An Interdisciplinary Journey

I came to my PhD topic, the ethics of architecture, through a slightly winding route. My academic background is in political science and political theory, with a particular interest in democratic theory and applied ethics. Within that broad field, however, I found myself drawn to a fairly narrow question: how do democratic societies relate, normatively and institutionally, to the built environment that surrounds them? It was a niche concern, but the more I followed it, the more it pulled me into territory that political science alone could not cover. To engage seriously with buildings — with how they look, what they signify, and how they shape everyday life — I needed to understand them on their own terms. So alongside my main studies I began reading architectural history, without quite knowing where it would lead. In that sense, my education ended up being both interdisciplinary and unusually specialised at the same time.

What I did not expect was that this odd combination would turn out to be exactly what someone was looking for. I had the good fortune to be offered a PhD position at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, where this particular intersection of political theory, ethics, and architecture was not just tolerated but actively wanted. I now do my doctoral research on the ethics of architecture, focusing on the relationship between democracy and the built environment in general, and architectural aesthetics in particular. The project asks what it would mean to develop architectural aesthetics in an ethically defensible way in democratic societies.

Chalmers is a technical university, and my division within it is something of an outlier in that environment. We are a group of researchers who, in different ways, examine "technology" in a broad sense through the lenses of the social sciences and the humanities. It is an intellectually generous setting, and the diversity of perspectives is genuinely productive. But it also brings with it the familiar challenges of interdisciplinary environments: it can be difficult to find common ground when colleagues are working on very different things, with very different methods, vocabularies, and assumptions about what counts as a good question or a satisfying answer.

Working with an interdisciplinary profile inside an interdisciplinary environment naturally raises a question that I think many early-career researchers in similar situations will recognise: where do I actually belong, academically? Which conferences are mine? Which communities will engage seriously with the kind of work I am trying to do?

I stumbled into part of an answer almost by accident. Early in my doctoral studies, someone mentioned the AESOP annual congress, which was being held in Łódź that year. I had no real idea what AESOP was. But when I looked at the programme, I noticed a track on Planning for Democracy and Governance — directly relevant to my work — which also included a session on beauty, a concept absolutely central to my project and one I had not expected to find at a planning conference. I submitted an abstract, was accepted, and gave my presentation in Poland that summer. It felt slightly improbable: presenting, at a planning conference, on the concept of beauty in the built environment. My approach was clearly different from most — more politically theoretical, with different methods and different reference points — but to my pleasant surprise the comments I received were, on the whole, generous, substantive, and useful. It was encouraging to find a community willing to engage with my work on its own terms. It was clear to me that this would not be the last AESOP event I would attend.

That first experience gave me more than just helpful feedback on my project. It also gave me contacts and friendships, and an early sense of the range of people working under the AESOP umbrella. There are some genuinely impressive scholars in this network. Through these conversations I was introduced to one of AESOP's thematic groups, Planning and Complexity, whose workshop I attended in Aachen in November 2024. I also became aware, somewhat belatedly, of AESOP Young Academics, whose 2025 spring conference in Hannover turned out to be one of the most stimulating events I have been part of as a doctoral student. Later that summer I attended the annual AESOP congress in Istanbul, where I participated in the Ethics, Values and Planning track — remarkably well-aligned with my own interests.

What all of these AESOP activities have taught me, taken together, is that despite the fact that many people in this community describe themselves as planners, AESOP is much more disciplinarily plural than that label suggests. It has been a place where I have found others with shared empirical and theoretical interests, but it has also been a place where I have felt able to contribute something — and sometimes something a little different from what is otherwise being discussed.

My philosophical training, for instance, has let me bring methodological perspectives that are not always present: an attention to argument structure, to the implicit premises underlying public and professional positions, and to the gaps in reasoning that can be hard to spot when you are inside a debate. My background in political science has let me bring something I think is sometimes missing from planning discussions — namely, what preference research actually shows about what citizens, in fact, tend to value and want. Planning conversations often invoke democratic ideals at a fairly abstract level, but the substantial body of empirical work mapping aesthetic and environmental preferences across populations is sometimes left aside. I have tried to bring that literature into AESOP discussions, both in relation to the recurring questions about beauty and architectural quality, and in relation to debates about sustainable urban development.

In Hannover, for instance, I argued that we ought to take preference research more seriously as part of the conversation about sustainable urban development. The empirical record suggests that people are, on the whole, sceptical of demolitions of older buildings and of generic new urban environments without local character or anchoring. These preferences, I think, are normatively important for any vision of urban densification that hopes to be experienced as democratically legitimate as well as environmentally sound. What struck me was not only that the argument was well received, but that the conversation around it was characterised by genuine curiosity — about perspective, about method, about theory. That openness has been my consistent experience across the AESOP events I have attended.

So, to draw the threads together: AESOP has been formative for my academic development in a way that few other settings have been. It has given me access to communities that take seriously the kinds of questions I work on, and it has given me the kind of informed, engaged feedback that is so important for a doctoral project to mature. The slightly paradoxical fact is that, although I am not a planner, it is within AESOP that I have found some of the most useful and incisive responses to my work. And my "different" disciplinary background has consistently felt like an asset rather than an obstacle, which says something good about AESOP as an academic community.

If there is a single thing I would want to leave with other early-career researchers reading this, it is just that: you do not need to be a planner to find a home in AESOP. If your work intersects with cities, with the built environment, with planning broadly conceived — even from an unusual angle — there is likely a track, a thematic group, or a workshop where your perspective will be welcomed and taken seriously. That has certainly been my experience, and I expect it could be yours as well.

Author

Henrik Hågemark is a PhD candidate in the ethics of architecture at Chalmers University of Technology, with a background in political science, philosophy, and architectural history. His research examines what constitutes an ethically defensible development of architectural aesthetics in democratic societies, combining normative theory with empirical analysis of public debate, planning frameworks, and concrete building processes. He also serves as AESOP Young Academics Regional Ambassador for the British Isles and Nordics (Sweden). He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/henrik-h-b9a3ab36/.