10-11 September 2025 | Symposium | ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg, HIB Open Space 2.
The public symposium A Century of Urban Futures: Archives, Vectors, and Perspectives (1950–2050) invites interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners to discuss the shifting narratives, epistemologies, and imaginaries of urban development. The term Urban Age is often used to describe the present era of global urbanisation, as if it were the inevitable outcome of demographic and economic trends. This symposium challenges such deterministic narratives. We propose a counter-history: the Urban Age was not simply a fact, but a project – actively imagined, constructed, and debated since the mid-20th century by architects, planners, policymakers, and scholars alike. From the postwar period onward, this process intersected with the emergence of electronic computing and the Information Age, shaping new urban epistemologies. Today, the rise of generative AI and large language models (LLMs) once again transforms how we produce, organise, and interpret urban knowledge. It prompts us to reconsider the histories we tell, the archives we build, and the futures we envision. We look forward to exploring how the city has been – and continues to be – studied, imagined, and made through evolving technologies, disciplines, and forms of knowledge production.
Hosted by Philip Ursprung and organised by Eric Häusler, Thomas Hänsli, Agostino Nickl, and Simon Nougué.
Language: English
The Symposium is supported by the ETH D-ARCH Enabling Grant.
No registration required. The event is public and free for everyone.
Confirmed Guests
Tom Avermaete
Nitin Bathla
Chenyi Cai
Irina Davidovici
Raphael Eder
Naomi C. Hanakata
Lindsay Howe
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel
Andreas Kalpakci
Nikos Katsikis
Dasha Kuletskaya
Darío Negueruela
Sol Pérez Martínez
Freek Persyn
Angela Rout
Mantha Zarmakoupi
Programme
Day 1 – September 10
9:00 Welcome Note: Philip Ursprung
Short presentation of The Archive of the Urban Age: Eric Häusler, Thomas Hänsli, Agostino Nickl, Simon Nougué
Panel A: Building Cities, Shaping Discourses
9:30 – 11:30 Moderator: Eric Häusler
- Nikos Katsikis (TU Delft): Is the World Urban? On the Metageographical Construction of the Urban Age
- Nitin Bathla (UZH): Anxieties of the Urban Age, Planetary Urbanisation and India’s Urban Future
- Naomi C. Hanakata (NUS): When Has the Future Become Urban?
- Andreas Kalpakci (ETH Zurich, gta Institute): Accelerating Construction: International Organisations and the Global Flows of Building Information, 194X-197X
11:30 – 12:00: Q&A
12:00 – 13:00: Lunch Break
Panel B: Designing Methods, Coding Practices
13:00 – 14:30 Moderator: Agostino Nickl
- Angela Rout (TU Delft): Architecture Data and Visions of Nature: Discovery and Understanding for Design in an Age of AI
- Chenyi Cai (NUS): Encoding, Retrieving, and Navigating Cities through Multi-modal Data
- Sol Pérez Martínez (ETH Zurich, gta Institute): AI Uses for Inclusive Architectural Histories: Diversifying the Datasets and Preventing Erasure
14:30 – 15:00: Q&A
15:00 – 15:30: Coffee Break
Panel C: Reading Archives, Writing Histories
15:30 – 17:00 Moderator: Thomas Hänsli
- Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel (UNIGE): Distant Views on the Early-20th-Century: Printed Images and Urban Imaginaries Through a Computational Lens
- Mantha Zarmakoupi (UPenn): From Delos to Ekistics: The Urban Imaginaries of the Delos Symposia and the Ancient Greek Cities Project
- Irina Davidovici, Luca Can, Tamino Kuny (ETH Zurich, gta Institute): Using (Meta)Data in the SNSF Project „The Architecture Competition as Political Project“
17:00 – 17:30: Q&A
17:30 – 19:00: Refreshments
Day 2 – September 11
9:00 Juan Barcia Mas (ETH Zurich): Introduction of REWORLDING, a NEWROPE initiative that uses science fiction and speculative worlding to bring radical imagination into architectural research and education.
Panel D: Imagining Urbanities, Crafting Futures
09:30 – 11:30 Moderator: Simon Nougué
- Lindsay Howe (TUM): Charting Pasts, Presents, and Possible Futures: Emerging Urban Research Methods from South Africa
- Darío Negueruela del Castillo (UZH/DVS): From Systems to Vectors: Machinic Denkstile for the Urban Age
- Raphael Eder (UC San Diego): Limits of Planned Futures: Building UC San Diego’s University Community
- Dasha Kuletskaya (RWTH Aachen University/ETH Zurich): HafenCity and the Politics of the Future: Reimagining Hamburg after 1989
11:30 – 12:00: Q&A
12:00 – 13:00: Lunch Break
Project Workshop: The Archive of the Urban Age
13:00 – 14:30 Moderator: Tom Avermaete (ETH Zurich, gta Institute)
- Elaboration on The Archive of the Urban Age: Eric Häusler, Thomas Hänsli, Agostino Nickl, Simon Nougué
This session presents The Archive of the Urban Age, a collaborative research initiative that revisits the genealogy of the Urban Age through the lens of Ekistics (1955–2007) – a seminal journal at the intersection of architecture, planning, and global urban discourse. We will present the project’s current stage, including our efforts to digitise and reframe the Ekistics corpus using semantic modelling, AI-based retrieval tools, and LLMs. Crucially, this session invites participants to engage with us in a collaborative mode: to question our conceptual assumptions, evaluate our digital tools, and contribute to a broader conversation about the promises and pitfalls of AI-assisted research in the humanities. What does it mean to build an archive of the Urban Age? How do technologies shape historical inquiry – and what new urban futures might emerge from re-reading the past in this way?
14:30 – 15:00: Closing Remarks
Organisation
Chair Philip Ursprung, History and Theory of Architecture
Eric Häusler, Thomas Hänsli, Agostino Nickl, Simon Nougué