As media and politics erode a shared sense of reality, what counts as evidence becomes an inescapably political question. Research on architecture and cities cannot settle today's disputes by experiment or decree. What it can do is study the world we hold in common, however unequally: the traces and spaces of our lives together. Such knowledge is indirect and conjectural, built from singular cases rather than general laws. A demolished building, a survey map, a testimony or a forgotten artefact can reveal how people and land are governed, how injustice endures, or how joy can be lived. But how are such traces made to speak, and what are they made to speak of? If building a case risks finding only what one set out to find, how can we reason backwards from what is left, excavated or recovered from oblivion, and remain open to what we did not expect?

Evidence, our 2026 Lecture series, examines the modes of reasoning and the tools with which researchers turn testimonies, buildings, artefacts and sites into evidence, and how that evidence becomes a narrative capable of changing the world it describes. Public lectures take place on Tuesdays, 4–6 pm, from 10 November to 1 December in the Lecture Hall of the Urban Studies Department, Hebelstrasse 3. Speakers will be announced shortly. 

Organized by Francesca Dell'Aglio, Ernest Sewordor and Kenny Cupers, the series runs for the first time in conjunction with Interdisciplinary Urban Research (IUR), a studio course that guides students through the first steps of their thesis research. On the day after each lecture, the speaker leads a workshop in which students test these questions on material from their own research.