Silk Cities is the outcome of an international conference held in early November 2012, focusing on urban change in Iran. The conference itself was an independent, bottom-up initiative hosted UCL/Bartlett and drew interest from a wide range of Iranian and non-Iranian built environment professionals, academics and students from around the globe. Initiated and organised by Farnaz Arefian, a doctoral researcher and consultant at the time, the conference received a total of 625 abstracts in response to the call for papers with over 120 conference attendees. The conference was branded as a landmark event by Oxford Brookes University and also received special attention from the UNESCO Director General, Irina Bokova, who acknowledged that Iran’s unique cultural heritage carries vast potential to inspire future sustainable development. The conference theme addressed socio-cultural drivers of urban transformation in the context of the impacts of exposure to natural hazards. The book Urban Change in Iran was published based on a selection of conference papers. You can find more information and the book in "Our First Conference" section.
Silk Cities was launched by founder , Dr. Farnaz Arefian (see her page here) in 2014, as the need for wider intellectual exchange necessitated the establishment of an independent platform with a broader geographic focus amongst built environment professionals and experts from related disciplines.
During and after the conference, discussions continued to explore the possibility of an ongoing initiative, which then became Silk Cities.
Since then, over 1,000 individual researchers and practitioners directly participated in our international conferences, workshops and other projects, the impact of Silk Cities projects spread globally through its peer-reviewed publications with Springer, self-published open-access eBooks and online resources.