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.
Las Becas Leonardo de la Fundación BBVA están destinadas a apoyar el trabajo de investigadores y creadores culturales que, encontrándose en estadios intermedios de su carrera, se caractericen por una trayectoria científica, tecnológica o cultural altamente innovadora.
Al dotar a estas becas con el nombre propio de Leonardo da Vinci se quiere enfatizar los atributos característicos de esa figura universal de la cultura, destacadamente la pasión por el conocimiento, la apertura y exploración de nuevos campos y problemas, la interacción entre trabajo teórico y observacional o experimental, así como el diálogo y realimentación entre los dominios de las ciencias de la naturaleza y de la vida, la tecnología, las humanidades y las artes.
En correspondencia con su nombre, las «Becas Leonardo» se dirigen a facilitar el desarrollo de proyectos individuales que aborden facetas significativas y novedosas de objetos y cuestiones científicas, tecnológicas y culturales del presente, elegidas libremente por sus autores.
[ES] Ciudades que envejecen: Los futuros del urbanismo de la edad avanzada en el litoral español desea estudiar el litoral mediterráneo español como un laboratorio presente y futuro de distintas versiones de la ‘buena vida’ bajo el sol, en un momento peculiar en el que las crisis demográficas, de vivienda y medioambientales confluyen en una tormenta perfecta. En los últimos cincuenta años, la costa mediterránea española –uno de los mayores enclaves para la ‘migración de retiro’ en el continente europeo– se ha enfocado en el urbanismo de la edad avanzada (‘late life urbanism’) a través de una enorme inversión en infraestructuras urbanas de cuidado y en la transformación de la accesibilidad en viviendas, así como en equipamientos urbanos (transporte público, parques, playas).
En este contexto crítico de formas urbanas de envejecimiento, el proyecto tiene dos objetivos principales: (i) estudiar la genealogía del urbanismo de la edad avanzada (trabajo de campo y de archivo) en uno de los siguientes enclaves: la Costa Blanca (Alicante), la Costa del Sol (Málaga), el Maresme (Barcelona) o Mallorca; y (ii) elicitar la imaginación de futuros para la vida urbana de las ciudades que envejecen dentro de los límites planetarios (a través de talleres especulativos e inmersivos).
El proyecto tiene lugar entre octubre de 2024 y marzo de 2026.
[EN] Ageing Cities: The Futures of Late Life Urbanism on the Spanish coast wishes to study the Spanish Mediterranean coast as a present and future laboratory of versions of the ‘good life’ under the sun, at a peculiar moment when housing, demographic and environmental crises are coalescing into the perfect storm. For more than fifty years, the Spanish Mediterranean coast, one of the main hotspots of ‘retirement migration’ in the continent, has developed a signature approach to late life urbanism: with a great investment in urban infrastructures of care and urban accessibility transforming dwellings, as well as urban equipment, such as public transports, parks and beaches. In this critical context of urban forms of aging the project has two main objectives: (i) studying the genealogy of late life urbanism (undertaking fieldwork and archival research) in one of the following enclaves: Costa Blanca (Alicante), Costa del Sol (Málaga), Maresme (Barcelona) or Mallorca; and (ii) eliciting the imagination around the futures of late life urbanism (by means of immersive speculative workshops) within planetary boundaries.
The project will run from October 2024 to March 2026.
[CAT]Ciutats que envelleixen: Els futurs de l’urbanisme de l’edat avançada al litoral espanyolvol estudiar el litoral mediterrani espanyol com un laboratori present i futur de diferents versions de la ‘bona vida’ sota el sol, en un moment peculiar en què les crisis demogràfiques, habitacionals i mediambientals conflueixen en la tempesta perfecta. En els darrers cinquanta anys, la costa mediterrània espanyola – un dels principals enclavaments per a la ‘migració de retir’ al continent europeu – s’ha enfocat a l’urbanisme de l’edat avançada (‘late life urbanism’) a través d’una enorme inversió en infraestructures urbanes de cura i en la transformació de l’accessibilitat a vivendes, així com en equipaments urbans (transport públic, parcs, platges).
En aquest context crític de formes urbanes d’envelliment, el projecte té dos objectius principals: (i) estudiar la genealogia de l’urbanisme de l’edat avançada (treball de camp i d’arxiu) en un dels enclavaments següents: la Costa Blanca (Alacant) , la Costa del Sol (Màlaga), el Maresme (Barcelona) o Mallorca; i (ii) elicitar la imaginació de futurs per a la vida urbana de les ciutats que envelleixen dins dels límits planetaris (a través de tallers especulatius i immersius).
El projecte tindrà lloc entre l’octubre del 2024 i el març del 2026.
As part of an ongoing collaboration with architect Micol Rispoli, we recently published an article in the journal Design & Culture. This text stems from a mutual interest in re-thinking on the pedagogy of participatory design from the plural embodied experiences, in this case searching to learn to be affected by neurodiverse spatial pratice.
Design Before Design: Learning to be Affected by Neurodiverse Spatial Practices
Current ethical and political revivals of design pedagogy foreground the participation of neglected subjects in attempts to democratize design practice. This article explores what participatory design practitioners in architecture might be required to learn when reconfiguring their tasks in the wake of Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches to Participatory Things: treating them as a more-than-human assembly and unfolding process. This requires designers and architects to engage in designing the “pre-conditions” of participatory practice, “learning to be affected” by variegated actors and their peculiar ways of dwelling. In describing our attempts at approximating ourselves to the spatial practices of a neurodivergent person, we suggest this requires taking into account more-than-verbal experiences that liberal understandings of participation tend to exclude. This approach is here discussed as “design before design”: a form of design practice learning from the alternative approaches to design practice that unfolding “things” might bring to the fore and invite to explore.
Recommended citation: Rispoli, M. & Criado, T.S. (2024). Design Before Design: Learning to be Affected by Neurodiverse Spatial Practices. Design and Culture, 16(3), 357–381 | PDF
Editorial note: The City of Shades is the second issue in a series of urban explorations that are part of an ongoing collaboration between Tarde and xcol.org.
Our climate cultures are in crisis. Heat is no longer a distant or abstract event, something that happens to us. It is among us. And in its most extreme versions, it appears more like a chronic illness with profound, unequal, and devastating effects [1].
In a peculiar way, for a country like Spain, where I live, accustomed to sun and heat as a recurring seasonal issue, this places us before a crisis for which we can feel over-prepared. But summer after summer, heat wave after heat wave, inherited habits and practices do not quite work. It is no longer enough to walk under cover, wear sunscreen, drink a lot, dress lightly, lower the blinds, and wait for the worst to happen because the worst is yet to come on those torrid, tropical, and infernal nights, as meteorologists call them.
Modern infrastructures and construction methods, which made us feel at the avant-garde, appear today hopelessly problematic. We need a radical change. Different international and intergovernmental organizations have long warned that the response to climate change must start from cities [2]: increasingly populated settlements and complex-to-change infrastructures from which we need to rethink the habitability of the planet.
Anti-solar urbanism
The ongoing climatic mutation places us before the challenge of reconfiguring urban ideas of care, protection, or shelter, inventing more plural ways of living, and protecting those who could be more exposed or suffer more from its devastating effects [3]. In that sense, we live in a time of urgency and frantic searches for solutions. However, and this is my proposal, in addition to infrastructural or “nature-based” solutions, we have an important task before us: this requires, above all, redescribing what the urban might be.
