Miruna Ioana Voiculescu and the team of the Romanian platform of public anthropology Antropedia have gifted me with this wonderful summary in Romanian of the attempts at prototyping a Department of Umbrology – a presentation given in the most recent EASA – as part of their Anthropologie cu impact series.
Thank you all for this wonderful initiative and the beautiful rendition of our work!
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Vorbim despre antropologie aplicată atunci când o cercetare are, pe lângă obiectivul înțelegerii și explicării unui context social, și misiunea de a găsi soluții pentru problemele cu care se confruntă grupurile studiate. Din Barcelona vine exemplul unui antropolog implicat într-un proiect de urbanism, care sprijină primăria în dezvoltarea unor prototipuri de umbrare. La Berlin, într-o cercetare doctorală despre afect și reprezentare a migrației/migranților a fost integrat un atelier în care migranții queer au realizat fanzine și au descoperit astfel o arenă pentru exersarea activismului. Proiectele de antropologie aplicată capătă amploare pe măsură din ce tot mai mulți cercetători încep să-și pună întrebarea: cum pot antropologii să aibă un impact în „lumea reală”, din afara mediului academic?
Peisaje umbroase: prototipuri pentru un departament de umbrologie
Fără soare nu ar exista viață pe pământ, dar ce se întâmplă când soarele ne face rău sau chiar ne pune viața în pericol în condiții de caniculă extremă? Aceasta este întrebarea de la care pornește cercetătorul Tomás Criado, afiliat la OUC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya), în prezentarea sa „Peisaje umbroase: prototipuri pentru un departament de umbrologie”, concentrându-se pe lecțiile învățate din experiența sa cu primăria din Barcelona. În ultima perioadă, accelerarea schimbărilor climatice a scos în evidență vulnerabilitatea deosebită a orașelor cu populațiile lor foarte mari și infrastructurile complexe dificil de adaptat la noile condiții și, prin urmare, nevoia urgentă de a găsi soluții. Unul dintre primele lucruri pe care am fost obligați să le reconsiderăm este relația cu mișcarea soarelui pe cer și, implicit, să redescoperim umbra în forme și practici mai vechi sau mai noi. Și odată cu noi, administrațiile locale și proiectanții de toate felurile au fost obligați să facă loc umbrei și umbririi în discursurile și acțiunile lor. Tot mai mult calitatea de a fi locuibil a unui oraș depinde de protecția pe care o oferă de efectele nocive ale soarelui, astfel că modesta umbră devine o resursă publică.
În Barcelona, verile excesiv de toride ale ultimilor ani, în combinație cu umezeala, au contribuit la disconfortul tot mai accentuat al locuitorilor, iar, din perspectiva grijii pentru cetățenii lor, combaterea caniculei extreme a devenit o prioritate pentru autorități. Astfel, primăria Barcelonei a produs un ambițios „plan al umbrei”, parte din Planul climatic 2018-2030 care cuprinde o gamă foarte diversă de măsuri de la intervenții în spațiile publice, refugii climatice, infrastructuri verzi, infrastructuri pentru umbră, itinerarii bioclimatice, până la încercări de decarbonizare a răcirii clădirilor, finanțarea soluțiilor bazate pe pompe de căldură, având în vedere mai ales sărăcia energetică.
Sub umbrela generoasă a acestui plan, Departamentul pentru schimbare climatică și sustenabilitate din cadrul primăriei Barcelonei, în colaborare cu BIT Habitat Foundation, a inițiat un proiect de ecologie urbană pentru a identifica soluții de umbrire adaptate orașului catalan. Trei consorții alcătuite din birouri de arhitectură, dar și cooperative ale arhitecților, cooperative sociale, lucrători în lemn și furnizori de sere agricole au primit 100.000 de euro pentru a produce un prototip de „umbrar” care să fie instalat într-un spațiu public unde plantarea copacilor nu e posibilă și a cărui eficiență să fie monitorizată. Deocamdată există trei prototipuri (În umbra mozaicului (trencadís); Marea de umbre; Oază. Umbră pentru toți) care, începând cu 29 septembrie 2024, vor fi testate timp de patru luni în oraș (se pot vedea aici: https://www.barcelona.cat/infobarcelona/en/tema/urban-planning-and-infrastructures/the-bit-habitat-challenge-prototypes-are-now-starting-to-provide-shade-2_1424415.html).
Autorul prezentării a ajuns să fie implicat în proiectul de urbanism al municipalității după ce inițial și-a propus să facă o etnografie a acestei etape a „planului umbrei”, asistând doar la întâlnirile tehnice dintre realizatorii prototipurilor și diverșii specialiști urbaniști ai primăriei. Pe măsură ce ședințele se apropiau de final însă, cercetătorul a oferit gratuit consultanță privind „monitorizarea socială” a prototipurilor, uitându-se în special la felul în care oamenii le folosesc efectiv, dar și la cum cei implicați în realizarea lor înțeleg dimensiunea socială și climatică a proiectului și urmărind procedura internă prin care, pe baza prototipurilor, municipalitatea planifică licitații viitoare.
Din această postură, autorul s-a confruntat cu limitările sancțiunilor și ale soluționismului (ideea că tehnologia poate rezolva toate problemele) și, mai ales, cu neajunsurile evaluării impactului social după implementare. Inspirați de o povestire de Tim Horvath („The Discipline of Shadows”), împreună cu etnograful urban columbian Santiago Orrego, care lucrează în Berlin, au avut ideea creării unui departament de umbrologie, o disciplină dedicată studiului vieții urbane a umbrelor, dar și al intervențiilor în spațiul urban după modelul Los Angeles Urban Rangers (http://www.laurbanrangers.org/site/). Acesta este un grup de activiști urbani care oferă drumeții și plimbări cu ghid dintr-o perspectivă critică, cercetând și încurajând explorări alternative ale relației cu mediul urban din Los Angeles. Cei doi cercetători și-au imaginat și organigrama unui astfel de departament de umbrologie din cadrul unei primării: un topograf al umbrelor, un cercetător-creator de umbre, un cartograf al luminii soarelui și un analist al rezilienței umbrei comunitare.
Mai departe, în cadrul proiectului său etnografic, s-a conturat ideea unui prim atelier de cinci zile, The City of Shades (Orașul umbrelor) ținut în iunie 2024, la Barcelona, la care au participat 15 specialiști, dar și studenți din științe sociale, arhitectură etc. și care și-a propus să testeze soluțiile birocratice printr-o serie de plimbări cu ghid, inclusiv vizite în locurile în care urmau să fie construite prototipurile de umbrare ale primăriei. În timpul unei astfel de vizite, când grupul încerca să descrie diferența dintre umbra privată oferită de copertinele barurilor sau cafenelelor și spațiile publice însorite, un participant și-a exprimat intuiția că „umbra nu e un spațiu, e o regiune”. Astfel, explică autorul prezentării, umbra nu mai este un spațiu măsurabil, un ansamblu de module și forme, ci un teritoriu traversat de relații de putere, fluxuri de circulație și de cunoaștere, care poate fi și este disputat de diferiții actori. Toate aceste concluzii au fost transformate într-o fanzină.
