Void Studios participated in the 2026 Innovate4Cities Conference (I4C26) in Nairobi. The conference marks the first time Innovate4Cities has convened on African soil, bringing together researchers, city leaders, practitioners, and policymakers to close the gap between climate science and the decisions that determine how cities are actually built, retrofitted, and governed. Its programme runs across thematic tracks linking scientific insight to implementation at city scale, structured through plenaries, parallel sessions, and workshops rather than a single plenary agenda: a format that reflects the conference’s underlying premise, that urban climate action is assembled from many overlapping disciplines, architecture among them.
Alongside the main conference, we participated in the two-day IPCC SRCities expert review workshop, convened as part of I4C26 to examine the Second Order Draft of the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Cities. It is the largest in-person expert review of that draft to date, bringing policymakers, practitioners, researchers, and civil society into direct contact with the report text before it is finalised. Our role is to bring an architectural and material perspective to a process otherwise dominated by climate science and urban policy: testing the report’s claims against the practical realities of how buildings are specified, constructed, and adapted, and flagging where its treatment of the built environment would benefit from greater specificity.
This kind of participation sits close to the core of what our research studio is for. We have argued, in our own published research, that architecture too often enters climate policy discourse late, once the scientific and economic framing has already been settled, treated as an implementation detail rather than a source of evidence. A report with the SRCities’ scope and authority will set terms that architects, city governments, and construction industries reference for years to come. The chance to help shape its second draft, rather than simply respond to its final form, is a rare one.
The two events sit deliberately close together on the calendar. I4C26’s stated ambition is to close the gap between climate research and implementation, and the SRCities review puts that ambition directly to the test: a scientific report only closes that gap if the practitioners who will eventually build against it have had the chance to question its assumptions before publication. For us, the value of attending both lies in how they build on each other. The conference’s thematic tracks provide the wider policy and urban-governance context, while the expert review offers a specific, textual point of contact with the science that will underpin future national and municipal climate strategies for the built environment.
We expect our contribution to the workshop to inform our ongoing research on regenerative and circular building practice at the urban scale, and we will share more on the review process and the report’s development as it approaches publication. Throughout I4C26, we have been listening to how African cities and practitioners are framing urban climate priorities that differ from the assumptions embedded in research produced primarily in the Global North, a distinction our own fieldwork across Latin America and Africa has made increasingly hard to ignore.