Call for Papers - CLOSED

‘Buy land! They’re not making it anymore’
Mark Twain

Access to land – serviced land in particular – is critical for sustainable urban development. The availability of land will determine the way our cities and neighbourhoods will grow, develop and expand; whether they will be able to absorb demographic growth, and how they will cope with the pressure for new uses and demands from businesses, services, entertainment, housing, transportation, conservation and beyond. In an era of pervasive social inequalities and renewed attention to the scarcity of our common resources; of increased environmental risk and of mass extinction of species, where land for housing will become an even more valuable but limited asset, our approaches to land accessibility and distribution require urgent attention. Unprecedented migration patterns – voluntary and forced displacements – further exacerbate asymmetries. While the urban core and central districts of global cities today boast high standards of living and are provided with innovative transport systems and infrastructure networks, peripheral districts repeatedly struggle with low density, commuting traffic, and an inadequate access to of services and jobs. As continuous urban growth only deepens the divide between social groups according to resource accessibility, the question emerges: what alternative approaches, policies, and ideas are possible?

Responding to this challenge, the SHARELAND Doctoral Colloquium will be linked to the ETH Forum Wohnungsbau 2019, taking place on previous day, April 05th, 2019. Under a common theme, the two-day event will provide a platform to share knowledge and experiences across fields and levels of inquiry. The colloquium will bring academic rigour and propose ideas within international and national frameworks, while also providing participants with the chance to share and discuss their work with both their peers as well as internationally renowned practitioners.

Intending to make sense out of the causes and effects, parallels, and unfolding phenomena at the heart of urbanisation processes related to land distribution in our contemporary era, the SHARELAND Doctoral Colloquium seeks diverse, intersecting and hybrid voices. Presenters will share and discuss their ideas under one of three tracks: ‘Sharing’, ‘Dwelling, and ‘Co-creating’. Experts participating in the ETH Forum Wohnungsbau 2019 conference will serve as moderators, facilitating discussion and adding elements of their practice to the research findings, discussions and empirical evidences revealed by doctoral works.

We invite architects, landscape architects, urban planners, designers, artists, sociologists, economists, ecologists and researchers in the field of urbanisation to bring together their knowledge, experience and lessons learned in the development of new approaches and ideas.

• alternative land distribution and building ownership models
• shared resources, infrastructure and public space
• Institutional and legal forms of sharing land for co-habitation
• sharing economies
• collective forms of dwelling
• new densities of common dwelling
• sharing models between human and non-human actors

• practices of dwelling together
• practices of shared public and green space management
• practices of shared land management
• practices of social cohesion
• upgrading and renewal of suburbs and informal settlements
• bottom-up conversion models
• dwelling assistance

• co-creation of new neighborhoods
• co-creation of public space and dwelling
• co-creation with non-human actors
• housing by the bottom of the pyramid
• incremental densification housing models
• processes and moderation of co-creation
• planning for informal urbanization

Please send your abstracts (PDF) of max. 500 words including title, authors and 3-5 keywords to: . We highly encourage PhD students and Post-Doc researchers to apply (max. 5 years after completion of PhD).

Selected presenters will be asked to submit a single image/photograph (TIFF, 150 DPI, DIN A2 Format) representing their ideas and research within the full presentation submission deadline, to be shown collectively in the space of the annual Wohnforum conference occurring the previous day.

• Abstract submission: December 14th
• Acceptance notice: Until January 18th
• Full presentation submission: February 15th
• Final presentation submission: March 15th