaces: Uncovering New Forms of Public Space Through Urban Design – Dorian Moore
    • Collective housing and urban production: the ground floor, the ground of the city – Marcos Leite Rosa (virtual)
    • Between Renovation & Resistance: Visual and Material Contestations of Modernist Social Housing Legacies in Brussels – Matthias Lamberts (virtual)
      
• Environment, ecologies, and extraction 2: Crosby Hall 120
  • The Place of Nature in the City – Chair: Matthew Heins
    • Parks around the Towers: History, Use, and Infill Prospects – Katherine Perrott
    • Zürich’s Bachkonzept: A longitudinal study of urban form’s transformation through the loss of urban streams’ ecosystems and their innovative daylighting – Luna Khirfan (virtual)
    • The Greenbelt in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects – Gianni Talamini (virtual)
      
• Agency, transfer, and disciplinarity 2: Hayes Hall 401
  • Pre-organized session: Reimagining Urban Futures: Collaborative Dialogues Across Disciplines.
  • Cathelijne Nuijsink, Eric Häusler, Dasha Kuletskaya, André Patrão, Chantal El Hayek, Anna Karla Almeida
    
• Technology, infrastructure, and modernity 2: Hayes Hall 403
  • Technological and Scientific Influence on Urban Design – Chair: Tom Avermaete
    • The Manhattan Project and Big Science – Ludovico Centis
    • Heterotopia as Fragment and Network the Urban Geographies and Cybernetic Histories of the 1990s – Joseph Bedford (virtual)
    • A Society of Robots: the Software that Shaped a Country – Pablo Miranda Carranza
    • Decentralized Aesthetics: Algorithmic Urbanism and the Death of Human-Centered Design – Duane Ebesu

1:00pm – 2:30pm – Lunch keynote (lunch provided) in Hayes Hall 403 : Janina Gosseye: A Shadow Canon? Neotraditionalism in Urban Design Historiography

2.30pm – 4.30pm – third parallel sessions in Crosby Hall

• Typology, morphology, and mapping 3: Crosby Hall 116
  • Pre-organized session: Map-Making as Implicit Urban Design: Re-tracing Histories of Critical Cartography.
    • Viviana d’Auria, Scott Aker, Garine Boghossian, Campbell Drake, Sebastián Oviedo
      
• Environment, ecologies, and extraction 3: Crosby Hall 120
  • Pre-organized session: Land(scape)-Oriented Approaches to Modernist Housing Estates in Northern Europe: Between Politics, Ecologies, and Resistance.
    • Robin Hueppe, Jennifer Mack, Adrià Carbonell, Chero Eliassi
      
• Agency, transfer, and disciplinarity 3: Crosby Hall 107
  • Urban Design, State Power, and Empire – Chair: Peter Laurence
    • Building Empire Otherwise: Towards an Urban Design History of Company Towns and Corporate Colonization in the Twentieth Century – Victor Munoz Sanz, Anna Karla De Almeida Milani
    • Exporting Housing Ideals: The Commonwealth Department of Works and Post-war Housing Schemes in Australia and its External Territories – Renee Miller-Yeaman (virtual)
    • Concrete Frames and Improvised Gardens: Architecture, Subjectivity and Class Composition in Lefkosia’s Refugee Housing Estates – Konstantinos Avramidis, Frixos Petrou (virtual)
    • Cold War Liberalism and the Origins of Collage City – Scott Colman
      
• Technology, infrastructure, and modernity 3: Crosby Hall 109 (on screen)
  • VIRTUAL pre-organized session: The Unlivable City: Shaping Surplus and Stigma in Twentieth Century Urbanism
    • Maroš Krivý, Jess Myers, Helen Rix Runting

8:30am – 10:30am – fourth parallel sessions in Crosby Hall

• Typology, morphology, and mapping 4: Crosby Hall 116
  • Pre-organized session: The alternative view on the urbanizing Pearl River Delta region
    • Xiaoyu Lin, Wenjian Pan, Jiaxiu Cai, Ai Ran, Liran Chen
      
• Environment, ecologies, and extraction 4: Crosby Hall 120
  • Heritage and Sustainability – Chair: Peter Laurence
    • A Heritage Centered Approach to Sustainable Urban Development in Baja California Sur – Stephen Ferroni, Ella Goulding
    • The Strip of Enclaves: Tracing Istanbul’s Waterfront – Ezgi Nur Güngör
    • From Good Living to Saving the World: Garret Eckbo and Environmental Design – Bruno Notteboom
      
• Agency, transfer, and disciplinarity 4: Crosby Hall 107
  • Gender, Equity, and the Domestic City – Chair: Kristine Stiphany
    • Between the Street and the Home. The Urban Dimensions of the Women’s Advisory Committee Rotterdam’s Advice – María Novas Ferradás
    • Imagined Futures and the Right to the City: Tokyo’s Urban Ants – Eric Häusler
    • Co-designing transformative city-making: reflecting on situated co-design practices in the Cape Region, South Africa – Sabina Favaro, Kathryn Ewing (virtual)
      
• Technology, infrastructure, and modernity 4: Crosby Hall 109
  • Innovativity and Evolution – Chair: Tom Avermaete
    • The Face of Manchester – Victoria Jolley
    • The 1901 Pan-American Exposition: An Architectural Catalyst for Crafting the Museum-City Concept in Buffalo – Gonca Dincer (virtual)
    • The Marblehead Labyrinth and the Manhattan Grid: An Urban Dialectic on the Sacred and Profane – Andrew Gipe-Lazarou (virtual)
    • A Rationalist Group: Another View on Portuguese Architecture Culture (1960-1989) – Filipe Lacerda Neto

