NAF/NAAR Symposium 2027 Striving for “Sufficiency” and “Care” Towards Hopeful Futures in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Urban Planning and Architectural Heritage Call for Papers The Nordic Association of Architectural Research (NAF/NAAR) and the School of Architecture at Tampere University proudly join forces in organizing the NAF/NAAR Symposium 2027. The symposium will take place on the university’s City Centre Campus in the city of Tampere, Finland, from 28 to 29 October 2027. A double-blind peer-reviewed proceedings publication with Gold Open Access published by Nordic Academic Press of Architectural Research will follow the symposium. Partners NAF/NAAR is an independent association of architectural researchers from universities and schools of architecture in the Nordic countries which has existed since 1987. NAF/NAAR symposia are held once a year. They are important platforms for critical reflection on architectural research within the fields of architecture, urban design, and landscape architecture. To ensure their dynamic and fruitful exchange of knowledge, the events are conceptualized and organized in collaboration with various partners and hosted by a different institution each year. The School of Architecture at the Tampere University follows an interdisciplinary approach to education and conducts scientific and artistic research. It offers expertise in urban design and planning, architectural design and sustainable housing, and architectural history and architectural heritage. The school aims to care for the continuity of our built culture and critically rethink material, ecological, social, and cultural sustainability, while fostering “healthy”, “accessible”, “beautiful”, and “authentic” architecture. The research group Future-oriented Heritage (ForHer) is taking the main responsibility for the practical organization of the NAF/NAAR Symposium 2027. Its research foregrounds “care”, “sufficiency”, and “locality” as key principles for sustainable architectural practice and education. Working across disciplines and combining research with artistic, pedagogical, and experimental approaches that actively challenge established norms and practices, ForHer is committed to doing otherwise: to developing alternative ways of understanding, caring for, and working with the built environment. The Overall Topic In light of contemporary global challenges such as climate change, pollution, and material scarcity, there is a need to engage with architecture in new ways and from multiple perspectives. Frameworks of sustainability, planetary boundaries, multispecies ecologies, and wellbeing offer promising approaches for rethinking the future of the built environment. Concurrently, growing attention to adaptive reuse, repair, and maintenance challenges the dominant logics of replacement and growth, foregrounding practices of care, stewardship, and resource sufficiency. Similar contestation of the status quo derives from the questioning of anthropocentric perspectives. In which way can architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, and architectural heritage shift their disciplines towards a relational and situated understanding of the interaction between humans and nonhumans? Against the backdrop of this question, the symposium discusses and contextualizes issues of “sufficiency” and “care” in relation to new architectural practices. Key Concepts Sufficiency The concept of “sufficiency” in this context (the Call for Papers) derives from sufficiency studies in architecture investigating how to meet human spatial and functional needs using the absolute minimum of energy, materials, land, and space, shifting the focus from making resource-heavy buildings more “efficient” so as to avoid excess consumption altogether.i In the era of both global overconsumption and the unequal distribution of wealth and resources, the culturally shaped conception of what is “sufficient” – and for whom – requires critical examination. Care The concept of “care” in architecture and contemporary architectural theory stems primarily from feminist ethics of care, philosophy/phenomenology, and ecological/regenerative design traditions. Referring in this context (the Call for Papers) to the understanding originating in gender studies that care encompasses all interdependent, eco-dependent, and collective activities and practices that “sustain life”,ii the concept of “care” has developed significantly in recent years, thus challenging hegemonic understandings of and perspectives in architecture and architectural practices. Invitation and Tracks We invite scholars and practitioners in the fields of architecture (including interior design, landscape architecture, and urban design), and architectural heritage to address the overall topic of the symposium from innovative and diverse standpoints. We welcome presentations of research and practice-based case studies and reflections concerning sustainable, future-oriented knowledge in architecture and architectural heritage. We also look forward to explorations of heritages across different scales and historical epochs. All authors should reflect on their research methods and positioning, contextualizing their contributions with respect to the following six specific “What about” symposium tracks: