Ahir vaig tenir l’oportunitat de debatre a Bàsics de Betevé amb la Sònia Hernández-Montaño – coordinadora d’arquitectura i salut del Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya – sobre els reptes urbans de la calor extrema i com reaprendre a viure a les ciutats d’avui posant l’ombra al centre
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Barcelona té prou ombra? “Durant 200 anys l’urbanisme europeu s’ha obert al sol, ara és un problema”
Analitzem al ‘bàsics’ com es poden adaptar les ciutats a aquesta nova realitat des dels punts de vista urbanístic, arquitectònic i social
En marxa el pla de Barcelona per ampliar els espais d’ombra a la ciutat. L’objectiu és plantar més de 9.000 arbres d’ara al 2026 i també instal·lar 194 estructures i tendals per mitigar el sol i la calor. Es tracta d’una iniciativa que s’emmarca dins el Pla clima, pensat per atenuar els efectes del canvi climàtic a la ciutat.
Com es poden adaptar les ciutats a aquesta nova realitat des dels punts de vista urbanístic, arquitectònic i social? En una entrevista al bàsicsSònia Hernández-Montaño, coordinadora d’arquitectura i salut del Col·legi d’Arquitectes de Catalunya, considera que els tendals són infraestructures d’emergència però que “a llarg termini s’ha d’anar a la implementació de verd per tot l’avantatge que té i no només la generació d’ombra”.
L’investigador del grup CareNet de la UOC, Tomàs Criado, alerta que “estem en un moment d’emergència o fins i tot mutació climàtica”. Recorda que “en els darrers 200 anys l’urbanisme europeu s’ha obert cap al sol i ara ens trobem amb un problema. Hem de canviar la manera de com ser un habitant urbà”.
Per Criado, les ombres a més de protegir del sol i la calor, “fan la ciutat més inclusiva, sota l’ombra hi ha infants, gent gran…”. Per l’investigador, aquestes persones “haurien de reclamar la seva sobirania de les ombres i generar les que cadascú necessiti”.
Què fan altres ciutats per mitigar els efectes del canvi climàtic?
Altres ciutats del món també es preparen per a les altes temperatures, la calor i el sol i, més enllà dels arbres, proposen solucions per mitigar els efectes de l’escalfament. Alguns exemples els trobem a Sevilla i Màlaga, amb tendals als carrers, les illes de frescor de París, un joc d’ombres a Phoenix, vaporitzadors als carrers de Tòquio, el túnel de paraigües de Doha i les dunes i un oasi urbà a Abu Dhabi.
The book features the work of many researchers who have been for a very long time a great inspiration to think of care and care practices in STS and beyond. As the editors position the book, this is:
An original essay collection that explores the generative dimensions of fragility, which can help reveal new life-affirming politics and ethics.
At a time when it may be easy to fall into a defeatist melancholia, if not outright pessimism, fragility offers an opportunity for a different kind of world-making. In Fragilities, Fernando Domínguez Rubio, Jérôme Denis, and David Pontille argue that we need to pay attention to the moments when the bodies, things, and worlds we inhabit begin to crack and reveal their fragility; it is in these instabilities that we can gain precious access to alternative ways of being. The essays in this collection explore how the work of care, maintenance, and repair compose with, rather than struggle against, fragilities.
Fragility forces us to reckon with the precariousness and contingency of life and to use this reckoning as a starting point to build and nurture life-affirming politics and ethics. The book explores fragility in four categories—bodies, environments, labor, and politics—and proposes to consider in each situation what/who is rendered visible, what/who is made absent, what is considered normal, and what is deemed strong and stable versus what is deemed fragile. The volume includes a strong line-up of leading and emerging scholars from a wide array of disciplines, including anthropology, social studies of science, disabilities studies, and sociology.
As the editors powerfully discuss in the conclusions, ‘fragility’ might operate less as a closed analytic and more as a ‘sensitising device’, a provocation of whose effects we need to take care of when deploying it in our analyses:
“No object or living being is fragile in itself. What matters is when, why, and by whom it is considered and treated as fragile: through which mode of attention, by which gestures and instruments, according to which collectives, in which situation, and among which interdependencies.” (p. 253)
“Resisting reductionism and cultivating discomfort are two crucial perceptual, affective, and conceptual operations that thinking with fragility helps to carry out. Thus, as a situated, relational, and ambiguous concept, fragility allows us to “stay with the trouble” …It is as much sensitizing and provocative as it is troubling. This dimension of what fragility does is particularly important when the concept is associated with repair, maintenance, and care, as it is in this collection. There is, indeed, a serious risk of romanticizing these practices as if they were intrinsically good and fair … care needs to be unsettled in order to escape reification and conservatism” (p.259)
“As troubling as it may be, thinking with fragility does not lead to paralysis or infinite oscillations. On the contrary, it unfolds the present and its openness and allows us to connect aspects of the past with possible futures that call for action.” (p.260)
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The book has just appeared not just as a paperback but, as a fully open access e-book, downloadable here.
Thanks for putting this together Fernando, Jerôme and David, what a treat!
