Conference Agenda

In the past decade, expanding the tools and methods for digital documentation has become a priority in historic preservation, offering valuable support for the management, maintenance, and adaptive reuse of heritage buildings. Although technologies such as laser scanning and photogrammetry can capture unprecedented detail, they often generate documentation with large file sizes that exceed the practical needs of many restoration projects. This paper introduces a workflow designed to balance efficiency with usable outputs. The method integrates material documentation pipelines to guide physical assessment, streamline data acquisition, and produce essential construction documents. The workflow was developed from interventions at Sacred Heart Church, a historic landmark in El Paso’s Segundo Barrio, one of the city’s oldest and most culturally significant neighborhoods in this US–Mexico border community in West Texas. Its application demonstrates the potential to reduce redundant data collection, focus analysis on critical elements, and generate documentation that directly supports restoration activities. Future work will examine how this approach can be adapted to different building types and contexts, and how streamlined digital documentation workflows can serve as tools for community empowerment and equitable preservation.

This paper examines Quanzhou, a historic city in southern China, through its intangible cultural heritage—the Pujing Temple System, which is rooted in local community life. Pu refers to residential units designated by administrative governance, while jing refers to self-organized community groups linked to shared beliefs and expressed through temple jurisdictions. As a combination of governance unit and belief unit, Pujing forms a spatial network that connects temple, neighborhood, and community scales. This system reflects decentralized local governance and integrates social collaboration, ecological adaptation, and cultural practice.

Contemporary Chinese cities promote a planning paradigm of five-minute life circles aiming to enhance the convenience of urban residents' lives. However, in practice, it often becomes visual templates, administrative slogans, or performance indicators. Based on Guy Debord's theory in The Society of the Spectacle, this paper criticizes that as urbanization has progressed, Pujing temples have been transformed from community-rooted spatial institutions into staged heritage attractions, resulting in the demolition of the authentic vernacular landscape and the compression of cultural practice and social relations.

Through historical analysis, spatial investigation, and resident narratives, this paper argues that the decline of the Pujing Temple system is closely related to the current urban challenges in Quanzhou, such as ecological fragility, infrastructure overload, and weakened social cohesion. As a self-adaptive mechanism, Pujing Temples’ spatial logic of the parading ceremony can evolve into a flexible urban strategy model combining community life, cultural participation, and ecological resilience.

The Pujing Temple system offers planning values that move beyond rigid regimes and symbolic urban imagery. Its resilient, locally grounded approach transforms the specialized urbanism to everyday public life, enabling constant community vitality. The spatial wisdom of Quanzhou’s Pujing temples supports the revival of historic cities and informs urban governance and sustainable transformation across diverse contexts.

This paper highlights a collaborative partnership between Georgia Tech and the Westside Future Fund, demonstrating an innovative intersection of architectural research, public health, and environmental performance within a building simulation design practice course. In Spring 2025, students conducted an adaptive reuse study of the historic 1922 English Avenue Carnegie Library on Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway in Atlanta, Georgia. Using advanced computational tools, teams investigated social, environmental, and health determinants and assessed sustainable design interventions with emphasis on energy efficiency, daylighting, water management, health outcomes, and carbon reduction. Grounded in data-driven methodologies, the work applied human-centered design principles and contextual insights to preserve the library’s historical identity while adapting it to contemporary needs. Future-proofing strategies examined long-term resilience and flexibility to ensure continued relevance amid evolving climate conditions and community priorities. The study offers a replicable framework for transforming historic structures into inclusive, high-performing community assets.

In a city where planning is scripted elsewhere, how might a small playground become a tool for agency and urban learning in everyday urban life? Drawing on participatory action research, on-site observation, and visual analysis, this paper examines the Pahlavani Playground in Zahedan, Iran, in a marginalized district. It reads the project as an experiment in claiming the right to the city, critical spatial practice, and rehearsing deep democracy. Zahedan’s rapid, uneven growth has left nearly half its residents in informal neighborhoods with limited public services and little voice in urban decisions. The study draws on co-design with residents, especially parents and children, and interpretation of drawings, murals, and built form. It traces how design emerged through residents’ desires and negotiations within a top-down planning regime, shifting the architect’s role from author to facilitator. Residents’ visions of an “ideal park” became spatial strategies: open edges instead of fences, traffic-calming pavements instead of asphalt, and wooden or earthen elements instead of overheated metal equipment. The paper develops three dimensions. First, it reads the co-designed ground, water channel, and tree-house structures as an enactment of the right to the city and the “right to architecture,” as residents appropriate space through use, imagination, and shared decision-making. Second, it analyzes the “canvas of unity” murals, boundary walls painted by children and families, as a critical spatial practice that re-signifies walls from instruments of exclusion into collectively authored surfaces, later protected by their makers. Third, drawing on Appadurai’s notion of deep democracy, it shows how these processes cultivated forms of self-organization, stewardship, and everyday negotiation with municipal actors. Rather than a solution to structural abandonment, such participatory interventions can open cracks in centralized planning regimes, enabling those long treated as objects of planning to act, however incrementally, as subjects in the making of their city.