This issue of Dimensions invites for contributions to advance knowledge on circularity and the city. It calls for new thinking and reflection on the change of academic and professional paradigms. While research about innovation in circularity in a material and technological perspective is already fostered, this issue is targeting to open up new fields and methods, between design, arts, architecture, and planning. We are interested to extend circularity and circular economy principles towards transformative urban thinking, to investigate new forms of organising material change as dynamic process and flows, and to initiate and steer processes of change. Approaches of design-driven research and a performative understanding of space, in this context, could open up new knowledge as well as new perspectives on impact and transfer.

The topic Circular Design for Transforming Cities wants to enhance architectural-urbanistic knowledge towards climate-neutrality and to embed it into the overall aim for sustainable cities. The Call aims to overlay, interrelate, and debate on how to combine concepts of material city, lived city, and city as community, leading to approaches to understand, shape, and change dynamic spatial realities. Consequently, the call asks for a new role of culture, arts, and creativity for urbanism and urban transformation. More strategic and entrepreneurial thinking and competences of urban designers and planners in new roles, we believe, need to be combined with a clear awareness of cultural, social, and economic values, in order to support cities and people as agents of change. We propose possible starting points for contributions – who are invited to think between and beyond them:

Spaces
can articulate a regenerative paradigm in the re-cycling of urban space, dynamics, and structures – and, first of all, in keeping in use. Regeneration in a social and cultural sense calls for activation and accessibility in urban scales and articulates an urban dimension of the change of roles and self-understanding of urban disciplines. How and in which form an urban perspective can change the understanding and upscaling of practices and experiments?

Networks
An urban and territorial perspective on networks, organisation, and flows of urban material – recycled or bio-innovated – can investigate mechanisms to redirect and establish not only material, but also immaterial flows. How can design- and space-driven perspectives contribute to understand circular approaches as urban and territorial innovation in an economic, cultural, and social sense?

Frameworks
To extend design knowledge to initiating, supporting, sustaining processes of urban change could exceed conventional thinking about urban visions, their concretisation in strategies, and their realisation in projects. How can space-driven and performative-oriented perspectives foster new forms to involve, activate, and engage, to combine bottom-up initiatives and social innovation with new governance models, but also regarding frameworks, policies, financial and technical regulations?

Overall, this issue is aimed to become an open platform to innovate and extend Circular Design for Transforming Cities. Therefore, the Call invites contributions from various backgrounds to share open reflections, critical statements, case studies, experiments, reframed interviews and visual works as reports, not exclusive of any media and welcoming multi-method approaches with a clear and rigorous set-up. We invite both more text-oriented contributions with an image apparatus or visual contributions with corresponding texts (see for details on the next page). Criteria for the pre-selection of abstracts for full contributions are the relevance to the topic, the originality, and the methodological rigour.

This issue of Dimensions is promoted by the Circular Design Innovation Alliance CiD, co-funded by the European Union. CiD aims at a new thinking on how to link design to circularity and urban transformation and to establish benchmarks for positioning design in a circular economy, shifting circular approaches urban design, architecture, product and service design towards carbon-neutral cities, and enhancing bio-based innovation for the built environment. CiD operates on three levels: the co-creation of knowledge, the set-up of an innovation ecosystem, and educational innovation in academia, for entrepreneurship, and continuous learning and upskilling.
For further information: cid-innovationalliance.eu

Schedule
Release of Call 01.03.2025
Submission of Extended Abstracts 30.04.2025
Announcement of Editorial Pre-Selection of Abstracts 31.05.2025
Submission of Contributions 15.08.2025
Revision Period 15.10.2025 – 01.12.2025
Editorial Feedback and Approval 01.05.2026
Publication July 2026

All contributions have to be original works, which have not been published in another context.
Dimensions. Journal of Architectural Knowledge publishes research that has been completed, but also explicitly
intends to present research projects that have not yet been completed. Here, the focus is on the presentation of the procedures/methods and intended goals or findings achieved so far.

