El proyecto Ciudades que envejecen: Los futuros del urbanismo de la edad avanzada en el litoral español (financiado por la Beca Leonardo de Investigación Científica y Creación Cultural 2024 de la Fundación BBVA entre octubre 2024 y octubre 2026) ha tenido dos objetivos principales: (1) estudiar etnográficamente los retos técnicos y las experiencias del envejecimiento urbano en el litoral de Barcelona, en un momento peculiar en el que las crisis demográficas, de vivienda y medioambientales confluyen en una tormenta perfecta para el urbanismo; y (2) explorar un dispositivo metodológico (en formato juego de mesa) para elicitar la futurización participativa del urbanismo de la edad avanzada. Con este dispositivo participativo, principal resultado del proyecto, buscamos mantener abierta una pregunta fundamental para el futuro del buen envejecer: ¿quiénes y cómo podrán rediseñar las ciudades que envejecen del futuro? Esta tarea requiere trabajar activamente por un buen envejecer que sea genuinamente plural, divergente y atento a las desigualdades y grandes diversidades que atraviesan la vejez hoy. Esperamos que los materiales aquí reunidos sirvan no solo para dinamizar procesos de imaginación colectiva, sino también para elicitar un tejido duradero de relaciones entre la administración, la investigación y el activismo asociativo de las personas mayores. Confiamos en que los resultados empíricos y metodológicos que este trabajo reúne ayuden a explorar modos de gobernanza novedosos para el buen envejecer, tanto en el litoral de Barcelona como en cualquier otro territorio dispuesto a soñar y construir el porvenir del envejecer urbano.
For the last couple of years Marina Peterson and Gretchen Bakke have been putting together Errant Elements, a beautiful project to create a chapbook series organized around the Periodic Table of the Elements.
In their words:
Dmitri Mendeleev left gaps in his model of the periodic table for the not-yet-known — elements that the prior century sought to standardize and classify by atomic weight and chemical properties — to allow history to fill in, but not to leave open to speculation, or to leave alone. What can be made from what is that isn’t yet? How might the elements be constitutive of something different? What is missing or lacking? How can those absences be incorporated or invented into the base materials? What needs to change from what we have to make what we don’t have?
The form – 118 folded chapbooks designed to be combined in various ways – supports a collective exploration of the combinatory affordances and stories of the elements. The format is a trifold brochure that folds into a 5×5” square. This allows readers to connect pieces in different ways, constructing official or imagined elements and reading across diverse entries in ways that open new imaginaries.
Thanks to their gracious invitation, I took the chance to propose a submission on the element Pa (Protractinium) or, rather, in my attempt: “Pavements” – but also “Panot”, something of a particular obsession of mine since I started doing fieldwork on urban accessibility.
My errant element starts like this:
Poor pavements, nobody seems to be thinking of them. Unless they are broken, that is. This invisibility is telling
…
You could check it out below. But, FYI, the whole set of chapbooks will be for sale. Contact the editors for more info!
How to quote: Criado, T.S. (2025.) Pa – “Pavement” but also “Panot”. In M. Peterson & G. Bakke (Eds.) Errant Elements, issue 2: 91. | PDF
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.
The Open University of Catalonia’s CareNet research group is pleased to invite you to «Contested Futures: Unsettling ageing, ecological, and digital transitions», an interdisciplinary symposium about the role of futures in research on ageing, climate crisis, and digitalisation.
On the 31st of March, we invited international STS scholars to theorise and empirically analyse the imaginaries, practices and narratives of the future in these three areas.
Helen Manchester (University of Bristol, UK),
Judith Igelsböck (Open University of Catalonia, Spain),
Uriel Fogué (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, Spain),
Alex Wilkie (Goldsmiths, University of London, UK).
On the 1st of April, we will have a hands-on and participatory workshop on future methods. This workshop is designed to foster a collaborative and speculative exploration of methods, practices and ideas on how to analyse, perform, reimagine and produce futures. Participants of this workshop are the invited international speakers and UOC scholars working on future studies.
What is this workshop about?
Ageing, climate crisis, and digitalisation are three domains deeply shaped by imaginaries, narratives, and prospective practices in which the futures of modern societies are constantly negotiated and contested.
Across these research fields, we observe a recurring invocation of potential futures – futures that have not yet materialised and remain uncertain but still are already shaping the present. These futures often appear in dystopian terms, as threats and risks: ageing, framed as a “demographic bomb” or “grey tsunami” that will overwhelm healthcare and social systems; a world becoming increasingly uninhabitable and unequal due to global warming and extreme weather; and the strangeness of artificial intelligence, as the boundaries between truth and falsehood, knowledge and ignorance, get blurred.
Public policy frames these futures as “challenges”, threats that are also presented as opportunities. They imply an obligation to transform the present in preparation for the future. Anticipating these futures acts as a call to action in the present, shaping life in advance and directing it toward specific horizons. For this reason, these “challenges” are often linked to various transitions –demographic, eco-social and digital– that require the continuous production of new knowledge and innovations.
