Editor’s Note
This special issue of Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review is dedicated iaste’s 2022 Conference, to be held in December in Singapore under the theme of “Rupture and Tradition”. As with past special TDSR conference issues, it intends to provide individual and institutional iaste members who are unable to attend with informa-tion about the content of the event. For those attending, the issue serves the addi-tional purpose of providing a preliminary document for discussion, as it contains all abstracts of papers accepted for presentation.
Past iaste conferences have dealt with themes as diverse as authenticity, value, myth, utopia, politics, and virtual traditions. The theme of the Seventeenth iaste Conference is designed to provide a collective reflection by foregrounding an examina-tion of the ways traditions in the built environment are changing in the current era of globalization. The COVID-19 pandemic years have certainly provided such a moment, which may be used to reflect on the ways that “rupture,” in its multifarious forms, has shaped traditional environments.

Paper in the conference explore how the “ruptures” caused by the ongoing pandemic are restructuring the ways traditions operate and are understood. To de-scribe a rupture is to describe an event that makes the difference between a before and an after. A rupture is a crack, a ?ssure, an impassable chasm, or a wrinkle in time. Whether understood in a temporal, physical, or topographic sense, ruptures have played an important part in the making of buildings and cultural landscapes. Instead of simply considering direct responses to this global crisis, our conference on “Rupture and Tradition” is also interested in the slower, more long-term processes by which traditions consolidate history-altering events. Indeed, it is often through re-percussions felt elsewhere, rather than the event itself, that ruptures produce change, altering traditions and their forms of continuation.

This year conference brings together more than 120 scholars and practitioners from a variety of disciplines including architecture, architectural history, art history, anthropology, archaeology, conservation, folklore, geography, history, planning, and urban studies. Their papers are structured around three broad themes: disruption, continuity, and repercussions.
For those attending the conference, we hope this document will help you select among the sessions and papers you would like to attend, and for those who are unable to be with us in Singapore we hope this special issue of the journal will give you a good sense of the content of the conference.

Nezar AlSayyad