CFP - Housing: Urban Form

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Matthew Heins

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Mar 11, 2026, 8:13:29 PM (7 days ago) Mar 11

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There's a CFP on the topic "Housing: Urban Form" for a future issue of the journal ARQ, with submissions due March 27. They accept a wide variety of submission types.

It's copied below or can be found (with more information about types of submissions, how to submit, etc.) at https://files.cargocollective.com/c1700685/Open-Call-ARQ-123.pdf

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Housing: Urban Form

As far as we know, it was Leon Battista Alberti who first set down in writing the reciprocal analogy between house and city. Writing in the mid-15th century—at a time when cities were believed to grow according to principles of natural law—he proposed the phrase now often reduced to an aphorism: “the city is like a large house, and the house in turn is like a small city”. Read in context, however, this is less a comparison between two terms than an operative analogy—one that underpins Alberti’s conception of compositional coherence between parts and whole. In Leoni’s 1755 translation: “For if a City, [… and] a House be a little City; why may it not be said, that the Members of that House are so many little Houses; such as the Courtyard, the Hall, the Parlour, the Portico, and the like?”. (Alberti 1755, 13).

Across history, the relationship between house and city has been reimagined under shifting pressures. Modernism displaced the city as an ideal model to a target of intervention. Under the influence of late-nineteenth-century sanitary science (another aphorism: “all smell is disease”) and twentieth-century planning, housing became the primary instrument of urban reform. Ethics and aesthetics were convoluted in the conviction that new domestic forms would produce new urban subjects. Confidence in this project faltered in the wake of WWII. When Aldo Rossi returned to Alberti’s analogy in The Architecture of the City (1966), amid student movements and mounting critique of the Modern Movement’s treatment of the city, compositional harmony was no longer the main issue. Deliberately unsettling the question of scale, he added: “it follows that the single building can be designed by analogy with the city”. Analogy operated for Rossi as a critical device, and its dismissal of scale as an attack on twentieth-century urbanism, as Joan Ockman has argued. Yet it also left tensions unresolved: if the design of the city lies latent in individual buildings, how are broader systems—spatial, political, economic—accounted for?

Perhaps the analogy persists because we need it to. It reassures us that formal decisions reverberate through streets and public life; that in an era of shrinking public spheres, the design of thresholds and public spaces matters. It also forces a harder reckoning: if the city is a large house, who gets to inhabit it? And if the house is a small city, who determines its order? We return to this correspondence with fewer certainties. Housing—and today its deficit—have an impact on urban form, though not always through design intention. Mortgage structures, zoning regimes, speculative development, incremental settlements, infrastructure corridors and logistical landscapes shape urban form as decisively as any compositional diagram.

Works and Projects

We invite contributions that examine how collective housing—through form, material systems, finance, regulation, infrastructure, or collective practice—has produced and continues to produce urban form. We are particularly interested in work that reveals how these forces shape the city through housing, and how design might intervene in, redirect, or reimagine those trajectories. Scale alone is not decisive; a project’s significance may lie in its replicability or in its capacity to reorganize relations between collective and public space, repetition and singularity, developers and users.

About ARQ
ARQ, a peer-reviewed academic journal focusing on architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Published three times a year by Ediciones ARQ of Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile (PUC), ARQ is indexed in several academic databases including WoS, DOAJ, Scopus, Avery Index, SciELO, and Latindex. Articles are published in English and Spanish.

Submission Formats
We encourage contributions from emerging and established scholars, practitioners, and researchers. Submissions are accepted in various formats, including interviews, academic papers (approximately 6,000 words), critiques (1,500 words), and projects—built or unbuilt, including a special section for master thesis or diploma projects. Material should be previously unpublished, or at least not have been published in Spanish. For detailed submission guidelines, please visit: https://edicionesarq.com/Open-Call.