The XII AISU Congress (Palermo, September 10-13, 2025) is organized by the AISU with the Department of Architecture of the University of Palermo.
The crossroad city: Relations and exchanges, intersections and crossing points in urban realities
Cities have exerted an irresistible force of attraction since antiquity and over the centuries, and still do today, representing themselves as places of aggregation, of exchange, sometimes of permanent settlement but frequently also of passage. In many respects and from different points of view, the city appears on many occasions to be a real crossroad, a place where cultures, religions, power groups and institutions meet but also clash, a theatre of markets and trade, a temporary landing place in the context of broader and more dynamic migratory processes, a place where urban design ideas and realisations are debated and technical confrontations are held; sometimes it is the urban form itself that materialises the concept of crossroads, in foundation or refoundation projects, material or symbolic, of the built environment. The 12th AISU Congress intends to produce investigations and promote debates on the city as a crossroad, in the material but also metaphorical meaning of the term, with a multi-scalar and multi-disciplinary approach and from the multiple points of view that contribute to define urban history studies.
In this sense, the city in the broad sense of a crossroad will be explored in the following wide-ranging macro-sessions conceived as spaces of confrontation and integration between dialoguing disciplines:
1. Cities and migrations; 2. Cities and powers; 3. Cities and city networks, trade, fairs and markets; 4. Multicultural and multireligious cities; 5. Cities and spaces of versatility; 6. Cities at the crossroads of urban design ideas and realisations/ crossroads and predetermined schemes in city design; 7. Cities at the crossroads of experiences, materials and technologies and as places of interchange of technical culture.
