Thanks to the wonderful invitation by Alice-Sophie Sarcinelli (CERLIS) and Cristiana Giordano (University of California Davis).
On November 4, I will be in Paris to present Putting solar urbanism in suspension. The right to shade as a terrestrial legal uprising as part of the research seminar Anthropologie des institutions au prisme des pratiques ethnographiques créatives, developed in the framework of the Art-e-Fact project (Artistic Approaches to Ethnographic Facts on Institutions), which explores how creative ethnographic practices can revitalize the anthropology of institutions.
The session will take place from 13:30 to 15:30 in the Salle Margaret Maruani (45, rue des Saints-Pères, 75006 Paris), organized by Université Paris Cité / CERLIS.
The event is open to external colleagues upon registration. If you wish to attend, please email alice.sarcinelli AT u-pariscite.fr
Here you have the details of my talk:
Putting solar urbanism in suspension. The right to shade as a terrestrial legal uprising
Cities globally have revitalised shade to adapt to rising temperatures and heat island effects. Since 2023, the metropolitan area of Barcelona has become one such experimental arenas, unfolding an ambitious climate action plan. Beyond planetary CO2 concentrations, urban heat points directly to the hard-surface public spaces that Barcelona developed into a world-renown model of Mediterranean public space design: turning the city into an ‘infrastructural sarcophagus’ where trees cannot easily be planted. Current municipal actions attempt to tackle this Euro-American ‘solar urbanism’ through standardised artificial awnings.
Attempting to go beyond a physicalist understanding of heat adaptation and its associated technocratic governmentality, since 2024 I co-curate a para-ethnographic space of collective inquiry: The Department of Umbrology, a speculative institution studying and intervening in the urban life of shades. Working in a transdisciplinary team—including UOC’s CareNet anthropologists and sociologists and DARTS’s digital art researchers, Arquitectura de Contacte’s architectural practitioners, Nusos’ environmental scientists, and Laboratorio de Pensamiento Lúdico’s speculative artists—our inquiries explore urban shades not just as the absence of light, but as generative, speculative atmospheres of care where alternative ways of inhabiting the city with their aesthetic vernaculars, urban symbolisms and cultural solidarities are forged.
Inspired by the ‘terrestrial legal uprisings’ of Camille de Toledo’s Parlement de Loire and The international of rivers––exploring how to grant rights to infrastructural ecologies and territories––, we have prototyped nomadic architectural shade infrastructures to host what we call ‘disputations in the shade:’ solar-protected street parliaments where to discuss umbrological grievances and a potential municipal law for the right to shade. These open temporary democratic spaces where residents, professionals, and local collectives reclaim their popular climatic sovereignty and that of companion species to terraform their surroundings for wider urban planetary habitability: a hands-on approach to put solar urbanism in suspension?