Call for Abstracts - Rural Urban Assemblages, Exploring The Continuum

RURAL URBAN ASSEMBLAGES, EXPLORING THE CONTINUUM

seminar - 1 Dec, 2026 - KU Leuven, ULB, UCLouvain, ULiège

In the Low Lands, cities and villages have long blurred into one another: ribbon developments, dispersed housing, industrial fragments, farmland and infrastructure form a continuous, in-between territory. Terms such as the diffuse city, horizontal metropolis or rural–urban continuum have tried to capture it. Yet they mostly describe it from the city outward, so the rural becomes what is left over or "not yet urban". The seminar Rural–Urban Assemblages: Exploring the Continuum takes a different starting point. It treats the urban and the rural not as opposites but as overlapping, entangled qualities, made through infrastructures, landscapes, ecological systems, agriculture, commoning and everyday practices. Taking Belgium as a particularly rich case, it asks what forms of rurality, urbanity and territorial agency appear when we stop working with centres and hierarchies. We bring together PhD research and spatial practice from urbanism, architecture, landscape, geography, anthropology and related fields.

Read more about it here: Rural urban assemblages, exploring the continuum

Call for Abstracts

We invite doctoral researchers, research-by-design practitioners, postdocs, and professors to submit contributions that examine or question the urban-rural continuum (max. 600 words).

Topics may include:

• Beyond the Urban-Rural Continuum: Assemblages, multiplex territories, relational geographies.

• Village Urbanism: Villages as active territorial agents rather than residual settlements.

• Infrastructures and Territorial Networks: Mobility, logistics, energy, water and digital systems.

• Productive ecologies and More-than-Human Territorialities: Agriculture, food systems, resources and rural economies, watersheds, habitats, climate adaptation, ecological networks ...

• Commoning and Territorial Governance: Collective practices, stewardship, local agency and new institutional forms.

• Designing and Representing Rural and/or Urban Assemblages: Design research, cartography, spatial practice and new modes of territorial representation.

DEADLINE: 25 Oct, 2026

CONFIRMATION: 1 Nov, 2026

SEND your abstract to ward.verbakel@kuleuven.be

This seminar is part of the Villageness Festival 2026.