Through a combination of essays, memoirs, guided imagery, and speculative storytelling, ‘Roadside Picnics’ re-enacts the famous science-fiction novel that addresses the problem of humanity’s contact with another intelligence in the environmental impact and devastation left behind by the visitors. It highlights how architecture and the built environment participate in and condition both our encounters with the unthinkable and possible futures in the Anthropocene. What if, simultaneously, such landscapes of unintended encounters, with the technologies, monuments, ruins, traces, and waste of seemingly supernatural forces, may also afford – and teach us – new designs and tools for survival?

Habitat became a hotly debated topic in architecture in the 1950s, when this ecological term was introduced in the avant-garde circles of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) and Team 10. Next to rethinking the housing question the notion of habitat brought a profoundly new way to conceive architecture and urban planning. No longer could one consider cities and buildings as discrete, isolate objects but instead they were to be understood as part of a larger whole, an environment or habitat. In light of contemporary environmental awareness Habitat: Ecology Thinking in Architecture offers a transhistorical perspective to reflect on design principles from the recent past, reinvigorate current debates while offering suggestions for future architectural research.

In a moment in which the term Man, and the humanist tradition which followed from it, have been challenged in feminist, queer, poststructuralist, and postcolonial critiques, which questioned its nature, or even pondered if we are actually human, Footprint 25 seeks to add to these perspectives cases of what we call radical conditioning, in which some architectures bypass assumed values of humanism and operate under a wholly different set of values, emanating from industrial and post-industrial economies and its technological developments. Unfolding in the study of histories, architectural types, aesthetics, atmospheres, systems, and users, the research articles and visual essays included in this issue shed light on the many ways architects, advertently or inadvertently, coalesce with forces intending to condition humans. Ultimately, this issue questions how these spaces, in which humans and their artifacts interact in unprecedented ways, could provide architecture with the timely opportunity to challenge our anticipated redundancy, and reconsider its own humanism in order to charge it with new meanings.

How can we create more human-centered, resilient, and sustainable cities in the tech age? Can we make use of technology and the opportunities presented rather than resisting its fast-paced evolution? What are the biggest and most likely spatial changes that autonomous vehicles will bring in cities? How can this change in mobility contribute to a better urban environment? To what extent do the spatial opportunities created by automated mobility respond to current urban issues and what is the role of urban design and spatial planning in this debate?