OPEN CALL Sophia Journal Vol. 11 Landscapes of Repair - The Invisible City: Manplan and Contemporary Forms of Repair

Fourth thematic cycle "Landscapes of Repair"

Guest Editors: Cristina Gastón (ETSAB-UPC), Hugh Campbell (UCD)

Editors: Ana Miriam Rebelo (FAUP), Maria Neto (FAUP), Raquel Paulino (FAUP)

Abstract deadline: 31 January 2026

Selected authors will be notified by the 28 of February 2026
Manuscript deadline (Conference): 1 May 2026

Conference (dtbc): 26 June 2026

Manuscript deadline (Journal): 1 October 2026
Publication date (tbc): by December 2026

Fourth thematic cycle, Landscapes of Repair
Sophia Journal is currently accepting submissions for its fourth thematic cycle, Landscapes of Repair, encouraging a humanist approach to urban transformation that transcends purely economic considerations. By exploring the impactful realms of photography, film, and various visual practices, we aim to highlight their significant contributions to the discourse surrounding architectural and spatial production. Our goal is to draw urgent attention to the necessity of repairing our fractured planet. In doing so, we seek to address and connect the multitude of challenges that contemporary cities and territories across the world are facing. These visual mediums not only document but also critically engage with the diverse and complex issues of our time, offering unique perspectives on urban and environmental crises. Through this lens, we hope to foster deeper understanding and inspire reparative forms of coexistence.

Framework of The Invisible City: Manplan and Contemporary Forms of Repair

More than fifty years after The Architectural Review launched the Manplan series (1969–70), many of the questions it posed remain urgently relevant. Created during a time of profound disillusionment with the failures of post-war architectural modernity, Manplan aimed to expose the gap between design intentions and lived reality. It challenged architects, planners, and the public to confront the social and political consequences of spatial decision-making in this way. Its programme was daring, controversial, constructive and rooted in the belief that architecture must be accountable to basic human needs. Photography and visual practices can act as potent tools for revealing systemic failures, inequalities, and possibilities for change.

In its radically human-centred visual strategy, Manplan abandoned the conventions of pristine architectural photography, replacing them with grainy, immersive images drawn from photojournalism. These photographs did not just focus on the buildings, but on the people and how they inhabited and lived in city spaces, making them the main subjects of the pictures.

The Manplan photography series revealed a powerful sense of proximity to the city. A necessity to make visible what had seemed invisible before, communicating the disconnection between planning ideals and lived conditions, and highlighting the social consequences of urban neglect. Many of these worries echo powerfully today, in a moment marked by climate crisis, social precarity, infrastructural decay, and an accelerating technosphere that weighs upon cities both materially and symbolically.

Manplan and the Landscapes of Repair

Within the broader Landscapes of Repair cycle, Sophia Journal Vol. 11 No. 1 builds on this legacy by asking:
How can visual and spatial practices once again confront the invisible pressures shaping contemporary cities, and how might they contribute to acts of repair—material, social, ecological—capable of lightening their weight?

Just as the 1969–70 series captured Britain at a moment of social fragility and political transition, we ask how contemporary visual practices can reveal the fractures, burdens, and possibilities that define the “invisible city” of the Anthropocene.

With the technosphere now estimated at approximately 30 trillion tonnes—an aggregate mass that rivals the biosphere—urban environments are weighed down not only by concrete, steel, and carbon emissions but also by less visible intensities: administrative inertia, social exhaustion, ecological loss, and affective forms of displacement. Repair, in this context, becomes an ethical and imaginative task, one that calls for new forms of witnessing, attention, and representation.

