March 14, 2026, 10:30am
For decades, architecture and urbanism have centered the city as an aspirational site for politics, relationships, and construction. Yet it is becoming increasingly evident that other frameworks are emerging, marking a profound change of paradigm. This demands new methodologies, new institutional frameworks, new coalitions, and new forms of practice.
Columbia GSAPP is convening the World Actioning Summit: an intensive one-day conversation in Seoul, with speakers including Minsuk Cho, Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, Philippe Rahm, Andrés Jaque, Lydia Kallipoliti, Nahyun Hwang, David Benjamin, Marc Tsurumaki, Rachaporn Choochuey, Mireia Luzárraga, Jong Ho Hong, Weiping Wu, Shirley Surya, and Mark Wasiuta, in a debate moderated by Bart-Jan Polman. The summit will take place on March 14, and aims to think of architecture and urbanism as exceeding “the city” and as intrinsically transscalar, collective and distributed.
Understanding climate and ecological processes today means recognizing that they do not stop at the city’s edge. Nor do activism, housing inequity, climate, surveillance regimes, migratory routes, geopolitics, toxicity, property speculation, warfare, commons, collective intelligences, carceral systems, trading platforms, logistics chains, extraction sites, data storage farms, or fabrication networks. These forces are largely indifferent to what we persist in calling “the city” and its administrative borders or disciplinary comfort zones.
To continue treating “the city” as the ultimate aspiration of our disciplines, or as a stable conceptual framework in which political dynamics neatly concentrate, is no longer sufficient—and perhaps no longer credible. The urban is not a bounded object; it is a volatile interface within planetary infrastructures. If the disciplines of the built environment are to remain relevant, we must shift from designing cities-as-forms to engaging with the transcalar ecologies, economies, and conflicts that incessantly exceed them.
This shift does not simply expand the field–it dislocates it. It opens a mode of inquiry and practice that cannot be housed within inherited disciplinary enclosures. What emerges is not an enlarged urbanism, but a different epistemic condition altogether—one in which “the urban” is no longer synonymous with the city, nor spatially confined to it.
The urban now unfolds through assemblages: heterogeneous entities, mineral and digital, atmospheric and logistical, biological and algorithmic, whose relationships are defined less by adjacency than by mutual infiltration. Their ecologies are not stable systems but volatile entanglements in permanent reconfiguration. Extraction sites pulse in financial districts; data centers condition domestic life; migratory corridors reorganize labor markets; toxic legacies seep into real estate futures. None of these dynamics respect municipal borders.
In this emerging condition, practice cannot merely represent complexity. It must operate within it—tracing, reassembling, and strategically intensifying the entanglements through which collective life is continuously made and unmade.
Please click here to see the full program for the day. For more information and to register, please contact events@arch.columbia.edu.
