As Barcelona hosts the UIA World Congress of Architects for the second time in its history, thirty years after the 1996 edition, the city becomes a site for reflecting not only on architecture but also on the changing conditions under which it operates. Titled Becoming. Architectures for a Planet in Transition, and developed by the six-member curatorial team of Pau Bajet, Maria Giramé, Mariona Benedito, Tomeu Ramis, Pau Sarquella, and Carmen Torres, the 2026 Congress expands the discussion beyond the city toward planetary questions, addressing architecture through ecological, social, political, and material systems rather than as an isolated discipline. During the opening day of the Congress, ArchDaily spoke with Mariona Benedito and Carmen Torres, two members of the curatorial team, about how this edition revisits Barcelona's architectural legacy, why uncertainty has become central to architectural thinking, and what they hope participants will take away from the event.
Cities: The Latest Architecture and News
"We Want to Learn Something New": In Conversation With the Curators of UIA World Congress of Architects Barcelona 2026
The World's Largest Cities in 2026 by Population
Every year on July 11, World Population Day draws attention to the demographic trends reshaping societies around the globe. In 2026, the United Nations marks the occasion under the theme, "Realizing the Hopes and Aspirations of Young People – Today and for the Future," highlighting how young people's decisions about education, employment, housing, relationships, and family life are increasingly influenced by the cities they inhabit. Drawing on Lives, Choices and Futures, a global survey of more than 108,000 young adults across 73 countries, this year's campaign underscores the close relationship between demographic change and the social, economic, and spatial conditions of cities.
The Inheritance Problem: Urban Planning and Community Engagement in U.S. Cities
Urban planning is often confused with adjacent disciplines: urban design, environmental policy, civic strategy, local politics, and data analytics. Truthfully, the overlap makes the field difficult to define clearly. In practice, it is often easier to recognize bad planning than to articulate what good planning is. When planning works well, it disappears. It removes friction from daily life so completely that people rarely think to credit a planner at all. At its core, urban planning is the relationship people have with their environments, and when that relationship is functioning, the mechanics of housing, transportation, affordability, access, and inclusion should feel ordinary and expected.
This has not always been the case, and in many places, it still is not. Urban planning has historically served as an instrument of division, used to segregate, exclude, and erase communities under the language of progress and order. Zoning maps, infrastructure investment, and land-use decisions are expressions of who holds power and which interests that power chooses to protect. That history is embedded in the boundaries that organize cities around the world. It is embedded socially, too, in the assumption that participation in planning requires expertise or formal training that most residents lack.
Beyond Human: Architecture as a Participant in Living Systems
The built environment has historically served humans as a mechanism of environmental control. Through our intellectual capacities and ability to organize, we have used buildings to actively influence and terraform the immediate context in which they are inserted, often treating geography, water, and ecosystems as resources to be extracted and managed. However, more and more, architecture is transitioning from exploiting physical and biological matter to actively collaborating with it. This shift demands that architects explore how buildings and their materials grow, transform, decay, and persist beyond human timelines. This thinking also serves as a starting point for the profession to reflect on how it influences the natural world, as well as the non-human species around it, creating networks and connections between humans, buildings, living organisms, and natural environments.
A Beating and Bleeding Heart: Bodies, Streets, and the Politics of Care in Bogotá
This article is the winning entry of the Epistle Writing Prize 2025, an annual competition dedicated to recognizing outstanding writing on design, architecture, and the environment.
It's wet season, but this morning's downpour does little to deter the rhythm along La Carrera Séptima. Cyclists and pedestrians weave past ambulatory vendors with carts of avocados, ginger sweets, and phone cases. Toy cars, lightbulbs, and hand-beaded jewelry glisten with raindrops, arranged neatly on tarps that demarcate vendors' territories. Police officers approach a recycler gathering bottles; a tourist bargains for a jacket; two women find each other in the middle of the road, embracing as their coats grow heavy with rain.
La Séptima, or Bogotá's Seventh Avenue, is the most emblematic road in Bogotá, traversed by more than two million people every day. Along this single road — part marketplace, part protest route, part transportation hub — Bogotá's history unfolds. For nearly a year, I traced its rhythms as a pedestrian, commuter, inhabitant, and researcher. In all these moments and their historical incarnations, one image endured: the road is a living body. It is imagined as Bogotá's backbone, its vital artery, its heart. It bleeds, bears scars, and demands care.
Mexico City Architecture City Guide: 38 Projects From Tenochtitlan to the 21st Century
Mexico City is a sprawling metropolis of layered temporalities, where architecture operates as a continuous negotiation between deep-seated history and intense urban mutation. Built over the aquatic traces of Tenochtitlan, the city's fabric is an ongoing dialogue between eras: the monumental scale of the Pre-Hispanic Templo Mayor and the Viceroyalty architecture of the Catedral Metropolitana coexist with the modern and contemporary impulses that define its skyline. This dense juxtaposition creates a unique urban canvas where sacred geography, colonial imposition, and 20th-century ambition intersect.
