CFP - Civic
Matthew Heins
Fabrications: The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia & New Zealand invites papers for a special issue (Vol. 36 No. 3) on the theme of Civic, edited by Susan Holden and Isabel Rousset. The deadline for full papers is February 27, 2026 and the publication is scheduled for November 2026.
This issue of Fabrications seeks to historicise civic architecture; to situate and interrogate the usage of the term in architectural discourse and design practice, across time periods and cultures. If in its broadest terms, the civic connects citizens and their cities, what can be gained from more fine-grained historical understanding of civic architecture for the present moment?
The term “civic” was once used to distinguish government buildings designed for public purposes from those for military use. During the Progressive era, its usage helped define the evolution of new city design concepts and practices. The civic architecture of the welfare state period was connected broadly with a concept of the public good. In the late twentieth century, ideals of the public realm as a space for social life continued to resonate even in new contexts of neoliberal urban governance that otherwise advanced free-market policies. More recently in 2023, the National Gallery of Victoria’s Civic Architecture exhibition sought to reclaim the term as a design ethos, highlighting the comfort, consolation, and sense of community that high quality public architecture can provide. In each case, the civic registers in distinct aesthetic and spatial ways.
The ascendence of populist and authoritarian politics is once again bringing attention to the formation of publics and returning us to the question: what are the spatial and architectural dimensions of democratic life? That the concept of civic architecture has resurfaced in contemporary discourse is symptomatic of this. On the one hand, civic architecture is being invoked in an aspirational way to reassert the value of a public realm, and the agency of architects in making it. On the other hand, evocations of civic architecture and the ideal “civic architect” deserve scrutiny as vehicles for the assertion of state power and colonial logics.
The double edge of the civic has a longer history. It has held conservative, progressive, and liberating agendas at different times and in different places. We ask: how has civic architecture intersected with building and property systems, legal systems, and governmental systems in modern society? What do the tensions in differing deployments of the term civic reveal for its representational capacity, its utility as a design concept, and, following Adrian Forty’s Words and Buildings, for the changing conceptions of civic life itself? How has architecture constituted, facilitated, and/or represented (or misrepresented) the role of citizens in cities?
Articles might explore:
- Civic architecture as a genre, building type, or design ethos
- Civic architecture as a professional specialisation or dedicated realm of expertise
- Architectural design and public space for civic assembly and engagement; for the formation, appearance, and representation of publics
- Changing spaces for governing and of government
- Architectural and building processes that yield or hamper civic engagement, and the inclusion or exclusion of civic engagement practices in city-making
- Architecture and design that makes governance tangible; governance by or through design
- The changing relationship between the architecture profession, bureaucracy, and the state
- Aesthetic registers of the civic realm or civic life