Emerging -Scapes: Conceptual and Spatial Constructs in Architectural and Urban Studies

Dear Colleagues,

When Arjun Appadurai introduced the notion of “-scapes” in the early 1990s, he sought to capture the disjunctive, deterritorialized flows that structure our global condition: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. More than three decades later, the “-scape” is not revisited here out of conceptual nostalgia. Rather, we contend that it remains an underutilized spatial analytic in architectural and urban research—one capable of tracing the radically recomposed conditions of spatial life in the Anthropocene. Urban environments are no longer shaped solely by physical infrastructures but also by planetary degradation, algorithmic governance, and digital sovereignty regimes. In an era marked by ecological urgencies and expanding platform economies, cities emerge less as fixed containers and more as metabolic assemblages—terrains traversed by flows of matter, energy, data, labor, affect, and code. From smart infrastructures and robotic protocols to automated labor regimes, trial ecologies, and retrofitted housing futures, contemporary urban and architectural forms demand new conceptual maps. As recent scholarship shows, the digital and ecological spheres are now co-constitutive forces, reconfiguring governance, perception, and spatial agency.

Against this backdrop, this Special Issue invites contributions that critically engage with the conceptual and spatial paradigm of “-scapes” in architectural and urban studies. The suffix “-scape” has increasingly evolved into a theoretical tool to describe spatial conditions as fluid, multi-layered, and dynamically constructed environments. Building on Appadurai’s influential framework, this Issue explores how architectural and urban thinking can extend and spatialize such imaginaries in response to contemporary global, ecological, and technological transformations.

The overall focus is on how diverse types of “-scapes”, including but not limited to spascapes, servicescapes, soundscapes, datascapes, repair-scapes, platform-scapes, naturescapes, smartscapes, or technoscapes, inform the way we design, perceive, govern, and contest built and unbuilt environments. These scapes are not merely symbolic framings of terrain but perspectival and infrastructural formations, emerging at the intersections of bodies, buildings, sensors, systems, and imaginaries. The scope of this Issue therefore spans empirical, theoretical, and design-based inquiries into emerging landscapes of care and wellness, infrastructure and heritage, ecological systems, digitalization and artificial intelligence, publicness and privatization, and multi-sensory or affective spatial experiences. By foregrounding hybrid or intersecting spatial logics, this Special Issue seeks to open new conceptual and methodological avenues for understanding the production and negotiation of spatial experience.

In doing so, this Special Issue aims to supplement the existing literature by bridging theoretical reflections on global flows and imaginaries with grounded architectural and urban research. While concepts such as landscape urbanism, smart cities, and wellness architecture have attracted scholarly attention, there is a pressing need to reframe them within a more integrative and critical lens that attends to the situated, relational, and speculative dimensions of spatial production. The “-scape” framework offers a valuable conceptual infrastructure to connect diverse research trajectories and foster dialogue across disciplines. We particularly welcome contributions that approach space as an imagined world—experienced, produced, and contested by individuals, institutions, and communities across cultural and geographic contexts.

Dr. Aleksandra Milovanović
Dr. Stefan Janković
Prof. Dr. Vladan Djokic
Guest Editors

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• spatial theory
• landscape and urban imaginaries
• urban transformation
• multisensory environments
• situated spatial practices
• hybrid spatialities
• architecture and urban experience
• cultural and social infrastructures
• digital urbanism
• design research methodologies
• interdisciplinary approaches to space