Since 2016, the Colloques Internationaux Imaginaires Construire et Habiter la Terre (ICHT) have alternated between Brazil and France. The most recent edition was held in 2023 in the cities of São Paulo and Recife, Brazil.

The central aim of these colloquia is to consolidate and constantly renew research on the relationship between the imaginary and the act of constructing and inhabiting the Earth, from a transdisciplinary perspective. The aim is to integrate reflexive, critical and projective aspects.

The ICHT is an event conceived and organised by teacher-researchers from the Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning and Design of the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP), in partnership with colleagues from SENAC-SP and the Postgraduate Programme in Urban Development of the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil, and the Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier 3, France.

For its sixth edition in 2025, the ICHT will promote a face-to-face meeting in Montpellier on 10 and 11 April to deepen the scientific debate on the issues presented. 

With this proposal, the sixth edition of the Franco-Brazilian event aims to continue and deepen the questions, themes and reflections discussed in previous editions, and in particular to stimulate the approach to The Sensitive in the City: Ambiences and Environments.

This event aims to:

• Contribute to reflections on the conceptualisations and expressions of the imaginary;
• Identify the forms of sensitive interaction with our urban environment that such imaginaries produce;
• Understand how the imagination organises, guides and enables such experiences;
• Analysing imaginative expressions such as rootedness, aspirations, projections or utopias of individuals, groups or societies;
• Foster reflections on individual and collective practices, whether hegemonic or non-hegemonic, which, through their diversity, produce new imaginaries and/or enrich existing ones.

With regard to these objectives, three thematic axes will guide the submission of works:

Axis 1: Environmental Transfigurations
In capturing the spirit of the times, the relationship between spatiality and nature is a specific feature of the contemporary urban imaginary, with epistemological and practical issues at stake in order to support the development of new comprehensive perspectives and immersive knowledge. The development of relational thinking between nature and the city takes a variety of forms, leading us to examine questions relating to the constitution of a sensitive approach to the relationships between human beings, milieux and environments. This involves the emergence of an aesthetic paradigm as a dynamic form of organic mutation of the social body, the urban body and nature, in order to place ‘ono-environmental’ characteristics back at the centre, from a transdisciplinary point of view, by means of sensitive perception. This transmutation involves new forms of inhabitation of the city and its spaces, architectural forms and places of practice that call into question the practice of perceptible knowledge based on nature, ecosophy, vegetation, biophilia, etc. What then are the forms of this contemporary living situation? How can we think about habitat in terms of environmental sensitivity? The aim is to move beyond the dialectic of nature/culture and nature/city in order to re-configure the way we think about the habitability of places and the emotional aesthetics that characterise our imagination.

Axix 2: Spatial Affectivities

Our relationship with spaces and places is increasingly rooted in a dynamic form of emotion, affect and sensation. Spatiality is influenced by a way of feeling via immersion, where the city represents a medium based on these sensitive qualities, its tones and its atmospheres. If man is disposed to ‘be-in-the-world’, then his way of being in space resonates with an affective capacity: in other words, how space affects us, and consequently how we affect it through experience. We are predisposed to feel, and this generates a kind of urban intonation in which our being is contaminated by atmospheres and tones, generating zones of the sensitive, affective zones charged with meaning. In the atmospherological immersion of places and spaces, feelings and emotions are brought to the fore, condensed through the various specificities of a kinaesthetic attraction, vibrations and fusion of sensations rooted in an empathy built up between bodies, architecture, sounds, smells, luminosity and other sensory components. How can we re-think the urban imaginary through affective tones? In what ways is being-in-the-world spatially embodied? How can we capture an emotional atmosphere? These are just some of the questions that lead us to think in terms of the senses, in order to access the spatial reality we experience, where affective tones (stimmungen) help to create a new urban aura.

Axis 3: Images, Bodies and Dissonances

With this axis, we are referring to anthropological, sociological and philosophical approaches, as well as artistic and architectural approaches, to the images that emerge from the experience of the body in space. The body appears as a sensitive centrality, interacting with its surroundings, the environment, but also as a place that generates vibrations and psychic elaborations that regulate its relationship with the exterior, the other and itself. This relationship, which is not always in balance and admits of ambiguities and contradictions, also raises the question of dissonances between space, the body and images. Contemporary visual practices, for example, frequently approach the body as a means of exploring and deconstructing these dissonances, through works involving the fragmentation of the image or its reconstruction in relation to various environments. How do ambiguities and dissonances in the relationships between the body, space and images enrich our understanding of contemporary spatialities? To what extent do interdisciplinary approaches make it possible to rethink the role of the body as a sensitive centrality in the creation of images and imaginaries? What links can we establish between bodily experiences and the development or transformation of archtectural and urban imaginaries? These questions invite us here to explore the interactions between the body and images, as sensitive and creative entities, but also as expressions of this complex experience that is redefining the imaginaries of contemporary spatiality.

For ICHT 2025, the scientific committee will be composed of researchers from various complementary fields of knowledge who, in addition to contributing to the international dissemination of the event, will be responsible for evaluating article submissions.

• Proposals must be submitted via the ScienceConf platform by December 20, 2024.
• Abstracts must be no longer than 500 words.

Authors will be informed of the acceptance of their articles by January 10, 2025.

Only proposals in French and English will be accepted.

In Montpellier, there will be no translation of the conferences and round tables. There isn't fees to participate and there will be no online session.

Accepted works will be presented in the form of round tables or posters, which will be printed by the University Paul Valéry and displayed on-site.