Call for Proposals
Issue 15: OWNERSHIP
Edited by Tonia Sing Chi and Hannah Walrath
Who owns this place? Can a place be owned?
As a legal concept, ownership turns an entity into property, establishing the right to use, possess, sell, or give away. What is owned can be tangible, like a house or a piece of land, or intangible, like an idea. The notion of ownership is linked to questions of power, authority, and who gets to decide. Yet, those who “own” a property are not necessarily the ones who use it or care for it, and those who feel a sense of ownership over a place may possess no claim to it as truly their own. Moving beyond legal definitions, a sense of ownership can signal pride, belonging, and authorship. To speak of our own community or our own place is to invoke kinship and relationality rather than alienable possession alone.
Questions of ownership permeate the built environment, where claims over land, buildings, and even air dictate who can and cannot use or benefit from a space. Land ownership is deeply entangled with colonial dispossession, concepts of property, and wealth accumulation. Homeownership is tied to questions of race, gender, and class, and shaped by both access and aspiration. Surveys, planning documents, and architectural plans make ownership legible through text and lines drawn on a map. Buildings materialize these claims through walls, circulation, and thresholds that delineate and complicate public and private space. At the same time, legal ownership frameworks have been appropriated as tactics of resistance: community land trusts and collective ownership models seek to redistribute wealth and decision-making power; Land Back and reparations challenge settler claims to territory; legal arrangements (such as usufruct) separate the right to use and enjoy property from its ownership. Other models challenge the idea of ownership entirely: the Whanganui River in Aotearoa New Zealand has been granted legal personhood and is no longer owned by the government. The river owns itself.
Issue 15 of Room One Thousand seeks articles, interviews, photo essays, design as scholarship, and other forms of media that attend to the different registers of ownership in the pedagogy, practice, and study of architecture and the built environment. Submissions might address public/private ownership, legal/illegal ownership, tangible/intangible ownership, co-ownership, felt ownership, self-ownership, and non-ownership. Expanding who participates in the production of architectural knowledge itself is a question of ownership. Who owns the narrative? Who gets to author, imagine, and design the worlds in which we live? As such, Issue 15 welcomes submissions from students, first-time authors, practitioners, artists, and those working in allied and adjacent fields, as well as established scholars who are interested in opening up space for new voices, dissenting perspectives, and ways of knowing that resist or escape the normative boundaries of our disciplines.
Submission Guidelines
Please send abstracts of approximately 300 words, a short biography (50 words max), a writing sample (2 pages max), and graphic sample where applicable via the online form by October 30, 2026 at midnight PT. Accepted authors will be notified by mid November 2026. Text articles or visual essays can be up to 2500 words. First drafts will be due in early December 2026, with final drafts due in early March 2027. This issue of Room One Thousand is expected to be published in print and online by Spring 2027.
Issue fourteen of Room One Thousand turns to the intertidal zone as a space of overlap shaped by the constant push and pull of external forces. Guided by the moon’s gravitational pull, each tide marks a subtle shift: rhythmic yet never identical. To thrive here is to exist between exposure and submersion, stillness and movement, depletion and renewal. In this state of continual change, the shifting edge of water becomes home to rich biodiversity, a site of rapid adaptation where flexibility is necessary.
As architects, we are accustomed to ideas of permanence, foundation, solidity, and endurance. Yet we live in an era of economic precarity and climate instability that calls on an architecture to respond with ideas that are nimble, responsive, and balanced. Considering an approach that is “in-between” could look like balancing affordability and delight in design, or designing with integration of natural cycles of fire and water.
The intertidal is at once ecological, political, cultural, and urban. Here, life within it moves between stasis and flux. The shifting edges of land and sea, city and nature, are not solely borders but boundaries: zones of exchange, tension, and possibility. As urban densities rise, climates destabilize, and economies fluctuate, can the interstitial become a framework for architectural thought? How can uncertainty produce a different type of architecture, one which creates balance within moments of flux?
Submission Guidelines
We invite submissions of scholarly articles, images, photo essays, drawings, speculations, and conversations that broadly consider this theme. Text articles or visual essays can be up to 2500 words in length. While contributions may take various forms, we encourage submissions that are clear and concise, and that present techniques and methodologies in detail.
To submit a proposal, email the following in one PDF document to roomonethousand@berkeley.edu or submit to the link below.
Title
Author name and bio, 50 words max.
Abstract describing method and argument, format (text or photo essay), and length of your proposed contribution, 300 words max.
A writing sample of academic or professional quality that is accessible to an audience beyond architectural academia. Maximum 2 pages. Samples may be partial.
Design or website urls, optional.
Due Date for Proposals: November 3rd, 2025 at midnight PT
