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.
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.
As part of an ongoing collaboration with architect Micol Rispoli, we recently published an article in the journal Design & Culture. This text stems from a mutual interest in re-thinking on the pedagogy of participatory design from the plural embodied experiences, in this case searching to learn to be affected by neurodiverse spatial pratice.
Design Before Design: Learning to be Affected by Neurodiverse Spatial Practices
Current ethical and political revivals of design pedagogy foreground the participation of neglected subjects in attempts to democratize design practice. This article explores what participatory design practitioners in architecture might be required to learn when reconfiguring their tasks in the wake of Science and Technology Studies (STS) approaches to Participatory Things: treating them as a more-than-human assembly and unfolding process. This requires designers and architects to engage in designing the “pre-conditions” of participatory practice, “learning to be affected” by variegated actors and their peculiar ways of dwelling. In describing our attempts at approximating ourselves to the spatial practices of a neurodivergent person, we suggest this requires taking into account more-than-verbal experiences that liberal understandings of participation tend to exclude. This approach is here discussed as “design before design”: a form of design practice learning from the alternative approaches to design practice that unfolding “things” might bring to the fore and invite to explore.
Recommended citation: Rispoli, M. & Criado, T.S. (2024). Design Before Design: Learning to be Affected by Neurodiverse Spatial Practices. Design and Culture, 16(3), 357–381 | PDF
At a time when market logics have become the hegemonic operating rationale of many governments, some public officers and bureaucrats worldwide seem to have undergone their own revolution in recent decades. At times referred to as a ‘creative turn’ in their practice (as in the annual Creative Bureaucracy Festival), at other times discussed as part of a ‘new municipalist’ transformation of public action (Bianchi 2022), urban bureaucracies seem to be going through a profound process of reinvention, seeking to renew their tools and approaches: from participatory budgeting or community involvement in policymaking to co-creation competitions and citizen laboratories that expand the range of knowledge and sensibilities in urban governance. As if Paul du Gay’s praise for their work (du Gay, 2000; Pedersen & du Gay, 2020) had caught on in the public sector, bureaucrats in many of these cases appear no longer as sinister machinic operators of Kafkaesque state violence, but as hopeful and flexible practitioners promoting many forms of public good. In our view, such ‘bureaucratic reinventions’ demand the attention of scholars interested in “material cultural practice in the organisation of the economy and the social” – one of JCE’s main aims – in at least two ways.
On the one hand, in line with relevant material-semiotic accounts of the practices of government (Hull, 2012a & 2012b) and the law (Kang, 2018; Kang & Kendall, 2019), how might we make these bureaucratic reinventions amenable to agnostic ethnographic study? This may require close attention to the ways in which bureaucrats in different sectors and departments deploy different legal and economic devices in different attempts at relational planning (Kurath, Marskamp, Paulos & Ruegg, 2018), on different issues in different places. Such attention to ‘bureaucratic reinventions’ would be an interesting way of empirically refocusing the much interesting work on market arrangements (Callon, 2021) – especially those interested in the specificity of economic arrangements for shared concerns (Frankel, Ossandón & Pallesen, 2019), as well as the predicaments markets face in ‘problem-solving’ (Neyland, Ehrenstein & Milyaeva, 2019) – for contemporary forms of government. In what ways are these bureaucratic reinventions more conducive to the public good than the actions of the market? To what extent might they be ‘performing different economies’ (Roelvink, St. Martin & Gibson-Graham, 2015) beyond the market?
On the other hand, we suggest that these bureaucratic reinventions alter the ways in which social researchers can approach these spaces or find ways to become relevant to them. Beyond critical takes or consultancy work, how might bureaucratic reinventions signal a new paradigm for research? Drawing on the work of Douglas Holmes and George Marcus (2005) on ‘para-sites’ – places of the contemporary populated by epistemic communities interested in inquirying on similar topics to researchers, and with whom ethnographers can enter in collaborative relations – what do these places mean for the ways in which we might study them? Indeed, various colleagues are also immersing themselves in the creative ethos of these renewed bureaucracies, experimenting with forms of joint problem-making (Estalella & Criado, 2018), sometimes drawing on cultural practitioners and the arts to explore other forms of relevance.
With this double lens, in this special issue we are inviting papers paying detailed ethnographic attention to (i) the assemblages and devices of peculiar bureaucratic reinventions and the forms of government there emerging, their predicaments and problems, as well as (ii) the singular research engagements that they might bring to the fore. As indicated above, these approaches will help us to shed light on the reorganisation of the social and the economic, while at the same time addressing an object of research, the city, which has long been approached and criticised as an arena of corporate entrepreneurship (Harvey, 1989; Jessop, 2003), neoliberal development (Graham and Marvin, 2001; Graham et al., 2019), and financialised activity (Aalbers, 2019).
