El próximo 6 de noviembre de 2026 participaré en la jornada, presencial y en línea, La irrupción del refugio climático: la protección climática como condición de la habitabilidad en el Antropoceno.
En un contexto de creciente inestabilidad climática, los refugios climáticos se están convirtiendo en una figura central de las políticas urbanas de adaptación. Pero al mismo tiempo que se formulan sus funciones como dispositivo de protección frente al calor extremo, ¿qué posibilidades abren para reinventar colectivamente nuestras formas de habitar y protegernos en un mundo cada vez más incierto? ¿Qué promesas, deseos y límites acompañan su rápida expansión?
La jornada reunirá a investigadoras, investigadores y profesionales de diferentes instituciones para explorar estas cuestiones y reflexionar sobre las posibilidades que abren los refugios climáticos como espacios de experimentación colectiva, acción climática y profundización democrática.
El evento se celebrará en la Facultade de Ciencias Políticas de la Universidade de Santiago de Compostela y contará con un formato híbrido, permitiendo la asistencia tanto presencial como en línea. Quienes deseen asistir pueden inscribirse a través del formulario habilitado.
En este encuentro, presentaré mi ponencia titulada Refugios de la especulación colectiva: Cómo reclamar la soberanía climática popular, donde hablaré de algunas de las reflexiones a las que venimos dando forma en el Departamento de Umbrología.
Quiero agradecer muy especialmente a Brais Estévez y Julia Hidalgo por su amable invitación a formar parte, aunque sea a distancia, de este espacio de diálogo y reflexión.
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?
Planning Miseducation is a book full of intentions and intensities. It is an intervention against dissatisfaction with how urban design and planning have been taught. If you ever imagine teaching and learning planning and design for cities differently, rather than mere repetition without making a difference, this book is for you. If you believe that planning and design are about making spaces of hope, for a city yet to come, this book is also for you. It is a reference for those who are keen to stop the bad education, to relearn the urban expertises from informal, street-related knowledges, and to take the risk of planning and organising the positive miseducation of future planners and designers.
Contributors: Geetika Anand, Antonio Bernacchi, Tomás Criado, Rendy Diningrat, Federica Duca, Enrique Espinosa Sánchez, Adolfo Estalella, Ignacio Farías, Verónica Francés, Ester Gisbert, Rupali Gupte, Mennatullah Hendawy, Gilly Karjevsky, José Laulhé, Alicia Lazzaroni, Mark Lemanski, Pablo Llobera, Ana López Ortego, Veljko Markovic, Candela Morado, Enrique Nieto, Manuel Pascual, Alberto Peralta, Camilo Pinto AKA Casi Nadie, Indrawan Prabaharyaka, La Escuela Nunca y los Otros Futuros (Ignacio Rivas, Leandro Cappetto and Eloise Maltby Maland), Poonam Prakash, Nahuel Quiroga, Prasad Shetty, Jörg Stollmann, Fotini Takirdiki, Rosario Talevi, Kemal Taruc, Raúl Urquiaga and Bohdan Volynskyi.
