The Future Architecture Platform, through the Landscapes of Care initiative, challenges multi-disciplinary emerging professionals from all over the globe to apply with transformative projects related to our built environments, contributing to the discussion and conception of innovative and alternative ways of living together. Applications, individual or collective, must be submitted by January 6.

Contemporary societies face dynamically changing challenges. The extractive and consumptive logics of the system create globalised issues, impacting different regions in real time. Geopolitical boundaries protect economic returns above and beyond protecting social interests while the recent pandemic spreads, and new territories and ecologies are rearranged according to logics of migration which are inextricably connected to the flow of financial wealth. Confronting this scenario, new regional initiatives question political divisions and corporate interests. Fluid boundaries traced by local organisers and citizens emerge to fill the spaces as yet un-commodified by the free market; spaces of exception free from the control of policy.

The flow of persons generates new modes of neighbourhood living and political commitments that demand care, empathy and awareness of the other. The recent health crisis has challenged entire societies, demonstrating how they can effectively, rapidly and mostly peacefully take action.

Designers, architects and urbanists see themselves handling social and political issues, rather than simply the spatial and formal aspects of a project; facing up to the challenge of transforming decades of self-complacency into active practices dealing with the politics of relations, of local communities, of energy flows, and of ever-changing urban dynamics.

“Landscapes of Care”, the theme proposed by dpr-barcelona, chosen by the members of FA platform and further developed with CAFx, for the 2021 edition of Future Architecture Platform will explore the dynamics of solidarity and collective self-organisation, the networks of trust working at the neighbourhood scale, and transitional common spaces and activities. The edition aims to trigger dialogues around the challenges of a society facing up to the myths of endless growth, the glorification of borders and national identity, and the hardships labelled as austerity by capitalism.