ARCHIVING RISK: Contributions from the History of Architecture and Urbanism is sponsored by the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative and the Mellon Foundation.

Call for Papers: deadline December 1, 2013
Graduate Symposium: February 8, 2014

The historical epistemology of risk is obscured by its apparent novelty, theorized by scholars including Ulrich Beck as an effect of “reflexive modernity,” where risk production replaces wealth production as the overarching political economic order. We submit that the so-called “risk society” is only the most recent ideological manifestation in a long and disparate history of probability, chance, insurance and speculation. This symposium seeks to examine risk in architecture, urbanism and design from the early modern period to the present, revealing it as an ideology underlying design’s agency.