To mitigate the so-called “demographic bomb”, policies on healthy ageing, ageing biomedicine, and gerontechnology seek to build a future in which people live longer without falling ill, maintain their independence, and defy the effects of ageing. To reconcile the climate crisis with capitalist progress, new technological solutions are emerging: space colonisation, geoengineering, urban adaptation, sustainable infrastructures, green energy. Responding to the risk of losing the ability to distinguish between truth and falsehood, between knowing and not knowing, new initiatives are being developed to promote responsible, ethical and inclusive artificial intelligence.
All of this shows how the future, far from being settled, is an object of contestation. We are concerned with how futures are not only imagined, anticipated, and enacted, but also cancelled, ignored, destroyed, and even colonised.
A space for reflection and practice
In this workshop, we invite scholars working in these three areas to explore questions such as:
What futures guide research on ageing, climate change, and digitisation?
To whom do these futures belong?
Who is empowered to imagine, to narrate, and to generate future-oriented practices-and who is not?
Which futures prevail? Which are silenced?
In what ways are futures being brought into the present and presents brought into the future? By what means, by what practices, by what methods?
What are the effects of power that their anticipation generates, and on whom?
We do not wish to approach these questions solely through theoretical reflection or through the empirical analysis of practices and narratives of the future — although both of these remain essential. Rather, we seek to foster an exchange of practices, methods, and techniques that enable us to think, analyse, transform, reimagine, and reconstruct futures. Thus, this is an invitation to explore the potential of participatory methods, speculative design, arts-based methodologies (visual, performative, etc.), and game-based approaches, among others. We want to create a space not only for analysing futures, but also for experimenting with and constructing new ways of imagining and inhabiting futures.
Schedule
Day 1 – Monday, March 31st
10:00 – 10:30h – Welcome and introduction
10:30 – 11:45h – Session 1
“Communities at the Margins: temporalities and sociodigital futures-in-the-making”
This presentation draws on our experiences co-producing Sociodigital futures (SDF) research with older adults living at the margins in the UK. We adopt a feminist technoscience approach to how SDF are claimed, imagined and acted upon, working with principles of design justice (Constanza-Chock, 2020) and anticipatory orientated design approaches (Korsmeyer, Light and Grocott, 2022).
We have found that the concept of SDF can be at best, intriguing and difficult to grasp; and at worst, alienating and insensitive. Its ‘digital’ component seems to dictate closed-down futures and fear and overwhelm seem to be dominant affective responses. In parallel, the emphasis on ‘futures’ is often perceived as disregarding present, immediate concerns such as the cost-of-living crisis and austerity politics (Brannen and O’Connell, 2022).
Given this we are developing our anticipatory design practices that start from what matters to older adults living at the margins and their lived, felt, embodied encounters with sociodigital infrastructures in the complex, thick present (Haraway, 2016).
Discussant:Blanca Callén (CareNet, Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona)
“A Twin Future: Explorations on Interactive Storytelling “
Digital twins are presently advertised as intelligent and dynamic replicas that are taking digital representation onto the next level. Digital twins can be deployed to monitor and “optimize” processes in a broad range of application areas such as disaster management, health care, or urban development.
Promoters of this emerging technology capitalize on our fascination with twins and the cliché that twinship “represents the ideal form of attachment” (de Bres 2024) and introduce the digital twin as a loyal companion that is intuitively and benevolently supporting the well-being of its ‘real-world’ equivalent. Potentially more problematic facets of digital representation, such as matters of ownership, artificial (in)justice, transparency or (ir)reversibility get out of sight.
In the presentation, I will share my interdisciplinary and collaborative attempts at critically engaging with the creation of digital twin futures beyond utopia and dystopia. These processes could be inspired by (human) twin studies and twin fiction and the various twin kinds and ways of “twinning” and “un-twinning” (Viney 2021) that have been described and lived, devicing the twin-metaphor and using interactive storytelling to open up space for thinking about the future of digital representation.
Discussant:Daniel López (CareNet, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
Assuming the ecological performativity of architecture entails understanding constructive and spatial processes as complex frameworks where commitments of different kinds are established. Based on a series of experiences developed over the last few years, this lecture seeks to think of architectural projects as ecological contracts and their constructive details as ecological portals that materially assemble more-than-human pasts, presents and futures.
Discussant:Tomás Criado (CareNet, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
“Energy Probes: Speculative Co-Design with More-than-Human Communities”
This presentation explores how inventive and practice-based design methods, combined with Science and Technology Studies, have been deployed to understand and intervene in the practices, hopes and futures of UK-based energy communities engaged in energy transitions. In so doing, I explore how such interdisciplinary methods shape collective engagement with futures, social data production, and nonhuman involvement. Drawing on UK-based fieldwork and co-design, it considers how more-than-human Engagement Workshops, idiotic Energy Probes, and visual Energy Workbooks challenge social science assumptions about method, energy demand reduction, more-than-human participation and data collection. Rather than impartial data elicitation tools, these speculative techniques act as generative and possibilistic methods, aimed at eliciting data on aesthetic and material energy practices, community composition and energy futures. Positioned within debates on futures and inventive methods, this research rethinks engagement and agency in the context of socioecological crises.
