City regions are increasingly shaped by decisions made before their long-term consequences can be fully known. Rather than treating this uncertainty as a background condition, the conference takes it as a starting point and asks how spatial decision-making can become more explorative: how knowledge is produced under incomplete information, how judgement replaces optimisation, and how insights travel across contexts.

We welcome contributions along three lines of inquiry:

Heritage: how continuity, identity, and use are negotiated over time and reinterpreted through adaptive reuse, governance, and everyday urban change.

Resilience: how risks, resources, and responsibilities are organised across housing, energy, mobility, circularity, and cross-border cooperation.

Spatial practice and research: how knowledge becomes strategy and built form through explorative methods such as AI-supported and scenario-based approaches, data-driven practices, and living laboratories.

Proposals may be conceptual, methodological, or practice-based, and we equally welcome contributions that extend beyond these themes. 

We look forward to your abstracts and to exploring these questions together in November.

Confirmed Keynotes:

Stefano Moroni, Politecnico di Milano

Andreas Kipar, LAND, Milano/Düsseldorf

Yasmin Kherad, Herzog & DeMeuron, Basel/Berlin

Carola Hein, TU Delft 

Frauke Kraas, University of Cologne

Hannes Taubenböck, DLR/Julius-Maximilians-University Würzburg 

Selected contributions will be considered for publication in a special issue.

-› More information on the call ‹-

-› Click here to submit an abstract ‹-

Key dates:

June 22: Abstract submission (extended deadline!)

June 30: Notification of acceptance + early bird registration

November 22 (Evening): Public festive opening (in German)

November 23–24: International Conference

Organiser: Prof. Christa Reicher, Chair and Institute for Urban Design, RWTH Aachen University

Contact: conference@staedtebau.rwth-aachen.de