In situations of great uncertainty, where how to respond is sometimes difficult to imagine, we may need to train themselves to pay attention to the seemingly irrelevant but crucial, such as urban shades and shadows: unimportant entities that articulate urban life and our daily relationships with the sun and heat.
Without a doubt, there is nothing more conventional than shades. As terrestrial beings we all have one. But thinking about urban shades can be something much deeper than it seems, since it forces us to pay attention differently to our everyday environments. Indeed, what is shade if not a changing relationship we enter with the Sun as it passes through our habitats throughout the day?
With Copernicus and Galileo, modernity put the Sun at the center. One of the many effects of this heliocentric turn and its profound cosmological effects is that we tend to attribute to the star that presides over our firmament a beneficent role, the ability to give life and irradiate us with its strength, but this regularly positive appreciation needs a counterpoint: What to do when it harms us or puts us at risk, such as in the conditions of extreme atmospheric heat or in the solar exposure that leads to melanoma? [4]
The modern philosophical tradition, but also our forms of artistic expression and folklore –– with innumerable children’s songs praising the Sun –– have difficulties treating without prejudice everything that remains outside of these irradiations: a solarized caricature treated as the archaic, the conservative, the dangerous, the murky hours of the night. However, and this is the hypothesis that I would like to share here, what if we have never been solar? What if, to breathe and think again, sheltered from wild solar power, we need to move the Sun away from the center?
This does not necessarily mean to stop considering the relevance of the Sun, nor resurrecting the Platonic distrust that condemns us to see nothing more than the shadows projected on the walls of a cave. The type of ‘sheltered thinking’ that we could begin to practice has, rather, shades at its center: What if shades were not the possibility of thinking negatively, taking things for what they are not, but a way of thinking protected from the Sun and its scorching heat and irradiation? In fact, as baroque painting amply showed, shadows are central to our perception, allowing figure/ground distinctions, but they are also key to our understanding of the world and our survival [5].
Climate shelter
Taken thusly, our terrestrial life could be re-read as a long interspecific story of how the living have learned to protect ourselves from solar irradiation. That is one of the most interesting arguments in the work of paleontologist and geologist Anthony J. Martin, Evolution Underground, which traces the evolutionary importance of burrows and underground architectures for the survival on the face of the earth of many animals since time immemorial, including human beings [6].
But, going further, the atmosphere itself, an initial bacterial achievement, with its complex circulation of air, or later in the history of the Earth, the seas and river banks, the iridescent tapestry of clouds and forests are nothing but aspects of a patchy system, with singular expressions, of ways to capture, regulate, dissipate or block the Sun’s rays. In this renewed centrality of shades, we cannot forget plants and their important role in making our planet habitable.
Cloud shade
Philosopher Emanuele Coccia expressed this very poetically in a recent conference titled “The Garden of the World.” One of his main arguments is that what we call Earth today cannot be understood but as a technical achievement of life, more precisely the work of plants, crucial to producing the atmosphere and orography, as well as the oxygen thanks to which other beings live:
“The Earth has the status of an artifact… a cultural production of all living beings that inhabit it and not only the transcendental precondition for the possibility of life. Gaia is Flora’s daughter. The Sun is Flora’s cosmic doll” (my translation) [7].
And what would have happened to the terraforming of our planet were it not for plants and, more particularly, trees: with their ability to transform soil and air, producing habitats or microclimates so that many animals could begin to crawl beyond the seas sheltered from the Sun [8]
Tree shade
In fact, many of our primary experiences of shade and protection from the Sun actually have to do with the delicate interweaving of tree foliage and the strange collage of plant cover. Thinking with trees allows us to venture another hypothesis about the habitability of our planet: What if shades have been more important than what we have told ourselves until now? What’s more, despite the fact that they are usually considered a secondary product of the Sun, its negative version, what if shades were the very condition of habitability on Earth and, therefore, in urban habitats troubled by climatic mutation?
The interesting thing is that even if shades are an old acquaintance, growing environmental concerns have caused administrations and professionals of all kinds to begin to recover this daily environmental relationship, long forgotten by modern forms of urbanization. For this reason, it has gained great importance in different technical solutions to face the extreme heat of the present: municipal shading plans, bioclimatic itineraries, or shade infrastructures [9]. This requires revitalizing ancient knowledges and techniques, as well as speculating and creating new solutions to mitigate and adapt to increasing heat.
Stating that we have never been solar, paying attention to shades also means restoring the violence exercised against many ancestral traditions by the moderns, with their hygienist obsession with clean air and wide, controlled streets intended primarily for traffic. This heliocentric or solar urbanism was the way in which Reason re-incarnated as a city project. In the aftermath of this, centering shades is also a way to restore their relevance for urban habitability, which allows us to admire the wrongly called ‘vernacular’ architecture with different eyes, seeking inspiration! Also, as Paloma Yáñez Serrano suggested in a conversation, it might lead us to understand trees and plan shades not just as ‘infrastructure’ but something part of a complex sentient ecology we should allow to thrive, something urban ecology and forestry schools are far from doing!
Solar Urbanism
However, to say that we have never been solar is not to throw modernist architecture overboard but rather to notice modernist urban formations for which shade has also been relevant. That is, it is about re-reading architecture and urbanism not from the blinding light of the Enlightenment but from the murky atmospheres of shades and shadows, as architect Stephen Kite proposes in his book Shadow-makers, a cultural history of shadows as a ‘shaping factor in architecture’, both in its traditional and modern forms [10].
Although much of Kite’s book is devoted to the importance of shadow in defining the cavities of buildings and interior spaces, there is a wonderful chapter on the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Islamic city because what is the medina –– an architectural conglomerate formed by deep canyon adobe buildings, together with canopies and the use of damp fabrics –– but a great ode to shade as a principle of urban habitability?[11].
But there are also interesting examples of urban treatments of shades and shadow in different modernist traditions that have developed in hot and arid climates. This is extensively covered in a recent exhibition on tropical modernism in Africa and India curated by Christopher Turner at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London [12].
In Barcelona, where I reside, there is also a history to be reconstructed of modernist shade architectures, of which the two umbracles (shadow buildings) of the modernist Ciutadella and Montjuic parks stand out: Siamese structures, but that operate on the inverse principle of the greenhouse, even if conceived as part of the same colonial impulse. This is far from being a local story: a similar twin architecture can be found in Lisbon’s signature Estufa Quente and Estufa Fria. Indeed, umbracles or estufas frias and greenhouses can be read as key to what architectural historian Lydia Kallipoliti calls the grammars of ‘colonial acclimatization,’ which allowed the fragile transportation, and the massive relocation of plants, animals and people from different regions of the world, for the purposes of trade and exhibition, sometimes also starting out a new troubled life in the metropolis [13].
Umbracle de la Ciutadella (Ciutadella Park’s shade building)
And yet, the great ‘achievements’ of the past, no matter how problematic or interesting, cannot be ‘the’ solution. We have entered an experimental moment, one of great stupor. Our cities have become what the French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour calls “critical zones”: complex unknown territories where living beings are literally risking their lives, but also where they rush the most to continue making liveable worlds in their irreducible plurality [14]. The challenge we face in what Latour calls the “new climatic regime” in these critical urban zones is, therefore, to engender plural forms of habitability in a frankly complex and problematic moment without guarantees [15].
