Re: New Towns
16 - 17 April 2026
Newcastle University (hybrid option available)
About the event
New Towns are central to the government's planning policies and ambition to build 1.5 million new homes by 2030.
Join us for a symposium on Thursday 16 - Friday 17 April 2025 at Newcastle University where we address what a 'New Town' can mean today and aim to gather local perspectives on national planning policies.
Who is welcome?
We welcome contributors, academics, professionals and interested members of the public. Details on how to register for the event will be added to this page shortly.
The wider project - Re: New Towns
This event is part of a wider project, Re: New Towns, responding to the UK government's New Towns policy, and hopes to eventually engage local communities in meaningful dialogue with local authorities. Re: New Towns seeks to remember, and go beyond, the UK's most significant urban movements of the post-war era: the New Town developments of the 1950s and 60s, and the Urban Renaissance of the 1990s and 2000s. We want to explore ideas, designs, tools, techniques, concepts, methods and media.
Suggesting an expansion of urban fabric and civic life, a New Town creates a dynamic arena of interaction amongst diverse stakeholders. It calls for a balanced synergy of perspectives, lived experiences, skills, roles, and expertise: a relational and holistic understanding of how we speculate, design, build and inhabit landscapes, appreciating how towns produce communities, cultures, ideologies, and inequalities.
Keynote Contributions
We're excited to announce keynote contributions from:
- Wayne Hemingway from Hemingway Design
- Town and Country Planning Association
Call for Papers
The symposium aims to spark discussions about how building from the ground up - planning for the future through local contexts - can creatively inform inevitable top-down processes, offering sustainable, enduring, and progressive solutions to housing and economic challenges.
We seek contributions that address international and UK exemplars - historical or contemporary - probing successes and failures, mindful of present-day challenges including (but not limited to):
- Engineering, design, politics, and governance
- Equity, social justice, resilience, and civic life
- Economy and ecology, growth and degrowth
- Housing: quality, affordability, homeliness, and efficiency
- Participation and co-design: the role of communities in imagining, designing, and inhabiting
- Relationality and the ethics of decision-making in planning and design
- Labour, employment, craft and (re)skilling
- Heritage, local vernaculars and indigeneity: the role of history, memory, place-making, and locality
- Imagination: the place of design thinking in the development of macro-scale and infrastructural projects
- Inclusivity: accessibility, openness, safety, security
- Energy and materiality, risk and regulation
To foster discussion, dialogue and collaboration, we welcome a variety of possible symposium contributions which can seed meaningful interactions between participants. We invite proposals for the following formats:
Thematic symposium
We welcome proposals from a group of contributors for a paper session to include a series of contributions on a specific theme from a range of participants. We strongly encourage groups proposing thematic symposia to consider the diversity of their panel.
Submission: A title and outline of the symposium content including the theme, its significance and a list of speakers with paper titles (up to 350 words).
Workshop
Whether at the conference venue or elsewhere, a workshop contribution can take whatever interactive format suits your intent. Ideas include:
- Show-and-tell
- Polemical piece
- Provocation an action
- Collaborative generative activity
Make a proposal for when, where and how your workshop could take place within the wider event.
Submission: An outline of the proposed content, format, length of time, and required space and resources (up to 350 words).
Creative Practice
A creative practice-based design, performance, commentary or exploratory process. Any medium or format can be proposed.
Submission: An outline of the proposed work/event/process including any equipment/materials needed, proposed duration etc. Please include any particular physical requirements, e.g. room type, wall space, furniture, outside space (up to 350 words).
Proposals must be submitted below by Monday 15 December. If you have any questions, please get in touch with Dr Christos Kakalis or Dr Adam Sharr.
Decisions by 15 January 2026.
Registration by 15 February 2026.