Track 1: What about “ugly” buildings? This track is dedicated to exploring current discourses on aesthetic value in architecture, more specifically in regard to the concepts of “outdatedness” and “ugliness”. In the context of a building sector that is driven by innovation, consumption and tabular rasa the timespan in which buildings are regarded as outdated becomes shorter and shorter. Somehow these buildings fall into a gap: they are already old news, but not old enough to be considered heritage. At the same time debates concerning architectural aesthetics,iii preservation,iv and landscape managementv reveal competing understandings of value, quality, and desirability, while emerging approaches in architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and heritage practices challenge established ideals of “beauty”, order, and control. The track invites contributions that examine how aesthetic conventions shape the valuation, preservation, management, and transformation of existing buildings. Whose aesthetic values are represented in the debates on the built environment, and whose are marginalized? How do values change over time, and how can architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and heritage practices engage with age, wear, temporality and even “ugliness” as potential qualities rather than deficiencies? Track 2: What about repair? This track is dedicated to examining the culture of building repair. In response to ecological concerns, practices of maintenance, care, repair, and adaptation are gaining renewed attention across architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and heritage. While repair has often been perceived as costly, difficult and risky, growing interest in renovationvi and reuse has highlighted the social, cultural and environmental value embedded in existing buildings, landscapes and infrastructures.vii The track invites contributions that, from an architectural perspective, examine repair as cultural, material, and everyday practices, from large-scale renovations and transformations to everyday maintenance and home repair. Following the British anthropologist Tim Ingold’s notion that a house is never truly finished but remains an ongoing “gathering of lives”,viii we welcome research on the opportunities, challenges, and stigmas associated with repair, as well as perspectives that consider the role of more-than-human actorsix in shaping and sustaining the built environment. What can we learn from existing repair practices, and how might they inform more sustainable futures for the built environment? Track 3: What about homes? This track is dedicated to discussions of homes, households, and residential areas, as they are undergoing profound social, demographic, and ecological change. Shifting family structures, ageing populations, increasing diversity, housing inequalities, new patterns of work and care, and demands for reduced resource consumption are challenging our established housing models. Yet much of the existing housing stock remains physically and institutionally configured around assumptions of stable households and predictable life courses. With a call for critical examination of how homes and residential environments can support diverse ways of living, this track welcomes research on adaptability, care, sufficiency, and housing transformation, including emerging practices such as co-housing,x intergenerational living, shared domestic infrastructures, Housing Firstxi initiatives and adaptive reuse of existing homes. How do such practices challenge established understandings of home, household, ownership, and dwelling? What implications do they hold for architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and heritage? Track 4: What about birds? This track is dedicated to exploring the relation between architecture and nonhuman actors. For a long time, buildings and cities have been designed for people to live and work in, with animals and plants relegated to subservient functions such as companionship, workforce, or food. Against this backdrop one can today observe the emergence of a discourse on multispecies justice in architecture. This perspective raises profound ethical as well as ontological questions. How can we reconsider architecture, landscapes, and urban design from the point of nonhuman actors? Can this reconsidering offer fertile ground for architectural inventions and new aesthetics? Can one develop an architecture that is able to reformulate the relations between human and nonhuman actors? Whether in the form of historical studies, contemporary cases, or projective investigations, this track asks what would an architecture be that puts nonhuman actors in focus? Track 5: What about sand? This track is dedicated to investigating the relation between architecture and materiality in a wider sense. Especially in the context of climate change, emissions, and resource use this relation has increasingly become a focus. Against this backdrop, this track expands on the notion of materiality to engage with a critical shortages of resources often deemed necessary for development. It also asks for ways of engaging with new materials including cyclical materialities and construction materials. Furthermore, it discusses approaches that engage with the territorial, addressing