Discussant: Israel Rodríguez (CareNet, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
13:15 – 13:45h – Final discussion
Day 2 – Tuesday, April 1st
The aim of the second-day workshop is to enable academic exchanges and mutual learning on futuring methods among UOC research groups and invited speakers. This dynamic approach allows researchers to learn from each other and adapt best practices to their own projects, fostering an environment of continuous collaboration and growth. Participants will showcase various futuring methods, engage in the collaborative design of specific methods, and discuss their relevance for the social sciences and humanities.
10:00 – 10:30h – Welcome and presentation
10:30 – 12:00h – Futuring methods showcase
Helen Manchester (Bristol University)
Alex Wilkie (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
How are cities and urban designers responding to the challenge of population ageing? How can we as ethnographers understand the social and material transformations underway in their efforts to shape ‘ageing-friendly’ cities or cities ‘for all ages’? These are two of the leading research questions of our ethnographic study project “Ageing Cities” on which we worked together in the academic year 2021-2022.
Our main concern has been to explore the distinctive intergenerational design challenges of what some architects and urban planners are beginning to call “Late Life Urbanism” (check the video of the final presentation).
Our exploration included an excursion in April 2022 to Alicante, Benidorm and neighbouring urban enclaves in the Costa Blanca (Spain). The area is relevant as ageing bodies and practices have become, since the 1960s, a sort of vector of urbanisation in the region: developing into what some geographers call “the Pensioners’ Coast.”
Considering the intriguing history of migration of this region, with pensioners from all over Central and Northern Europe (but also from other regions of Spain) relocating there, the “Pensioners’ Coast” is an interesting experimental ground to witness what happens when older bodies take centre-stage. Over the course of seven eventful and exciting days we had the chance to explore how sensitised urban designers from the area respond to the intergenerational design challenges these bodies bring in different ways.
In a joint endeavour with STS-inspired architectural researchers from the Critical Pedagogies, Ecological Politics and Material Practices research group of the University of Alicante, the visit allowed us to explore different approaches to architectural practice where older people have more active roles in the design and management of ageing cities (from cooperative senior cohousing to inter- and multigenerational housing projects, as well as accessible public space infrastructures, ranging from sidewalks to beaches and public transportation).
With this Zine we wish to share some of our main reflections, learnings to engage ethnographically with late life urbanism in Costa Blanca (or should we say eng-age?). The Zine could be taken as a long thank you note and a memoir of our encounters with different initiatives. But we also see it as a relevant intergenerational gift of sorts, lent to future urban researchers on these topics.
There I will present on Friday 17, 2021 at 1:30pm-3:00pm CET at paper I am working on with Israel Rodríguez Giralt, called “The Pharmakon of Collaboration: Activating Research with the Independent Living Forum” (Chaired by Anna-Lena Wiechern).
Abstract
In this paper, we think with a concrete set of research practices afforded by a long and intense exploration of independent-living activism in Spain. At that time of the main indignados mobilisations in 2011, we started a collective research project on the topic. In an explicit gesture towards forms of ‘emancipatory research’ (Oliver, 1992), the project was conceived from the onset including different activist members in its advisory board, as co-researchers. We aimed to prevent researchers from ‘speaking for the other’ (Ruby, 1992) and to create instances of friction and shared reflection.
In the course of these years we attempted to practice a wide variety of modes of research ‘speaking nearby’ (Minh-ha, 1992) if not explicitly ‘with’ them: hence engaging in a wide variety of collaborative forms of research with actors that were always treated as ‘epistemic partners’. Building on this, the paper analyses the impact this exploration had on us as researchers: or, to be more specific, on our ways of engaging with independent living activism, and to consider how this might inspire our ‘experimentally collaborative’ or ‘activated’ ways to engage in other activist settings (Estalella & Criado, 2018). For instance, we will describe how we were activated to share common spaces of discussion and debate or even presentation (in scholarly and activist workshops but also in academic events), plunging in ‘joint problem-making’: that is, collaboratively engaging in exploratory material and textual undertakings, such as in the collective En torno a la silla, attempting environmental interventions and remakings of wheelchair users and their surroundings.
Far from telling a ‘happy’ or ‘utopian’ tale, we wish to remain attentive to the affordances as much the problems this collaborative research activation brought and opened up. For this, we will draw from Stengers’s conceptual work around the pharmakon–an ambivalent entity that for the Greeks oscillated between a drug and a poison, depending on doses, components, modes of preparation and administration. Following her concern to remain attentive to the practicalities of different research devices and tell technical stories “about the kinds of traps that each had to escape, constraints the importance of which had to be recognized” (Stengers, 2015: 132), we would like to close reflecting about the impact these collaborative undertakings had on us and on the people we were working with; and how this experience might contribute to (re)assess collaborative and engaged research from its frictions.