In my contribution I wish to imagine a practice of weird urban study where to miseducate planners to engage in:
A School for the Urban Pluriverse: Learning to Inquire on the Many Ways of Inhabiting
The peculiar Euro-American way of living has come to be premised on highly infrastructured urban landscapes, of variegated kinds. Once considered the pinnacle of modernity, these settlements have had an unmitigated role in unfolding human-centric modes of inhabiting, with disastrous planetary effects: the anthropogenic environmental devastation some call the “urban Anthropocene”. In this disorienting moment, which calls into question how the Moderns have inhabited planet Earth and what they took for granted, might require urban experts and regular urbanites to re-learn what urban habitation might mean from many other urban actors. The current predicaments suggest the need for new learning spaces: not secluded institutions where to be instructed in what must be known; rather, porous sites devoted to making the plural conditions of urban habitability thinkable and liveable as a problem not yet fully known, that is, as a ‘pluriverse’. This notion, cultivated by pragmatist thinkers, has been reinvigorated by a decolonial urban agenda suggesting there are many different and uncommon ways of living beyond the modern ‘one-world world’ worth exploring. Following these lines of insight, this text is a manifesto for A School for the Urban Pluriverse: a space where different urbanites, including urban experts with their technical knowledges, might get acquainted or ‘sensitise’ themselves to the needs of these times of change. Such an experimental pedagogical impulse would demand searching for inspiration in those forms of living — human or other than human — crushed by modern ways of infrastructural inhabitation. Perhaps there are no better guides, no better ways to proceed than to inquire into what it might mean to inhabit together with the many others left behind by the modern urban project. Put otherwise,working with manifold urban actors and thinking collectively about what to do with existing modern infrastructure might invite us to imagine a school where to re-learn what urban inhabiting might mean today.
As part of the first international conference organized by STS-CAT on 3rd-5th February, 2027 titled “STS Encounters in the Mediterranean”, Pablo Alonso, Alejandro Limpo and myself will be hosting a panel called Devicing Ecologies: How to Care for the Mediterranean Anthropocene? (see more info below)
Panel 11: Devicing Ecologies: How to Care for the Mediterranean Anthropocene?
Convenors: Tomás Criado, Pablo Alonso García, Alejandro Limpo
Modernity transformed the world into a site of intensive exploration and exploitation, rendering the atmosphere, oceans, and the complex infrastructural networks we inhabit into mere backdrops for human political and cultural life. In the Anthropocene, however, these landscapes have erupted as active, unpredictable agents. Nowhere is this more palpable than in the Mediterranean basin. Once conceptualized as the Mare Nostrum—a structured space of human transit and trade—the contemporary Mediterranean sea and its encompassing landscapes are rapidly mutating into a Mare Monstrum: a volatile, feral geography where socio-ecological «monsters» emerge. From severe urban and marine heatwaves to toxic atmospheric suspensions, mega-fires, and anthropogenically altered water bodies, these phenomena disrupt inherited political, cultural, and epistemic institutions. They demand not only new bestiaries to map them but also experimental, collective practices to learn how to become with and care for them.
This panel proposes to confront this challenge by introducing and testing the conceptual framework of “devicing ecologies.” Drawing inspiration from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and the expanded notion of mediation developed by Environmental and Elemental Media Studies, we approach a conversation around the study and practice of specific techniques, arrangements, and material operations that actively articulate, sustain, and render sensible troubled landscapes, or what we wish to call “devicing ecologies.” Moving beyond generic environmental discourses, devicing ecologies emphasizes the situated, technical, and artistic / creative processes through which particular landscapes are both made palpable and ecologically viable. It underscores a double meaning: analyzing the material infrastructures that make ecologies legible, while actively devising new practices to render them habitable for different beings.
We invite a variety of empirical and conceptual takes on creative interventions that explore how diverse communities and collectives are devicing ecologies to inhabit, map, and care for the Mediterranean Anthropocene otherwise. We welcome papers addressing, but not limited to:
Localized responses to extreme heat.
Practices for living with flooding and urban stormwater infrastructures.
Everyday coexistence with toxic micro-particles and atmospheric suspensions.
Responses to environmental warfare, genocide / ecocide.
Community preparedness and practices surrounding mega-fires.
Collective responses to sacrifice zones or the effects of areas of industrial activity.
Initiatives engaging with anthropogenically altered bodies of water.
Multispecies reconfigurations of social life beyond human language.
By centering these as forms of “devicing ecologies”, this panel aims to foster a shared inquiry into the epistemic and political mediations and dispositions required to care for Anthropocene landscapes. More concretely, we ask: How can we inhabit the irreducible plurality of the Mediterranean region and landscapes while taking material responsibility of vital mediations that could continue rendering them inhabitable, therefore, not only ours but of many others.