În încheiere, un potențial departament de umbrologie și umbrologii săi ar putea constitui, din perspectiva autorului, o ecologie a sprijinului* care să însoțească implementarea prototipurilor de umbrare ale municipalității din Barcelona, atrăgând atenția asupra existenței diferitelor teritorii din oraș și a inegalităților dintre ele și deschizând discuția despre cum putem trăi cu toții în ecologii urbane mai umbroase – cu alte cuvinte, să ajute la integrarea dimensiunii sociale din faza de proiect, ori nu tratarea ei ca încă o problemă tehnică, de rezolvat după realizare. ____________
* Ecologii ale grijii (ecologies of care) și ecologii ale sprijinului (ecologies of support) sunt noțiuni folosite de autorii care au prezentat în acest panel (Către o grijă atmosferică: anularea violenței ecologice, experimentarea cu ecologii ale sprijinului) pentru a descrie multitudinea de reacții și soluții individuale sau colective (inclusiv alături de alte specii) la schimbările atmosferice determinate de încălzirea globală și alte fenomene asociate schimbărilor climatice tocmai pentru a sublinia interdependența și practicile care apar sau sunt redescoperite pentru a ne recalibra relația cu mediul înconjurător.
The Open University of Catalonia’s CareNet research group is pleased to invite you to «Contested Futures: Unsettling ageing, ecological, and digital transitions», an interdisciplinary symposium about the role of futures in research on ageing, climate crisis, and digitalisation.
On the 31st of March, we invited international STS scholars to theorise and empirically analyse the imaginaries, practices and narratives of the future in these three areas.
Helen Manchester (University of Bristol, UK),
Judith Igelsböck (Open University of Catalonia, Spain),
Uriel Fogué (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain),
Alex Wilkie (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK).
On the 1st of April, we will have a hands-on and participatory workshop on future methods. This workshop is designed to foster a collaborative and speculative exploration of methods, practices and ideas on how to analyse, perform, reimagine and produce futures. Participants of this workshop are the invited international speakers and UOC scholars working on future studies.
What is this workshop about?
Ageing, climate crisis, and digitalisation are three domains deeply shaped by imaginaries, narratives, and prospective practices in which the futures of modern societies are constantly negotiated and contested.
Across these research fields, we observe a recurring invocation of potential futures – futures that have not yet materialised and remain uncertain but still are already shaping the present. These futures often appear in dystopian terms, as threats and risks: ageing, framed as a “demographic bomb” or “grey tsunami” that will overwhelm healthcare and social systems; a world becoming increasingly uninhabitable and unequal due to global warming and extreme weather; and the strangeness of artificial intelligence, as the boundaries between truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance, get blurred.
Public policy frames these futures as “challenges”, threats that are also presented as opportunities. They imply an obligation to transform the present in preparation for the future. Anticipating these futures acts as a call to action in the present, shaping life in advance and directing it toward specific horizons. For this reason, these “challenges” are often linked to various transitions –demographic, eco-social and digital– that require the continuous production of new knowledge and innovations.
To mitigate the so-called “demographic bomb”, policies on healthy ageing, ageing biomedicine, and gerontechnology seek to build a future in which people live longer without falling ill, maintain their independence, and defy the effects of ageing. To reconcile the climate crisis with capitalist progress, new technological solutions are emerging: space colonisation, geoengineering, urban adaptation, sustainable infrastructures, green energy. Responding to the risk of losing the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, between knowing and not knowing, new initiatives are being developed to promote responsible, ethical and inclusive artificial intelligence.
All of this shows how the future, far from being settled, is an object of contestation. We are concerned with how futures are not only imagined, anticipated, and enacted, but also cancelled, ignored, destroyed, and even colonised.
A space for reflection and practice
In this workshop, we invite scholars working in these three areas to explore questions such as:
What futures guide research on ageing, climate change, and digitisation?
To whom do these futures belong?
Who is empowered to imagine, to narrate, and to generate future-oriented practices-and who is not?
Which futures prevail? Which are silenced?
In what ways are futures being brought into the present and presents brought into the future? By what means, by what practices, by what methods?
What are the effects of power that their anticipation generates, and on whom?
We do not wish to approach these questions solely through theoretical reflection or through the empirical analysis of practices and narratives of the future — although both of these remain essential. Rather, we seek to foster an exchange of practices, methods, and techniques that enable us to think, analyse, transform, reimagine, and reconstruct futures. Thus, this is an invitation to explore the potential of participatory methods, speculative design, arts-based methodologies (visual, performative, etc.), and game-based approaches, among others. We want to create a space not only for analysing futures, but also for experimenting with and constructing new ways of imagining and inhabiting futures.
Schedule
Day 1 – Monday, March 31st
10:00 – 10:30h – Welcome and introduction
10:30 – 11:45h – Session 1
“Communities at the Margins: temporalities and sociodigital futures-in-the-making”
This presentation draws on our experiences co-producing Sociodigital futures (SDF) research with older adults living at the margins in the UK. We adopt a feminist technoscience approach to how SDF are claimed, imagined and acted upon, working with principles of design justice (Constanza-Chock, 2020) and anticipatory orientated design approaches (Korsmeyer, Light and Grocott, 2022).
We have found that the concept of SDF can be at best, intriguing and difficult to grasp; and at worst, alienating and insensitive. Its ‘digital’ component seems to dictate closed-down futures and fear and overwhelm seem to be dominant affective responses. In parallel, the emphasis on ‘futures’ is often perceived as disregarding present, immediate concerns such as the cost-of-living crisis and austerity politics (Brannen and O’Connell, 2022).
Given this we are developing our anticipatory design practices that start from what matters to older adults living at the margins and their lived, felt, embodied encounters with sociodigital infrastructures in the complex, thick present (Haraway, 2016).
Discussant:Blanca Callén (CareNet, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona)
“A Twin Future: Explorations on Interactive Storytelling “
Digital twins are presently advertised as intelligent and dynamic replicas that are taking digital representation onto the next level. Digital twins can be deployed to monitor and “optimize” processes in a broad range of application areas such as disaster management, health care, or urban development.
Promoters of this emerging technology capitalize on our fascination with twins and the cliché that twinship “represents the ideal form of attachment” (de Bres 2024) and introduce the digital twin as a loyal companion that is intuitively and benevolently supporting the well-being of its ‘real-world’ equivalent. Potentially more problematic facets of digital representation, such as matters of ownership, artificial (in)justice, transparency or (ir)reversibility get out of sight.
