Today, cities and metropolitan areas have emerged as leading hubs of innovation across the globe, driven by favourable ecosystems that combine high concentrations of tech enterprises, universities, and capital. This dominance has deep historical roots, reaching back to the late medieval and early modern periods, when cities began to function as experimental laboratories. Urban centres served as so-called trading zones where actors from diverse backgrounds actively engaged in creating, implementing, and disseminating knowledge to shape and advance urban conditions. From scientists to craftspeople, from the church to the courts, people with different institutional, social, and cultural backgrounds contributed to the formation of an urban body that was constituted by and continually reshaped through their knowledge-making.

The conference aims to shed light on the city as a contact zone and as both a subject and an object of knowledge-making. We situate architecture and civil engineering within a broader field of knowledge production in order to explore the paths and conditions of technological and cultural change.