context

This year’s overarching theme is 'Designing Under Pressure', which frames our conversations around the societal, climatic, political, and economic forces shaping landscapes today. Within this, our sub-theme 'Agency Under Pressure' calls attention to the many actors and agents of change operating in the urban realm. We invite speakers and voices from varied contexts to share how their work, whether formal or informal, local or global, is responding to these pressures and actively reimagining the spaces we inhabit.

topic

Landscapes do not look the same everywhere, and societies do not live the same realities. Each part of the world faces its own combination of pressures; social, climatic, political, economic. Urbanism, landscape design, and architecture sit at the heart of this tension. They are fields of struggle shaped by their context. They shift across time, scale, and geography, and it is this constant variation that defines how we respond to the challenges of our age. And the responses themselves are as varied as the conditions that give rise to them. The diversity of responses reveals a wide spectrum of actors and agents of change working from different positions but influencing our collective landscape. These actors emerge not only from formal institutions like government, academia and professional practices but also from communities, informal networks, activists, and individuals who act outside formal structures.

​This Urban Landscape Week is about bringing diverse voices into focus. It is about celebrating the multiplicity of approaches, the unlikely collaborations, and the inventive ways in which people are reshaping urban and spatial realities across the world.