Workshop
By drawing on STS, Crip Technoscience (Hamraie/Fritsch 2019) and approaches from participatory design research and practice, this event discusses body-technology relations from inter-, transdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspectives. We argue in favor of extending the concept of materiality beyond the borders of the physical object to include practices and relations and consequently, want to question common concepts of norm, normality, and normativity. Because these notions are not only entangled with artefacts but also with their design and the practices they involve, which include bodies embedded in historical, cultural, infrastructural and institutional contexts. Thus, they can be considered situated (Haraway 1988). As a result, questions and demands for inclusion and social participation, too, become virulent (Star 2017, 1999; Winner 1980) and have been problematized as politics of assistive artefacts (Mills 2012). In sum, we propose to re/frame technology and body (differences) as interacting entities within societies.
The event aims to think critically through a theoretical framework in the context of dis/abilities that recognizes assistive technologies as political as well as situated interconnections. On this basis, we endorse to reflect on infrastructures of design for questions of inclusion and participation – cross-cultural, inter- and transdisciplinary. Reflecting on open source practices in medical and assistive technologies (e.g. 3D printing) will allow us to question the effects of heterogeneous interests, economic implications and everyday affordances of socio-material assemblages produced within the frameworks of participatory design research.
Organized by
Tom Bieling (Hamburg), Melike Şahinol (Istanbul), Anna-Lena Wiechern (Lüneburg), Robert Stock (Berlin)
Ensamblajes peatonales: Los andares a ciegas como prácticas tecno-sensoriales | Pedestrian assemblages: Blind people’s walks as techno-sensory practices
Resumen
¿Cómo andan y cruzan las calles las personas ciegas? Esa es la pregunta, solo aparentemente sencilla, que hemos abordado a partir de un estudio etnográfico en la encrucijada de la Antropología Sensorial y los Estudios de Ciencia y Tecnología (STS) realizado en los últimos seis años en la ciudad de Barcelona. En él hemos seguido a diferentes activistas por los derechos de la diversidad visual en su cotidianidad, así como en sus trabajos de politización de las infraestructuras urbanas. A partir de una atención a la agencia múltiple y distribuida que equipa e in/habilita modos de desplazarse por la ciudad, esta pregunta nos permite describir la complejidad corporal, social, material y técnica que encierra este vulgar acto cotidiano. Nuestra indagación gira en torno a dos elementos principales: (a) la descripción de prácticas sensoriales para caminar a ciegas y (b) la descripción y examen del papel que juegan conjuntos de elementos no-humanos (animales y tecnológicos) que conforman el «equipamiento» para andar a ciegas. Profundizando el giro material y corporal de la antropología urbana sobre las realidades y prácticas de los peatones, transeúntes o flâneurs, en el presente trabajo queremos resaltar la importancia de prestar atención a los ensamblajes peatonales y las prácticas tecno-sensoriales que habilitan particulares desplazamientos: unos ensamblajes que en lugar de una ciudad hecha para el encuentro indiferente entre distintos sujetos, nos muestran una ecología compleja de soportes y acompañamientos para acoger la diversidad corporal.
Abstract
How do blind people walk and cross the streets? This has been the guiding question, only simple at first glance, of our ethnographic study at the crossroads of Sensory Anthropology and Science and Technology Studies (STS), undertaken in the last six years in the city of Barcelona. In it we have followed different activists for the rights of people with “visual diversity” in their everyday urban displacements, and in their politicizations of urban infrastructures. Paying attention to the multiple and distributed agency that equips and dis/ables modes of moving about in the city, this question allows a description of the embodied, social, material and technical complexity that this mundane act entails. Our inquiry foregrounds two main elements: (a) the description of the sensory practices unfolded in blind walks; and (b) the description and close examination of the role played by non-human actors — animals and technologies — which constitute the “equipment” to walk as a blind person. Deepening urban anthropology’s material and embodied turn to the understanding of the circumstances of pedestrians, the present work wishes to highlight the relevance of considering pedestrian assemblages and the techno-sensory practices enabling particular types of displacements. A description around assemblages allows us to unfold a description of the city not as a place for the indifferent encounter of abled subjects, but as a complex ecology of supports and accompaniments to host bodily diversity.
Recommended citation: Cereceda, M. & Criado, T.S. (2021) Ensamblajes peatonales: Los andares a ciegas como prácticas tecno-sensoriales | Pedestrian assemblages: Blind people’s walks as techno-sensory practices. AIBR. Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, 16(1), 165 – 190 | PDF (Español) · PDF(English)
El próximo 25 de noviembre de 6 a 7:30 pm30 de noviembre de 4 a 5:30pm [pospuesto por enfermedad] (CET) estaré impartiendo una sesión en el curso online de ANTIARQ (plataforma que busca crear espacios de complementariedad universitaria orientados a la producción de conocimiento interdisciplinar entre la Antropología y la Arquitectura) titulado EL URBANISMO COMO DISCURSO. ENFOQUES ALTERNATIVOS PARA RESIGNIFICAR LA PRAXIS
Del 16 al 26 de noviembre 2020
El curso consta de seis sesiones en donde analizaremos varias categorías empleadas de manera recurrente por los discursos promotores de las trasformaciones urbanísticas en la actualidad -tales como participación ciudadana, innovación tecnológica, sostenibilidad, accesibilidad universal, escala humana, etc.-, con la intención de analizarlas desde enfoques alternativos para evidenciar sus contradicciones, pero también como oportunidad para repensar los fundamentos de la práctica urbanística. Además, el contenido del curso rema a contra corriente de la proliferación de fórmulas urbanísticas que han surgido a raíz de la pandemia generada por la COVID-19, y que se difunden especulativamente como “mano de santo” para resolver problemáticas ligadas a la afectación entre el entorno urbano y las formas de sociabilidad que alberga, obviando e rol instrumental del urbanismo para el fortalecimiento de las políticas neoliberales, que son en última instancia, las que han dado innumerables pruebas de atentar sin reparos contra la reproducción de la vida –urbana-.