the direct and indirect shaping of materials whether in constructions, in territories, as affected by constructions, or the managing of the new conditions of flooding, drought, landslides, and other effects that are emerging in the wake of climate change. Track 6: What about architects (and the architectural discipline)? This track is dedicated to reflections on the architectural discipline and its self-understanding, its theories, methods, and practices. It addresses past and present epistemological frameworks that in many ways – for better or for worse – continue to shape our understanding(s) of society and the built environment. It invites researchers to revisit the canon of architecture and architectural history/theory and critically reflect on their representation(s) and future scopes. Against the backdrop of discussing “sufficiency” and “care” in architecture, it poses the questions: How do we as architects, landscape architects, and urban planners “re-learn” through considering past epistemologies? And in which way does this “re-learning” change the social role of the architect? Keynote Speakers Elke Krasny Dr. Elke Krasny is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her scholarship and writing, her lectures and curatorial work focus on care, ecologies, transnational feminist activism and politics of memory in contemporary art, architecture, public space, and urbanism. In recognition of her contributions to feminist research, she was awarded the Gabriele Possanner State Prize in 2023. Her major publications include Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (with Angelika Fitz, MIT Press, 2019), Living with an Infected Planet: Covid-19, Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care (transcript, 2023), Curating with Care (Routledge 2023) and Curating as Feminist Organizing (Routledge 2023; both with Lara Perry) as well as Feminist Infrastructural Critique (with Sophie Ling and Claudia Lomoschitz, 2024). Jarno Valkonen and Veera Kinnunen Jarno Valkonen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Lapland, Finland. He has extensive research experience in the fields of environmental sociology, nature resource politics, naturecultural research and Sámi and Indigenous studies. Valkonen’s research spans a wide range of topics, including politics of nature, reindeer herding, tourism, waste governance, Indigenous fish pluralities, and local and Indigenous knowing. His ongoing research forms a central part of the activities of the Centre of Excellence for Multibeing Justice in Indigenous Societies (MultiBEING, RCF). His recent publications include the books Knowing from the Indigenous North: Sámi Approaches to History, Politics and Belonging (with Thomas Hylland Eriksen and Sanna Valkonen, Routledge, 2019) and Mökin kanssa ajattelu: ympäristösosiologinen mielikuvitus ympäristökriisin aikakaudella (Thinking with the Cabin: Environmental Sociological Imagination in the Age of the Environmental Crisis, Vastapaino, 2022). Veera Kinnunen (PhD, title of Docent) is a sociologist working on the threshold of more-than-human sociology, environmental humanities, and feminist ethics. She is a lecturer of Sociology at the University of Lapland, and a founding member of University of Lapland’s strategically significant Research Community SuMu (Sustainable Naturecultures and Multispecies Futures). In addition, she is the Co-PI of University of Oulu's More than just human homes (HOMINGS, RCF 2024-2028). Her ethnographic research focuses on dwelling, exploring issues such as living with clutter, waste, soil, and microbes. She has published widely on ethics of care (Bokashi 2023, Avain publishing), more-than-human infrastructures (Infrastructural Being 2022, Palgrave), and embodied methods (Researching with Proximity 2024, Palgrave). She is the Editor-in-Chief of the leading Finnish social scientific journal Sosiologia. Third keynote speaker (TBC) Submission Submit your abstract in British English (max. 300 words, excluding 4 keywords and references) by 15 January 2027 at the latest. Indicate the preferred track and whether you plan to develop your contribution into a scientific article or an academic essay. To learn more about how NAF/NAAR distinguishes between a scientific article and an academic essay, please go to: https://www.sintef.no/globalassets/sintef-byggforsk/a-scientific-article-or-an-academic-essay.pdf Your abstract must be anonymized by you (the author/s) as it will be peer reviewed. We therefore urge you to remove all traces and references that might reveal your identity as the author/s of the abstract. The abstract title as well as the author’s/authors’ name(s) and email address(es) should be ent (by email) in a separate document to the symposium email address: nafnaar2027@tuni.fi cc: aet@aarch.dk; magnus.ronn.arch@gmail.com no later than 15 January 2027. Note: a maximum of only three authors per abstract! Author Guidelines Authors whose abstracts are accepted after the peer review of abstracts will be asked to submit a full paper in British English no later than 27 September 2027. The (anonymized) papers submitted should have a minimum of 6,000 words but not exceed 8,000 words (excluding the abstract, references, and figures). Note: a maximum of only three authors per paper! Authors should use