To tentatively respond to this major challenge, I believe we need to experiment with forms of urban transformation. This may sound paradoxical, I know because we are at a moment where we feel like we have to run to do something to fix the problem right away. But we must be careful not to turn this rush into a technocratic project governed by experts or elites who impose on us how to live, as in the colonial period. No doubt, terrible things are underway, but there is a great danger of confusing the diagnosis with the solution, especially when we do not know how we could live and with whom.
Precisely in this moment of pressing urgency, we need more than ever an experimental culture to rethink the city. With this precaution concerning technical solutions, I do not mean that countless infrastructural arrangements –– such as porous and reflective pavements or shaded spaces to protect us from the Sun and the heat island effect ––are not important. We also need to learn to leave space for plants to develop or allow animals to thrive in cities on an equal footing. This is all key, but we need to go further.
Street canopy
At a time like this, we also need to address the social and material life of atmospheric and climatic phenomena, such as shades, whether already existing or designed. In a heated present, where the ability to shelter ourselves from the scorching Sun is a poorly distributed good, revitalizing their knowledge and generative practices may be crucial to relearning to live as earthly beings.
To do this, perhaps we need a ‘Department of Umbrology’ in each of our territories. This notion was developed by writer Tim Horvath in his short story The discipline of shadows, where he explores the complex relationships in a comically absurd university department devoted to the study of the life of shadows, where physicists, shadow theater dramaturgs and Platonic philosophers coexist without understanding each other, generating funny situations in their mutual incomprehension [16].
Collateral shade
However, in an absurdly tragic moment like the one we find ourselves in, we might need to explore how to make the type of space inspired by that story exist, but not as a university department. Rather, taking inspiration from the description and intervention work of artivist collectives such as the Los Angeles Urban Rangers [17] or the dramaturgical speculative experiments of the Crisis Cabinet of Political Fictions [18], what if we imagined it as a workspace devoted to the study of and intervention in the urban life of the shades: hence developing umbrology as a practice addressing both physical and material aspects as well as social and cultural relationships.
To make it exist, we would need to train ourselves to appreciate the intricacies of this environmental relationship: devoting ourselves to the study of the complex relationships between the Sun and buildings, the street or trees, as well as the role that different types of shadows can have for different people or groups and their ways of surviving the scorching heat. I would like to appeal to the relevance of ethnography for this task because of how it foregrounds an investigation of the embodied and situated study of practices, the senses, and ways of life. Ethnography would also allow a different approach to inquiry, enabling an understanding of environmental phenomena beyond two well-trod paths in which we render shades readable and discussable: [19]
On the one hand, climatological and meteorological practices that foreground their temperature and other atmospheric variables (such as humidity), leaving in the shadows their lived or cultural dimensions, the forms of life from which they arise and those that make them emerge, enabling or disabling different urban climates;
On the other hand, the practices of spatial legibility, from a bird’s eye and in Euclidean terms, undertaken by projects such as ShadeMap or Shadowmap, geographic information systems (GIS) that, through geolocation, allow us to simulate the inclination of the Sun and the shades and shadows cast by the urban environment on our digital devices.
Bird safe glass, using shades
To study how to make our cities habitable again in the face of increasing heat, we also need to learn to describe with many more nuances, both symbolic and ephemeral, taking into account other knowledges and ways of articulating problems, the new terra ignota that our cities have become: undertaking experimental cartographic endeavours such as the one suggested by Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes and Axelle Gregoire in their magnificent Terra Forma, hence allowing us to re-center our bodily implications in the urban climates we inhabit and the plurality of our ways of inhabiting them [20].
The importance of the lived body in ethnography is a key aspect since it can help us stop thinking about atmospheres or climate and, more specifically, heat as res extensa: as an external thing or issue, detached from our actions. Rather, as different recent works in the fields of history and social studies of science and technology have argued, climate, atmospheres, and heat are something humans have partaken in their making: by omission and commission, in more direct or more distant ways, in our daily practices, embodied and mediated by different technical gadgets, but also by the ways in which we consume and build cities: our clothing, our buildings with air conditioners. Put differently, as a result of deeply mediated collective practices [21].
The sociality of shades
Thus considered, shades cease being a mere natural effect and acquire relational cultural properties because there is no shadow equal to another, and its uniqueness depends on how we observe, practice, and interrogate it in its site-specificity. This sensitivity seems important to me because it would allow repopulating shades and shadows: not, to say it again, as the negative presentation of what can be seen or as empty places [22], but as sites that enable many living beings to thrive: hiding from the blinding light of both the Sun and the Enlightenment as a project.
This version of shades as protecting other life-forms deeply resonates with the antiracist work of radical Black Caribbean thinker Édouard Glissant, who coined ‘a right to opacity’ as a condition of survival for all forms of difference in the long tail of slavery [23]. But also, in a more clearly environmental sense, with the proposals of architectural historian and disability activist David Gissen [24]. Gissen defends the need to rethink cities from many forms of bodily vulnerability, commonly removed from the centrality of urbanism: Black communities, older people and children, people with chronic illnesses and disabilities. Particularly because of how the Sun and heat endanger them: like the older people suffering in silence the ‘fatal isolation’ of heat waves or the uncountable Black bodies of outdoors workers exposed to brutal conditions of heat and insolation [25]. This would dispute the Sun’s centrality in public space design, making shade into a careful urban design principle.
Solar playground
Considering the social and material shade arrangements from the practices of diverse bodies in need of urban supports, allows us to think of shades not only as a ‘civic resource’, but also as an ‘inequality index.’ Shade is, indeed, subject to different conditions of unequal access, both in troublesome everyday negotiations of spatial production and in the legal regulations of who is allowed to produce or live in the shadows and how in different contexts. Shade, thus, appears a key infrastructure for urban habitability. And that is the main reason why journalist Sam Bloch suggests shades should be turned into a mandate for urban designers, or even more radically by urban theorist Mike Davies, into a collective urban right [26].
But how to study shades ethnographically? Faced with this challenge, therefore, we actively need to relearn how to describe and dimension the problems we face – also the problems of solutions –in order to be able to test many proposals to make the plural habitability of our urban environments possible. We need, therefore, to cultivate urban speculation, not real estate! I am referring to our ability to think and rethink the many possible ways that the urban could have to make it habitable again. This would require both (i) the invention of devices to carry out field research, giving a new meaning to the term ‘shadowing’, and (ii) taking inventory of everyday spatial practices, focusing on the relationship that different people have with our perpetual companions as inhabitants under the Sun [27].
Shade on a notebook
Hence, experimenting and speculating on how to articulate a Department of Umbrology: a confederation of singular forms of thinking and intervention, a self-constituted entity from where we could liberate, imagine, and cultivate new urban sensibilities and responsibilities on how to make more livable cities. We need such a space to take responsibility for describing, protecting, and bringing to dimmed light many underground forms of knowledge and forms of collective intelligence that need opaque supports to flourish. That is, to discuss the multiple needs of a large number of unique actors often displaced by solar urbanization. I do not only mean those who cannot pay the air conditioning bill or those who need support to transform their homes and workspaces into more energy-efficient and comfortable. I also mean those who, like homeless people, appear as second-class humans, in addition to many non-human urbanites, like dogs or birds, we rarely think of when imagining climate policies.
