Preface

Will Spring be far?

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In the context of ongoing political conflict, environmental crises, and social destabilisation, the present at times feels like an endless winter. The design profession holds the capacity to respond constructively, reframing dispersion and stagnation through a positive lens grounded in solutions and proposals that usher in Spring and a hopeful future.

 

Urbanogram: Journal of the Built Environment, therefore, invites reflections on how designers, architects, researchers, and thinkers can herald the arrival of Spring and embrace radical optimism. This issue encourages contributors to share their ideas on the complex interplay of time, place, and possibility by conceiving urban environments that can weather adversity and emerge stronger, more livable, and more humane. This includes urban renewal, reinvention, reuse, and technical progress in the context of social, political, environmental, and economic upheaval. As we start from environments that are already defined and dense, change can happen simply by “re”-imagining reality and proposing new ways of seeing what is around us. Revolution does not mean destroying and rebuilding, but rather taking what exists and remodelling it, giving it a new shape.

 

“Will Spring be far?” is an invitation to think beyond the challenges of the moment and to engage with the prospect of a future that is as much about transformation as it is about self-reflection. 

Inspired by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ode to the West Wind” [1], the theme of the upcoming issue builds on the concluding question of the text: “If winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” [2] It provokes a vision of the future while also acknowledging the past as a source of inspiration.

 

As on the cover, in the silent white of snow that envelops everything in winter in some parts of the world, we can perceive, between the letters of the title, the colours of a tree blossom. This gesture celebrates the Prunus mume blossom, emerging through the snow. In Chinese and Japanese culture, they represent resilience, hope, renewal, purity, and beauty. Artists use plum or cherry blossoms in snow to emphasise strength, moral courage, and quiet optimism. The apparition of David Hockney’s iPad drawing “11th April 2020 No.1” [3] on the cover is an homage to the artist, for whom blossoms are not just decorative or fragile, but rather are a rebuttal to pessimism. This issue aims to evoke the Swinging Sixties, the cultural movement centred in London in the 1960s, marked by youth culture and rebellion, as well as optimism and social change. This is the fight of designers today: despite everything, to be courageous enough to rethink the world in which we live, to shape it differently, and above all, to have fun, to blossom creatively like the flowers in Hockney’s work. 

 

The white cover also serves as a blank canvas, which invites creativity. Only through a process of liberation and the freedom to explore our boundaries can we truly rethink reality. In this issue, you will find new ideas and fresh ways to see, imagine, and think about the urban environment and the relationships between humans, nature, and cities. Through reading this issue, you will encounter writers, our pioneers and strong blossoms, who are “proudly blooming despite snow and frost” [4], and perhaps Spring will not be so far away.

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Editorial Team

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Title explained

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Seasons are imagined as persons: Winter leaves and Spring is welcomed as a force of renewal. The capitalisation of “Spring” in this issue title draws from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” [1] in which it is personified as more than a season, but as a symbolic presence.

 

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