Please submit your 400-word abstract (excluding references) and biography (up to 250 words) to tomcriado AT uoc.edu and julio.paulos AT arch.ethz.ch by July 5, 2024.
Selected authors will be expected to submit a full draft of their paper by 15 February, 2025.
Timeline
Reception of abstracts: July 5th, 2024
Selection (Notification of acceptance): September 6th, 2024
Authors’ workshop with draft papers: March 2025
Initial manuscripts for editorial comment: April-May 2025
Submission of special issue for JCE review: July 2025
References
Aalbers, M.B. 2020. Financial Geography III: The Financialization of the City. Progress in Human Geography 44(3): 595–607.
Bianchi, I. 2023. The Commonification of the Public under New Municipalism: Commons–State Institutions in Naples and Barcelona. Urban Studies 60 (11): 2116–32.
Callon, M. (2021). Markets in the Making: Rethinking Competition, Goods, and Innovation. Zone Books.
du Gay, P. (2000). In Praise of Bureaucracy: Weber, Organization, Ethics. Sage.
Estalella, A. & T. S. Criado (2018) (Eds.). Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through Fieldwork Devices. Berghahn.
Frankel, C., Ossandón, J., & Pallesen, T. (2019). The organization of markets for collective concerns and their failures. Economy and Society, 48(2), 153–174.
Graham, S., & Marvin, S. (2001). Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities, and the Urban Condition. Routledge.
Graham, M., Kitchin, R., Mattern, S., & Shaw, J. (Eds.). (2019). How to Run a City like Amazon, and Other Fables. Meatspace.
Harvey, D. (1989). From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism. Human Geography, 71(1), 3–17.
Hull, M. S. (2012a). Documents and Bureaucracy. Annual Review of Anthropology, 41, 251–267.
Hull, M. S. (2012b). Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan. University of California Press.
Jessop, B. (2003). The Future of the Capitalist State. Polity Press.
Kang, H. Y. (2018). Law’s materiality. In Routledge Handbook of Law and Theory (pp. 453–474). Routledge.
Kang, H. Y., & Kendall, S. (2019). Introduction to the special issue “Legal Materiality.” Law Text Culture, 23, 1–15.
Kurath, M., Marskamp, M., Paulos, J., & Ruegg, J. (Eds.). (2018). Relational Planning: Tracing Artefacts, Agency and Practices. Springer.
Holmes, D. R., & Marcus, G. E. (2005). Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization: Toward the Re-Functioning of Ethnography. In A. Ong & S. J. Collier (Eds.), Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (pp. 235–252). Blackwell.
Neyland, D., Ehrenstein, V., & Milyaeva, S. (2019). Can markets solve problems?An empirical inquiry into neoliberalism in action. Goldsmiths Press.
Pedersen, K. Z., & du Gay, P. (2021). COVID-19 and the Flexibility of the Bureaucratic Ethos. In J. Waring, J.-L. Denis, A. R. Pedersen, & T. Tenbensel (Eds.), Organising Care in a Time of Covid-19 (pp. 99–120). Palgrave Macmillan.
Roelvink, G., St. Martin, K., & Gibson-Graham, J. K. (Eds.). (2015). Making Other Worlds Possible: Performing Diverse Economies. Minnesota University Press.
I took the occasion to share my vision for what I have been calling not Public Anthropology but, rather, A Publics’ Anthropology!
A Publics’ Anthropology: Setting up ecologies of collective speculation
What does it mean to undertake anthropological work in contemporary domains populated by a wide variety of ‘publics’, ranging from technical experts to affected communities? Publics are perhaps the main collective condition of knowledge production and circulation in the contemporary: not just as media-provoked entities–e.g. the ‘public sphere’ or scientific and professional societies, connected through ‘publications’–, but also the many uncertain and emergent collectives that gather in different degrees of involvement under issues of concern, using a variety of mediums. As I see it, an anthropology aware of its public dimension should not just be one engaging in public criticism, but also, and perhaps mainly, one transformed by the very relation to publics, developing different forms of engagement and exploring different aims and effects. In my work, I have been inspired to do this in activist design endeavours with different kinds of urban agents. To discuss the different forms a publics’ anthropology might entail, in this session I’ll share with you two recent projects working with municipal actors setting up ecologies of collective speculation: the game Waste What?, an interdisciplinary team production as part of studying activist circular economy projects in Berlin, searching to simulate the conundrums of these initiatives as well as provoke a reflection on their predicaments; and the Department of Umbrology, a collective speculative experiment equipping a proto-municipal division to inquire on the social dimensions of heat mitigation projects, in the hope that his might sensitise technical professionals to consider the social in the plural.
