During the last decade, the issue of citizen participation has become a key feature of political discussion and public opinion in Chile and elsewhere. New social and political movements emerge and protest in public spaces to demand changes in such varied themes as constitutional arrangements, democracy and human rights, public education and health, environmental issues or the control of corporate power over citizens and political authorities.

Both this local condition and the global context of a growing concern about participatory processes from architects, designers, IT and social scientists, advocacy and grassroots organizations, raise an interest to discuss the relations between architecture, design, the city and the political from new views.

This conference aims to frame new discussions on these matters, besides and beyond well-known ties between architecture, design, power and bureaucracy or the struggles for the right to the city or housing. Our goal is to go further and deeper into the political rationales within design processes, and to visualize the extents to which design thinking may contribute to different approaches to the problems of the city, dealing both with imagination and political elements.

In summary, we want to address the question of how do we politically imagine the city?, understanding it as a departure point of a reflection about opening architecture and design to social processes and a common thinking about possible futures.

The conference aims to gather perspectives and thought on the relationship between architecture, design, the city and the political, emphasizing how current processes of production of the city may enable the formation of citizen organizations and subjectivities; how imagination and the political relate to each other in practices and discourses; and which conception, representation and organization resources are used by individuals and collectives to imagine the city.

There will be three thematic sessions with presentations plus a session for networking and exchange of experiences between participants. Thematic sessions will develop under the concepts of Imaginaries, Procedures and Assemblages.

Imaginaries will deal with political, design and urban theories related to participation and the relationships between citizens and design processes.
Procedures will mainly be about design methodologies and the ways theoretical discussions are taken to actual design interaction with and within communities.
Assemblages will discuss political processes linked with the city and the formation of subjectivities and organizations around urban change.

Authors will submit abstracts of up to 400 words, which will include between three and five keywords, plus authors’ names and corresponding author’s institutional information. Authors should choose a specific session to participate. The conference encourages authors to submit not only traditional academic papers or essays, but also media-oriented presentations, for instance experimental or visual archive explorations.

Upon selection of their abstracts, authors should develop and submit a draft paper of up to 1,500 words. These draft papers will undergo a double-blind review process which will lead to the submission of definitive papers.