For this proposal to work, we need very different professional and collective knowledges –– not just academic or institutional –– to work together. This mutual exchange and cross-contamination would allow exploring and trying out devices for urban inquiry, drawing on the plural sensibilities and knowledges to imagine how to equip these strange professionals of umbrology: between the natural and the cultural, with a particular interest in the analysis and politics of shades; devoting themselves to understanding the social and material complexity of shades, the multiplicity of actors and assemblages constituting them; the practices of generating shade, by and for whom, as well as the forms of sociality that they allow as regions or territories [28]: attending to their temporalities, their rhythms, and their spatial dramaturgies.
If we are successful in setting up such an experiment in the ways we encounter and describe shady urban worlds, we might make another city appear, one usually overlooked: the city of shades!
[3] My argument draws on and is deeply inspired by the work of the late French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour and many of his collaborators. In his work of the last decade, there is a central notion: “New Climatic Regime,” which refers to the problems as a way of life, production, and its dependence on fossil energies that a particular has thrown us into. A destructive regime that has transformed our environments, shaped our knowledges and political institutions for more than a century, putting the habitability of the planet at risk. At the same time, this characterization suggests the possibility of its transformation from an old regime (ancien régime) to a new one: this requires searching for other horizons of meaning to engender plural forms of habitability. For an introduction to these ideas, see Latour, B. (2017). Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Polity.
[4] For an attentive look at the elemental plurality of human and non-human practices, or the scalar paradoxes of the multiple spatial, corporal, temporal, historical-cultural configurations of our omnipresent relationship with the sun and the dissipation of its rays or what we could call “solarities” –– from the infrastructural forms linked to the photovoltaic energy transition to anthropogenic catastrophes induced by the carbonification of the atmosphere (where the sun appears as “the source of withering and desiccation, a maker of monstrous heat”, p.18), not to forget the planetary centrality of photosynthesis or diurnal cycles, or its effects in the production of fossil energy or our very visual perception systems –– see Howe, C., Diamanti, J., & Moore, A. (Eds.). (2023). Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions. punctum books.
[5] The most detailed attempt to restore the philosophical centrality of shadows that I am aware of is that of Casati, R. (2003). Shadows. Unlocking their secrets from Plato to our time. Vintage Books.
[6] Martin, A.J. (2017). The Evolution Underground: Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean World Beneath our Feet. Pegasus Books.
[8] Albert, B., Halle, F., & Mancuso, S. (2019). Trees. Thames & Hudson; Coccia, E. (2018). The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture. Wiley; Coccia, E. (2021). Metamorphoses. Wiley; Leonardi, C., & Stagi, F. (2019). The Architecture of Trees. Princeton Architectural Press; Mattern, S. (2021). Tree Thinking. Places Journal, https://doi.org/10.22269/210921
[9] Such as the ones developed by an architectural contest and experimental prototyping process put together by Barcelona’s City Council that I have been accompanying since the summer of 2023: https://bithabitat.barcelona/es/proyectos/sombra/
[10] Kite, S. (2017: 5). Shadow-makers: A cultural history of shadows in architecture. Bloomsbury Academic.
[11] Ludovico, M., Attilio, P. & Ettore, V. (Eds.) (2009). The Mediterranean Medina. Gangemi Editor.
[12] Turner, C. (Ed.) (2024). Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence. V&A Publishing.
[13] Kallipoliti, L. (2024). Histories of Ecological Design: An Unfinished Cyclopedia. Actar.
[14] Latour, B., & Weibel, P. (Eds.). (2020). Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth. ZKM/MIT Press.
[15] Latour, B. (2018). Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime . Polity; Latour, B. (2021). After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis. Polity.
[16] Horvath, T. (2009). The Discipline of Shadows. Conjunctions , 53 , 293-311.
[17] Bauch, N., & Scott, E.E. (2012). The Los Angeles Urban Rangers: Actualizing Geographic Thought. Cultural Geographies , 19 (3), 401-409; Kanouse, S. (2015). Critical Day Trips: Tourism and Land-Based Practice. In E.E. Scott & K. Swenson (2015). Critical landscapes: Art, space, politics (pp. 43-56). University of California Press.
[19] Hepach, M.G. & Lüder, C. (2023). Sensing Weather and Climate: Phenomenological and Ethnographic Approaches. Environment and Planning F 2 (3): 350–68.
[20] Aït-Touati, F., Arènes, A., & Grégoire, A. (2022). Terra Forma: A Book of Speculative Maps. MIT Press.
[21] Calvillo, N. (2023). Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds. Columbia Books on Architecture and the City; Fressoz, J.-B., & Locher, F. (2024). Chaos in the Heavens: The Forgotten History of Climate Change. Verse Books; Hsu, H. L. (2024). Air Conditioning. Bloomsbury; Parikka, J., & Dragona, D. (Eds.). (2022). Words of Weather: A glossary. Onassis Foundation; Starosielski, N. (2021). Media Hot & Cold. Duke University Press.
[22] In the same way that deserts are not empty either, a colonial representation commonly associated with the justification of the savage exploitation of arid lands: Henni, S. (Ed.) (2022). Deserts Are Not Empty. Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
[23] Glissant, E. (1997). For Opacity. In Poetics of Relation (pp.189-194). University of Michigan Press.
[24] Gissen, D. (2022). Disabling Environments. In The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access (pp. 95-114). Minnesota University Press.
[25] Keller, R. C. (2015). Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003. University of Chicago Press; Macktoom, S., Anwar, N.H., & Cross, J. (2023). Hot climates in urban South Asia: Negotiating the right to and the politics of shade at the everyday scale in Karachi. Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980231195204
[26] Bloch, S. (2019). Shade: An Urban Design Mandate. Places Journal, https://doi.org/10.22269/190423 ; Davis, M. (1997) The radical politics of shade. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 8(3): 35–39; Macktoom, S., Anwar, N.H., & Cross, J. (2023). Hot climates in urban South Asia: Negotiating the right to and the politics of shade at the everyday scale in Karachi. Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980231195204
[28] In the rich ethological sense explored by Despret, V. (2021). Living as a Bird. Wiley. A proposal that breaks with the idea of territory as something that can be explained away either in functional and economic terms or as property, ownership and exploitable resources, claiming instead the need to describe it from multiple practices of inhabiting that constitute it and the arts of coexistence that they make possible. This idea is further developed by Latour, B. (2021). After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis. Polity. Latour’s proposal is to undertake a cartographic practice of territories different from the ideas of ‘blood and soil’ that have underpinned European traditionalisms and nationalisms. This is crucial, in his words, to orient oneself in the New Climatic Regime, which requires understanding ‘where we live’ and ‘what we live off’ by listing our affiliations.