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Our contribution, written at the height of the pandemic, reflected on our fieldwork projects: Vincent’s on MOS@N, a mobile health (mHealth) initiative implemented in Nouna, rural Burkina Faso, and myself’s on the do- it- yourself (DIY) collective En torno a la silla in Barcelona, Spain. Here you have it.
Care in Fragments: Ecologies of Support Beyond Repair
Writing almost two years into a global pandemic response gone wild (ripe with vaccine colonialism, securitarian nationalism, and blatantly unequal exposure to the virus), with public infrastructures in shambles, amid the splintering effects of decades of neoliberal policies and centuries- long settler and white supremacist vio lence, it seems pretty safe to suggest that care is falling to pieces. Care, a series of practices by which life is supported and made to thrive, is in fragments. When dealing with such a state of affairs, care thinking can become complicit with a tendency to subsume care, and indeed the organization of collective life, under a project of repair understood narrowly as a mere recovery of lost function.
But what if taking care beyond repair entailed attending to fragmented lives without any hope of return to a lost unity or to a retrieved “normality”? Even in fragments, care demands to be defended— perhaps, even, especially in fragments. The often disempowering or weakening effects of fragmentation are well documented. In this chapter, however, we examine how fragmentation may also give rise to, intensify, and pluralize the relations that hold and support lives— precariously composing what we call “ecologies of support”. By exploring fragments and their afterlives, we aim to contribute to thinking about fragility not merely in the negative form of a loss, as the notions of ruins, degradation, or decay tend to pose. Rather than drawing from the reparative and restorative approaches that often haunt maintenance and repair studies, this chapter focuses on the endurance of fragments and how they may multiply and unfold in unexpected ways.
[ES] El urbanismo de la modernidad puso al Sol en el centro. Pero los peligros de su exposición excesiva, agravados por la crisis climática, exigen repensar la arquitectura y el espacio público desde la sombra.
[CAT] L’urbanisme de la modernitat va posar el Sol al centre. Però els perills d’exposar-s’hi excessivament, agreujats per la crisi climàtica, imposen repensar l’arquitectura i l’espai públic des de l’ombra.
[EN] The urban architecture of modernity placed the Sun centre stage. But the dangers of over-exposure to the Sun’s rays, aggravated by the climate crisis, are forcing us to rethink public spaces and architecture from the perspective of shade.
¿Qué capacidad tienen las comunidades para gestionar sus recursos, enfrentar la crisis ecológica e imaginar alternativas futuras? ¿Qué formas de reconsiderar las relaciones con el ambiente, la naturaleza y otros seres podemos encontrar? ¿Qué rol pueden jugar el arte contemporáneo y los procesos de participación pública para vislumbrar y movilizar deseos hacia la transformación social
Agenciamientos ecológicos reúne ensayos, experiencias y propuestas para rearticular la relaciones entre comunidades, territorios y futuros viables a través de procesos artísticos. Busca reconocer, en diferentes territorios y geografías, prácticas, léxicos y discursos que ponen de manifiesto la agencia de las comunidades en procesos de autogobierno, poner en cuestión las visiones heredadas en la concepción de lo que nos rodea y la capacidad del arte contemporáneo y la participación comunitaria para catalizar nuevos relatos y narrativas con los que enfrentar la crisis de imaginación ante un futuro climático incierto.
Con textos de Elisa Aaltola, Christian Alonso, Natalia Balseiro, Graham Bell Tornado, Marisol de la Cadena, Concomitentes, Katalin Erdődi, Alfredo Escapa, Brais Estévez Vilariño, Llorián García Flórez, Yayo Herrero, Michael Marder, Tomás Sánchez Criado, Antje Schiffers y Fran Quiroga
Gracias a su amable invitación a colaborar en la propuesta, Brais Estévez Vilariño y yo participamos del volumen con el siguiente capítulo:
La crisis de las crisálidas. Reactivar la política en el fin del mundo
Hace ya más de diez años, la inestabilidad, la falta de horizonte, la ruptura de sentido o, dicho de otro modo, la falta de suelo o su desahucio precipitó intentos y tentativas generativas de salir al encuentro del otro. Esa fuga permitió elaborar en común lo que nos pasaba con relación a la crisis que bloqueaba nuestras vidas desde 2008. Sin embargo, hoy, esa falta de suelo común nos sitúa en un vacío del que nos defendemos desde el yo, a donde parecemos habernos desterrado. Entre los impasses de la época y la desorientación generalizada ante un mundo que nos desafía con un sinfín de amenazas y horizontes apocalípticos, se extienden el malestar y la angustia. La angustia es un afecto que pasa por el cuerpo, pero quizá convenga pensarlo como señal de un momento inquietante. Aunque muchas veces no resulte sencillo discernir el origen de la angustia, en este texto queremos tantear una genealogía posible del malestar de la época y sus efectos políticos paralizantes. Para ello, provocaremos un encuentro entre la teoría psicoanalítica y el pensamiento ecológico de Bruno Latour e Isabelle Stengers.
Gracias a la amable invitación de 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.
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 the pedagogy of participatory design from plural embodied experiences, in this case searching to learn to be affected by neurodiverse spatial practice.
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