Extended Abstract
Language UK English, citation Harvard Style
Title max. 60 characters
Keywords 5–8 keywords / terms
Text max. 5.000 characters (spaces incl.)

Full Paper
Language UK English, citation Harvard Style
Title max. 60 characters
Keywords 5–8 keywords / terms
Abstract max. 1.000 characters
Text 20.000–25.000 characters (spaces incl.)

Visual Contribution
Language UK English, citation Harvard Style
Title max. 60 characters
Keywords 5–8 keywords / terms
Abstract max. 500 characters
Text 5.000–10.000 characters (spaces incl.)
This call is explicitly open to all forms of media. Visual contributions require a short textural reflection in order to
incorporate the background, genesis, and relation of these works to the contribution. Text 5.000–10.000 characters (spaces incl.) Visuals see below.

Anonymous Submission
Please submit your contribution as a text file (doc; docx; pages) anonymously with no reference to your identity and affiliation.

Structure
The main part of the texts can be structured by the authors as they wish, but should cover the following aspects:
Introduction – Material and Methods – Results – Discussion – Conclusion. In this, the authors should
give an overview of the aim of the research and the underlying questions, as well as of the state of knowledge and research in the field. This should be followed by an explanation of the approach used to address the research
question. Furthermore, each contribution should end with a conclusion that reflects on the knowledge gained from
the work on the different Dimensions of Knowledge in Architecture. The text can be structured with sub-headlines, which should be reduced to a necessary minimum, provide comprehensibility and allow the readers to follow your argumentation. Footnotes can be inserted to provide additional information, but should be reduced to an absolute minimum. For further technical information on the requirements and formatting of the text please consult the Author Guidelines.

Biography
Please provide short biographies of all authors, max. length 1.000 characters, as an extra file.

Images and Figures
Extended abstracts can include up to five images or figures. Images or figures can be included in the text. In
the text, please refer to images or figures in brackets, i.e. (fig. 1). After the selection of abstracts, full papers can include up to nine images or figures. Images or figures can be included in the text. In the text, please refer to images or figures in brackets, i.e. (fig. 1). All images must be handed in as separate files (pdf, jpg, 300 dpi). Frame for images on one page: 100/180 mm. For visual contributions the number of images is unrestricted, but the total length of the contributions should not exceed approx. 8 pages (are not obliged to the images and figures criteria above and can have another size and format).

For print, figures and images can only be reproduced in black and white; for open access, they can be
reproduced in colour. Please provide a caption for each image, including the title, author and/or photographer,
and year. It is the author’s responsibility to provide the full copyrights of all images included – both for publication
imprint and Open Access with an open Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (BY) license.

Peer-Review
All contributions invited after the pre-selection of extended abstracts and both full paper or visual contributions with larger portions of non-textual content will be reviewed in a double-blind peer-review procedure. This evaluation may lead to full acceptance, acceptance with requested revisions, or non-acceptance.

Contact
For further information, please visit www.dimensions-journal.eu and feel free to contact us via mail:
maildimensions-journal.eu

Submission
Please submit your Extended Abstract by 30 April 2025.
If your proposal will then be invited in the editorial selection, please submit your contribution by 15 August 2025.
To: issue-13dimensions-journal.eu
Maximum upload capacity is 10 MB, for larger files please provide a download link.

Issue Editors Jörg Schröder (Leibniz University Hannover), Alissa Diesch (Universidad del Norte), Anna Pape (Leibniz University Hannover), Martynas Germanavičius (Architekturos Fondas), Riccarda Cappeller (Leibniz University Hannover)

Issue Advisory Board Marite Guevara (Ersilia Foundation), Selma Harrington (Architects’ Council of Europe), Eglė Kliučininkas (Architekturos Fondas), Paulius Kliučininkas (Architekturos Fondas), Larissa De Rosso (Architects’ Council of Europe), Federica Scaffidi (Leibniz University Hannover), Andreu Ulied (Ersilia Foundation), Rebekka Wandt (Leibniz University Hannover), Jackie Williams (Leibniz University Hannover).