La umbrología, la nueva ciencia que apuesta por el derecho a la sombra en las ciudades
Con los termómetros marcando cifras no vistas hasta ahora, hace falta proteger los sitios de paso para que los entornos urbanos sean más habitables
Con la que está cayendo, con medio París enganchando en las ventanas papel de aluminio como si fueran persianas y el otro medio utilizando tiza blanca (blanco de Meudon) mezclada con agua para pintar el exterior de los cristales y que la pasta refleje los rayos solares e impida que el calor penetre en las viviendas, está claro que la sombra cotiza al alza. Por suerte, el Departamento de Umbrología, un consorcio formado por varios colectivos, ha redactado una Ordenanza por el Derecho Urbano a la Sombra (Detrumb, un manifiesto todavía en curso) donde se apuesta por desplegar sombras protectoras en los espacios públicos con la premisa de que ellas también construyen ciudad, producen confort y generan nuevas maneras de habitar para muchos seres, humanos y no humanos.
Marc Sureda, socio trabajador de la cooperativa Arquitectura de Contacte, explica: “Tenemos muchas referencias de cómo no hay que hacer las cosas, lo que llamamos urbanismo solar, proyectos basados en suelos no permeables y uso de materiales que favorecen el efecto isla de calor, siempre al servicio del vehículo motorizado y la especulación inmobiliaria”.
Todo empezó con el proyecto A la Sombra del Trencadís, una intervención pionera en la Rambla de Sants en Barcelona, frente a la Escola Cavall Bernat, un espacio que era inhóspito y peligroso para la salud y que hoy se ha convertido en un lugar de encuentro donde se celebran cumpleaños, juegan los niños y la gente puede permanecer durante la tarde y la noche. El proyecto, un sistema de sombreado a partir de una estructura formada por módulos de madera de pino capaces de agregar una gran malla, una solución ligera, descarbonizada y reversible, ganó el concurso Generación de Sombra Efímera en el Espacio Público, convocado por el Ayuntamiento de Barcelona y BIT Habitat.
Tomás Criado, antropólogo del grupo CareNet e implicado en el proyecto, habla de explorar “la ciudad de las sombras”, es decir, la umbrología como ciencia de las sombras aplicada al combate del calor urbano. Raquel Estany, arquitecta de Arquitectura de Contacte, lo argumenta: “Durante demasiado tiempo la arquitectura y el urbanismo han proyectado ciudades como si pudieran emanciparse de las condiciones ecológicas que sostienen la vida, y la crisis climática revela los límites de ese paradigma en un contexto de aumento de temperaturas debido al consumo desmedido de energías fósiles”.
Raquel Estany recuerda que Marraquech o Rabat tienen cubiertos los zocos con estructuras de sombra “protegiendo no solo espacios de estancia y de relación puntual, sino también recorridos diarios”. El de Marraquech data de 1071. Por su parte, Tomás Criado reivindica los proyectos del arquitecto Francis Kéré en Burkina Faso y de la arquitecta Nzinga Mboup en Senegal.
El nombre de Departamento de Umbrología está inspirado en el relato La disciplina de las sombras, de Tim Horvath. El manifiesto nace de un proyecto transdisciplinar y dice: “Nunca fuimos solares, nuestra vida en la tierra podría ser leída como una larga historia interespecies sobre cómo los seres vivos han aprendido a protegerse de su radiación”.
Su propuesta supone un cambio de paradigma: dejar de pensar la sombra como el simple negativo de la luz y empezar a entenderla como una auténtica infraestructura de habitabilidad en un contexto de crisis climática.
Estiu rere estiu, batem rècords. Per què les nostres ciutats s’han convertit en trampes de calor? El disseny urbà actual està pensat per al passat, no per a l’emergència climàtica. Podem adaptar-nos-hi abans no sigui massa tard?
A la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya avui estrenem “Preguntes obertes: Les nostres ciutats estan preparades per la calor extrema?”