Zine: Kit, Roles & Devices for the Department of Umbrology
Nuestra cultura climática está en crisis. El calor extremo ya no es un evento externo, está entre nosotros, como un mal crónico con profundos efectos desiguales y devastadores.[1]
De manera peculiar para un país como el nuestro, acostumbrado al sol y al calor como un asunto estacional recurrente, esto nos sitúa ante una crisis en la que podemos creernos sobre-preparados. Pero verano tras verano, ola de calor tras ola de calor, los hábitos y prácticas heredados no acaban de funcionar: ya no basta con caminar a cubierto, llevar crema solar, beber mucho, vestirse ligero, bajar las persianas y esperar a que pase lo peor, porque lo peor está por llegar, en esas noches tórridas, tropicales e infernales, como las llaman nuestras colegas de la meteorología.
Las infraestructuras y modos de construcción modernos, que nos hacían sentir a la vanguardia, aparecen hoy irremediablemente problemáticos. Necesitamos un cambio radical. Diferentes organizaciones internacionales e intergubernamentales alertan desde hace tiempo que la respuesta al cambio climático debe partir de las ciudades:[2] asentamientos cada vez más poblados e infraestructuras complejas de cambiar desde los que necesitamos repensar la habitabilidad del planeta.
La mutación climática en curso nos sitúa ante el reto de configurar nuevas ideas urbanas de cuidado, protección o refugio, inventando formas plurales de habitar que protejan a quienes pudieran estar más expuestos o sufrir más sus efectos devastadores.[3] En ese sentido, vivimos un tiempo de urgencia y de búsqueda frenética de soluciones. Sin embargo, y ésta es mi propuesta, además de soluciones infraestructurales o “basadas en la naturaleza” tenemos ante nosotros una tarea importante: esto requiere, sobre todo, redescribir qué es lo urbano.
En situaciones de gran incertidumbre, donde cómo responder es un asunto a veces complicado de imaginar, quizá necesitemos entrenarnos a prestar atención a lo aparentemente irrelevante, pero crucial. Ese es el objeto primordial de este taller, que quiere poner el foco en las sombras: entidades aparentemente ínfimas, pero que articulan nuestra vida urbana y nuestras relaciones cotidianas con el sol y el calor.
Sin duda, no hay nada más convencional que la sombra. En tanto seres terráqueos todos tenemos una. Pero pensar la sombra urbana puede ser algo mucho más profundo de lo que parece, puesto que nos obliga a prestar atención de otra manera a nuestros entornos cotidianos. De hecho, ¿qué es la sombra, sino una relación cambiante en que entramos con el sol a medida que atraviesa nuestros hábitats a lo largo del día?
Con Copérnico y Galileo, la modernidad puso al Sol en el centro. Uno de los muchos efectos de ese giro heliocéntrico y su profunda transformación cosmológica es que solemos atribuir a la estrella que preside nuestro firmamento un rol benefactor, la capacidad de dar vida y de irradiarnos con su fuerza, pero esta apreciación regularmente positiva necesita un contrapunto: ¿qué hacer cuando nos daña o nos pone en riesgo, como en las condiciones atmosféricas del calor extremo o en la exposición solar que conduce al melanoma?[4]
La tradición filosófica moderna, pero también nuestras formas de expresión artística y folklore (con innumerables canciones infantiles alabando al sol), tiene dificultades para no tratar con prejuicio todo lo que queda por fuera de esas irradiaciones: una caricatura solarizada, tratada como lo arcaico, lo conservador, lo peligroso, lo turbio de la noche. Sin embargo, y esta es la hipótesis que quisiera compartir aquí, ¿y si nunca fuimos solares? ¿Y si para volver a respirar y pensar, guarecidos de su poder salvaje, a la sombra, necesitemos desplazar al sol del centro?
Esto no necesariamente quiere decir dejar de considerar al sol, ni resucitar la desconfianza platónica que nos condena a no ver más que las sombras proyectadas en las paredes de una cueva. El tipo de pensamiento cobijado que pudiéramos empezar a practicar tiene, más bien, en su centro a la sombra: ¿Y si la sombra no fuera la posibilidad de pensar en negativo, tomando las cosas por lo que no son, sino un modo de pensar protegido del sol abrasador? De hecho, como mostró ampliamente la pintura barroca, las sombras son centrales para nuestra percepción, para nuestro entendimiento del mundo, para nuestra supervivencia. [5]
Con esa clave, nuestra vida terrestre pudiera ser leída como una larga historia interespecífica de cómo los vivientes hemos aprendido a protegernos de su irradiación. Ese es uno de los argumentos más interesantes del trabajo del paleontólogo y geólogo Anthony J. Martin Evolution underground (la evolución bajo tierra), que retraza la importancia evolutiva de las madrigueras y arquitecturas del subsuelo para la supervivencia sobre la faz de la tierra de muchos animales desde tiempos inmemoriales, incluidos los seres humanos.[6]
Pero, yendo más allá, la misma atmósfera, logro inicial bacteriano, con su compleja circulación del aire, o más tarde en la historia de la tierra los mares y las riberas de los ríos o el tapiz irisado de las nubes y los bosques no son sino un gran sistema, con expresiones locales, de formas de captar, regular, disipar o bloquear los rayos del sol. En esta centralidad de la sombra no podemos olvidar a las plantas y su importante papel en hacer habitable nuestro planeta.
El filósofo Emanuele Coccia expresaba esto de forma muy poética en una reciente conferencia en el CENDEAC, titulada “El jardín del mundo”. En ella planteaba que lo que hoy llamamos Tierra no puede entenderse sino como consecución técnica de la vida o la labor de las plantas, cruciales para la producción de la atmósfera y la orografía, así como del oxígeno gracias al cual otros seres vivimos:
“la Tierra tiene un estatuto de artefacto… una producción cultural de todos los seres vivos que lo habitan y no sólo la precondición trascendental para la posibilidad de la vida. Gaia es hija de Flora. El sol es la muñeca cósmica de Flora.”[7]
¿Y qué hubiera sido de la terraformación de nuestro planeta a través de las plantas y, en particular los árboles, de no ser por su capacidad de transformar lo, producir hábitats o microclimas para que muchos animales pudiéramos comenzar a reptar más allá de los mares, cobijados del sol?[8]
De hecho, muchas de nuestras experiencias primordiales de sombra y protección del sol tienen que ver, de hecho, con los delicados entramados del follaje de distintos árboles y plantas. Pensar junto con los árboles nos permite aventurar otra hipótesis sobre la habitabilidad de nuestro planeta: ¿Y si la sombra fuera más importante de lo que nos hemos contado hasta ahora? Es más, a pesar de que suela ser considerada como un producto secundario del sol, su versión en negativo, ¿y si la sombra fuera condición misma de la habitabilidad en la tierra y, por ende, en nuestros entornos urbanos atribulados por la mutación climática?
Lo interesante es que, aunque la sombra sea una vieja conocida, la creciente preocupación ambiental ha hecho que administraciones y profesionales de todo tipo hayan comenzado a recuperar esta relación ambiental cotidiana largamente olvidada por las formas modernas de urbanización. Por esto mismo ha cobrado gran importancia en distintas soluciones técnicas para hacer frente al calor extremo del presente: planes municipales de sombras, itinerarios bioclimáticos o infraestructuras de sombreado.[9] Esto está requiriendo revitalizar saberes y técnicas antiguos, así como especular y crear nuevas soluciones para mitigar y adaptarnos ante el calor creciente.
