CLOSED: Special Issue on Computing and the Built Environment

Important Dates

• Title and Abstracts Due: 1 December 2024 (to david.theodore@mcgill.ca, theodora.vardouli@mcgill.ca)
• Full Manuscripts Due: 01 October 2025 (via submission site)
• Publication: Apr-Jun 2026

Call for Papers

What were the material, technical, epistemic, cultural, and political conditions that made the built environment computable? And, conversely, what are the implications of emplacing the history of computing in material and spatial settings – in the built environment?

The Special Issue “Computing and the Built Environment” invites historical scholarship that tackles the co-constitution and entanglements of computing and the built environment. The term “built environment” here refers both to human-made material configurations and to the interdisciplinary field concerned with their design and function. Known as “environmental design,” this field burgeoned in the second half of the 20th century, in proximity to computational concepts and techniques. Environmental design expanded the scope of architecture from objects (buildings) to relationships between humans and the settings they inhabit. Often drawing from cybernetic and information theory, new space-based approaches ushered in the imperative not to just design but to compute the built environment – and with it, the fantasy of environmental computability. 

We invite interdisciplinary historical scholarship that examines the relationship between computing and the built environment at the mesoscale of buildings and urban infrastructures.

Potential topics include:

• Digital electronic computers as built environments;
• Environmental design’s relationship with systems theory, cybernetics, and electronic computing;
• Histories of carbon accounting software and quantitative energy models for building and city design;
• Historical construction of microclimate regulation and “smart” buildings;
• Infrastructures of climate computing;
• Neuromorphic computing and the design of “green” cities;
• Ecocriticism, hardware, and architectural dystopias

The special issue will highlight new thinking about the historical dependencies of computing on the built environment, specifying the roles that computing has played in how designers and architects conceptualize and design the world that surrounds us. At a time when computational models, techniques, and infrastructure are once again invoked to legitimize human-made interventions on an ailing planet, a deeper understanding of these histories is imperative.

To be considered for this Special Issue, please send a 250-word abstract and a brief bio to the editors David Theodore (david.theodore@mcgill.ca) and Theodora Vardouli (theodora.vardouli@mcgill.ca) by 1 December 2024.

Guest Editors

David Theodore, McGill University

Theodora Vardouli, McGill University