SAHANZ-AUHPH 2026: Absence

Our cities and landscapes are pockmarked by evidence of absence. Architectural, landscape and planning practices and their histories are similarly marked; by the unbuilt and unrealised, by the demolished, by the invisible and the hidden. Gaps between buildings and unfinished estates are parallels with the spaces we have carved out of nature in order to build. Moreover, the void – the negative space enclosed by an architectural, theoretical, chronological, historiographical or geographical frame – is often as telling as the surrounding structure.

What happens to those things you can’t see: those things that have been obscured, elided, or forgotten either by time, by design, or through selective memory? Who advocates for them, and what effect do they have by being brought into the light? Where do they go, and who sees them? Absences and their associated gaps in history have prompted much recent academic research.

This conference invites contributions that explore the echoes within the void: to engage with the idea of absence in the built and designed environment in all its myriad forms and machinations: absences of people, structures, places, ideas, or representation, by design, neglect, or by force.