Decir que no hemos sido solares, prestar atención a las sombras, significa también restaurar la violencia ejercida contra muchas tradiciones ancestrales del habitar por parte de los modernos, con su obsesión higienista por el aire limpio y las calles amplias, controladas y destinadas primordialmente al tránsito. Este urbanismo heliocéntrico fue la forma en que la Razón se hizo ciudad. Frente a ello, colocar la sombra en el centro es restituir su centralidad para la habitabilidad urbana, lo que nos permite admirar con otros ojos a la mal llamada arquitectura vernácula: buscando inspiración.
Sin embargo, decir que nunca hemos sido solares no es tirar la arquitectura modernista por la borda, sino comenzar a advertir formaciones urbanas modernistas para las que la sombra ha sido nuclear. Esto es, se trata de releer la arquitectura y el urbanismo no desde la luz, sino desde la centralidad de la sombra, como plantea el arquitecto Stephen Kite en su libro Shadow-makers, una historia cultural de las sombras como factor modelador de la arquitectura (“shaping factor in architecture”), tanto en las formas tradicionales como modernas.[10]
Aunque gran parte del libro de Kite está consagrado a la importancia de la sombra para definir las oquedades de edificios y espacios interiores, hay un capítulo maravilloso sobre la ciudad islámica mediterránea y de Oriente Próximo, porque ¿qué es la medina –– conglomerado formado por arquitecturas de adobe de cañón largo y usos de toldos o tejidos humedecidos –– sino una gran oda a la sombra como principio de habitabilidad urbana?[11]
Pero existen también ejemplos interesantes de tratamientos urbanos de la sombra en diferentes tradiciones modernistas que se han desarrollado en climas cálidos y áridos, de lo que trata ampliamente una reciente exposición sobre el modernismo tropical en África y la India comisariada por Christopher Turner en el Victoria and Albert Museum de Londres.[12]
En Barcelona hay también una historia por reconstruir de las arquitecturas modernistas de la sombra, de entre las que destacan los dos umbráculos de los parques de la Ciutadella y Montjuic: estructuras siamesas, pero que funcionan por el principio inverso al invernadero; concebidas como parte del mismo impulso tenebroso que la historiadora de la arquitectura Lydia Kallipoliti denomina las gramáticas de la “aclimatización colonial”, que permitieron el frágil transporte o la relocalización masiva de plantas, animales y personas, para su comercio y exposición, en ocasiones comenzando una nueva vida problemática en el corazón de la metrópolis.[13]
Y, sin embargo, las soluciones del pasado, por problemáticas o interesantes que resulten, no puede ser la solución. Hemos entrado en un momento experimental, de gran estupor. Nuestras ciudades se han convertido en lo que el filósofo y antropólogo francés Bruno Latour llama “zonas críticas”: complejos territorios ignotos, donde los vivientes se están jugando la vida literalmente, pero también donde más se apresuran para seguir haciendo mundos vivibles, en su pluralidad irreductible.[14] El reto ante el que nos sitúa lo que Latour llama el “nuevo régimen climático” en estas zonas críticas urbanas es, por tanto, engendrar formas plurales de habitabilidad en un momento francamente complejo y problemático, sin garantías.[15]
Para responder tentativamente a este reto mayúsculo creo que necesitamos practicar una cultura experimental de la transformación urbana. Esto puede sonar paradójico, lo sé, porque estamos en un momento en el que sentimos que debemos correr para hacer algo. Pero debemos tener cuidado de no convertir esta prisa en un proyecto tecnocrático gobernado por expertos o por élites que le digan o le impongan al resto cómo vivir, como ya ocurrió en el periodo colonial. Si la vida es compleja, si la vida consiste en fabricar las condiciones generativas de hacer la tierra habitable, podemos sin duda advertir que están pasando cosas ciertamente tenebrosas, pero existe un gran peligro de confundir el diagnóstico con la solución, sobre todo cuando no sabemos cómo podremos vivir y con quién.
Precisamente en ese momento de urgencia, necesitamos más que nunca una cultura experimental para repensar la ciudad. Con esta prevención de la solución técnica no quiero decir que no sean importantes innumerables arreglos infraestructurales como pavimentos porosos y reflectantes, espacios de sombra para protegernos del sol de justicia y del efecto isla de calor, o dejar sitio para que la vegetación autóctona se desarrolle o que los animales vuelvan a ocupar un lugar central en las ciudades. Sin lugar a dudas todo esto es central, pero necesitamos ir más allá.
En un momento así, necesitamos también abordar la vida social y cultural de muchos fenómenos atmosféricos y climáticos, como las sombras, sean estas ya existentes o diseñadas. En un presente acalorado, donde la capacidad de cobijarnos del sol abrasador es un bien mal repartido, revitalizar sus saberes y prácticas generativas quizá sea crucial para reaprender a vivir como seres terráqueos. Para ello, quizá necesitemos, un ‘Departamento de Umbrología’ en cada uno de nuestros territorios.
Este idea está inspirada en una propuesta desarrollada por el escritor Tim Horvath en su cuento corto The discipline of shadows, donde explora las complejas relaciones en un absurdo departamento universitario dedicado al estudio de la vida de las sombras, donde coexisten sin entenderse y generando muchas situaciones cómicas y de incomprensión supina físicos, dramaturgas del teatro de las sombras y filósofos platónicos.[16]
Sin embargo, en un momento absurdo como en el que nos encontramos, el taller es una invitación a co-crear y explorar cómo hacer existir un tipo de espacio inspirado por ese cuento, pero no como un departamento universitario. Más bien, tomando inspiración del trabajo de descripción e intervención artivista de colectivos como Los Angeles Urban Rangers[17]o los experimentos especulativos del Gabinete de Crisis de Ficciones Políticas,[18] quisiéramos imaginar un espacio de trabajo entregado al estudio de y la intervención en la vida urbana de las sombras: una umbrología que atienda tanto a los aspectos físicos y materiales como a las relaciones sociales y culturales.
Para hacerlo existir, a través de distintas actividades queremos entrenarnos a apreciar esta relación ambiental: dedicándonos al estudio etnográfico de las complejas relaciones entre el sol y los edificios, la calle o los árboles, así como el papel que distintos tipos de sombras pueden tener para distintas personas o colectivos y sus modos de sobrevivir al calor abrasador. Apelamos a la centralidad de la etnografía, como forma de indagar por la importancia que otorga al estudio de las prácticas, la sensorialidad y los modos de vida, porque creemos que necesitamos comenzar a entender estos fenómenos ambientales más allá de dos formas convencionales con que solemos hacerlos legibles y discutibles:[19]
Por un lado, las prácticas climatológicas y meteorológicas que ponen la temperatura y otras variables atmosféricas como la humedad en el centro, dejando en la sombra las dimensiones vividas o culturales, las formas de vida de las que surgen y las que hacen emerger, que permiten o dificultan distintos climas;
Por otro lado, las prácticas de legibilidad del espacio a vista de pájaro y en términos eucliedeanos, como hacen algunas plataformas digitales como ShadeMapo Shadowmapbasadas en sistemas de información geográfica como OpenStreetMap que, a través de la geolocalización, permiten simular en nuestros dispositivos la inclinación del sol y las sombras que proyecta el entorno urbano.