The recurrent everyday distress many of us live with in times of climate mutation seems to have unearthed a peculiar link that seemed long lost: between the mental and the environmental. More than a century ago, already Georg Simmel (1903) sought to discuss how a growing urban condition was making emerge new and unprecedented forms of mental life. He was far from being the only one concerned with how urban environments were affecting urban dwellers. In the last century, a plethora of experts of different kinds – architects, public health practitioners, social reformers, urban ecologists – have been trying to address urban milieus and atmospheres, so as to tackle a wide variety of environmental stressors, ranging from noises to air pollution, with green spaces and infrastructures becoming a central area of intervention deemed good ‘for the body and the mind’. In recent times, the green city movement is one prominent example of an increasingly recurring and intensified debate about the relevance of urban parks (Fitzgerald 2023).
One of the main features of the present environmental conditions is that things seem to be happening in distributed spatial formations that sometimes seem ‘all over the place.’ Interestingly, cultural studies of mental phenomena have for decades tried to dispute cognitive sciences’ abstruse interest in emplacing the mental in, say, the brain. For instance, Gregory Bateson (1971), drawing from cybernetic theory, notably attempted to ecologize the mind: the mental, thus, could thereon be conceptualized as a relational effect of the interaction of humans with their environments. In a famous example Bateson used, a blind person’s sense of touch was not just in their hand but also at the very tip of their cane, helping navigate the contours of a sidewalk. These attempts at ecologizing mental phenomena beyond the skin and the organism, have been considerably expanded recently by the work of another anthropologist, Tim Ingold (2000, 2011), who has proposed to move beyond a dualistic, binary understanding of mind and body by empirically focusing the relational co-constitution of organisms and environments in activities rather than stressing the embeddedness of an organism in a supposedly pre-existing environment.
Focusing on the processual emergence of both, organisms and environments, situating subjective, embodied experiences in their in-betweenness, overcoming the binary distinction of nature and nurture while refraining from biological as well as environmental determinism and particularly emphasizing how bodily processes are entangled with and permeated by environmental conditions resonates with recent interest of social science scholars in the production and phenomenology of atmospheres (Anderson 2009, Duff 2016, Winz 2018), the anthropological inquiry into biosocial relations (Ingold/Palsson 2013) as well as practice theoretical investigations on bodies as assemblages (Blackman, Mol 2002). Concepts such as “local biologies” (Lock 2001), “biological localities” (Fitzgerald et al. 2016), “health environment” (Seeberg et al. 2020) or “anthropo-zoo-genesis” (Despret 2004) have been proposed to describe the permeable entanglements of bodies and environments, the biological and the social (cf. Meloni et al. 2018).
Little attention, however, has been paid so far to the similarities and differences between the broader focus on biology/embodied experiences and ‘the mental’ – understood as ecological relationality – and the specificities of ‘the urban’ have only been slightly addressed in research with a particular focus on mental health questions (cf. Bister et al. 2016, Söderström 2019, Rose/Fitzgerald 2022). Paying attention to the mental in the environmental is not just important to address the convoluted sentiments we associate with ‘eco-anxiety’, but also to understand how the mind has been ecologized, in a different sense. For instance, notions of the mental are being everyday invoked to articulate many urban spaces: from the conventions of informal encounters that regulate how we greet to more infrastructural conditions such as, say, infographics (Halpern, 2018) in transportation systems. But, also, in an ecology of the mind so brutally dominated by psychopharmaceutical compounds (Rose 2018), how come we seldom discuss the environmental effects of drugs such as anxiolytics and antidepressants in our very cities?
This Special Issue wishes to articulate these interests and sensitivities through ethnographic inquiries that empirically ground connections between ‘mental’ phenomena and urban life. We want to ask: How might a biosocial agenda searching to ecologize the mind be relevant to discuss environmental conditions making dwellers feel, indeed, ‘all over the place’ as well? Conversely, what sort of environmental effects and relations are our ecologies of the mind producing? All in all, how can we imagine, describe, map and theorize the resulting ‘urban mentalities’ or ‘mentalistic cities’ without falling into the traps of idealism, holism, cultural essentialism and Cartesian dualism? What concepts, field devices and research designs might enable us to bring into dialogue experience-based approaches (cf. Söderström et al. 2016, Bieler et al. 2023, Dokumaci 2023, Bister 2023) with an inquiry of ecologies of expertise (Beck 2015) in which ‘mental experiences’ are taken up, translated, shaped and inscribed into the urban fabric?
