The contemporary city is no longer shaped by stable trajectories of growth, but by overlapping states of emergency. This transformation marks a shift from linear and deterministic ideas of development, moving instead toward fragmented, discontinuous, and non-hierarchical trajectories in which urban transformations unfold through ruptures and dispersed processes rather than predictable sequences. Climate collapse, health crises, forced migrations, energy scarcity, geopolitical conflicts, and social inequalities do not occur as isolated events: they accumulate, persist, and redefine the very condition of inhabiting space. 

Yet this condition is not without precedent. Cities have never developed along smooth or uninterrupted lines. Calamitous events, environmental crises, and migratory phenomena have always been constitutive forces in the shaping of urban territories, leaving visible traces in their morphologies, constructive techniques, and planning strategies. Examples are the post-plague transformations of medieval cities, the reconstruction programmes following wartime destruction, to the demographic upheavals of early industrialisation.

Each of these episodes demonstrates that emergency has historically functioned not only as a force of dissolution but as a motor of spatial and technical invention. Many instruments available to contemporary practice carry within them the sedimented memory of responses elaborated under conditions of scarcity and urgency. 

What changes today is the degree to which these responses must be conceived simultaneously across scales and temporalities that were previously addressed in sequence. The question is no longer how to rebuild after collapse, but how to inhabit and transform territories that are structurally exposed to overlapping pressures.

Hence, emergencies are intended as a structural and spatial condition, emerging from the accumulation and sedimentation of processes that have left deep material, social, and ecological traces.

 

But emergency also means something else:

It means what emerges.

New practices surface where systems fail.

New forms of inhabiting appear where design  hesitates.

These forms manifest in everyday practices, in economies of care, and in the infrastructures that sustain life under conditions of fragility. New alliances between people, matter, and environment take shape in the cracks of urgency.

 

Emergencies is an issue about this double movement:

The pressure of contemporary crises, and the appearance of spatial, common, and artistic responses. It views cities beyond the concept of a stable construct, framing it  as fields of tension, constantly negotiating between collapse and invention.

This call does not seek heroic solutions or reassuring narratives. 

It asks how architecture, urbanism, and cultural practices operate when time is compressed, resources are scarce, and the future is uncertain. When care replaces control and adaptation becomes a daily ritual rather than an exception.

Emergencies leave marks: provisional structures that become permanent, infrastructures born as temporary fixes, informal spaces that quietly reorganize urban life. They generate new economies, new aesthetics, and new ethics of making and maintaining. They also produce violence, exclusion, and extraction. This issue holds both together.

The volume questions who defines emergencies, who is left exposed, and what practices are emerging. It seeks to critically examine how emergency narratives have been and are used to legitimize spatial decisions, suspend rights, or, conversely, enable new forms of collective agency.This issue also invites contributions that adopt a position of discomfort, acknowledging that working within emergencies requires inhabiting tensions, contradictions, and unstable ground rather than seeking conceptual or operational comfort.