Dan Dubowitz

Instruments of Perpetual Revolution: Taking Care in City Making

Dan Dubowitz is Reader in Architecture at Manchester School of Architecture where he is director of Atelier FLUX which investigates how architecture and urbanism can activate a state of change.

He is  founder and director of Civic Works Ltd, a multi-disciplinary design practice for city-making. From 1997 -2015 he developed 9 city-scale Cultural Masterplans for post-industrial areas in decline in 5 city-regions across the UK from Glasgow (Gorbals), and Manchester (Ancoats) to London (Nine Elms).

He is a UK Research institute (Arts and Humanities Research Council) Innovation Scholar to Investigate Cultural Masterplanning: New Methods for Developer-led Urban Regeneration (2023-2026)

He is author of  a number of monographs including ‘Citizen Manchester’ (2014) and ‘ The Peeps’ (2011) on the transformation of Manchester, ‘Wastelands’ (2009) on post-industrial cities around the world, and ‘Fascismo Abbandonato’ (2010) Investigating the Children’s holiday camps of Mussolini’s Italy. His Next books are ‘Instruments of Perpetual revolution: The Life and Works of Stefan Sebök’ (2024) and ‘Megalomania: Delusions of Grandeur in City Making’ (2026)

Hélène Frichot

Repair Stories: World Mending and World Destroying

Hélène Frichot is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, Australia. Previously, she was Professor of Critical Studies and Gender Theory, and Director of Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH Stockholm, Sweden. Drawing on her background in architecture and philosophy, her research fosters creative practice methodologies and develops concept-tools situated in relation to feminist posthumanities, dirty materialism, the environmental humanities, and affect theory. She experiments with ficto-critical and transversal writing methodologies and environmental story telling approaches, currently with a focus on the Plantationocene. Recent publications include Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture (AADR 2019) and Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (Bloomsbury 2018). Recent edited collections include: with Adrià Carbonell, Hannes Frykholm, and Sepideh Karami, Infrastructural Love: Caring for our Architectural Support Systems (Birkhauser 2022); with Marco Jobst, Architectural Affects After Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge 2021); with Naomi Stead, Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches (Bloomsbury 2020); with Gunnar Sandin and Bettina Schwalm, After Effects: Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research (Actar 2019).

Elke Krasny

Living with a wounded planet. On building care

Elke Krasny is Professor for Art and Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is a feminist cultural theorist, urban researcher, curator, and author. Her scholarship addresses ecological and social justice at the global present with a focus on caring practices in architecture, urbanism, and contemporary art. Her 2008 exhibition and edited volume The Force is in the Mind. The Making of Architecture investigated tools in architecture.  With Angelika Fitz, she edited Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet together (MIT Press, 2019). With Angelika Fitz and Marvi Mazhar, she co-edited Yasmeen Lari. Architecture for the Future (MIT Press, 2023). Her book Living with an Infected Planet. Covid-19 Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care develops a feminist perspective on the rhetoric of war and the realities of care in pandemic times (transcript, 2023).

photo: Yona Schuh

Robert Mull

The Free World:
Architecture, education, activism and care within the Global Free Unit

Robert Mull is Professor of Architecture and Design at the University of Brighton, visiting Professor at Umeå University Sweden, and a Director at Publica. Robert was previously Director of Architecture and Dean of The Cass Faculty of Art, Architecture. Robert now leads the Global Free Unit, a transnational educational structure with academic, research, NGO and institutional partners focusing on live projects within areas of displacement and institutions including prisons, schools and communities. Robert is currently working with partners in Ukraine in support of the Kharkiv School of Architecture.

Jane Rendell

Site-Writing and other situated and ethical practices

Jane Rendell is Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Introducing concepts of ‘critical spatial practice’ and ‘site-writing’ through her authored books: The Architecture of Psychoanalysis (2017), Silver (2016), Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), The Pursuit of Pleasure (2002); her co-edited collections include Reactivating the Social Condenser (2017), Critical Architecture (2007), Spatial Imagination(2005), The Unknown City (2001), Intersections (2000), Gender, Space, Architecture (1999), Strangely Familiar (1995). From 2015-22 she led Bartlett’s Ethics Commission, (with Dr. David Roberts), and ‘The Ethics of Research Practice’, KNOW (Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality) (with Dr. Yael Padan). Currently she curates a situated reviewing site – site-readingwritingquarterly.co.uk, and with Roberts and Padan, a situated ethics on-line toolkit, www.practisingethics.org, and most recently she is site-writing in response to water resource issues in the Pyrenees and blue green infrastructures.