CriticalProductive Journal Open Call for Projects: Aesthetics of Urban Infrastructure/Natural Environment

Date: Jan 23, 2026

Location:

United States

CRITICALPRODUCTIVE JOURNAL NO. 04

FALL / WINTER 2026 

CALL FOR PROJECTS, OPEN SEPTEMBER 30, 2025–JANUARY 23, 2026

THEME: AESTHETICS OF URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE  / NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

Milton S. F. Curry, Editor

Elena Bellaart, Editorial Coordinator

What does it mean to consider infrastructure as an aesthetic project? How can critical theories on aesthetics inform socially and politically engaged urban development of cities and adjacent or embedded open lands? Rather than rehearsing old dichotomies between the natural and the urban, or between aesthetic and socio-political analysis, this issue asks how urbanism can be productively reoriented by treating these frameworks not as oppositional but as simultaneous, hybrid, or complimentary. Recent United States federal legislation enacted (The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022; Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021) and proposed (Green New Deal of 2021), for example, has aimed to provide substantial funding that would transform infrastructure projects nationally. Grafting urban infrastructure and nature together, various movements in urbanism, urban design and landscape architecture have assumed agency over new design protocols to ensure that the aesthetics of the natural environment are preserved and even enhanced by manmade systems. Meanwhile, the expansion of urban infrastructure into landscapes and ecologies continues to bring the realms of the “urban” and the “natural,” as well as their human and non-human populations, into ever-greater proximity. How might the lens of aesthetic theory help us to analyze the politics of public infrastructure projects, or assess the distribution of natural resources? How does infrastructure mediate the adjacency between cities and environments like the desert, the forest, or the ocean, and between human and non-human inhabitants of these environments? How do these confluences manifest at the scale of the building, the city, or the nation?

We are looking for rigorous, culturally informed, and exploratory creative works and intellectual offerings from cultural workers, scholars, artists, designers and thinkers in fields including but not limited to urban history and urban studies, architecture and urban design, urbanism and landscape architecture, area studies, Indigenous studies, art history, and philosophy.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: JANUARY 23, 2026

Submissions can be texts (2,000–6,000-word essays with visual accompaniments) or visual submissions (art, design, architecture / urban design, urbanism / landscape architecture) accompanied by text (1,000–6,000 words). To submit work, contributors should: review the full, detailed Submission Guidelines on CriticalProductive’s MIT Press page (https://direct.mit.edu/cpro/pages/submission-guidelines); and register as an Author and upload materials to the Journal’s online submission system: (https://www.editorialmanager.com/cpjournal/default2.aspx). Access previous issues of CriticalProductive Journal, subscribe and/or purchase a print copy or pdf files at: https://direct.mit.edu/cpro