En la primera sesión se analiza la retórica proyectual del espacio público, ofertado como símbolo ligado a la democratización de la ciudad para ocultar la privatización de la gestión urbana y las políticas de control social. En la segunda sesión, se analiza el sentido de la participación ciudadana en el urbanismo neoliberal, evidenciando lo que opera tras su fachada de fácil consenso y sus efectos en la vida de los ciudadanos. En la tercera sesión, se presenta una mirada crítica de las ciudades inteligentes, poniendo de relieve la crucial implicación de las empresas de tecnología en las operaciones privatizadoras del espacio urbano, mostrando cómo los algoritmos suelen normalizar sus efectos de exclusión social para rehusar las contradicciones o conflictos, justificándolos como errores del sistema. En la cuarta sesión, se profundiza en el tema de la sostenibilidad y su conversión en un discurso vacío, al ser uno de los eslóganes necesarios para dar valor al producto ciudad como mercancía en el mercado global y nos invita a preguntarnos si urbanismo sostenible no es un oxímoron. La quinta sesión está enfocada en los retos pedagógicos e institucionales del diseño urbano en materia de accesibilidad universal, lo que supone no solo la democratización técnica de los procesos de diseño urbano, sino también la desestigmatización cultural de unos cuerpos considerados impropios. Finalmente, la sexta sesión pon en el centro del debate, la noción de ´escala humana´ empleada como coartada para el montaje de ciudades humanizadas, en donde ciertos usuarios o usuarias serán excluidos sistemáticamente del usufructo de las zonas reformadas por actuaciones urbanísticas.
Mi sesión: “Aprender a afectarse: la accesibilidad como reto pedagógico e institucional del Diseño Urbano”
Desde su eclosión en los ciclos de protestas civiles de los años 1970 en adelante, los activistas por los derechos de las ‘personas con discapacidad’ – actualmente ‘diversas funcionales’ – llevan luchando para que nuestras ciudades sean hospitalarias con la diversidad corporal. Esto no sólo ha supuesto articular procesos de desestigmatización cultural, buscando sostener la autonomía de unos cuerpos hasta ese momento considerados impropios. También, ha promovido el debate de la democratización técnica de los procesos de diseño urbano e infraestructural. En consecuencia, varias ciudades del Norte Global han desarrollado acciones para sensibilizar a arquitectos, ingenieros y funcionarios públicos, para que tales entornos pudieran existir, creando condiciones favorables para un diseño inclusivo de las infraestructuras urbanas. En no pocas ocasiones, este proceso de sensibilización requiere una profunda transformación pedagógica de las personas implicadas en el diseño y en el rediseño urbanístico. Este reto institucional y pedagógico que se analiza en esta sesión, implica un ‘aprender a afectarse’ por la diversidad corporal y visibilizar lo que ello supone desde la implementación de políticas de ‘supresión de barreras’ y estándares arquitectónicos, hasta problematizaciones en torno a enfoques ‘culturales’ y ‘multisensoriales’. Se expondrán ejemplos recabados desde un trabajo antropológico acerca de la transformación accesible de la ciudad de Barcelona, mostrando su constructo institucional en un intento de sensibilización de los técnicos municipales. Pero, también, se compartirá el impacto de este trabajo antropológico aplicado desde la docencia, como pedagogía experimental orientada a impartir otras metodologías de diseño desde la formación de arquitectos en la Universidad Politécnica de Múnich.
Lo aprendido en En torno a la silla, así como siguiendo a técnicos del Instituto Municipal de Personas con Discapacidad y formando arquitectos en Múnich me lleva a sugerir que esto supone una democratización técnica de los procesos de diseño urbano, así como la desestigmatización cultural de cuerpos considerados impropios.
Una democratización del diseño que antes que proveer soluciones para otros implica “aprender a afectarse” por los derechos, necesidades y aspiraciones de cuerpos diversos, experimentando con otras formas de hacer ciudades más hospitalarias.
Lo que contaré, por tanto, son tres modos de activar urbanismos posibles: prototipos, infraestructura pública y cursos de proyectos. En todos ellos late esa aspiración por fabricar, sensibilizar o convocar una ciudad poco común (la de los cuerpos impropios y los encuentros extraordinarios con la posibilidad de una otra manera de hacer ciudad)
Mi sueño sería que esto sirviera para poder trabajar en paralelo en una copia en castellano del libro en inglés, para poder abrirlo a discusión densa y profunda, pero las fuerzas son las que son y por eso me hace especial ilusión poder contar el argumento en forma seminario.
