Sophia Journal Announces the Programme for the 11th International Conference — Landscapes of Repair: The Invisible City: Manplan and Contemporary Forms of Repair
The Invisible City: Manplan and Contemporary Forms of RepairPortuguese Architects’ Association — Northern Regional Section (OASRN) | 25–26 September 2026
CONFERENCE LIVE STREAMING YOUTUBE . FAUP
https://www.youtube.com/live/Zvsnrhaf4cg?si=fjc65NuZ1nU72eN7
Portuguese Architects’ Association — Northern Regional Section (OASRN)
Faculty of Architecture, University of Porto (FAUP) | CENP — Nuno Portas Centre for Architectural Studies
Culture Centre, Technical University of Porto — UTP / FMAD / ID+
COORDINATIONPedro Leão Neto — FAUP
GUEST EDITORSCristina Gastón — ETSAB–UPC
Hugh Campbell — University College Dublin
EDITORSAna Miriam Rebelo — FAUP
Maria Neto — FAUP
Raquel Paulino — FAUP
PARALLEL PROGRAMMEOlívia Marques da Silva — Culture Centre, Technical University of Porto — UTP / FMAD / ID+
Jorge Sobrado — Councillor for Culture and Heritage, Porto City Council
The 11th Sophia Journal International Conference — Landscapes of Repair: The Invisible City: Manplan and Contemporary Forms of Repair will take place in Porto on 25 and 26 September 2026, with an in-person programme and online streaming.
On 25 September, the scientific programme will be held at the Portuguese Architects’ Association — Northern Regional Section (OASRN). On 26 September, the parallel programme will take place at the Culture Centre, Technical University of Porto — UTP, followed in the afternoon by a visit to Quinta da Conceição, in Matosinhos.
Across the two days, the conference will bring together researchers, architects, photographers, artists, editors and other professionals to explore the relationships between architecture, image, the city and contemporary forms of repair.
Part of the fourth thematic cycle of Sophia Journal, the conference proposes a broad understanding of repair. Rather than being understood solely as a technical intervention on buildings, infrastructures or landscapes, repair is approached as an ethical, social, cultural, ecological and imaginative practice, capable of recognising vulnerabilities, bringing often overlooked conditions into view, and renewing relationships between people, places and institutions.
The conference takes as its starting point the critical legacy of Manplan, the series published by The Architectural Review between 1969 and 1970. By confronting the promises of architecture and planning with the realities of everyday life, Manplan shifted the focus of architectural representation away from the isolated building and towards human experience and the social, political and economic systems that shape the conditions of inhabitation.
More than fifty years later, this perspective remains particularly relevant in the face of urban inequalities, housing precarity, deteriorating infrastructures, environmental pressures, the invisibility of maintenance work and other, sometimes less apparent, forms of collective wear and exhaustion.