Exploring Identity, Memory, and Urban Life in Indian Cities
Submit your interest to participate in our inaugural conference.
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Exploring Identity, Memory, and Urban Life in Indian Cities
Submit your interest to participate in our inaugural conference.
CitiStrata Research Foundation is a knowledge-driven organization pioneering the integration of architectural and urban research into practice. Founded by a multidisciplinary team of architects, urban planners, and historians, CitiStrata advances critical research in architecture, urbanism, and the built environment with a strong commitment to equity, context, and rigor.
CitiStrata’s work spans heritage interpretation, urban policy, urban planning, architecture, and education, with collaborations involving public agencies, academic institutions, and community-based organizations. Through practice and publications, it aims to promote public scholarship by making research accessible to broader audiences, particularly in the Global South.
CitiTalks 1.0: ENTANGLED is CitiStrata’s inaugural annual conference series exploring the intersections of identity, memory, and urban life in Indian cities. The 2025 edition is envisioned as a platform to critically engage with the layered experiences, histories, and transformations that shape urban life across India.
The conference aims to spotlight the tensions, solidarities, and contradictions of contemporary urbanism, particularly in the face of rapid development, socio-political flux, and environmental change, through grounded research, interdisciplinary dialogue, and inclusive participation.
A curated selection of submissions will be peer-reviewed and included in the proceedings.
Indian cities are shaped by multiple layers of centuries of history, diverse communities, everyday experiences, and the constant interplay of socio-economic, spatial, and climatic changes. CitiTalks 2025 is a platform to reflect on how these layers intersect in today’s rapidly evolving urban landscape. The conference invites scholars, practitioners, community workers, and citizens to think deeply about the connections between history, society, climate, and the built environment in India. The theme aims to gather interdisciplinary methods using AI, digital media, data interpretation, graphic design, digital humanities tools, oral histories, and other lateral mediums of examination.
Urban life in India is marked by numerous contrasts. Cities are places of incredible resilience and solidarity. People come together in times of crisis, showing care and courage. At the same time, cities also face significant challenges, including social tensions, inequality, poor planning, and gaps in governance. These are mixed realities that shape how dwellers perceive and experience their cities, which therefore influence each city's identity in complex ways.
Today, as cities grow rapidly and undergo massive transformation through smart city projects, infrastructure upgrades, and new master plans, there’s a risk of losing the unique character and emotional connection people have with their surroundings. This raises urgent questions about how to protect not just the physical fabric of cities, but also their sense of place, the memories, meanings, and shared experiences that make cities feel like home, through a systematic analysis of development strategies, technology, physical changes, and changes in lifestyle.
CitiTalks 2025 focuses on understanding these invisible yet powerful aspects of urban life. We invite contributions that explore the contradictions, conflicts, and solidarities that shape how cities are built, remembered, and lived in.
Smellmap: Newport, RI
A detail of the downtown area as the smells congregate along Thames Street, Broadway, and the Wharves.
Source: Summer Aromas of Newport, RI. (2011). Sensory Maps.
Cities are deeply emotional spaces. They are shaped not only by buildings and infrastructure, but also by how people feel in them: fear, belonging, nostalgia, anxiety, joy. This theme explores innovative methodologies that bridge architectural design, spatial analysis, and affective mapping to understand how individuals and communities interact with the built environment. From AI-driven behavioral analysis and immersive data visualizations to ethnographic mapping and sensory data tools, contributions should demonstrate how cities can be read beyond their physicality through affect, memory, and perception. The goal is to explore how qualitative and quantitative methods together can inform user-centric, inclusive planning and design. It can also draw insights from ethnography and oral histories to creative methods like mapping memories, soundscapes, and performative storytelling. This theme explores innovations and challenges in capturing urban emotions, atmospheres, and perceptions, especially in contexts like migration, displacement, or redevelopment.
Key Questions
The visual is inspired by Charles Jencks' Tree of Evolution (Jencks, 1971). Here, the canvas represents the architect in a built environment. The terms on the Y-axis describe the process of an architect, and the terms on the X-axis refer to the large skill set architects are trained with. The other terms on the canvas are the vocabulary of architects, irrespective of the nature of the work they perform in the fraternity. The words in the black-and-white spaces refer to the practitioners and researchers, respectively, while the grey region shows the intersection of these terms among design practitioners and research practitioners.
Source: Evangeline, F., & Clifford, E. K. J. (2024). The burden of research in architecture. Exchanges the Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 11(3), 56–65. https://doi.org/10.31273/eirj.v11i3.1534
Urban planning and governance often focus on land, zoning, and infrastructure, but what about a city’s soul? This theme delves into how cultural identity, shared practices, and non-material heritage can be recognized and protected in formal policy. Submissions may explore the role of documentation tools, including digital mapping, photogrammetry, and database-driven heritage registers, in shaping policy responses. Also of interest are immersive technologies such as Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) that enable interpretive storytelling and accessible public engagement with intangible and layered heritage. Papers may also discuss the limitations of current regulatory mechanisms, the fragility of heritage under urbanisation pressures, and the challenges of sustaining heritage narratives through planning instruments.
Key Questions
A palimpsest map showcasing ritualistic interdependencies between two religions in an urban centre.
