Announcements

  • Antoni Gaudí – The Gaudí Year 2026

    2025-08-01

    Editors:

    Ubaldo Cuesta Cambra, Complutense University of Madrid
    María Antón Barco, CEU San Pablo University
    Alfred Sonnenfeld, International University of La Rioja

    Abstract:
    The Gaudí Year 2026 marks the centenary of the death of Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926), an architect whose work has transcended his own time to become a universal symbol of creativity, spirituality, and urban experimentation. Recognised by UNESCO as World Heritage in several of his masterpieces—such as Park Güell, Casa Batlló, Casa Milà (La Pedrera), and the Crypt of Colònia Güell—Gaudí transformed Barcelona’s urban landscape into a living artistic ecosystem, where architecture, nature, and symbolism merge into a narrative that continues to inspire contemporary artists, urban planners, and creators.

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  • AI for Cities: Generative AI, Digital Twin Simulators for Advanced Urban Efficiency, Quality of Life, and Resiliency

    2025-04-07

    Across the globe, cities are grappling with the dual challenge of sustaining growth while ensuring an improved quality of life for their citizens. Technological innovations—particularly in the realm of Artificial Intelligence (AI)—are revolutionizing how urban environments are planned, managed, and experienced. The integration of advanced technologies such as Generative AI, Digital Twin Simulators, and Agentic AI is transforming urban environments, enhancing urban efficiency, quality of life, and resilience. These technologies offer innovative solutions to address the challenges posed by rapid urbanization, resource depletion, and environmental sustainability. From Generative AI models that design optimal information management solutions and citizen engagement to Digital Twin Simulators that replicate real-world conditions in virtual space to help managers make the best-informed decision, and on to Agentic AI systems capable of semi-autonomous decision-making helping our civil servants with complex tasks and always using all available knowledge, these advancements open up new frontiers in urban innovation.

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  • Rhetoric and Poetics of the Image

    2024-12-04

    In 1964, Roland Barthes wrote The Rhetoric of the Image, defending the general principles of rhetoric regardless of medium, expressive substances, or types of discourse in which it is used. As Horace anticipated in his expression "ut pictura poesis", rhetoric manifests itself in verbal, visual, auditory, audiovisual, and digital discourses, both in its argumentative function (Perelman, 1969) and persuasive function (Aristotle's triple strategy: logos, ethos, pathos, 4th century BC). Burke's New Rhetoric (1950) posits that the use of discourses is linked to their agents to form attitudes and induce actions in receivers, thus introducing the concepts of identification and dialogue. In this sense, rhetoric must also be considered from a Pragmatic perspective, understood as the relationships between sender agents and the text (verbal, visual, auditory, audiovisual, and digital) within a given context.

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