OPEN CALL
CHINA BEYOND EXCEPTIONS
Spatial entanglements across Architecture and Urban Studies
2027, JAN 20—22
To mark its 10 years of activities, China Room is pleased to announce the conference “China Beyond Exception. Spatial entanglements across Architecture and Urban Studies” conceived to mobilize and extend the debate initiated within the group outward, in an attempt to broaden the discussion with new perspectives and trajectories.
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While China is often portrayed as a singular case, an extreme laboratory, or a systemic anomaly,
China Beyond Exception proposes a shift in perspective from exceptionality to relationality. Processes observed in China are thus treated as critical lenses through which to interrogate broader contemporary transformations across rural and urban spaces, infrastructures, professional practices, and pedagogical experiments.
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THE CALL
The call for original contributions is organised around three interrelated thematic axes that shape the current research trajectories of the group—architectural knowledge, planetary ruralism, infrastructure-led urbanisation—and invites theoretical, empirical, and design-oriented contributions from architecture, urban studies, and geography. Emphasis is not placed solely on contributions that take China as their primary or exclusive case study; rather, the call explicitly encourages submissions that pluralize geographies and engage with the conference’s three thematic axes beyond any single geographical focus.
In line with the group’s values, the conference seeks to foster an open, inclusive, and collaborative space for exchange. The call deliberately pluralizes voices and is addressed to PhD researchers, early-career researchers, professors, and faculty members, all invited to contribute to a collective conversation that begins in China but deliberately moves beyond it.
SESSION #1
The architectural profession is entering a phase of structural instability marked by shifting markets, hybrid roles, and expanding domains of practice. Recent transformations in China’s architectural profession—particularly the contraction of real estate markets and the consequent impact on education—make these dynamics especially visible. Rather than framing this condition as a crisis, this session approaches instability as a productive terrain of debate where architectural knowledge, pedagogy, and professional identities are renegotiated. Taking the Chinese case as a starting point, we invite contributions from diverse contexts that explore how changing professional realities reshape competencies, redefine expertise, and generate new forms of architectural subjectivity.
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SESSION #2
Ruralism(s) calls for a radical epistemological rethinking of the rural beyond urban subordination, crisis and nostalgia. Refusing binary hierarchies, it situates ruralities along a relational rural–urban continuum and as an active planetary condition shaping uneven spatial transformations. From China to planetary perspectives, this session invites critical, situated, and more-than-human approaches that unveil multiple ways of knowing, governing, and producing rural spatial dynamics and everyday practices. By foregrounding repair and care as experimental and adaptive forces in planning, design, and reuse strategies, we call for envisioning new imaginaries of plural and heterogeneous rural futures.
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SESSION #3
Infrastructure-led urbanities explores the urban afterlives of Chinese-related infrastructure projects. As geopolitical conditions shift, this session examines how initiatives such as the Belt and Road reshape cities beyond their initial moment of expansion. The session focuses on emerging infrastructure-led urbanities, the urban projects and design visions that frame them, and the multiple temporalities (delay, anticipation, incompletion) through which infrastructure produces lasting spatial, governance, and social transformations.
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