The mid-century marked a definitive era of experimentation, forging a Mexican Modernism that masterfully synthesized international structural rationalism with local identity and materiality. This synthesis is epitomized by the sweeping, plastic integration of art and architecture at the Ciudad Universitaria, the structural poetry of Félix Candela's hyper-parabolic shells, and the raw, monumental brutalism of Teodoro González de León and Abraham Zabludovsky. Parallel to this, the intimate, introspective mastery of Luis Barragán and Juan O'Gorman redefined domestic space, experimenting with light, vernacular color, and tectonic honesty to create spaces of profound spatial stillness.
Dreaming in the Ruins: How a Sleeping Ritual in Logroño Proposes a New Civic Architecture
Cities are increasingly designed to mitigate risk, and by doing so, need to collect data on climate, infrastructure, biodiversity, and social fragmentation so that the language of resilience becomes a fixture of planning. Yet the underlying conditions that produce polarization, civic disengagement, and ecological breakdown often remain unquestioned. The tools that dominate urban practice tend to address only one register of human experience, while the emotional and imaginative dimensions of transformation are not treated as reliable solutions.
Philosopher Felix Guattari proposed that sustained ecological transformation depends on simultaneous attention to three distinct ecologies: the ecology of the mind, the ecology of society, and the ecology of the environment. Mainstream environmental politics tends to concentrate on one or two of the three, flattening a complex condition into a defined problem with a clear answer. Ancient rituals remind us that transformation depends on practices that simultaneously engage the body, the community, and the environment.
Architectures of Movement: ArchDaily's July Editorial Focus
Every twelve years, the banks of the Ganges at Prayagraj become one of the largest cities on Earth — and then disappear. The Maha Kumbh Mela draws over 400 million pilgrims across six weeks, requiring the construction of a full urban infrastructure: pontoon bridges, field hospitals, kilometers of temporary roads, a grid of tent cities visible from space. When the festival ends, it is dismantled entirely. No gathering in human history produces a more complete architecture of movement; built for arrival, engineered for transience, and designed to leave no permanent trace. The Kumbh Mela is exceptional in scale, but not in condition: movement has become a defining spatial problem of the century.
This month, ArchDaily explores Architectures of Movement: Land, Borders, and the Politics of Belonging, a theme that examines how mobility reshapes architecture's relationship to territory, ownership, and identity. The topic does not treat movement as a crisis to be managed, but as a fundamental lens through which to reconsider what buildings, cities, and borders actually do: who they accommodate, who they exclude, and what they make permanent.
Building Public Life: How Bogotá and Mexico City Addressed Urban Inequality
In many Latin American cities, peripheral neighborhoods have historically had less access to the resources that make urban life more than just livable. Housing, transportation, and public services are the usual markers of that gap. But there is another gap that is harder to quantify: the absence of places where people can gather, learn, rest, and participate in collective life. When those spaces do not exist, the city not only fails to provide a service. It fails to acknowledge a presence.
In recent decades, a growing number of projects have tried to address that absence directly. Rather than focusing only on physical infrastructure, they invest in spaces designed to support education, culture, recreation, and community, often merging several of those functions within a single building in neighborhoods where those spaces are otherwise limited.
Feeding the Land: What We Eat Built the World We Inhabit
There is a standard way of telling the history of architecture and food. It begins with the human decision to cultivate, to store, to distribute, to consume, and ends with the building that decision produced. In this version of events, food is the occasion and architecture is the response.
But what if the story runs differently? What if the tomato built Almería? What if the cod redesigned the North Atlantic? What if the soybean is, at this moment, constructing a port in Santos and demolishing a forest in the Cerrado simultaneously, and the architect has simply not been told? These are descriptions of processes already complete, or well underway, that have produced some of the most spatially consequential contemporary landscapes. Much of the built environment is shaped by the pressures, metabolisms, and territorial ambitions of what we eat. Architecture, in this, is often less a project than a consequence, and the discipline has been telling its own story from the wrong end.
City-Making Through Participation: Lessons from Utopian Hours 2026
Who has the right to the city? Henri Lefebvre's writings question the structures that control urban space and, instead, put the citizens at the center of decision-making. His ideas have influenced the way architecture and urban design are practiced, bringing about community participation and co-design. These have been some of the most prominent themes at Utopian Hours 2026, the festival of city-making, the first part of which was held in the Dutch city of Rotterdam to mark its tenth anniversary edition.
Unearthing the Ground: Architecture and the Politics of Soil
What architecture leaves in the ground outlasts what it puts in the air. A demolished building disappears from the skyline in a matter of days, but its foundations remain embedded in the soil for generations. The contamination caused by an industrial complex does not clear when the complex is torn down. The legal boundaries inscribed across colonial territory do not dissolve when the colonial administration ends. The ground holds what architecture quickly forgets.