Parlo com a un dels tres experts del Centre de Recerca Interdisciplinari en Transformacions Socials i Culturals (UOC-TRÀNSIC) – l’Irra Rodríguez-Giralt, la Isabel Ruiz Mallén i jo mateix – que compartim tres projectes que es fixen en el disseny de les ciutats, els patis escolars i els seus entorns de ciment o la prevenció d’uns incendis cada cop més propers a les àrees urbanes.
Des de les ciències socials i les humanitats també es dona resposta als reptes d’avui!
As part our contributions to the ASA2022: Anthropology Educates online conference (14 March to 7 November 2022), with my long-time colleagues Ester Gisbert and Enrique Nieto, we wrote a chapter contribution on our anthropological explorations of architectural education.
Learning and education are fundamental to human experience – yet they have often been side-lined in anthropological inquiry. Educating Otherwise brings these questions to the centre, exploring what anthropology can reveal about how people learn, and what learning reveals about anthropology itself. Spanning formats ranging from short essays to ethnographic fiction, the volume is organised around five themes: anthropology as education, decolonising the academy?, student-academic collaborations, anthropology and the university, and anthropology across disciplines. Together, these examine how anthropological education can perpetuate exclusion and privilege while also offering vivid, grounded accounts of more regenerative ways of teaching and learning.
Here is our contribution:
Mutual Intraventions: Anthropology and/as Architecture, and the Other Way Round
In recent years, both independently and in a series of teaching collaborations, we have been exploring what architecture and anthropology can learn from one another. Whereas for anthropologists, architecture could inspire a more materially grounded, compositionist, and interventionist approach, anthropology’s emphasis on processual and relational inquiry, together with the conceptual vocabularies and borrowings from more-than-human, multispecies and new materialist thought, might also help us to rethink architectural practice. In this chapter we wish to discuss the ‘conceptual travails’ – or, as we will call them, the ‘mutual intraventions’ – we have been undertaking over the last eight years.
The whole seminar was also recorded, and here’s the video of my talk:
The possible city: On dismantling Infrastructure to make Interstice habitable for all life forms
Although the genealogy of the term ‘public space’ is relatively recent, its material form has deeper roots and can be read as part of what could be called a modern Euro-American mode of building cities. Drawing from Egin Isin’s work public space can be read as part of a genealogy of the city as a ‘machine of difference,’ laying out distinct figures of citizenship, founded on an analysis of their alterities. Here, I offer an update to Isin’s typology in the form of a ‘tale of two cities,’ one attempting to make it face the conditions of our urban present. The first I will call Infrastructure, the existent city at the end of the modern world: one that divides, spatializes, and segregates bodies and beings according to notions of hygiene and modernist governmentality. I exemplify through the historical treatment of pavements, rats, dogs and trees, as well as disabled people. I argue that this form of urban infrastructuration offers nothing more than a ‘conditional inclusion’ to humancentric welfare. The focus on devising infrastructural solutions (hard surfaces or similar brutal forms of urban emplacement) has contributed to new forms of othering, exposing a wide plurality of urban bodies to uninhabitable milieus, further eroding the welcoming and gathering functions of public space. The second city it’s called Interstice: the possible city yet to come, sadly visible because of as well as subjugated by Infrastructure. Intervening in this domain of infrastructural solutionism, I foreground activist, artistic and pedagogical projects where multispecies urban landscapes appear less as an infrastructure and more as interstices of urban habitability: where different forms of coexistence between human and non-human bodies can be explored and supported.
How to cite: Criado, T. (29 April 2026). The possible city: On dismantling Infrastructure to make Interstice habitable for all life form International seminar Interspecies City, CCCB, Barcelona. https://hdl.handle.net/10609/155182
Por la intermediación de los comisarios web de La Casa de la Arquitectura––Bartlebooth (Antonio Giráldez López y Pablo Ibáñez Ferrera) y Diego Morera Sánchez, a quienes agradecemos su atención y amabilidad––hace unos meses tuvimos el enorme privilegio de poder presentar nuestro trabajo en el Departamento de Umbrología en una conversación que acaba de ver la luz.