Pero quizá para estudiar cómo volver a hacer habitables nuestras ciudades ante un calor creciente, necesitemos también aprender a describir con muchos más matices, tanto simbólicos como efímeros, atendiendo a otros saberes y formas de articular los problemas la nueva terra ignota en que se han convertido nuestras ciudades: fabricando otras cartografías experimentales que, como en el trabajo de Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes y Axelle Grégoire Terra Forma, nos permitan traer a la centralidad nuestras implicaciones corporales en los climas urbanos que habitamos y la pluralidad de nuestras formas de habitarlos.[20]
La importancia del cuerpo vivido en la etnografía es central porque nos permite dejar de pensar las atmósferas o el clima y, más concretamente, el calor como res extensa: cosas externas desgajadas de nuestro hacer. Antes bien, como bien argumentan diferentes trabajos recientes en los ámbitos de la historia y los estudios sociales de la ciencia y la tecnología, el clima, las atmósferas y el calor son algo de lo que “participamos en su hacer”, por omisión y comisión, de formas más directas o más distantes, en nuestras prácticas cotidianas, encarnadas y mediadas por diferentes instrumentales técnicos, pero también por los modos en que consumimos y construimos ciudades o, dicho de otra manera, por las prácticas colectivas en las que estamos insertos: nuestra vestimenta, nuestros edificios, nuestros aparatos de aire acondicionado.[21]
Así, la sombra deja de ser un mero efecto natural y adquiere también propiedades culturales relacionales: porque no hay una sombra igual a otra y su singularidad depende de cómo la observemos, practiquemos e interroguemos. Esta sensibilidad me parece importante porque nos ayudaría a repoblar la sombra: no como la presentación en negativo de lo que se ve, algo vacío[22], sino como algo que posibilita y ha posibilitado la vida de muchos colectivos que buscan esconderse de la mirada cegadora de la luz, tanto del sol como del proyecto ilustrado.
La centralidad de la sombra como protectora de otras formas de vida resuena en el trabajo del pensador de la tradición radical negra caribeña Édouard Glissant, que en un contexto que todavía convive con la larga cola del esclavismo, defendió “el derecho a la opacidad” como condición de supervivencia para todas las formas de diferencia.[23] Pero también en el sentido más netamente ambiental del que habla el historiador de la arquitectura y activista de la discapacidad David Gissen.[24] Gissen defiende la necesidad de repensar las formas de urbanización desde muchas formas de vulnerabilidad corporal comúnmente apartadas de la centralidad del urbanismo –– las personas negras, mayores y la infancia, con enfermedades crónicas, diversas funcionales, etc. ––, por los considerables riesgos para la salud que el sol y el calor implican: como la de las personas mayores que sufren en silencio el “aislamiento fatal” de las olas de calor o la de la infinidad de cuerpos negros trabajan en exteriores, expuestos al calor y al sol abrasador.[25] Esto disputaría la centralidad del diseño del espacio público con sol abundante, haciendo crucial la sombra como principio de diseño urbano.
Pensando en los arreglos sociales y materiales de la sombra desde esta diversidad de cuerpos que la necesitan para su sostén cotidiano nos permite pensarla no sólo como “recurso cívico”, sino también como un “índice de desigualdad”: una infraestructura de la habitabilidad urbana central que debiera ser un mandato para los diseñadores urbanos, pero que aparece sometido a diferentes condiciones desiguales de acceso y negociación de la producción espacial, en la regulación de a quién se le permite que produzca o viva en la sombra y cómo, en diferentes contextos. [26]
Por tanto, partiendo de esa sensibilidad antropológica queremos: (i) trabajar en el diseño de pequeños materiales para realizar investigaciones de campo; y (ii) hacer un inventario de prácticas espaciales cotidianas, centrado en la relación que diferentes personas tienen con nuestras perpetuas compañeras como habitantes bajo el sol.[27] Experimentando y especulando con cómo poder hacer realidad diferentes Departamentos de Umbrología –– una confederación de entidades autónomas, singulares y auto-constituidas ––, queremos también liberar, imaginarnos y cultivar nuevas sensibilidades y responsabilidades urbanas sobre cómo hacer nuestras ciudades habitables.
Queremos hacernos responsables de describir, proteger y traer a la luz tenue muchos saberes y formas de inteligencia colectiva subterráneos que necesitan soportes opacos para florecer. Queremos, también, poner en discusión las múltiples necesidades de un gran número de actores singulares muchas veces desplazados de la centralidad urbana: no sólo quienes no pueden pagar la factura del aire acondicionado o quienes necesitan soportes para transformar sus viviendas y espacios de trabajo; hablamos, también, de quienes muchas veces no se contemplan como humanos o se nos aparecen como humanos de segunda, además de una gran cantidad de urbanitas no humanos en los que rara vez pensamos.
Para armar esta propuesta puede ser crucial poner a trabajar conjuntamente muy diferentes saberes, profesionales y colectivos, no sólo académicos ni institucionales, que tenemos la gran suerte de tener en esta sala. Esto nos permitirá, además de imaginar ese departamento que, esperemos, deje de ser una ficción de un cuento, hacer que esto ocurra a través de la generación de un proceso de intercambio mutuo y contaminaciones cruzadas.
Ante este reto, por tanto, necesitamos activamente volver a aprender a describir y dimensionar los problemas ante los que nos encontramos – también los problemas de las soluciones –, para así poder ensayar muchas propuestas para hacer posible la habitabilidad plural de nuestros entornos urbanos. Necesitamos, por tanto, cultivar la especulación urbana: ¡no la inmobiliaria! Me refiero a nuestra capacidad de pensar y repensar las muchas formas posibles que podría tener lo urbano para convertirlo de nuevo en habitable.
Explorando e inventando dispositivos de indagación urbana, bebiendo de sensibilidades y saberes de las artes, las humanidades y las ciencias queremos imaginar cómo equipar esos extraños profesionales de la umbrología, entre lo natural y lo cultural, con un interés particular por el análisis y la política de las sombras. Si tenemos éxito en estos experimentos sobre las formas en que entramos en contacto y describimos los mundos urbanos, haremos aparecer otra ciudad: la ciudad de las sombras, normalmente pasada por alto. Y nos entregaremos a entender su complejidad social, así como la multiplicidad de actores y ensamblajes que la constituyen; las formas de generar sombra, por parte de y para quiénes; así como las formas de socialidad que las sombras permiten como regiones o territorios:[28] atendiendo a sus temporalidades, sus ritmos y sus dramaturgias espaciales.