In the presentation, I will share my interdisciplinary and collaborative attempts at critically engaging with the creation of digital twin futures beyond utopia and dystopia. These processes could be inspired by (human) twin studies and twin fiction and the various twin kinds and ways of “twinning” and “un-twinning” (Viney 2021) that have been described and lived, devicing the twin-metaphor and using interactive storytelling to open up space for thinking about the future of digital representation.
Discussant:Daniel López (CareNet, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
Assuming the ecological performativity of architecture entails understanding constructive and spatial processes as complex frameworks where commitments of different kinds are established. Based on a series of experiences developed over the last few years, this lecture seeks to think of architectural projects as ecological contracts and their constructive details as ecological portals that materially assemble more-than-human pasts, presents and futures.
Discussant:Tomás Criado (CareNet, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
“Energy Probes: Speculative Co-Design with More-than-Human Communities”
This presentation explores how inventive and practice-based design methods, combined with Science and Technology Studies, have been deployed to understand and intervene in the practices, hopes and futures of UK-based energy communities engaged in energy transitions. In so doing, I explore how such interdisciplinary methods shape collective engagement with futures, social data production, and nonhuman involvement. Drawing on UK-based fieldwork and co-design, it considers how more-than-human Engagement Workshops, idiotic Energy Probes, and visual Energy Workbooks challenge social science assumptions about method, energy demand reduction, more-than-human participation and data collection. Rather than impartial data elicitation tools, these speculative techniques act as generative and possibilistic methods, aimed at eliciting data on aesthetic and material energy practices, community composition and energy futures. Positioned within debates on futures and inventive methods, this research rethinks engagement and agency in the context of socioecological crises.
Discussant: Israel Rodríguez (CareNet, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
13:15 – 13:45h – Final discussion
Day 2 – Tuesday, April 1st
The aim of the second-day workshop is to enable academic exchanges and mutual learning on futuring methods among UOC research groups and invited speakers. This dynamic approach allows researchers to learn from each other and adapt best practices to their own projects, fostering an environment of continuous collaboration and growth. Participants will showcase various futuring methods, engage in the collaborative design of specific methods, and discuss their relevance for the social sciences and humanities.
10:00 – 10:30h – Welcome and presentation
10:30 – 12:00h – Futuring methods showcase
Helen Manchester (Bristol University)
Alex Wilkie (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
¿Qué capacidad tienen las comunidades para gestionar sus recursos, enfrentar la crisis ecológica e imaginar alternativas futuras? ¿Qué formas de reconsiderar las relaciones con el ambiente, la naturaleza y otros seres podemos encontrar? ¿Qué rol pueden jugar el arte contemporáneo y los procesos de participación pública para vislumbrar y movilizar deseos hacia la transformación social
Agenciamientos ecológicos reúne ensayos, experiencias y propuestas para rearticular la relaciones entre comunidades, territorios y futuros viables a través de procesos artísticos. Busca reconocer, en diferentes territorios y geografías, prácticas, léxicos y discursos que ponen de manifiesto la agencia de las comunidades en procesos de autogobierno, poner en cuestión las visiones heredadas en la concepción de lo que nos rodea y la capacidad del arte contemporáneo y la participación comunitaria para catalizar nuevos relatos y narrativas con los que enfrentar la crisis de imaginación ante un futuro climático incierto.
Con textos de Elisa Aaltola, Christian Alonso, Natalia Balseiro, Graham Bell Tornado, Marisol de la Cadena, Concomitentes, Katalin Erdődi, Alfredo Escapa, Brais Estévez Vilariño, Llorián García Flórez, Yayo Herrero, Michael Marder, Tomás Sánchez Criado, Antje Schiffers y Fran Quiroga
Gracias a su amable invitación a colaborar en la propuesta, Brais Estévez Vilariño y yo participamos del volumen con el siguiente capítulo:
La crisis de las crisálidas. Reactivar la política en el fin del mundo
Hace ya más de diez años, la inestabilidad, la falta de horizonte, la ruptura de sentido o, dicho de otro modo, la falta de suelo o su desahucio precipitó intentos y tentativas generativas de salir al encuentro del otro. Esa fuga permitió elaborar en común lo que nos pasaba con relación a la crisis que bloqueaba nuestras vidas desde 2008. Sin embargo, hoy, esa falta de suelo común nos sitúa en un vacío del que nos defendemos desde el yo, a donde parecemos habernos desterrado. Entre los impasses de la época y la desorientación generalizada ante un mundo que nos desafía con un sinfín de amenazas y horizontes apocalípticos, se extienden el malestar y la angustia. La angustia es un afecto que pasa por el cuerpo, pero quizá convenga pensarlo como señal de un momento inquietante. Aunque muchas veces no resulte sencillo discernir el origen de la angustia, en este texto queremos tantear una genealogía posible del malestar de la época y sus efectos políticos paralizantes. Para ello, provocaremos un encuentro entre la teoría psicoanalítica y el pensamiento ecológico de Bruno Latour e Isabelle Stengers.
Gracias a la amable invitación de Rubén Gómez Soriano estaré el próximo 27 de febrero presentando en el seminario del Institut d’Història de la Ciència de la UAB, donde hablaré de uno de los capítulos de mi proyecto de libro An Uncommon City.
Técnicos sensibles: La construcción de la accesibilidad como infraestructura pública en Barcelona
Tomás Criado (investigador RyC, CareNet-IN3, UOC) Presentat per Rubén Gómez (professor lector UAB i membre iHC)
En esta presentación quisiera presentar un relato genealógico, a caballo entre la antropología y la historia de la ciencia, de las luchas y la inventiva epistémica y política que emergieron del encuentro entre activistas y técnicos de la administración que tuvo lugar en un singular entorno institucional: el Instituto Municipal de Personas con Discapacidad (IMPD) del Ajuntament de Barcelona, principal institución municipal dedicada a la participación de las personas con discapacidad desde los años 1980 en la elaboración de versiones de leyes, normativas e infraestructuras de accesibilidad urbana y cultural. Quisiera poner el foco en las prácticas de los profesionales resultantes de ese encuentro, a los que denomino “técnicos sensibles”, por la centralidad que tiene en sus tareas diversas formas de “sensibilizar” a ciudadanos y otros profesionales, privados y de la administración en diferentes procesos en los que se construye la accesibilidad como una forma de infraestructura pública. Una tarea crucial para activar – en el lenguaje de la filósofa de la ciencia Isabelle Stengers – otras formas urbanismo posible desde la diversidad corporal. Una actividad frágil y falible, no exenta de trabas y dificultades en un entorno altamente tecnocrático.
Gracias a la amable invitación de Brais Estévez Vilariño, participaré del seminario de Futuros Urbanos 24-25 de la Facultad de Geografía e Historia de la Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, “un espacio de encuentro para compartir indagaciones en curso e imaginar futuros deseables.”
El próximo 21 de noviembre a las 13:30 CET (online en Teams, acceso libre y gratuito), estaré presentando Prototipos para un Departamento de Umbrología: El calor como un asunto que pensar con las manos, sobre mis recientes indagaciones acompañando un proceso de prototipado de infraestructuras de sombreado público para mitigar el calor en la ciudad de Barcelona, especulando con la posible creación de un Departamento de Umbrología por venir.