Evangeline, F., (2023). Folklore of Friendship. Dtalks, Calgary. https://thisisthefold.org/rituals/fiona-evangeline
Cities are spaces of conflict and contradiction. This theme invites contributions that analyse urban contradictions between formal planning and informal practice, between infrastructural expansion and community displacement. We invite analysis of these conflicting or multiple narratives: between official master plans and lived practices, between the image of the “world-class city” and the realities of eviction, pollution, and precarity. Studies may cover spatial justice frameworks, data-driven inequality mapping, governance conflicts, and post-colonial critiques of master plans. Interdisciplinary methods that combine architectural analysis with geospatial tools, urban policy review, or AI-led risk assessment are encouraged. This theme also encourages a critical look at media, education, and institutional representations of urban identity and how those shape public perception and urban futures.
Key Questions
Visual by Anuradha Mathur explaining Deccan Traverses peels back layers of contemporary Bangalore to reveal how the 18th and 19th century colonial enterprises of surveying, triangulating, picturing and botanizing constructed the 'Garden City of India.' These enterprises continue to rule the disciplinary imagination, in particular that of the historian and planner. They also work to marginalize local practices that are easily dismissed as informal, primitive, or 'other'.
Source: Mathur. A. Decan Traverses. https://www.mathurdacunha.com/deccan-traverses
This theme invites research on the design, governance, access, and transformation of civic spaces, parks, lakes, streets, and informal gathering areas that serve as the backbone of urban life. They are often shaped by collective use, informal governance, and local knowledge. Submissions may explore spatial morphology, inclusive design strategies, lifecycle analysis of civic assets, and smart monitoring tools for the commons. Special attention may be given to legal protection, digital twins for civic spaces, or community-based stewardship models that sustain equitable access across social and economic strata. It asks: What makes a space truly public? How are commons negotiated across class, caste, gender, or religious lines? Who has access to them, and who doesn’t? Case studies could include citizen-led lake restorations, contested urban spaces, or legal battles over open spaces.
Key Questions
Visual Complexity by Manuel Lima
Christian Tominski and Heidrun Schumann
Enhanced Interactive Spiral Display
2008
An interactive spiral diagram showing temperature fluctuations in the city of Rostock, Germany, between the years 2008 (at the origin of the spiral) and 2014. Color ranges from dark blue (-20°C) to dark red (40°C).
Whether it’s a flood, pandemic, fire, or forced eviction, crises expose both the resilience and the vulnerabilities embedded in our urban systems. This theme explores the preparedness of communities to mitigate risks either using infrastructure or post-event adaptation. Submissions may address housing patterns, neighborhood design, multi-use spaces, or planning strategies that counter spatial segregation and foster shared civic life. We welcome studies on urban density, mobility systems, public infrastructure, and spatial organisation in the context of floods, pandemics, displacement, or other crises. Contributions may also include post-disaster evaluations, risk-sensitive design, and community-led interventions. One could start by asking, How do urban form and land use planning influence who gets displaced and who gets protected? This theme also invites critique of structural inequalities encoded into the city’s fabric and asks how urban planning and design practices might learn from grassroots responses to build more just and resilient environments.
Key Questions
Author: Abhilash Barbade + Krushna Lahoti
Tutors: Victor Cano-Ciborro + Mansi Shah
The cartography attempts to retrace the protest and riot that happen in the city of Chicago in 1968 and demonstrates the spatial situation as a peaceful protest turned to incited riot. The mapping attempts to visualise the enthusiasm of the protesters and the tension and fear during the riots. Based on the study of events that happened during the riots of Chicago in 1967.
Urban peace is not only shaped by people, but it is also deeply influenced by how cities are designed, organised, and inhabited. This theme explores how elements of the built environment, such as inclusive public spaces, mixed-use neighborhoods, accessible infrastructure, and equitable land use, can serve as quiet yet powerful peacemakers. Planning decisions could foster or hinder everyday coexistence among diverse communities. And spatial arrangements can promote interaction, interdependence, and shared belonging. From buffer zones and neutral spaces to interwoven housing patterns and layered access systems, this theme investigates how urban form and land use can either exacerbate divisions or facilitate trust, dialogue, and tolerance. It encourages inquiry into how planning and design can be tools for conflict mitigation, social repair, and long-term coexistence in rapidly changing cities. Submissions may critically review housing patterns, neighborhood design, multi-use spaces, or planning strategies that counter spatial segregation and foster shared civic life.
Key Questions
All abstracts will be screened for relevance, originality, and thematic alignment. Full papers will be double-blind peer reviewed by an editorial board comprising domain experts. The review will consider methodological rigour, contribution to theory/practice, and clarity of writing.
Abstract Submission Deadline: 30th September 2025
Notification of Acceptance: 15th October 2025
Full Paper Submission: 30th November 2025
Review Feedback: 15th December 2025
Final Paper Submission: 15th January 2026
Conference Presentation Dates: 14th February 2026
Average length per paper: 3000–4000 words
Posters of size 594 mm x 1089 mm, 150 dpi
Format will be shared consecutively.
The conference will be hosted in Chennai, India, and will include keynote lectures, panel discussions, thematic paper sessions, interactive panels, and a curated exhibition. Selected contributors will be invited for oral presentations. Financial support will be provided for the selected authors’ transport.