10:30am – 11:00am – coffee break in Crosby Hall

11:00am – 1:00pm – fifth parallel sessions in Crosby Hall

• Typology, morphology, and mapping 5 – Crosby Hall 116
  • Sensory and Experiential Urbanism – Chair: Janina Gosseye
    • Morphogenesis and Homothety in Alvar Aalto’s Urban Design and Regional Planning – Gianni Talamini (virtual)
    • Designing Poverty & Crime: Histories of Carceral Urbanism on Blackwell’s Island, New York – Annelise Verrydt
    • The Emergence and Development of Instant Apartment Cities in South Korea – Planning and Urban design of First-Generation New Towns in the 1990s – Joonwoo Kim (virtual)
    • Urban Morphology and the Pursuit of Pleasure: How Artifice Enhances Sensory Engagement in Urban Design – Mirko Guaralda (virtual)
      
• Environment, ecologies, and extraction 5: Crosby Hall 120 (on screen)
  • VIRTUAL pre-organized session: Geologic civics: extraction, pragmatic acculturation and settler nature in mining town urban design
    • Hannah le Roux, Christopher Alton, Petros Phokaides, Serah Calitz, Foteini-Tereza Tsakalou, Maria Liapi
      
• Agency, transfer, and disciplinarity 5: Crosby Hall 107
  • Utopian Imaginaries and Reframing the Future – Chair: Erkin Özay
    • Urban Design Over Time: The American Institute of Architects’ Design Assistance Team Project, 1967-2022 – Carlton Basmajian
    • Reinventing Utopias: Building China’s Dream Town Through Visionary Planning – Colleen Chiu-Shee
    • Escaping the historical frame. Critically re-mapping the historical efforts to ‘develop’ the Dender Region – Elke Dhaenens (virtual)
    • Canonization and evolution of American urban design ideas over the past 35 years – perspectives from the Rudy Bruner Award for Urban Excellence – Conrad Kickert, Kelly Gregg, Carl Siegel
      
• Technology, infrastructure, and modernity 5: Crosby Hall 109
  • Systems and infrastructure – Chair: Gregory Delaney
    • The Rise and Fall of the Puerto Colombia Pier: Infrastructure, Urban Development, and Neglected Communities – Pedro Abel Romero Leiro
    • Modernism After Marketmen: The Indifferent Urban Renewal of New York’s Washington Market District, 1960s-1980s – Addison Godel
    • Food spaces, systems, infrastructure: re-framing the productive city – Joe Nasr, Matthew Potteiger
    • Crossroads of Contestation: Citizen Mobilization and Environmentalism in Brussels’ Urban Highway Projects – Eline Inghelbrecht (virtual)

1:00pm – 2:30pm – Lunch keynote (lunch provided) in Hayes Hall 403 – Dr Tom Avermaete: Toward Reciprocal Histories of Urban Design

2:30pm – 4:30pm – sixth parallel sessions in Crosby Hall

• Typology, morphology, and mapping 6 – Crosby Hall 116
  • Resilient Urban Design – Chair: Paul Hess
    • Architecture on the Edge: Building Design that Fosters Memorable and Meaningful Urban Precincts in Subtropical Cities – Olivia Crawford (virtual)
    • Curved Commodities: The Emergent Typology of the Global Real Estate Polykatoikia and the Shadow of Ghost Urbanism in Post-Crisis Athens – Aristotelis Kaleris
    • Urban Typologies of the Winter City: Diverging Spatial Strategies to Winter Climate in Arctic Urbanism – Åste Kristine Ullring Holtan (virtual)
    • Fostering Social Resilience through Built Form: Urban Design Principles for Neighbourhoods – Szymon Nogalski
      
• Environment, ecologies, and extraction 6: Crosby Hall 120
  • Climate and Settlement Theory – Chair: Kristine Stiphany
    • Alternate Imaginaries for the Kinara: River Ravi’s Edge as a Threshold – Mahwish Khalil
    • Red-green Advocacy in Europe’s Urban Landscapes – Dries Pattyn (virtual)
    • Urban Design with “Natural Forces”—from Owens Valley to Los Angeles – Anna Renken
      
• Agency, transfer, and disciplinarity 6: Crosby Hall 107
  • Pre-organized session: Transnational Care and Design Politics
    • Maria Kouvari, Petros Phokaides, Olga Toulomi, Amina Kaskar, Min Kyung Lee, Tania Gutierrez-Monroy, Anooradha Siddiqi
      
• Technology, infrastructure, and modernity 6: Crosby Hall 109
  • Pre-organized session: Translationese: Borrowing, Hybridity, and Innovation in East Asian Urban Design
    • Ben Parker, Boya Guo, Yun Fu, Yoeun Chung
      

4:30pm – closing comments in Hayes Hall 403

• Observations on track Typology, morphology and mapping by Janina Gosseye
• Observations on track Environment, ecologies, and extraction by Robert Fishman
• Observations on track Agency, transfer, and disciplinarity by Robert Shibley
• Observations on track Technology, infrastructure, and modernity by Tom Avermaete
  Closing comments and announcements by Conrad Kickert and Kelly Gregg

5.30pm – 7:00pm – closing reception in Hayes Hall Atrium

9am – 12pm noon – bus tours for those who have indicated interest – tour pickup at 468 Washington St in downtown Buffalo (Just Buffalo Literary Center)

• Tour Option 1 – Buffalo
• Tour Option 2 – Niagara Falls