Editorial note: Prototypes for a Department of Umbrology is the third issue in a series of urban explorations that are part of an ongoing collaboration between Tarde and xcol.org.
How could we transition from a dangerous modernist ‘solar urbanism’ [1] to the renewed hope in the urban powers of shade? This transformation is far from just material or technical one; it also requires culturally symbolic and everyday practical undertakings. However, to achieve this, perhaps there is no other way around experimenting with speculative political practices and collective formations, where ethnography might still play a relevant role: not just as a documentary practice but an interventive one. A possible avenue to try out new forms of ethnographic relevance could be to draw inspiration from artistic practices searching to probe new ways into the contemporary climatic mutation in its complex local expressions.
As suggested in Tarde’s number 6, The City of Shades – the first in a trilogy on urban shades – we could follow the trail of the guided walks proposed by Los Angeles Urban Rangers or the immersive protocols of experimental politics of the Crisis Cabinet of Political Fictions[2]. Their works could be of great relevance to go beyond an attempt at undermining the practices of existing institutions. In fact, at a time when reclaiming the social state as a crucial infrastructure accompanying and sustaining experimentation with the forms of personal and collective protection might be needed, the task might be more akin to what legal activist Radha D’Souza and artist Jonas Staal stated when proposing their Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC):
“For art to have emancipatory significance, it must go beyond mere questioning and deconstruction, and learn to retool statecraft’s arsenal to construct alternative popular institutions” [3].
Poster of The City of Shades workshop
Taking this thread, perhaps what is needed in times of a deep climatic mutation and growing extreme urban heat is to propose an alternative popular institution of that kind, as a parasitic companion to the work of existing civic actors and administrations. As put forward in Tarde’s issue #6 we could unfold a Department of Umbrology (DoU) in our urban territories: a space where to equip a new kind of professional of this strange discipline imagined by writer Tim Horvath, as well as a crossroads of knowledges and practices, bundling together those interested in the inquiry on and politics of urban shades.
But what would be the relevant knowledges and the concrete practices that this department, however fictional or speculative, might need to foster? First of all, it would need to gather people devoted to understanding things like: the social and material complexity of shades, the multiplicity of actors and assemblages constituting them; the practices of generating shade, by and for whom; or the forms of sociality that they allow as regions or territories of care, attending to their temporalities, their rhythms, and their spatial dramaturgies. Come what may, its first mandate would be to create the conditions for all this to happen.
Even if we imagined it to be a flexible collective of sorts – perhaps even summoned anew for every issue, articulated around yet-to-be-defined requests or mandates, and devoted to exploring the wide gamut of mediational possibilities ranging from civic or artivist protest to para-institutional endeavors – to grant it some reality we needed a setting, as well as a series of practicable ways for people to imagine this. Our current issue seeks to document a first attempt at doing this.
Testing the DoU hypothesis in a sheltered environment, I: Background
The concrete setting to materialize this speculative scenario took us around six months of on-and-off preparatory work. It happened in and around an open 5-day workshop, The City of Shades, in Barcelona on June 17-21, 2024 [4]. Organized in collaboration with Santiago Orrego, the workshop was backed by my own Ramón y Cajal research funds and a small amount of funding and promotion for the Architectural Weeks of Barcelona. The workshop was put together in collaboration with the City of Barcelona’s Climate Change and Sustainability Office and BIT Habitat, a foundation from the municipality whose mandate concerns deploying internal innovation mechanisms within the city hall and fostering the city’s innovative ecosystem to face municipal challenges.
I have been formally collaborating with both areas of the city council of Barcelona since July 2023, when they launched an architectural contest to prototype temporary public space shade solutions for the hot season. The contest wished to make emerging solutions unavailable in the market, responding to a main need detected by the municipality’s public officers: although, in their view, tree shade should be the main way to go, even in the midst of the worst drought of a century, certain urban configurations and regulations make it impossible to plant trees or other forms of greenery. Particularly (1) big open places with underground heavy infrastructure, such as transportation pathways or car parks, (2) small streets where fire regulations would not allow tree planting, and (3) playgrounds due to safety regulations concerning their pavements and zonification. The focus on these three spatial problems, as well as a desire to have re-usable, scalable and modular solutions, became the main prerequisites of the contest.
Heat measurements of uncovered urban soils
The ‘temporary public space shade’ challenge serves to develop one aspect of the ‘shade plan’ conceived in the City Council’s Climate Plan 2018-2030, an ambitious series of adaptation and mitigation interventions, amongst them a wide portfolio of measures to tackle urban heat [5]: ranging from public space interventions (climate shelters, shade infrastructures, bioclimatic itineraries) to attempts at decarbonising building cooling, incentivising aerothermal solutions centring energy poverty. All of this is part of a crucial agenda of the municipality for environmental justice, foregrounding its concern for ‘vulnerable populations’, like children, older and disabled people. Indeed, after increasingly scorching years, with every summer bringing sky-rocketing temperatures, Barcelona’s humid heat is one of the city’s main public concerns.
For the challenge, three consortia were selected by a committee of technical experts who valued how well the initial ideas might develop over a year into good-enough technical projects to respond to the contest’s challenges [6]. The consortia are of a rather mixed nature, comprising companies and architectural studios, cooperatives of architects and woodsmiths, or agricultural greenhouse providers, and a network of cooperative architects and social cooperatives. They were awarded 100 000€ to produce an idea that would be implemented with the advice of the relevant urban planning areas of the municipality, installed in given public spaces, and monitored in the next hot season. The incentive for this prototyping endeavor is that later, they could define the municipality’s calls for tenders for future urban shade products and establish a business model selling them to the public sector.
Render of one of the prototypes, as discussed on site in The City of Shades workshop
Since July 2023 I have joined as a peculiar fly-on-the-wall ethnographer the technical mentoring meetings, where the projects’ makers met with different public officers from relevant municipal areas – usually, engineers and architects by training – in charge of monitoring any new addition to Barcelona’s already packed public space. Interestingly, as the installation phase approached, I was asked for advice.
Although our formal collaboration agreement doesn’t include any payment for services, all parties became interested in having my views on how to approach the ‘social monitoring’ of the projects, a requirement from the municipality. It accompanies a more technically-developed ‘climatic monitoring’ (measuring temperature, humidity, shade coverage, etc.). Each project will need to study their own prototype and produce accounts of societal acceptance and use, as well as of thermal comfort [7]. Ever since, I have been informally suggesting and advising how to engage in the design of their surveys (sampling, data-gathering techniques, etc.) or discussing more or less experimental cartographic approaches to study spatial use: flow movements and permanence.