This is what makes soil so uncomfortable as a subject. The discipline tends to orient itself upward, toward the form, the façade, the spatial experience of inhabitation. The ground is where architecture begins and, in a certain sense, where it ends: the point at which building becomes geology, legal title becomes territorial claim, and construction becomes extraction. Treating soil as a medium rather than a datum means acknowledging that the acts of building carry consequences that run deeper than the visible object above grade.
PREVI Lima and the Politics of Resident Authorship in Social Housing
Architects are accustomed to being credited for buildings long after construction ends. Names remain attached to projects through photographs, publications, and histories, often decades after the original drawings were produced. Buildings, on the other hand, rarely remain faithful to that narrative for long. Families grow, technologies change, businesses emerge, and daily life introduces demands that no plan can fully anticipate. Over time, architecture accumulates modifications, repairs, additions, and improvisations that gradually distance it from its original form.
Few projects confront this question as directly as PREVI Lima. Conceived in the late 1960s as Peru's Experimental Housing Project, PREVI invited an international group of architects to develop housing prototypes capable of accommodating growth over time. The project is often remembered for its ambitious roster of designers, which included figures such as James Stirling, Aldo van Eyck, and Christopher Alexander. More than fifty years later, the neighborhood has become a record of resident decisions, revealing a form of architecture designed to remain unfinished.
Ecologies of Repair: Reconciling Our Relationship with Water
Ola Hassanain is a Sudanese architect and artist operating in the Netherlands, and will be exhibiting at the Pan-African Architecture Biennale in Nairobi, Kenya, later in 2026. All three locations tell stories of the built environment's relationship with water. These illustrate the continuous battles between the amorphous forces of nature that are the rivers and seas, and human attempts to shape and control them. In most cases, they are attempts at extraction. Catastrophes happen as a result of the overreach of these attempts or of their mismanagement, or both.
Thick Walls and Deep Openings: When Architecture Rediscovers Mass
For much of the twentieth century, architectural culture was shaped by the pursuit of lightness. Steel structures and curtain walls reduced the building envelope to a thin layer separating interior from exterior, while façades became smooth, continuous surfaces where windows were cut as precise openings within an abstract plane. But for centuries, buildings were conceived as bodies of mass; walls possessed depth, windows were recessed within thick masonry, and space was often experienced as something carved from the solidity of construction. In recent years, several contemporary projects appear to revisit this older spatial logic, reintroducing thickness as an architectural condition through deep openings, monolithic volumes, and heavy envelopes.
This shift does not imply a rejection of modern construction technologies, nor does it represent a nostalgic return to historical forms. Instead, it reflects a renewed interest in the fundamental relationship between material, mass, and void. By reintroducing thickness into the architectural vocabulary, these buildings reconnect contemporary practice with long-standing traditions in which space was inseparable from the weight and depth of construction.
World Environment Day 2026 Coincides with Record Heatwaves, Renewing Focus on Climate Adaptation in Cities
As Europe experiences one of its earliest and most intense heatwaves in recent years, World Environment Day 2026 arrives amid renewed discussions about climate adaptation, urban resilience, and the capacity of cities to respond to increasingly extreme temperatures. Across Portugal, France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, and the United Kingdom, temperatures have surged well above seasonal averages, prompting heat alerts, school closures, emergency planning measures, and growing concerns about the performance of buildings and public infrastructure under prolonged heat stress. The convergence of these highlights a reality that is becoming increasingly worldwide: climate change is no longer solely an environmental concern but an issue that is fundamentally reshaping the spaces where people live, work, and gather.
The Metrics We Use Decide the Cities We Build: Urban Indicators and Lived Experience
Modern cities are running on performance indicators. They move millions of people each day, concentrate capital, separate land uses, and sustain complex systems of logistics and consumption. In that sense, the city functions as a system to be continually adjusted and optimized.
Today's dominant metrics are familiar and widely witnessed: vehicles per hour, average commute times, floor area ratios, parking turnover, housing starts, and tax revenue per parcel of land. These figures describe a city that is legible through efficiency. They are inherited from an industrial logic, where urban space is treated more like a production mechanism than a lived-in environment. In this framing, cities begin to mimic the needs and metrics of a machine.
Copenhagen Architecture City Guide: 44 Projects Defining the Capital of Human-Scale Design
Copenhagen is long famous as the global capital of human-scale design and livability. Today, the city has widened its focus and is an active space where mid-century Scandinavian modernism meets the modern demands of climate adaptability, material circularity, radical conservation, and neighborhood density. During the first-ever Copenhagen Architecture Biennial, in 2025, the city transformed into a global platform for dialogue under the theme "Slow Down," exploring how architecture can respond to global pressures by rethinking the pace of change. And this year's 13th edition of the 3daysofdesign Festival will explore the theme of "Make This Moment Matter", encouraging the global design community to step away from digital noise and mass production to focus on the present.
