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 does not refer here to an absent territory, but rather to a set of experiences, relationships, practices and tensions that tend to remain outside dominant regimes of visibility: ordinary uses of space, informal forms of adaptation, threatened memories, urban voids and interstices, material traces and networks of care that sustain collective life.
Making these realities visible also requires us to reflect on the forms of representation themselves: who produces the images, who is represented, through which languages and framings, and with what consequences.
It is in this sense that photography, film, critical cartography and the visual essay are understood by Sophia Journal not simply as means of documentation, but as instruments of research and knowledge production. They can reveal inequalities and transformations, follow processes of deterioration or abandonment, bring different temporalities into relation and, at the same time, contribute to imagining other forms of care, repair and transformation.
The conference brings together research papers and visual essays that explore these questions through case studies situated in different cities, landscapes, buildings and communities.
From the Legacy of Manplan to Contemporary Practices of RepairThe 11th International Conference continues the programme Wide-Angle View: Architecture as Social Space in the Manplan Series 1969–70, developed at OASRN throughout 2026.
The Wide-Angle View exhibition, which opened on 27 February, revisited the influential photographic series Manplan and was accompanied, between March and May, by a programme of guided visits, public conversations, educational activities and round tables that sought to bring the critical memory of this editorial experiment into dialogue with contemporary questions surrounding housing, the city, public space and representation.
The conference does not bring this process to a close. On the contrary, it extends it, bringing the legacy of Manplan into dialogue with contemporary practices of visual research, representation and intervention, while asking how looking, documenting and making visible may themselves constitute a first form of repair.
25 September — Scientific ProgrammeThe first day forms the scientific core of the conference and will take place in the auditorium of the Portuguese Architects’ Association — Northern Regional Section.
Following the institutional opening by the Portuguese Architects’ Association — Northern Regional Section, José Pedro Sousa, representing FAUP, will give a brief introduction to the Sophia Journal cycle at FAUP. Pedro Leão Neto will then officially launch the call for Sophia Journal Vol. 12 — Learning Repair: Situated Pedagogies, Civic Landscapes and Visual Practices, thus carrying forward the reflection initiated through Landscapes of Repair.
This will be followed by a keynote lecture by Valeria Carullo, Curator of Photography at the Royal Institute of British Architects — RIBA, focusing on the Manplan archive, the politics of visibility and the public responsibility of architectural representation.
Valeria Carullo’s participation continues the collaboration developed through Wide-Angle View, whose Porto exhibition emerged from a dialogue with the curatorial research previously undertaken at the RIBA.
Throughout the day, four thematic panels will bring together research papers and visual essays addressing memory and archives, heritage and reuse, critical cartographies, and practices of care, maintenance and repair.
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