CALL UOUsj#13 / THE CITY OF TREES

07.09.2026

Dear UOU Enthusiasts,

We are delighted to announce what we believe is a truly necessary theme for our next issue:

THE CITY OF TREES, and its Call for Papers!

We are looking forward to exploring, together, the multiple ways in which trees can transform our understanding of the city, architecture, landscape, and the ways we inhabit our shared environment.

Thank you all for being part of this journey, and for continuing to make UOU a space for exchanging ideas, experiences, and knowledge across borders.

Let’s make the city grow!

The UOU Team

UOU scientific journal - Issue #13 / THE CITY OF TREES

June 2027

Guest Editor: Valerio Morabito, Università Mediterranea Reggio Calabria. Italy.

15 September 2026, 5pm CET / Call opens:

WEBEX LINK

https://ua2.webex.com/ua2/j.php?MTID=m4fd26be80a20d7b5b60f3dec3168d77e

Meeting number: 2743 796 5841

Password: YjryMpdq868

15 January 2027 / Full paper submission

15 February 2027 / Outcome of double-blind peer review process

15 May 2027 / Final submission of completed papers

THE CITY OF TREES

Trees as Urban Co-Designers

Post-Anthropocentric Perspectives on the Future of Cities

Thematic Focus

Trees have generally entered urban discourse as environmental infrastructure, aesthetic components, or providers of ecosystem services. They offer shade, reduce urban heat, absorb carbon dioxide, retain water, support biodiversity, and improve the quality of public space. Although essential, these descriptions continue to define trees principally through their usefulness to humans.

This special issue proposes a different starting point: trees are not passive objects placed within cities but living subjects that actively participate in their spatial, ecological, and temporal transformation.

Trees occupy, modify, and redesign urban space. Their roots fracture and reshape the ground; their trunks establish distances and orientations; their canopies construct shade, shelter, atmosphere, and changing boundaries. Through growth, adaptation, decay, and regeneration, they continuously revise the places they inhabit. They respond to climate, soil, water, other species, built structures, and human behaviour. Their forms are not fixed compositions but evolving spatial decisions.

From this perspective, trees may be understood as intelligent urban co-designers. Their intelligence does not necessarily resemble human reasoning or intentionality. It emerges through sensitivity, memory, adaptation, cooperation, improvisation, and the ability to negotiate changing environmental conditions. Trees design through their bodies and through time.

Such an assumption requires us to reconsider the conventional distinction between the human designer and the non-human object of design. What happens when the tree is no longer treated as material within a project, but as an autonomous presence capable of modifying that project? Can urban design become a process of negotiation between different forms of intelligence, agency, and duration?

Trees also possess temporalities that exceed those of political mandates, construction programmes, and human lives. They may survive the intentions that led to their planting, transform the spaces conceived around them, and give gardens, streets, ruins, and abandoned places unexpected afterlives. Some trees grow within carefully planned conditions; others emerge in residual, hostile, or forgotten spaces. In both situations, their actions reveal forms of resilience, intuition, and spatial invention that challenge the apparent stability of the city.

A post-anthropocentric perspective therefore asks us to move beyond the idea of simply designing for trees. It invites us to consider how cities might be designed with trees—and, more radically, how trees already design cities themselves.

This issue of UOUsj welcomes theoretical, critical, visual, and interdisciplinary contributions exploring trees as active participants in the production, transformation, and imagination of urban environments. Contributions may engage with architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, ecology, philosophy, environmental humanities, political ecology, art, geography, and multispecies studies.

Possible Perspectives

Contributions may address, but are not limited to:

trees as intelligent agents of urban spatial production;
trees as designers rather than elements of design;
vegetal intelligence, memory, sensitivity, and communication;
arboreal form, posture, movement, and spatial expression;
trees that adapt to, resist, or transform architectural structures;
spontaneous trees in ruins, residual spaces, and abandoned urban areas;
post-anthropocentric and more-than-human approaches to city-making;
arboreal temporality and long-term urban transformation;
trees as political, social, ecological, and cultural actors;
coexistence, co-design, and multispecies urban governance;
vegetal networks as alternative forms of infrastructure;
urban forests as models of collective organization and resilience;
trees as witnesses to urban histories and human mistakes;
the afterlives of gardens, landscapes, and designed spaces;
ethical questions arising from designing with non-human beings;
decolonial, ecological, and posthuman interpretations of urban vegetation;
new forms of representation capable of expressing arboreal agency;
artistic, architectural, and landscape practices that recognize trees as creative partners.

Theoretical Perspectives

Contributions may engage with posthumanism, post-anthropocentrism, plant philosophy, new materialism, actor-network theory, multispecies studies, environmental philosophy, landscape urbanism, political ecology, and related fields.

Particular attention will be given to contributions that question the ontological separation between human designers and non-human urban actors. The issue is not intended to prove that trees possess intelligence according to human categories. Instead, it begins from the assumption that trees manifest their own forms of intelligence and asks where, how, and through which spatial conditions this intelligence becomes perceptible.

Key Questions

What would a city become if trees were considered not as objects located within urban space, but as subjects participating in its design and evolution?

How might architecture and urban design respond to the agency, autonomy, and temporal depth of arboreal life?

What can designers learn by observing how trees occupy space, negotiate limits, construct relationships, and adapt to uncertainty?

Can the city be understood as a multispecies work in continuous transformation rather than as an exclusively human creation?

Toward a City Designed with Trees

This special issue seeks to advance a radical reconsideration of urban futures by positioning trees as co-creators of cities. It invites contributors to investigate forms of design that emerge through coexistence, reciprocal transformation, and dialogue between human and vegetal intelligence.

Rather than asking how trees can serve cities, this issue asks how cities might learn from trees.

Guest Editor: