MONU Magazine has launched a new call for its 32nd issue, entitled "Affordable Urbanism". MONU (Magazine on Urbanism) is a unique biannual international forum for architects, urbanists and theorists that are working on urban topics. MONU focuses on the city in a broad sense, including its politics, economy, geography, ecology, its social aspects, as well as its physical structure and architecture. Therefore architecture is one of many fields covered by the magazine - fields which are all brought together under the catch-all term “urbanism”. 

Bernd Upmeyer, Editor-in-Chief, summarizes the 32nd issue:

One motivation for our previous issue #31 on "After Life Urbanism" was based on an interest in finding innovative solutions for the creation of affordable housing in spite of the increasing amount of city-space that is covered by cemeteries. But the question how to generate affordable urban spaces in general - whether for housing, work spaces, public spaces, urban infrastructure or other spaces - has, as a matter of fact, been nagging us for a very long time, if not since day one of the magazine around 15 years ago when we started with MONU #1 on "Paid Urbanism". 

In that first issue we demonstrated how subsidies and public spending shape our urban spaces, supporting people to afford their urban lives and have access to urban places and activities. Thus, this new topic of MONU has a lot to do with Lefebvre's famous idea of the "right to the city", but projected onto our contemporary world, and therefore also touches on themes such as accessibility to urban life, inclusiveness, spatial inequality, liveability, social interaction, collective life, co-creation, openness, and the re-thinking of capitalism when it comes to the cities of today. Read on...

"To trigger a fresh discussion on urban affordability that reflects the situation that we face in our current cities, and to come up with new ideas and strategies, MONU invites you with this new open call for submissions for MONU #32 on "Affordable Urbanism", to submit ground-breaking visions, decisive analysis, original projects, economic strategies, sociological reflections, urban philosophy, eye-opening interviews and texts, imaginative photography and descriptive illustrations." 

Abstracts of around 500 words, and images and illustrations in low resolution, should be sent, together with a short biography and a list of publications, as one single pdf-file that is not bigger than 1mb to [email protected] before December 31, 2019. MONU's spring issue #32 will be published in April 2020. 

Top image: Banksy's artwork on Scott Street bridge in Kingston upon Hull, UK, 2018.

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