Today, with more than fifty active armed conflicts around the world, the relationship between architecture and conflict is a relevant and multifaceted issue.
Wars shape territories, erase heritages, and force entire populations to flee their land. But conflict, understood not only in its warlike form but also as social tension, ecological crisis, struggle for resources, cultural or identity fracture, can also become a transformative force. It can indeed shake the existing order, generate instability, but at the same time reveal new needs, fuel radical visions and thus stimulate design imagination.
ADH Journal, in an issue devoted to the relationship between Heritage Cities and Conflicts, invites reflection on the role of architecture in contexts marked by conflict, exploring its critical, memorial and generative potential.
In a time when climate change is intertwined with increasingly widespread geopolitical tensions, conflict takes on new and pervasive forms. It is crucial to interrogate how architecture can interpret, narrate, and sometimes overcome the fractures of the present.
Numerous examples show how conflict act as catalyst for significant transformations. These events force crucial decisions, redefining architectural functions and values, or leaving permanent traces that become symbols of historical memory.
At the same time, conflict manifests itself in the everyday dimension, in urban landscapes marked by inequalities, exclusions and latent tensions.
In this perspective, the project becomes a critical act, capable of shaping new possibilities of cohabitation, presiding over memory and generating future.
To contribute to this issue, we invite groundbreaking investigations and reflections about themes revolving around (but not limited to) the following fields:
• Architecture and armed conflict, exploring the role of architecture before, during or post-conflict.
• Architecture and conflicting memories, investigating how to manage the controversial legacy produced by totalitarian regimes, revolutions, and post-colonial historical categories.
• Architecture and conflict of interests, exploring how divergent interests and climate and economic crises threaten the world’s urban and architectural heritage.
• Architecture and Inner conflict, considered as the driving force behind the creative act in architecture and art.