Call for Papers and Visual Essays

In this call for papers and visual essays for Sophia Journal Vol. 11 No. 1, we invite submissions that revisit, expand, or challenge the critical spirit of Manplan by exploring how visual and spatial practices - particularly through the lenses of photography, film, and architecture - can act as instruments of care, exposure, and repair. Contributions may examine unstable territories, critically revisit urban archives, or propose actions that seek to repair the imperceptible scars of contemporary cities and landscapes.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Revisiting Manplan: contemporary re-readings of the series and its relevance to contemporary city problems
Visualising the invisible city: photographic and filmic strategies for making visible social, ecological, or infrastructural forms of neglect
Landscapes of care: practices of maintenance, repair, cohabitation, and socio-ecological oversight
The politics of representation: how image-making shapes public understanding of urban unfairnesses and possibilities for change
Urban weight and urban lightness: responses to the material and immaterial burdens of the technosphere
Human and more-than-human cohabitation: visual narratives of interdependence, vulnerability, and resilience spaces and interactions
Spectral architectures: capturing the atmospheres, absences and ruins of contemporary urban life
Speculative repair: creative proposals that confront contemporary dysfunctions and envision an alternative future
Visual and spatial narratives: envisioning ecological and social repair in urban and rural contexts
Critical frameworks: critical visual narratives addressing diverse problems across cultures and disciplines

We welcome submissions from scholars, artists, architects, practitioners, activists, and transdisciplinary researchers who explore these questions through theoretical essays, visual essays, documentary projects, experimental formats, or hybrid research practices.

Towards a Reparative Visual Praxis

By revisiting Manplan's ethos—its attention to lived reality, its refusal of aesthetic sanitisation, and its commitment to social critique—this issue seeks to explore how contemporary visual practices can once again operate as catalysts for public reflection and collective responsibility. In an era when cities grow heavier—materially, symbolically, and ecologically—we ask how image-making can help lighten them: by exposing the unseen, attending to the overlooked, and participating in acts of repair.

We look forward to receiving contributions that illuminate, interrogate, or reimagine the landscapes of care shaping today's and tomorrow's cities.

Submission instructions

To submit your abstract proposal, please send a 500-word text (including references and a maximum of five images) and a short bio for each author (up to 70 words each) by the 31st of Jnauary, 2026.

Submission of abstracts is done through our OJS platform by registering and submitting at: https://www.up.pt/revistas/index.php/sophia/index

Selected authors will be notified by the 28 of February 2026 and will benefit from Sophia´s Editorial orientation and instructions in order to deliver a full paper (between 3000 to 6000 words) or a visual essay (length between 6 to 8 pages, plus text between 750 to 1500 words) by the 1 of May 2026.

Authors who have not sent in this first stage their abstract can still send a full manuscript until the 1 of May 2026.

Please note that all theoretical papers will be subject to blind peer review. The other modalities of submissions we publish (visual essays, interviews, and critical reviews) are subjected to peer review.

Acceptance of an abstract in any of these modalities does not guarantee publication.

Sophia Journal International Conference

Sophia Journal International conference "The Invisible City: Manplan and Contemporary Forms of Repair” will take place at FAUP - Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, continuing the successful annual cycle of international forums dedicated to the critical exploration of the intersections between image and architecture.

The conference emerges as a dynamic platform for addressing descriptive, analytical, and interpretative projects that offer a unique perception and new knowledge about how can visual and spatial practices once again confront the invisible pressures shaping contemporary cities, and how might they contribute to acts of repair—material, social, ecological—capable of lightening their weight?

Abstracts for conference presentation will be published in the e-book of abstracts, which will have also the program and will be accessible and free to download through Sophia Journal OJS platform at the time of the event.

Subsequent publication of the most relevant (expanded – full manuscripts) contributions will be published in Sophia Journal - Volume 11, No. 1 - Landscapes of Repair: The Invisible City: Manplan and Contemporary Forms of Repair

The international conferences enhance our global outreach and foster deeper international collaboration, and are closely aligned with Sophia's peer-reviewed publication. Sophia supports and disseminates scientific research by publishing theoretical articles and visual essays that critically explore the intersections between image and architecture.