Referencias bibliográficas
Blok, A., & Farías, I. (Eds.). (2016). Urban Cosmopolitics: Agencements, Assemblies, Atmospheres. London: Routledge. Callon, M., & Rabeharisoa, V. (2008). The growing engagement of emergent concerned groups in political and economic life: lessons from the French association of neuromuscular disease patients. Science, Technology & Human Values, 33(2), 230–261. Callon, M., Lascoumes, P., & Barthe, Y. (2011). Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hamraie, A. (2017). Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability.Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press. Latour, B. (2004a). Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latour, B. (2004b). How to talk about the body? The normative dimension of Science Studies. Body & Society, 10(2–3), 205–229. Marres, N., & Lezaun, J. (2011). Materials and devices of the public: an introduction. Economy and Society, 40(4), 489–509. Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative Ethics for a More Than Human World. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press. Stengers, I. (2019). Civiliser la modernité ? Whitehead et les ruminations du sens commun. Paris: Les presses du réel. Vilà, A. (Ed.). (1994). Crónica de una lucha por la igualdad: apuntes para la historia del movimiento asociativo de las personas con discapacidad física y sensorial en Catalunya. Barcelona: Fundació Institut Guttmann.
I was kindly invited to take part in the webinar POWER TO CO-PRODUCE: Careful power distribution in collaborative city-making, hosted on September 14th 2020 by Burcu Ateş, Predrag Milić, Laura Sobral and Sabine Knierbein at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space (SKUOR), Technische Universität Wien. As part of a session on ‘co-production practices’, I shared 15′ of my research on Democratising Urban Infrastructures: The technical democracy of accessibility urbanism (see full text below).
In this intervention I summarise my particular urban anthropological interest in accessibility urbanism as a peculiar form of a technical democratisation of city-making. ‘Technical democracy’ is a term used in STS to discuss different approaches participatory forms of technoscience, where an expansion of expertise to knowledges beyond hegemonic technical ones has been approached and experimented upon. It has many versions, but nearly all of them are concerned with the need to reverse the effects of technocracy and expertocracy. This has been done in a wide variety of ways: from searching to make science and technology amenable for public discussion and deliberation to expanding the who and the how of technoscientific practice (for an overview, see Callon, Lascoumes & Barthe, 2011).
This concern is particularly important in a context of planetary urbanisation with its concomitant development of urban infrastructures. A concern with technical democracy becomes crucial when these urban infrastructures are not only heavily managed by all kinds of experts, but are redefining in uncertain ways the scopes and practices of urban modes of togetherness. Following also in this an STS concern, rather than as large technical systems, infrastructures should be appreciated as sites for the controverted relational re-articulation of social and material worlds: that is, particular forms of bringing together and apart agents, material entities, knowledges… Or, to say it better, relational configurations that foreground some of these agents, material entities, knowledges neglecting or, even, excluding others (Farías & Blok, 2016).
Precisely because of this, urban infrastructures are also the sites where new forms of the demos are emerging: Indeed, multitude of concerned groups and affected publics mobilise and undertake research around these highly technical issues; sometimes they train themselves to become quasi-experts in order to challenge expert control, when not searching to manage those urban infrastructures themselves. Contemporary urban infrastructures are one of the most crucial sites where an experimentation and a reinvention of particular forms of technical democratisation are taking place: not just because of how urban infrastructural design might need to be democratized, but also because of how we might be engaging in and designing infrastructures of urban democratization (Harvey, Jensen & Morita, 2016).
In what follows I will show you a few instances from my work on the technical democracy of accessibility urbanism. Since 2012, I have been doing research on urban accessibility issues in Spain and Germany, with a comparative European gaze: in particular, I have been studying and engaging in a variety of emergent publics mobilised around accessible design and urbanism. As a pioneering field in the democratisation of urban infrastructures, urban accessibility teaches us that in order to democratize infrastructures, we might need to engage in the experimentation with and implementation of different infrastructures for urban democratisation. As I will show: (a) To manage complex socio-technical issues like this one requires the creation of infrastructures for inclusive policy-making, engaging publics and concerned groups in different forms of participatory governance; (b) The democratization of modes of designing and doing urban infrastructures also implies setting up infrastructures for epistemic collaboration with emergent publics; (c) But as I will suggest, in closing, for any of this to make any sense, we also need to intervene expert education: experimenting with pedagogic infrastructures for the ‘sensitization of experts.’
II. Participatory Governance
Since the 1970s, and through different forms of contestation, disability rights advocates have been searching to create public concern on the discrimination they suffer, making their bodily experiences of exclusion palpable to articulate more inclusive urban infrastructures (Hamraie, 2017; Williamson, 2019).