En la misma participamos: Tomás Criado (CareNet, UOC), Marc Sureda (Arquitectura de Contacte) y Antonio R. Montesinos (Laboratorio de Pensamiento Lúdico).
En ella presentamos el Departamento de Umbrología, una institución ficticia de estudio e intervención sobre la vida urbana de las sombras, cuyo principal objetivo es revitalizar los saberes y prácticas de las sombras para la habitabilidad de las ciudades en contextos de crisis climática.
Trabajando «en las sombras, sobre la sombra», el Departamento de Umbrología es un proyecto transdisciplinar financiado por la Fundación Daniel y Nina Carasso que articula a cuatro socios de la ciudad de Barcelona en la encrucijada de las humanidades, la arquitectura, las artes y las ciencias ambientales: los grupos CareNet y DARTS de la UOC, el colectivo Arquitectura de Contacte, las ambientólogas y divulgadoras científicas de Nusos Coop y los artistas especulativos del Laboratorio de Pensamiento Lúdico.
El proper dimecres 15 d’abril a les 12:30 presentaré al Seminari permanent del Departament d’Antropologia Social de la UB, en debat amb Roger Sansi (UB).
On: Laboratori d’Antropologia (Planta 1) Facultat de Geografia i Història, UB.
Activitat oberta fins a completar aforament
Temptejant la foscor: Indagacions col·lectives sobre el futur de l’habitabilitat urbana
La calor extrema i altres mutacions climàtiques actuals han abocat les ciutats del present a la major crisi de disseny a la qual s’han enfrontat en els últims segles. Aquesta transformació i els graus efectes de desigualtat que comporta, desafien radicalment les nostres concepcions culturals de l’habitabilitat urbana i exigeixen una transformació profunda de les nostres institucions conceptuals i polítiques. Quin hauria de ser el paper de les humanitats en aquest context? El meu treball recent s’ha centrat a revertir la tendència comuna en aquest context urbanístic a buscar solucions ràpides per part de professionals molt ben preparats, però amb pràctiques profundament tecnocràtiques. Això planteja una qüestió crucial en un context d’urgència: Com podem prendre’s seriosament la necessitat d’un pensament col·lectiu sobre els efectes de la mutació climàtica en curs, en un context de rapidesa on pensar es fa equivaler a ralentir els processos de presa de decisions? Com podem abordar i afectar la configuració futura de l’espai urbà sense imposar una única visió, i considerant la multiplicitat de formes de vida (humanes i no humanes) que hi coexisteixen? En un context com aquest, necessitem reivindicar la rellevància de l’experimentació i els temptejos amb tot el que no sabem, generant espais d’indagacions col·lectives per tal d’obrir la pregunta de què podria esdevenir l’habitabilitat urbana del futur. Un d’aquests espais possibles és el “Departament d’Umbrologia”, una institució especulativa per a l’estudi i la intervenció de la vida urbana de les ombres. Aquest projecte articula quatre socis de la ciutat de Barcelona a la cruïlla de les humanitats, l’arquitectura, les arts i les ciències ambientals: els grups CareNet i DARTS de la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, el col·lectiu Arquitectura de Contacte, les ambientòlogues i divulgadores científiques de Nusos Coop i els artistes especulatius del Laboratori de Pensament Lúdic. El projecte es desenvoluparà a partir del gener de 2026 a través d’una sèrie de tallers col·laboratius de co-creació on temptejarem col·lectivament la foscor del moment present. Es tancarà al 2027 amb un Festival de les Ombres on mirarem de donar la rellevància present i futura a molts sabers intergeneracionals, interculturals i interespècie que ens ajudin a reclamar la sobirania popular de les ombres i la protecció que aquestes fan possible en temps de mutació climàtica.
