CfP: Regimescape: Rethinking the Urban and Environmental Legacy of 20th-century Totalitaian and Authoritarian Regimes
The term Regimescape refers to urban, architectural, and agricultural landscapes shaped by twentieth-century regimes as material manifestations of political ideology, social engineering, and modernist ambition. As Hannah Arendt observed, totalitarian power extends beyond institutions to the organization of space, nature, and everyday life; in this sense, architecture and landscape become essential instruments of governance and political legitimation.
This volume offers a historical-critical reconsideration of these landscapes, moving beyond both celebratory narratives and uncritical erasure. The focus is on cities, monumental districts, infrastructure, land reclamation projects, and agricultural landscapes as sites where politics, technology, and ecology intertwined in meaningful ways, becoming tools of governance, economic development, and symbolic representation. Drawing on James C. Scott’s analysis of state-imposed territorial legibility, the volume investigates how regimes transformed environments to make them governable, productive, and symbolically communicative. These transformations were achieved not only through material interventions but also via a vast apparatus of publications, manuals, magazines, exhibitions, and visual campaigns that helped construct ideological and cultural narratives of the territory. In this perspective, the volume seeks to develop a critical reflection on the relationship between architecture, landscape, and power, exploring how twentieth-century regimes used territory as a political, social, and cultural instrument. It aims to analyze urban and agricultural policies, land reclamation, infrastructure, and ecological transformations, connecting them to communication strategies and the production of publications.
A paradigmatic example is the reclamation of the Pontine Marshes, a large swampy area south of Rome transformed during the 1920s–1930s under the Fascist regime. The project combined hydraulic works and infrastructure, the design of new towns, agricultural policies, and controlled population settlement. At the same time, an intense publishing activity—including magazines, books, exhibitions, and photographic campaigns—promoted the transformation as a symbol of modernity, social order, and the regime’s ability to discipline nature and society. The rhetoric associated the project with African colonization, reinforcing the ideological dimension of comprehensive land reclamation, promoted in various regions of Italy.
The volume does not intend to be limited to the Italian case but welcomes contributions analyzing similar processes in other European and global contexts. Among European cases, particular attention is given to totalitarian and authoritarian regimes such as Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Francoist Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Metaxas’ Greece, or Vichy France, where territorial transformations served as instruments of governance, modernization, and propaganda. Beyond Europe, the field of inquiry may extend to colonial and semi-colonial territories managed by European powers, as well as other authoritarian or postcolonial contexts where urban, infrastructural, and environmental policies were used as tools of political control and national identity construction. In all these cases, territorial transformations were accompanied by forms of communication and publications aimed at legitimizing and disseminating the regime’s vision.
Contributions may develop reflections on various aspects of twentieth-century regimes’ landscapes and architectures. Indicative topics include, but are not limited to:
- Architecture and urban planning under authoritarian and totalitarian regimes
- New towns and internal colonization
- Land reclamation, water management, and large-scale infrastructure
- Environmental policies and the history of ecology
- Nature, technology, and ideology
- Landscape as a tool of propaganda and political communication
- Publications and territorial narratives
- Critical histories of landscapes constructed by regimes
Submission guidelines and deadlines
Key dates:
- Abstract submission: January 20, 2026
- Notification of acceptance: January 30, 2026
- Full paper submission: March 20, 2026
Selected chapters must be original, not exceeding 20,000 characters including spaces, and may include up to 10 copyright-free images. Texts can be submitted in either Italian or English. The editors reserve the right to publish contributions in both languages, with translation coordinated with the author.
The volume is promoted by the University of Rome Tor Vergata and the Centre for Architectural Literature (CAL), a cultural association dedicated to the study of intersections between architectural history, theory, and criticism. CAL supports research, seminars, workshops, and publications, reflecting on how architecture is understood, expressed, and documented through written and visual forms. Participation in the volume does not involve any publication fee; any image rights remain the responsibility of the authors. Authors are also warmly invited to consider membership in CAL as a way to support the study centre’s research activities, seminars, and publications, and to receive a copy of the publication.