Allow me to give you an example. In what was known at the time in Barcelona as the cripples’ revolt diverse small associations of people with disabilities united to hold public demonstrations demanding ‘a city without barriers.’ These protests paved the way for the creation of a newly democratic municipal institution governing these matters in a participatory fashion since the early 1980s (the Institut Municipal de Personas amb Discapacitat, or Municipal Institute of People with Disabilities, IMPD, in its last denomination): in whose ‘hybrid’ board politicians and technical staff are joind by elected representatives of people with disabilities (IMPD, 2019).
The IMPD was quintessential in re-designing Barcelona’s urban infrastructures in preparation for the 1992 Olympics: this hybrid institution engaged in a comparative search for urban accessibility and inclusive design policies around the world; it was also a fundamental site for the legal training of disabled representatives to address highly complex technicalities, as well as the experiential training of professionals. This combination of comparative policy analysis, together with experiential and technical forms of knowledge exchange was important to develop new urban standards, building and technical codes that became a model in the country; a lasting urban infrastructure developed thanks to the participatory engagement of disability rights advocates.
But what this case shows is that a public engagement in the field of urban accessibility cannot just be an issue of merely allowing people to take part in, or to give very vulnerable people the means to appropriate technical knowledge or to transform technologies through consumption and user-led innovation. In a context in which regulation tends to happen in the extrastatecraft form of market-based building standards, ISO or DIN (Easterling, 2014), public institutional infrastructures are crucial to bring together concerned publics and experts to regulate, and assemble together inclusive forms of policy-making. Not only to be able to deal with the legal technicalities that policy-making on these issues requires, but also to ensure their implementation and sustainability for neglected actors. This is far from being an easy task. And it has usually entailed shaking the grounds of the classic means by which experts produce knowledge about these bodies.
III. Documentation interfaces
In the last decades, emergent publics and concerned groups with accessibility urbanism have been crucially developing particular infrastructures to mobilise and articulate their experiential knowledges, many times mobilising spatial registers going beyond expert-based Euclidean notions (Hall & Imrie, 1999; Imrie, 1999). I have been addressing them as ‘documentation interfaces’ (Criado & Cereceda, 2016): that is, not only as situations to frame, elicit and discuss diverse bodily experiences and the environmental and material affordances to host them; but also as situations that produce a trace in different kinds of media, forms of record whereby their experiential knowledge is mobilized to have an impact in design situations, such as in: (1) video-camera records to show what it means to move using a wheelchair; (2) urban explorations with blind people to discuss in situ whether different pavement textures, light settings or colours can be distinguished; (3) not to mention the increasing use of digital platforms for the audio-visual documentation of inaccessibility experiences by all kinds of disability experts, such as collaborative mapping apps.
These documentation interfaces are also interesting empirical sites to understand how particular alliances between concerned groups and experts or technicians are attempted, sometimes way beyond state-run institutional frameworks. One of the most interesting domains for this techno-political experimentation are the many do-it-yourself initiatives, makerspaces and hacklabs emerging throughout the world, and seeking to ‘democratize’ the access to technical knowledge and the users’ engagement in prototyping. I have collaborated in such endeavours as part of my long ethnographic engagement between 2012 and 2016 with the Barcelona-based open design collective En torno a la silla: part of a wider DIY network in the country including engaged professionals and technicians as crucial allies for people with disabilities.
Being able to work together in those settings entails implementing and managing infrastructures of documentation, requiring particular events and digital platforms. These infrastructures, in turn, have allowed intensive learning experiences of collaborative doing and making creating the conditions whereby alternative urban accessibility arrangements can be critically explored and tried out. Yet, despite the crucial importance of DIY forms of engagement for the democratisation of design they are far from being a ‘solution for all’. As we’ve also learnt, these engagements are extremely exhausting and time-consuming for people who also need many social and technical supports to take part in them. Also, without some degree of institutionalisation they prove fragile. Hence, they do not necessarily serve the purpose of bringing into existence safe, economically sustainable, and lasting urban infrastructures for personal autonomy and independence. Nevertheless, they are very relevant as documentation interfaces: that is, as infrastructures of epistemic collaboration where not just a redistribution of technical skills is being attempted, but where an exchange of knowledges becomes possible.
IV. Expert Education
But engaging in infrastructures of more inclusive policy-making or epistemic collaboration are not the only forms in which to create conditions of technical democracy. In closing, I would like to highlight another strategy that we could learn from accessibility issues: perhaps a more important one that we tend to overlook, even though it might open up fertile avenues to play a crucial role as scholars in technical universities like this one. What if democratizing technical decision-making did not just require citizens or lay people to become experts or hackers, but that professional experts in the private and public sector would be aware of the limits of their own expertise? What if technical democracy had to do with building pedagogic infrastructures to train these experts to open themselves to other forms of sensing, knowing and valuing?
Indeed, most urban designers do not usually receive proper accessibility training. This hinders the use of existing accessibility codes and policies. Beyond that, understanding the singular experiences and conditions of diverse bodies neglected by design disciplines is something that needs to be learnt by doing. When confronting with these issues many designers have to ‘retrain’ themselves, challenging their own expertise. For this they need to develop other skills as another kind of practitioners: not only inventing or adapting multi-sensorial gadgets to make possible co-design situations, but also creating collaborative devices to learn from disability advocates what it means to be different kinds of bodies. To make this process easier would require intervening early on in formal training and curricula, as in the ground-breaking experiments of Raymond Lifchez incorporating accessible concerns in design studio teaching (Lifchez, 1986): where disability rights advocates rather than being treated as end users in projects addressed at them were engaged throughout the duration of the course as design consultants of any kind of projects students were working on.