Render of one of the prototypes, as discussed on site in The City of Shades workshop
Even if thinking on the relations between shades, architecture, and heat practices has proven an extremely creative conceptual exploration from the onset, my ethnographic work remained confidential and tied to an activity of minute-taking: filling up pages and pages of a notepad to remember rather dense technical details. This is where the idea of a collective and public-oriented Department of Umbrology, where to inquire and discuss intuitions on the urban life of shade with others, became an interesting hypothesis to explore and experiment with forms of ethnographic relevance in the vicinity of all the other technical actors I have been collaborating with: not treating ‘the social’ as a closed category in advance (what the material or the climatic is not, the human factor), nor invoking it after the fact (providing sanctioning takes about technology acceptance) but rather evoking its emergent, everyday and ongoing creative process. To do this, we needed to imagine ways in which ethnography could come to matter: hopefully opening up what the social might mean in different shady locations, enabling more nuanced takes on the complex social and material life of shades and their forms of urban care.
Graphic storytelling of the inaugural presentation of The City of Shades workshop by Carla Boserman
i. Testing the DoU hypothesis in a sheltered environment, II: Producing a collaborative workshop
Testing ‘what a DoU might be’ was the inspiring idea behind The City of Shades workshop. A 5-day event, open to like-minded interdisciplinary people coming from the arts and humanities, the social sciences, and the design and architectural disciplines, with mandatory prior registration to screen who was interested and be able to create relevant synergies when attempting to articulate an exploratory collective research space like this. Sensing the organizational burden would be too much for us to carry the conceptual weight of the workshop, and in a spirit of collective speculation where many more views are needed, we additionally invited as mentors six colleagues from the arts and the social sciences working on experimental ethnographic approaches and with an artistic sensitivity to inquiry, who would push us to take it seriously or contribute to expand it beyond what we had imagined.
Cap with the DoU corporate logo
To render this practicable, we imagined umbrologists would require a series of roles, such as: (1) Shadow topologist, (2) Shade research-creator, (3) Sunlight cartographer, and (4) Community Shade Resilience Analyst. For each of these roles, we provided a small description and designed a series of specific forms, enabling the DoU to be imagined as a department of sorts: working ‘in the shadows’ of real ones, re-signifying what ‘shadowing’ tends to mean in common ethnographic parlance [8]. We also created a logo, a website, and baseball caps each of the participants could wear to protect from the scorching sun in our urban explorations as a way to enforce an idea of corporate identity and to become noticeable when moving around. The materials gathered in Tarde’s issue 6 and its zine were the main outcome of this preparatory effort. Indeed, the long essay was the discursive opening of the workshop, and the zine contained some of the forms we conceived and tried out.
We didn’t imagine this kit to be more than a first workable version, something enabling us to plunge into the problem and its conundrums more quickly, helping people have something to work with when thinking on shades for the first time. Our aim, thus, was to put to a test these bureaucratic forms undertaking a series of guided walks (around the Poblenou district of Barcelona, where the workshop venue was located; and monographic visits to the future sites where the municipal shade prototypes were going to be implemented, meeting the projects). We wanted to do so with the objective of later engaging in the hands-on redesign of the roles and forms of what a DoU could be, inspired by lectures, presentations and hands-on activities.
With the help of the mentors and a core group of 15 people who had registered – mostly from social sciences and architectural backgrounds – and the fluctuating assistance of people from the architectural contest, we had the immense luck to explore the possible research devices and mandates for the DoU. Our learnings were summarised on-site: the workshop ended with the production in less than 8 hoursof a fanzine, with the help of the open source collective PliegOS (our thanks again to Enric Senabre and Ricard Espelt for their work on this!), specialized in alternative forms of public documentation of events [9]. This raw and wonderful collective zine formed the backbone of the ethnographic kit for the study of urban shades you can now download in this issue. The only upgrade has been slightly polishing the language and developing aesthetic continuity between the different parts.
Collective work on a quick zine in The City of Shades workshop
ii. Learning to become umbrologists under the scorching sun: Documenting the workshop
Sweating over our cards, on different walks we learned to think about the urban inclinations of the sun, to relate to trees and plant coverage, to draw shadows with solarized spinach paper, to distinguish shade’s private contours (in the form of bars and terraces) from shady public infrastructures, to understand the relevance of broadening our view beyond the human (exploring an ethology of shades!), and to find ways to gather experiences of urban shades.
Our workshop took place mostly in the Sant Martí district of Barcelona, where the Poblenou neighbourhood is located. This is where I live and work, and my previous experience walking around with my daughters informed the selection of the places. But we also ventured beyond it when visiting the places where the municipality’s shade prototypes were to be emplaced and installed. This experimental journey also took us to the seafront of Barceloneta, then to the immense gap between large buildings of the Maresme-Forum over one of Barcelona’s main ring roads, or to the highline of the Sants district, created over the transportation box that the underground and commuter trains use to traverse the city.
As novice umbrologists, these endeavors enabled us to probe into the true power of urban shades, which also swallowed a measuring briefcase from the municipality without leaving a trace in one of our visits. In the final session, prior to working on the closing zine, I attempted to summarise our learnings as follows.
First lesson. To work as an umbrologist, it is advisable not to lose sight of one’s own body, as well as pay attention to the corporeality of our recording materials. Climates are mutating, and so should our recording devices! We learned this together with artist Carla Boserman, who pushed us to try out the complex task of following moving shades with blank pieces of paper, forcing us to go beyond reifying and representational takes. Carla also introduced us to the art of drawing through the climate-prone technique she has been recently exploring: anthotypeson emulsified papers, the predecessor of photographic printing, using the sun as a recording device.
Catching shades on paperA kit to work on anthotypes
Following shades and their shaky silhouettes, we realized that shades are anything but static. They move, and they move us with them. Also, they are not a single thing but a strange singular amalgamation of contours in between opacity and luminosity. As Carla told us, she became passionate about anthotypes when inquiring on affective forms of inscription that might also be attentive to atmospheric changes [10]: that is, not thought of from pens or pencils that always work, irrespective of the weather they are used in, but from the unstable environmental relationship of the sun imprinting its radiating force on fragile papers.
Shade on white notebook
Second lesson. On our walk through Poblenou, largely inspired by Carla’s work, we realised that it did not make much sense to think of shades as atmospheric occurrences, even though there are many useless, ephemeral or evanescent shadows. Rather, as we discussed at length that same Monday morning, the urban shades that interest us, those that allow us to shelter and cool off, should be thought of more as existential or lived regions.
Umbrologist at work
This was the main result of a collective conversation after spending some time, amazed as well as surprised, debating at length about an intersection. In it, shades were in some way ‘privatized’ by a terrace for the greater part of the day, leaving the nearby playground untouched, turned into an accidental grill for risk-prone parents and children. This ‘regional gaze’ at shades, as someone aptly called it in our discussion, also meant understanding them not from their metric spatial dimensions or climatological indicators but as interwoven topologies of atmospheric care for a plurality of bodies: territories plotted by power relations, flows of movement and knowledge, and divisions enacting sometimes profoundly unequal conditions of access, or as locales of possible multispecies inhabiting [11].
