During the past five decades, the neoliberal market economy has become one of the most influential forces in the process of spatial production, transforming cities worldwide by subjecting them to the rationale of global finance. In a world where religions and ideologies continue to lose their influence, financial supremacy has turned into an adequate substitute. The global nature and overarching impact of neoliberalism has made it the research focus of a vast cohort of urban and architectural scholars, historians, theoreticians, geographers, and economists, leading to a significant body of literature that discusses the relationship between the market economy and the built environment on all scales. This “globality” of neoliberalism is recently being disputed by its widely‐accepted depiction as a western phenomenon with varied local implementations. Post‐socialist neoliberalism, we argue, is not an isolated occurrence but rather an extreme case that accentuates the distinct features of neoliberal spatial transformations, making its characteristics more evident and traceable. This thematic issue challenges the notion of neoliberalism as solely a post‐Fordist Keynesian phenomenon, proposing a new theoretical framework that redefines the neoliberalization of the built environment as a global spectacle with diverse, yet analogous, localized expressions across various spatial scales.

El desplazamiento masivo de la población en América Latina ha creado corredores de movilidad humanitaria en todo el continente y, en consecuencia, un territorio de larga tradición de desplazamiento forzado, donde miles de migrantes legales o ilegales, nacionales e internacionales se mueven cada día. En ese sentido, el primer interrogante que surge es: ¿cuál es la infraestructura que soporta estos flujos de migración en ausencia de apoyo estatal? En este número de la Revista Bitácora queremos explorar cuáles son las configuraciones espaciales, sociales y económicas que produce el desplazamiento forzado y qué mecanismo oculto de resistencia generan las poblaciones frente a la crisis migratoria.

This issue of Writingplace Journal moves into the field, exploring the moment when reflection turns into action, and questions how knowledge produced via research is appraised and applied on the ground. In the articles, authors reflect upon their concrete experiences where insights regarding the city and its narratives have been made operational. Understanding the urban as a complex expression of social, historical, material, spatial and temporal relations between people and their built environment, we argue that this comprehension of places demands and envisions action, by which active and transformative processes take place in the real world. Fieldwork is in this sense both research and event, both investigative process and performative project.

In recent decades, the development of advanced weaponry systems and the instant flow of information have redefined the notion of urban warfare as a local phenomenon with global effects in an increasingly interconnected world. The annihilation of Aleppo and the broadcasted demolitions of Palmyra demonstrate the accelerating politicization of the destruction process. In this timely volume, Elisa Dainese, Aleksandar Staničić, and a broad range of contributors explore the weaponization of architecture—targeted attacks on art and infrastructure meant to destroy not only physical structures but also political unity and cultural memory.

Focusing on regions where planners, architects, and artists are involved in concrete initiatives on the ground, War Diaries looks at complex postwar settings to illuminate design responses to urban warfare and violence against the built environment. The essays discuss creative strategies for rebuilding and restablizing damaged sites, often within the context of continuing animosities; the establishment of design coalitions to work with local communities on reconstruction; the designing of emergency settlements; the development of new and customized strategies for rebuilding diverse parts of the ravaged world; and the teaching of culturally sensitive design practices to architects and urbanists, among many other topics. A much-needed contribution to our understanding of postconflict design, this volume maps the creative approaches that specialists have used to remediate the effects of violence against cities and cultural heritage.

Conflict, when dislodged from its conventional understanding as a process and system of war and destruction exclusively, may be apprehended as an experimental method for analysis and synthesis, as a potent resource for pedagogy, for disruptive design and for the production of theory. In this sense, conflict produces more than the eradication of (the possibility of) life and its supporting structures: conflict produces transitional spaces at different scales, of differentiated material ecologies and site-specific meanings in relation to their global position. Conflicts are both locations and explanations of often ‘seductive’ images of destruction offered by popular (and other) media: ruined architectures, dead (or barely alive) bodies, forced migratory movements, impermanent infrastructures and settlements, as well as the tracing and construction of borders, real-estate driven post-war reconstruction processes, etc.

The emphasis on the mediatic aspect in the concept of conflict, may be seen as a way of triggering trans- and interdisciplinary discussions, conversations and encounters that serve as a negotiation between conditions of violence and new — or alternative — possibilities for everyday life. Artistic mediations could be as effective as violence in resolving conflicts, but operate through other means and through other channels, thus truly producing new power relations and alternative ways of political struggle. This exposing of conflict and violence through the artistic work is an activist act, but more importantly an artistic and technological mediation. The agency of the artistic work in terms of conflict, then, is situated in the capacity of visualising the conflict, creating awareness of its consequences, its side-effects, its collateral damage. And the creating of awareness and the becoming of fertile ground for protest and the creation of alternative realities.

At a three-day conference held at the TU Delft on November 6-8, 2019 researchers, scholars, activists, practitioners and artists presented individual papers that addressed the relationships between spatiality, mediation and conflict from a variety of perspectives. In addition to academic paper contributions, the conference welcomed other proposals in different formats and media: audio-visual material (film, video, photography), digital or physical archives, experimental design proposals, installations, performances, etc.

The thematic core of the conference explored new — or innovative — theoretical and methodological approaches and insights on: (1) Spaces of conflict as transitional spaces of material interactions between violence and everyday life; and (2) Spaces of memory as transformative space of violence).