About the Journal

Footprint is an academic journal dedicated to publishing architecture and urban research. The journal promotes the creation and development – or revision - of conceptual frameworks and methods of inquiry. It is engaged in creating a body of critical and reflexive texts with a breadth and depth of thought which would enrich the architecture discipline and produce new knowledge, conceptual methodologies and original understandings.

Announcements

Footprint 38 published

2026-10-01

Footprint 38 is out now. Edited by Gert van der Merwe and Serah Calitz, this issue is dedicated to African Dreams: Re-enchantment through Relational Ontologies.

The issue includes research articles by Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk, Christopher Clarkson, Hélène Frichot, Liana Psarologaki and Arinola Adefila, and Killian O’Dochartaigh. It also contains review articles as dialogues between Piero Medici and Anna Kintsurashvili, Courage Kpodo and Kathryn Chesebrough, and OMI collective (Abdullah Ogunsetan and Olorunfemi Adewuyi) with Eytan Mann; and visual essays by Costanza Franceschini and John Hanna, Ana Barone and Tainã Dorea, and Anusia Govender-Elshove.

Read more about Footprint 38 published

Current Issue

Vol. 20 No. 1 (2026): Issue # 38 | African Dreams: Re-Enchantment Through Relational Ontologies
View Vol. 20 No. 1 (2026): Issue # 38 | African Dreams: Re-Enchantment Through Relational Ontologies

Footprint 38, positions Africa as a site for thinking and theorising worlds to come. Responding to persistent epistemic silences surrounding African discourse in architectural theory, the issue brings together situated writings that explore forms of attachment and worlding across African and Afro-diasporic peoples, places and objects. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s notion of re-enchantment and relational approaches to knowledge, the contributions intersect through four overlapping thematic lines of of ontological relationality in the form of infrastructural futuring, diasporic subjectivities, speculative futuring and cosmotechnical relationalities. Across research articles, dialogues and visual essays, contributors engage questions of infrastructure, memory, embodiment, ecology, technicity and speculative practice. Rather than proposing a singular account of African architectural thought, the issue assembles a heterogeneous field of perspectives in which architecture emerges as an assemblage becoming through socio-ecological, technical, economic and political relations that are continually activated and recomposed.

Published: 2026-09-30

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