Playground under the sun
Visiting the locations of the municipality’s shade prototypes, we realized that, in addition to thinking about their patterns or modularity, we always needed to pay attention to: their surroundings, the habitual and possible uses of space, and the modes of circulation, the symbolism and the affordances of given places; and to actors both human and other than human (doves, seagulls, dogs and parakeets being regular companions in our walks). That is, to the different ways in which different actors make these spaces existential territories of life, both in the open and in hideouts, in different moments of the day as well as in the dark hours of the night. This regional, domain-specific look, attentive to the places and their shady life, felt to us of the utmost importance given that the prototypes could redefine and alter urban care: both opening up conflicts that didn’t exist before, hardening others that were hidden, as well as enabling newer ones to emerge.
Parakeet sheltered from the sun
Third lesson. This corporal approach and the importance of a regional perspective had as a result a full revamping of the kit we had proposed, developing new sheets and protocols of analysis of and intervention in the shades. Also, thanks to the fabulous interventions of Isaac Marrero-Guillamón [12] and Fernando Domínguez Rubio [13], we started imagining different mediational mandates for what a DoU might wish to respond to, drawing from the work of different artistic and activist forms of research they suggested us to resonate with.
As a result of all of these intense 5 days, the zine we worked on materialized a handful of activities to activate a possible DoU, enabling a bunch of research modalities that could be mobilized in different contexts of use.
Reworking our previous kit
iii. Prototypes for a DoU: Imagining a future practice
All in all, what these learnings prompted us to reflect on is the poetic and political potential of shades, which transcends the idea of simple technical solutions to thorny problems. In our workshop, shades appeared as a popular and well-spread figure of everyday climatisation (who can’t create shades, even with their own hands?), whose mundanity might precisely allow re-politicizing climate and weather not as things out there, observed and pinned down by meteorologists or climatologists, but as an urban collective concern, eliciting a broader conversation on how we could learn to live in more protective urban ecologies.
In other words, urban shades could also have the power to renew political ecology, the practice of creating and inhabiting them, unfolding a desire for exploration, play, and doing things with others that might not be so obvious when thinking of conventional forms of climatization grounded on air conditioning or ventilation [14]. Precisely because of its mundane nature, shading – a manual activity [15], a hands-on practice of learning to collectively condition and make a space inhabitable under the sun [16] –subtly but unavoidably challenges the problem of modernist solar urbanism and helps qualify mechanical air conditioning acting as a technology for forgetting the deadly fossil fuel substrate of our ways of living and its role in the formation of our atmospheric conundrums [17].
As a result, this issue of Tarde offers prototypes for a Department of Umbrology: a more grounded tentative proposal, slightly upgrading what we learned in the workshop. The accompanying zine, hence, is a small kit with a series of practical exercises and research devices: on the one hand, there are devices enabling a sensitization to what thinking with shades does to understanding the urban, as a matter of sun inclinations and exposure, or a first attempt at their inventory, documenting their changing features, their uses, and uselessness; on the other hand, we have devices for a more collective analysis of shades as regions with their spatial divisions, a proto-ethology of their human and other than human actors, and a series of prompts to elicit individual and group experiences.
The shade as an intergenerational and multispecies region?
Taken as a whole, these six devices enable us to imagine a future practice for the DoU to continue existing. This might also mean mutating in each place and around particular places and topics [18], for the DoU should not just be a collaborative space to study the urban life of shades but an urban space to enter into generative and fruitful shady relations! [19]
References
[1] With this expression, rather than discussing the use of solar power in urban settings, I refer to the signature modernist hygienist drive to design urban settings for clean air circulation and insolation, as a heliocentric approach to city-making. For more context, see Tarde’s issue #6: https://tarde.info/the-city-of-shades/
[2] The latter define their work as “an exercise in political speculation that different experts make to bring possible futures to the present through fictional scenarios that must be addressed within a limited period of time.”
[3] D’Souza, R., & Staal, J. (Eds.). (2024: 10). CICC – Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes. Rotterdam: Framer Framed.
[11] Something for which I’ve found both Vinciane Despret and Bruno Latour’s territorial musings of great food for thought. See Despret, V. (2021). Living as a Bird. Wiley; Latour, B. (2021). After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis. Polity. For an interesting companion for this kind of territorial thinking, see Aït-Touati, F., Arènes, A., & Grégoire, A. (2022). Terra Forma: A Book of Speculative Maps. MIT Press.
[12] Isaac took us on a tour de force revisiting the inspiring works of a dozen artists exploring modes of representation and collaboration to render practicable different ‘mediational’ possibilities of what the DoU might be or, in his words, “I would wish that a Department of Umbrology could think in recursive cycles of research, relationship, and public interfacing”. To name but a few of the many examples he discussed at length to substantiate this, allow me to select just three, because of the impact they left on some of our conversations: Silvia Zayas’s magnificent collaborative artistic speculation ruido ê, working – by means of a documentary and other media – with oceanographers to expand their sensory registers of subaquatic perception when studying manta rays and sharks; Stephen Gill’s Buried photographic series, a work of photographic remediation of the future transformation of the contaminated soil of the Olympic site in London (a moment where many informal uses of the space were lost) recording scenes of the life of these ‘post-industrial marshes’ with a cheap camera, then burying them images on the ground of the conflict, letting them impact it, thus being a double record of the chemicals in the camera and on the ground; Jessie Brennan’s The Cut, a juxtaposed drawing exploring fragments of the oral history of a neighbourhood from London traversed by a canal, using the canal as the storytelling device.
[13] Fernando discussed the speculative work around fiction that the Crisis Cabinet of Political Fictions and cognate works have sought to render practicable. Discussing at length the relevance of fiction to mould reality, he expounded the different scenarios they had been working on. In his presentation, he advocated for a use of fiction that discloses its own shadows (absences, problems, strange effects), rather than hiding its own productive and speculative engine.
[14] With the wonderful exception of the very inspiring hands-on artistic take to ‘air conditioning’ explored years ago by Iñaki Álvarez and Carme Torrent, inventing a wide variety of exercises whereby the air we breathe and sweat is rendered collectively articulate in given situations by means of “actions and choreographic and climatic situations in which the air can be the main character and a performer”, see https://mercatflors.cat/en/espectacle/salmon-air-condition-2/ (the materials of these sessions, graciously donated by Blanca Callén were of great food for thought when imagining the workshop; my appreciation goes to Iñaki, Carme and Blanca for the long conversation we had on this experience).
[15] For a very graphic exploration of this, see Fernández, M. (2021). Tejiendo la calle. Rua ediciones. This book recounts the story of a community-driven architectural project in the village of Valverde de la Vera (Spain), where villagers have engaged in a process of creating parasols out of recycled plastic, later on deciding collectively where and how to hang them in the hot season. This project beautifully shows how these parasols are not just ways of sheltering from the sun, but the changing fabric of a shady community in the making.