This became a key concern when having to teach at the Department of Architecture at the TU Munich between 2015 and 2018, together with my colleague Ignacio Farías (Farías & Criado, 2018). We realized that the space of the classroom and the training of future design professionals were largely unattended but critical aspects of the project of ‘technical democracy.’ In fact, training professionals to commit to other forms of producing knowledge and making things might be crucial to make more democratic forms of science and technology possible. But this requires inverting the so-called ‘deficit model’ of participation that aims to enhance the public engagement in science and technology: that is, we need to address the potential knowledge deficits of experts.
In the nearly three years we worked there, we plunged in the development of a series of teaching experiments called Design in crisis. In them we felt the need for STS to move from the ‘expertization of laypersons’–a classic public engagement trend, such as in citizen science–to the creation of pedagogic infrastructures for the ‘re-sensitization of experts.’ One example of what this might mean could be the ManualCAD:
“a portable game for architectural design in which both blind or visually impaired architects, and architects who have the sense of sight can participate and create together.”
Taken from https://designincrisis.wixsite.com/designincrisis2017
It was developed by students in the MA in Architecture in a studio project I taught in 2017. After a several weeks’ intensive training to raise awareness of the need to re-appreciate the multi-sensory features of the built environment they had to undertake a group assignment: to collectively prototype a new architectural toolkit for a blind architect. This led them to explore and do research about multi-sensory devices, methods, and skills. Rather than a solution for an almost impossible challenge, the device they came up with was an interesting object to ask good questions or, rather, to open up design as a problem: A tool, perhaps, to re-learn what it might mean to engage in non-visual forms of architecture?
After engaging in this and many other similar teaching experiments, I have come to believe that for technical democracy to take place in city-making, it has to be always reinvented in specific terms from within the technical practices of experts, sensitizing them through different pedagogical experiments and interventions to be another kind of professionals, more open to the wide diversity of actors they could be designing with.
References
Callon, M., Lascoumes, P., & Barthe, Y. (2011). Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Criado, T. S., & Cereceda, M. (2016). Urban accessibility issues: Techno-scientific democratizations at the documentation interface. City, 20(4), 619–636.
Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso.
Farías, I., & Blok, A. (2016). Technical democracy as a challenge to urban studies. City, 20(4), 539–548.
Farías, I., & Criado, T.S. (2018). Co-laborations, Entrapments, Intraventions: Pedagogical Approaches to Technical Democracy in Architectural Design. DISEÑA, 12, 228–255.
Hall, P., & Imrie, R. (1999). Architectural practices and disabling design in the built environment. Environment and Planning B, 26, 409–426.
Hamraie, A. (2017). Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press
Harvey, P., Jensen, C. B., & Morita, A. (Eds.) (2016). Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion. London: Routledge.
IMPD. (2009). Barcelona, una ciutat per a tothom : 30 anys treballant amb les persones amb discapacitat. Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, Institut Municipal de Persones amb Discapacitat (IMPD).
Imrie, R. (1999). The body, disability and Le Corbusier’s conception of the radiant environment. In R. Butler & H. Parr (Eds.), Mind and Body Spaces: Geographies of Illness, Impairment and Disability (pp. 25–44). New York: Routledge.
Lifchez, R. (Ed.). (1986). Rethinking Architecture: Design Students and Physically Disabled People. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Williamson, B. (2019). Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design. New York: New York University Press.
Estando en Helsinki para el NORDES tuve el placer de charlar con Mariana Salgado en Diseño y Diáspora sobre el cuidado como una activación de otros diseños posibles: aquellos que aparecen pensando desde la diversidad funcional en En torno a la silla o desde el re-aprender a diseñar para todxs.
Diseño y Diáspora: El podcast de diseño social en español y portuñol. Conversaciones entre una diseñadora y Otros: a veces amigos, a veces investigadores en diseño, la mayoría de las veces diseñadores trabajando en innovación social o en practicas de diseño emergentes. Desde Helsinki, con ganas por Mariana Salgado.
#79: Diseñando para la diversidad funcional
En esta charla Tomás Criado nos cuenta sobre su trabajo en el ámbito del diseño desde la antropología. Él es antropólogo con especialización en STS (estudios de ciencia y tecnología). Trabaja en la Universidad de Humboldt en Berlín (Alemania). Nos explica conceptos como el cuidado, la diversidad funcional y las tecnologías de la amistad. A la vez describe algunos proyectos de diseño concreto en los que se comprometió luego del 15M, en España. Nos convoca a pensar el diseño desde la incertidumbre y entender los vínculos que se producen en procesos de diseño colaborativos. Al final de la entrevista también hablamos de la enseñanza de diseño a partir de un proyecto donde exploró con alumnos el diseño en situaciones de crisis.
