Urbanity should, by its very definition, form the essential quality of the city as such. Yet still, from the 1960s and 1970s onward, fears began to emerge of urbanity’s complete disappearance or the weakening of the city’s urban character, often in connection with criticism of functionalist urban design. On the international level, this critique arose not only among architects and urbanists but no less among social scientists, humanistic scholars, or journalists. Its proponents included authors as diverse as Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, Christian Norberg-Schulz, Christopher Alexander, Aldo Rossi, the Krier brothers, among others. Indeed, the historian of urbanism Françoise Choay went so far as to ask whether the city itself even exists. These and similar reflections relied methodologically on the findings from phenomenology, urban morphology, sociology, or the psychology of perception. In turn, the theme of urbanity – or more precisely its loss – began to appear by the 1980s in expert debates even in the former Soviet Bloc, primarily in the context of criticizing mass housing production in prefabricated estates.
In further debates – still ongoing today – one theme emerging as salient was that of public space as the bearer of urbanity (Jan Gehl, or the international European Prize for Public Space competition). A multidisciplinary approach to its creation, i.e. placemaking, often came to draw upon community initiatives. Alongside attention to the formal or structural traits of urbanity, its understanding as a social and political concept became reinforced, with the subject of analysis becoming questions of its control by power (David Harvey), or the relation between urbanity and community (Richard Sennett and his differentiation between ville and cité). At the same time, these efforts toward the renaissance of urbanity attracted their own counter-critique, which discerned in certain forms of it a nostalgic adherence to the past. Such an idea of urbanity and traditional ideas of the city were, for instance, problematized by Rem Koolhaas in his essay “The Generic City”.
The aim of this special issue of A&U is to reflect the change in the understanding of urbanity as a concept in professional debates through the past decades, and to test the vitality and potential of it in the present. The central question is whether we are now witnessing urbanity’s renaissance, its dissolution, or the emergence of entirely new forms of it. Among the relevant partial questions are:
- What is the relation between the physical and the social conception of urbanity? What are the defining traits of urbanity today?
- What role in the decay/preservation of urban character is played by recent changes in the urban landscape (increasing scale in megalopolises, the city dissolving into urban sprawl, changes in the terrain organization of various functions) and how does it reflect civilizational changes (the dominance of mobility and virtual relations in communication, segregation in urban territories, gentrification and overtourism, etc.)?
- To what extent is the idea of urbanity dependent on the European tradition? Are there cultural differences in the conception of urbanity? What gender does urbanity assume?
- How have theoretical conceptions of urbanity developed in recent history, and what key personalities played a significant role in such development?
- Additionally, we welcome analyses of specific phenomena and events that illustrate vital points in the discussions of urbanity in the past decades, whether as local initiatives or as authorial interventions.
- We are interested particularly in contributions addressing the space of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe, whether focusing on the understanding and role of urbanity in the era of late socialism as well as the significance of urbanity in the years of postsocialist transformation.
Submissions from PhD students and early-career researchers are welcome for this call.
Editors of the thematic issue:
Petr Kratochvíl and Petr Roubal
Deadlines:
Call published 20. 5. 2026
Deadline for abstracts 22. 6. 2026
Notification of acceptance 6. 7. 2026
Deadline for full papers 30. 11. 2026
Journal published 10. 2027
This issue is prepared in connection with the project „Urbanity: Inequality, Adaptation and Urban Public Space in the Historical Perspective“, No.: CZ.02.01.01/00/23_025/0008735.
To submit your abstract in this special issue, please use our online form
