Interdisciplinary perspectives on architecture, design, and environmental practice.

The Network’s themes define the intellectual framework for its conferences, journals, and books—serving as evolving points of dialogue across architecture, planning, landscape, and urban design. These themes reflect the Network’s commitment to understanding the built environment as both a material and cultural construct—an ever-changing interface between human intention, ecological process, and social life.

Ninth International Conference on The Constructed Environment, Centro Cultural Vila Flor, Guimarães, Portugal (2019)
Ninth International Conference on The Constructed Environment, Centro Cultural Vila Flor, Guimarães, Portugal (2019)

Theme 1: The Design of Space and Place

Addresses the ways in which human settlements and the built environment is conceptualized, plans represented, and competing interests negotiated.

  • Design disciplines and practices: architecture, engineering, industrial design, landscape architecture
  • Settlement disciplines and practices: planning, human geography
  • Science in the service of technology
  • Information, design, modeling and geospatial technologies
  • Urban and regional planning
  • Local government in the planning process
  • Transportation modes and structures: reconfiguring flows
  • Parks and recreation in urban spaces
  • Designing interior spaces
  • Information flows in the constructed environment
  • ‘Virtual’ space and ‘real’ space
  • Place and identity
  • Form and function in space: how aesthetics relates to function
  • Project planning
  • Inclusive design: design for human needs, sensitive to human differences, affirming rights to access
  • Involving stakeholders: participatory design
  • Consultation, negotiation and consensus building in the (re)design of the constructed environment.
  • Aesthetic paradigms: classicism, modernism, postmodernism, constructivism and other ‘isms

Theme 2: Constructing the Environment

Examining the processes of constructing buildings and creating landscapes.

  • Urban impacts
  • Building construction
  • Landscape construction
  • Spaces and sites of construction: urban, greenfield, rural, remote
  • From design studio to construction site: design and project planning
  • Project management processes and practices
  • Construction activities, processes and flows
  • Time cycles, process transparency, quality management and efficiencies
  • Efficiencies: prefabrication and modularization
  • The construction of access to wild spaces
  • Building and construction regulation

Theme 3: Environmental Impacts

Exploring questions of sustainability in the constructed environment.

  • Materials, construction and environmental sciences
  • Helping structures change, grow or end their useable lives—adaptations, renovations and recycling
  • Green construction, sustainable building practices
  • LEED and other environmental certifications
  • Energy sources and destinations: reconfiguring grids
  • Water needs and sources: refiguring demand and access
  • Natural movements: floods, droughts, earthquakes and other acts of nature
  • Waste creation, transportation and recycling or disposal
  • Determining footprints: environmental impact analyses

Theme 4: Social Impacts

Investigating the social life of constructed environments.

  • Social and material flows
  • Functions of construction: housing, commercial, public, community
  • Habitats: home, work, civic, business, natural
  • Spatial cultures: the ethnography of space
  • Cultural diversity and the built environment
  • Globalization and its environmental impacts
  • Gender and the built environment
  • Disabilities and corporeal differences in the built environment
  • Heritage values and practices in design, architecture and construction
  • Addressing inequality and poverty in the built environment
  • The global and the local: applying human and material resources
  • Values, ethics and aesthetics in environmental decision making
  • Leadership and management in the human geographies and the constructed environment
  • Education and training for workers in the constructed environment
  • Values and ethics in human and natural environments
  • Research and evaluation methods in human geographies and constructed environments
  • Law and regulation in and for the constructed and natural environments
  • Human resources and workforces in the building and environment sectors
  • Needs assessment and analysis
  • Social impact analyses