Ante la mutación climática que cambiará cómo viviremos en las ciudades, queremos, por tanto, contribuir a pensar otras formas posibles de habitabilidad urbana más allá de grandes soluciones de todo propósito y pensadas de forma tecnocrática. Es por ello que nuestra llamada a constituir departamentos de umbrología aparezca como un intento de abrir a reflexión colectiva los modos de respuesta urbana al cambio climático aprendiendo de un gran número de agentes urbanos: incentivando, estimulando y ayudando a sostener sus tejidos de saberes y prácticas en formas que bien pudieran exceder a las responsabilidades de las instituciones. Esa es la tarea de un ‘Departamento de Umbrología’ en nuestros territorios urbanos: salir de las sombras, para estudiar las sombras, trabajando “sobre las sombras, desde las sombras.”[29]
[3] Mi argumento bebe y se inspira profundamente en la obra del recientemente fallecido filósofo y antropólogo francés Bruno Latour y muchos de sus colaboradores. En su trabajo de la última década hay una noción central: “Nuevo Régimen Climático”, que remite a los problemas a los que nos ha arrojado un modo de vida particular, la producción y su dependencia de las energías fósiles. Un régimen destructivo que ha transformado nuestros entornos, moldeado nuestros saberes e instituciones políticas durante más de un siglo, poniendo en riesgo la habitabilidad del planeta. Al mismo tiempo, esta caracterización sugiere la posibilidad de su transformación, de un antiguo a un nuevo régimen: lo que supone la búsqueda de otros horizontes de sentido para engendrar formas plurales de habitabilidad en un momento francamente complejo y problemático, sin garantías. Para una introducción, véase Latour, B. (2017). Cara a cara con el planeta. Una nueva mirada sobre el cambio climático alejada de las posiciones apocalípticas. Siglo XXI.
[4] Para una mirada atenta a la pluralidad elemental de prácticas humanas y no humanas, o a la paradoja escalar de las múltiples configuraciones espaciales, corporales, temporales, histórico-culturales de nuestra omnipresente relación con el sol y la disipación de sus rayos o lo que pudiéramos llamar “solaridades” –– desde las formas infraestructurales vinculadas a la transición energética fotovoltaica a aquellas formas relacionadas con la catástrofe antropógena de la carbonificación de la atmósfera (donde el sol aparece como “the source of all withering and desiccation, a maker of monstrous heat”, p.18), por no olvidar de la centralidad planetaria de la fotosíntesis o los ciclos diurnos, o de su efecto en la producción de energías fósiles, por no hablar de nuestros sistemas de percepción visual –– véase la compilación de Howe, C., Diamanti, J., & Moore, A. (Eds.). (2023). Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions. punctum books.
[5] El intento más detallado de restituir la centralidad de la sombra del que tengo conocimiento es el de Casati, R. (2003). Shadows. Unlocking their secrets from Plato to our time. Vintage Books.
[6] Martin, A. J. (2017). The Evolution Underground: Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean World Beneath our Feet. Pegasus Books.
[8]Albert, B., Halle, F., & Mancuso, S. (2019). Trees. Thames & Hudson; Coccia, E. (2017). La vida de las plantas: Una metafísica de la mixtura. Tipos Infames; Coccia, E. (2021). Metamorfosis. La fascinante continuidad de la vida. Siruela; Leonardi, C., & Stagi, F. (2022). La arquitectura de los árboles. Santa & Cole; Mattern, S. (2021). Tree Thinking. Places Journal, https://doi.org/10.22269/210921
[10] Kite, S. (2017: 5). Shadow-makers: A cultural history of shadows in architecture. Bloomsbury Academic.
[11] Ludovico, M., Attilio, P. & Ettore, V. (Eds.) (2009). The Mediterranean Medina. Gangemi Editore.
[12] Turner, C. (Ed.) (2024). Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence. V&A Publishing.
[13] Kallipoliti, L. (2024). Histories of Ecological Design: An Unfinished Cyclopedia. Actar.
[14] Latour, B., & Weibel, P. (Eds.). (2020). Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth. ZKM / MIT Press
[15] Latour, B. (2019). Dónde aterrizar. Cómo orientarse en política. Taurus; Latour, B. (2021). ¿Dónde estoy? Una guía para habitar el planeta. Taurus.
[16] Horvath, T. (2009). The Discipline of Shadows. Conjunctions, 53, 293-311.
[17] Bauch, N., & Scott, E. E. (2012). The Los Angeles Urban Rangers: Actualizing Geographic Thought. Cultural Geographies, 19(3), 401-409; Kanouse, S. (2015). Critical Day Trips: Tourism and Land-Based Practice. In E. E. Scott & K. Swenson (2015). Critical landscapes: Art, space, politics (pp. 43-56). University of California Press.
[19] Hepach, M.G. & Lüder, C. (2023). Sensing Weather and Climate: Phenomenological and Ethnographic Approaches. Environment and Planning F 2 (3): 350–68.
[20] Aït-Touati, F., Arènes, A., & Grégoire, A. (2019). Terra Forma: Manuel de cartographies potentielles. Éditions B42.
[21] Calvillo, N. (2023). Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds. Columbia Books on Architecture and the City; Fressoz, J.-B., & Locher, F. (2024). Chaos in the Heavens: The Forgotten History of Climate Change. Verso Books; Hsu, H. L. (2024). Air Conditioning. Bloomsbury; Parikka, J., & Dragona, D. (Eds.). (2024). Palabras de tiempo y del clima: Un glosario. Bartlebooth; Starosielski, N. (2021). Media Hot & Cold. Duke University Press.
[22] De la misma manera que los desiertos tampoco están vacíos, representación colonial comúnmente asociada a la justificación de formas de explotación salvaje de tierras áridas: Henni, S. (Ed.) (2022). Deserts Are Not Empty. Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
[23] Glissant, É. (2017). Por la opacidad. En Poéticas de la relación (pp.219-224). Universidad Nacional de Quilmes.
[24] Gissen, D. (2022). Disabling Environments. In The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access (pp. 95-114). Minnesota University Press.
[25] Keller, R. C. (2015). Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003. University of Chicago Press; Macktoom, S., Anwar, N.H., & Cross, J. (2023). Hot climates in urban South Asia: Negotiating the right to and the politics of shade at the everyday scale in Karachi. Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980231195204
[26] Bloch, S. (2019). Shade: An Urban Design Mandate. Places Journal, https://doi.org/10.22269/190423; Macktoom, S., Anwar, N. H., & Cross, J. (2023). Hot climates in urban South Asia: Negotiating the right to and the politics of shade at the everyday scale in Karachi. Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980231195204
[27] Para un ejemplo interesante, véase Boserman, C. (2023). Dibujos solares: Los caballos de espinacas Sobre antotipias y afectividad ambiental / Solar Drawings: On anthotypies and environmental affectivity. Re-visiones,13. http://www.re-visiones.net/index.php/RE-VISIONES/article/view/529
[28] En el rico sentido etológico explorado por Despret, V. (2022). Habitar como un pájaro: Modos de hacer y de pensar los territorios. Cactus. Una propuesta que rompe con la idea del territorio como algo que pueda explicarse bien en términos funcionales y económicos o en términos de propiedad, posesión y recursos explotables, reivindicando más bien la necesidad de describirlo desde las múltiples prácticas del habitar que lo constituyen y las artes de la convivencia que hacen posible.
Esta idea es desarrollada por Latour, B. (2021: 90). ¿Dónde estoy? Una guía para habitar el planeta. Taurus, para proponer una cartografía de los territorios diferente de las ideas de “sangre y suelo” que han fundamentado los tradicionalismos y nacionalismos europeos. Esto es crucial, en sus palabras, para orientarse en el Nuevo Régimen Climático, que requiere comprender de “dónde vivimos” a la vez que “de qué vivimos” listando nuestras afiliaciones.