[16] In that sense, shading practices could very well be thought of as the next of kin the embodied approaches to ‘weathering’ proposed by Neimanis, A., & Walker, R. L. (2014). Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality. Hypatia, 29(3), 558-575.
[17] An argument developed at length by Barak, O. (2024). Heat, a History: Lessons from the Middle East for a Warming Planet. University of California Press.
[18] In his intervention, Adolfo Estalella ventured beyond his work on ‘ethnographic invention’ (c.f. Criado, T. S., & Estalella, A. (Eds.) (2023). An Ethnographic Inventory: Field Devices for Anthropological Inquiry. Routledge) to offer ‘diffraction’, an optical concept taken from the work Donna Haraway, as an interesting new way to discuss the different attempts, trials and tribulations of a ‘shady’ ethnographic practice beyond the totalising idea of ‘method.’
[19] What Francisco Martínez referred to, in another of the presentations of the workshop, as a practice of opacity. See Martínez, F. (2024). “Lights out: practicing opacity in Estonian basements.” Etnográfica, 28 (1), 285-297.
Qué complejas son las relaciones con la prensa: sus prisas, sus exigencias y sus formatos. Seguramente están muy ligadas a la precariedad y el saltar de tema en tema. Pero estas condiciones, qué poco permiten espacios para el pensar y el discurrir colectivo. ¿Cómo armar otras formas de la relación con lo público frente a las imposiciones de esa “divulgación científica” apresurada?
El contexto de esta reflexión es que, a mediados de octubre, me solicitaron una entrevista, bastante larga, que tendría por objetivo comparar la investigación de distintas personas interesadas en “cuidar el planeta”. Hoy supe que, de todo ello, sólo saldrán publicadas un par de frases, un poco fuera de contexto.
Con el resquemor de la ocasión perdida y la voluntad de aprovechar el trabajo ya hecho, que tenía por motivación suscitar posibles conversaciones sobre la relevancia de las ciencias sociales en la investigación sobre el cambio climático o el trabajo complejo de lo interdisciplinario, he decidido hacer disponible el contenido completo de mi respuesta. Ojalá sirva para algo.
Mi agradecimiento a Carmen Lozano Bright por su asistencia en este proceso.
Se habla mucho de que los más pequeños de la casa son los más concienciados para cuidar el planeta pero, ¿qué podemos aprender de nuestros mayores?
En el activismo siempre se suele poner el foco en las generaciones jóvenes, donde reside la esperanza de un mundo nuevo. Solemos atribuir a los mayores un cierto conservadurismo. Pero esto hace tiempo que se viene disputando. Las personas que hoy se encuentran en las edades más avanzadas son también las de la generación del 1968 y las luchas por la emancipación corporal. Y mucha de esa gente sigue batallando por abrir la posibilidad de un futuro en un momento aciago, complejo y donde podemos sentir cierta parálisis.
Dicho esto, quisiera recalcar que las generaciones no son homogéneas, los legados intergeneracionales siempre un reto y los aprendizajes nunca unívocos. Tenemos mucho que aprender de las luchas pasadas por la prosperidad, el estado social, la protección y la redistribución de la riqueza como un trabajo de lo que para ellos era su futuro y el de las generaciones venideras.
Pero también tenemos que olvidar, no hay herencia sin olvido: necesitamos deshacernos de una idea de bienestar caduca, con sus hábitos de uso energético, estéticas existenciales del gasto, formas de urbanización y movilidad desastrosas. Expresado de otra manera, necesitamos librarnos de un legado de lo que podríamos llamar, apoyándonos en el trabajo de Pierre Charbonnier, un “bienestar de carbono”, para imaginar otras formas de buena vida, otros territorios existenciales sostenidos también por el estado social, pero dentro de los límites planetarios.
Antes que nada es importante situarnos. Por una parte, la mayor parte de la humanidad vive en entornos urbanos extremadamente densos, tecnificados e intervenidos. Por otra parte, en los últimos cincuenta años la población mundial está alcanzando a vivir muchos más años que nunca anteriormente en la historia. Particularmente en la UE más de una quinta parte de sus habitantes tiene actualmente más de 65 años.
En este contexto, las preguntas del proyecto son dos. La primera es qué formas de urbanización han permitido que envejeciéramos como no lo hemos hecho nunca antes: en longevidad y calidad de vida o con salud. Pensemos en el logro social del transporte público o las calles accesibles para todos, fruto del trabajo de muchos activistas y técnicos.
España es un lugar donde la accesibilidad urbana está ampliamente desarrollada y en transformación. Si uno camina por una ciudad española, las calles están llenas de mayores y cuerpos diversos. Esto no es así en muchos otros sitios del planeta. Queda mucho por hacer, pero hay mucho bien hecho y debemos sentir orgullo.
La segunda pregunta remite a nuestro reto climático actual. Estamos en un proceso de fabricar ciudades amigables para las personas mayores y la diversidad funcional, pero lo hacemos muchas veces a través de infraestructuras desarrollistas, crecentistas y carboníferas.
Pensemos en nuestras calles de cemento, hormigón o granito, en esos pavimentos sellados hechos para poder caminar de forma segura para personas en silla de ruedas o ciegas. Esos mismos pavimentos son ahora el fundamento de muchos problemas, como el efecto isla de calor, que vulnerabiliza y expone a esos mismos cuerpos a los que se les quería restituir su derecho a la ciudad.
El reto actual es, por tanto: ¿cómo podremos pensar los futuros de estas ciudades que envejecen, demográficamente y como proyecto urbano? A través de talleres inmersivos y especulativos queremos aprender a pensar, junto con activistas mayores, urbanistas, técnicos municipales y legisladoras cómo construir ciudades para envejecer bien dentro de los límites del planeta.
¿Qué es lo más enriquecedor de trabajar desde la interdisciplinariedad para luchar contra el cambio climático?
Llevo muchos años en una conversación densa con activistas de la accesibilidad, arquitectas, diseñadoras y urbanistas. El trabajo de la interdisciplinariedad es duro, complejo, lleno de retos. Es un lugar de aprendizajes muy ricos, pero mentiría si dijera que es algo fácil. Al contrario, requiere de mucho trabajo, muchas veces friccional.
Sea como fuere, creo que es uno de nuestros principales retos en tiempos de mutación climática. Precisamente cuando alguna gente quisiera correr y darnos las soluciones es cuando más necesitamos aprender a ponerlas en común y explorar sus efectos, interesantes o desastrosos.
A mí me preocupa mucho que no todos los saberes se presentan en ese encuentro interdisciplinar en igualdad de condiciones: hay saberes que se creen más racionales o justificados que otros en su deseo de definir los problemas e intervenir. Las disciplinas biomédicas o las disciplinas técnicas, por ejemplo, tienden a hacer esto.