endnotes (rather than a reference list), with a maximum of 50 notes. Further guidelines will be sent at a later date to authors whose abstracts have been approved. Please also indicate the preferred track and whether your contribution should be peer-reviewed as a scientific article or an academic essay. Language Both the abstract and the full paper must be submitted in British English. AI Statement NAF/NAAR allows authors to use generative AI tools to improve spelling, grammar, and general editing. AI tools cannot be listed as an author or co-author of an abstract, a paper, or an article/essay. NAF/NAAR allows generative AI tools to be used neither for the creation and manipulation of images, figures, or artwork, nor to analyse or draw insights from original research as part of the research process. Authors who have used AI are requested to state so in their manuscript (abstracts, papers, and articles/essays), and to briefly specify how it was used. This rule applies to abstracts, papers, and articles/essays to keep research and writing honest and clear for everyone. Please follow the instructions below: Disclosure instructions Add your statement at the end of your manuscript in the core manuscript file, before your list of endnotes. The statement should be placed in a new section titled “Declaration of Generative AI and AI-assisted technologies in the writing process”. Statement: During the preparation of this work the author(s) used [NAME TOOL / SERVICE] in order to [REASON]. After using this tool/service, the author(s) reviewed and edited the content as needed and take(s) full responsibility for the content of the publication. Key Dates and Deadlines Call for papers: November 2026 Deadline for submission of abstract: 15 January 2027 Notification of abstract acceptance: 1 March 2027 Deadline for submission of full paper and authors registration: 27 September 2027 Deadline for participation without presentation: 27 September 2027 Get-together in Tampere: 27 October 2027 Symposium in Tampere: 28–29 October 2027 Organizing Committee Representatives of Tampere University, Finland: Iida Kalakoski, PhD, Lecturer Enni Heiskanen PhD-Student Lotta Hietava, PhD-Student Verna Hahtola, PhD-Student Mari-Sohvi Miettinen, PhD-Student Riina Sirén, PhD-Student
Anne Elisabeth Toft, PhD, Associate Professor, Aarhus School of Architecture Magnus Rönn, PhD, Associate Professor, Emeritus, Gothenburg University Daniel Koch López, PhD, Associate Professor, KTH Royal Institute of Technology Turid Borgestrand Øien, PhD, Associate Professor, Aalborg University Proceedings publication: A double-blind, peer-reviewed proceedings publication with Gold Open Access will follow the symposium. All manuscripts accepted after scientific review will be published in the online proceedings publication. The proceedings will be published in British English. The double-blind peer review of articles and essays take place after the symposium. Symposium Fee: Teachers and researchers: €370, PhD students: €220. The fee includes a double-blind peer review process for full articles and essays to be published in the resulting proceedings publication, Email: Send abstracts and conference papers to nafnaar2027@tuni.fi cc: aet@aarch.dk; magnus.ronn.arch@gmail.com Homepage: (Forthcoming/under construction) Getting to Tampere/Tammerfors (Forthcoming)
Notes ii In the words of feminist scholars Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto, “care” can be defined as “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible”. According to the two of them, this process of maintenance, continuation, and repair includes, “our body, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex life-sustaining web”; see Joan Tronto and Berenice Fisher, “Toward a Feminist Theory of Caring”, in Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women's Lives, ed. Emily K. Abel and Margaret K. Nelson (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press), pp. 36–54. Although Fisher and Tronto had humans in mind when writing “we” and “ours”, in this context (the Call for Papers) we include the concept of more-than-human actors. iii On the architectural uprising, see https://www.arkitekturoproeret.dk/; https://www.arkitekturopproret.no/; https://www.arkitekturupproret.se/; https://www.architecturaluprising.com/. On ugliness in architecture, see Timothy Hyde, Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). iv Anastasiya Halauniova, “Brick is Warmer than Concrete: Care for Urban Aesthetics in Cities with Violent Pasts”, European Journal of Sociology/Archives Européennes de Sociologie 66, no. 3 (2025), pp. 256–90. v Vild med vilje, https://www.vildmedvilje.dk/. vi Renoverprisen: https://renover.dk/. vii Jérôme Denis and David Pontille, “Material Ordering and the Care of Things”, Science, Technology, & Human Values 40, no. 3 (2015), pp. 338–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243914553129. viii Tim Ingold, “Building, Dwelling, Living: How Animals and People Make Themselves at Home in the World”, in The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (Abingdon on Thames: Routledge, 2000). ix Elke Krasny and Lara Perry, eds., Curating with Care (Abingdon on Thames: Routledge, 2023). xi https://housingfirsteurope.eu/.
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