Creo que tienen mucho que aprender de las ciencias sociales, las humanidades, las artes y muchas otras formas de expresión cultural: la sensibilidad por la pluralidad de sentidos y formas de vida, su respeto y cultivo. Pero nos involucran muchas veces únicamente en la detección de necesidades o en la validación de sus resultados. Creo que esto es un error de planteamiento.
Entonces, para que esa colaboración interdisciplinar funcione habrá que bloquear las soluciones fáciles y evitar relaciones donde las cartas están marcadas. Necesitaríamos abrirnos a colaboraciones genuinamente experimentales para poder abordar los muchos retos de cómo viviremos, cómo habitaremos democráticamente en un momento sin precedentes.
En la atención a las sombras: sobre dibujos y registros, sobre cuerpos y climas
¿Cómo puede el dibujo contribuir a hacernos sensibles a las sombras, para así dejar de percibirlas como el negativo de lo que se vemos o de lo que se quiere mostrar? ¿Cómo puede el dibujo activar procesos de investigación que requieren de un desplazamiento hacia el cuerpo y la materia?¿Cómo puede el dibujo habitar un tiempo cambiante y acercarnos al ritmo de climatología?¿Cómo puede el dibujo hacer mundos más habitables, reivindicando “el derecho a la opacidad y a la diferencia”[1]?
Todas estas preguntas las habitamos durante el taller La ciudad de las sombras[2], que organizamos en el mes junio de 2024. Un taller de indagación para etnografiar la habitabilidad urbana ante un calor creciente y extenuante. En el taller invitamos a les participantes a explorar estrategias de dibujo para abrir imaginarios y explorar formas de registro y documentación que faciliten relacionarnos con sombras urbanas en contexto. Estas estrategias las pusimos en acción haciendo un recorrido a pie por diferentes puntos de del barrio de Poblenou en Barcelona, saliendo al encuentro con las sombras de la ciudad. Llevamos materiales de dibujo como lápices, rotuladores, papeles de diferentes gramajes y opacidades, cartulinas y tijeras. También material para practicar con la técnica de antotipia[3] (procesos de dibujo e impresión solar buscando modos de producción de imágenes inestables que favorezcan la afectividad ambiental[4]). Para ello utilizamos papeles emulsionados con espinacas preparados para solarizarse y generar así positivos de elementos que generan sombras: infraestructuras, vegetación, y otros elementos azarosos. Durante el paseo buscamos reaprender y acuerpar formas de registro y documentación, que implican unos tiempos y unos ritmos que nos exceden, que nos obligan y nos abren a la posibilidad de acercarnos a temporalidades propias del contexto y del objeto de estudio en este caso. Dibujar es en sí un acto sencillo, que pude ser relativamente inmediato, al alcance de la mano. Aquí, antes que un acto representacional, el dibujo cobra una dimensión afectiva, donde al prestar atención a sombras móviles, nos movemos con ellas. Así, dibujar una sombra implica atender a una presencia en movimiento y en relación; reparar en que su registro no produce una imagen fija, que documentarlas nos lleva a recorrer, a agacharnos, a sudar, a esperar y a trabajar con materiales tan inestables como sensibles.
Quisiéramos defender que esta experiencia de dibujo y de investigación experiencial es un modo de responder al desafío ambiental: urge activar una sensibilidad visual que nos pase por el cuerpo,[5] por la experiencia estética de los procesos de elaboración de imágenes y por desarrollar la sensibilidad en los haceres. Dibujando la sombra en contexto, la exploramos como una región por habitar o ya habitada.[6] Así, el dibujo se convierte en una herramienta central para explorar afectivamente formas de convivencia en tiempos de mutación climática.[7]
[1] Glissant, E. (1997). For Opacity. In Poetics of Relation (pp.189-194). University of Michigan Press.
[4] Giraldo, O. y Toro, I. (2020). Afectividad Ambiental. Sensibilidad, empatía, estéticas del habitar. México, Colegio de la Frontera Sur, Universidad Veracruzana.
Together with my long-time friend and associate Ignacio Farías, we are contributing to the brand new edition of the Elgar Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Studies, edited by Ulrike Felt and Alan Irwin (our thanks for their curatorship and initiative!).
Our contribution seeks to re-tell what STS does as a particular form of urban storytelling, from the classic stories around the Brooklyn bridge to attempts at doing a city otherwise!
Cities: stories of urban STS
This chapter explores stories STS scholars tell about cities: a tale of field formation and transformation, as well as how the urban has de-centred the object of STS. We retell stories about cities as socio-technical infrastructures. Then we focus on stories about urban natures, activist ecologists, the city as a geological intervention, and untameable nonhuman atmospheric elements. Finally, we engage with stories about how participation and do-it-yourself activism in the infrastructuring of urban worlds re-shape what we take the city to be. Each section retells iconic stories and rehearses some key STS insights attached to them.
“Queda molt per aprendre de la gent gran, tant del passat com per al futur que està per construir”
Tomás Sánchez Criado, expert en transformacions urbanes de la cura vinculades a l’accessibilitat, la calor extrema i l’envelliment poblacional, és investigador Ramón y Cajal, amb una Beca Leonardo, en el grup CareNet de l’Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) de la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). En aquesta conversa, l’investigador repassa els principals reptes que plantegen dues qüestions molt connectades entre si, el canvi climàtic i l’envelliment de la població, des d’una perspectiva tant nacional com internacional. A més, recorda una de les múltiples activitats en què ha participat recentment per contribuir a fer d’aquest món un lloc més habitable: el taller La ciutat de les ombres en el marc de les Setmanes d’Arquitectura de Barcelona.
“Queda mucho por aprender de los mayores, tanto del pasado como para el futuro que está por construir”
Tomás Sánchez Criado, experto en transformaciones urbanas del cuidado vinculadas a la accesibilidad, el calor extremo y el envejecimiento poblacional, es investigador Ramón y Cajal, con una Beca Leonardo, en el grupo CareNet del Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) de la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). En esta conversación, el investigador repasa los principales retos que plantean dos cuestiones muy conectadas entre sí, el cambio climático y el envejecimiento de la población, desde una perspectiva tanto nacional como internacional. Además, recuerda una de las múltiples actividades en las que ha participado para contribuir a hacer de este mundo un lugar más habitable: el taller La ciudad de las sombras en el marco de las Semanas de Arquitectura de Barcelona.
“We still have much to learn from our elders, about the past and about the future we hope to build”
Tomás Sánchez Criado, an expert in care transformations in urban contexts relating to accessibility, extreme heat and population ageing, is a Ramón y Cajal researcher, with a Leonardo Grant, in the CareNet group of the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). In this conversation, he reviews the main challenges posed by two closely related issues, climate change and population ageing, from a domestic and an international perspective, and also comments on one of the many activities in which he has recently participated to help make this world a more habitable place: a workshop on “La ciutat de les ombres” (The City of Shadows), as part of Barcelona’s Architecture Weeks.