We want to focus on ethnographic studies approaching dwellers attempting to render their habitats inhabitable, making emerge a wide variety of ecological relations between the mental and the environmental, be they regarding experiential matters, new or disrupted habits, conundrums in between the personal and the collective, the body and the infrastructural, and relations between humans and other-than-human beings. This is the research arena we wish to address as environ|mental urbanities, a denomination hopefully guiding us to grasp the sometimes elusive or ungraspable aspects of both mental and environmental practices and experiences in urban arenas. Hence pushing us to study how we can sense, describe and analyse what and how “bodies-in-action” (Niewöhner/Lock 2018) – or, more precisely: minds-and-environments-in-action, or environ-mental configurations – feel, touch, smell, navigate, encounter and thereby come into being (cf. Manning et al. 2022, Schillmeier 2023). Beyond the seemingly unmediated immersion of bodies in socio-material environments, environ|mental urbanities urge us to ethnographically inquire into the dynamic, shifting co-constitutive relations between subjective experiences, bodies, material environments, cultural practices, urban infrastructures, animals and other non-humans.
With more than half of the population of the planet now living in urban arenas of different kinds, but under the strain of daunting and unravelling environmental conditions, new urbanities seem to be developing that hold the mental and the environmental in tension. At a time when eco-anxieties are grabbing a hold of us, perhaps the time has come to re-analyse the environ-mental conditions of urban dwellers, and the role that the intertwinement of the mental and the environmental play in contemporary urban arenas. In this spirit, we invite contributions from anthropology, geography, sociology and adjacent disciplines which provide inspiring ethnographic case studies, tinkering and experimenting with methods and collaborative fieldwork and/or aim for situated concept work that allow to problematize ‘the environ|mental’ while simultaneously enriching our conceptualisation of ‘the urban’ beyond mere material or geographic locality and stage for cultural practices.
Deadline: Please submit abstracts of no more than 200 words, plus your institutional affiliation(s) and a short biography (a few lines) to patrick.bieler AT tum.de, milena.bister AT hu-berlin.de and tomcriado AT uoc.edu by April 29nd, 2024. If you have any questions, please write the three of us as well.
Process: We will notify acceptance by May 21st, 2024. Abstracts of the selected contributions will be proposed as a special issue to an international English-speaking multidisciplinary social sciences Journal. We aim for Open Access publishing. All contributors will meet online to pitch and discuss their abstracts in June 2024. First drafts will be discussed in a workshop in January 2025 (either in person or online). Final manuscripts will be due in March 2025.
Denielle Elliott & Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer have been for the last years working on a much-needed compilation on the art of fieldnotes, called Naked Fieldnotes. A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing. The volume has been recently published by Minnesota University Press.
In their words:
Unlocking the experience of conducting qualitative research, Naked Fieldnotes pairs fieldnotes based on observations, interviews, and other contemporary modes of recording research encounters with short, reflective essays, offering rich examples of how fieldnotes are shaped by research experiences. By granting access to these personal archives, the contributors unsettle taboos about the privacy of ethnographic writing and give scholars a diverse, multimodal approach to conceptualizing and doing ethnographic fieldwork.
As they expound in the introduction:
The practice of writing a fieldnote— what goes in, what is left out, who the audience is— is a difficult one to acquire, which is belied by the breadth of books and classes that purport to teach novice ethnographers to write fieldnotes. Like any writing, fieldnotes are the outcome of a learned sensibility that can be acquired only through the practice of writing […] This is one of the persistent challenges of teaching ethnographic methods, particularly when most of what students learn about ethnographic writing and fieldnotes is inferred from exemplary ethnographies. Students want prescriptive, generic expectations of what goes into a fieldnote and what a fieldnote should look like, thereby ensuring their writing of “good” fieldnotes; as an index of this sentiment, a few exceptional (p. x)
Growing out of the frustrations we have had as novice ethnographers— and that we have shared with our students— this collection of fieldnotes is intended to dispel the myths about the charismatic nature of fieldnotes and ethnographers by providing readers with a diversity of techniques, generic experiments, and objects and processes of ethnographic investigation so as to show how research and writing are always shaped by the sensibilities of researchers and the shapes of the ethnographic projects they are conducting. Fieldnotes are always experimental in their attempts to capture that experience. (p.xi)
I very much wish to thank them for their invitation to share one of mine, titled:
Munich, Blind Activism, Participatory Urban Design, November 2015
This note is part of my attempt at doing fieldwork with the Bavarian Association for the Blind and Partially Sighted (BBSB). It captures one of the organization’s in/accessibility explorations of a square in Munich on November 12, 2015. This took place after the square had already been finalized by the city administration, an anomaly in how to involve disabled people in design projects. As the blind activists already knew, the square presented many inaccessibility issues. Doing fieldwork in a very graphic-intensive field like architecture requires one to think from the visual materials, so when I was handed the promotional brochure, including pictures and renderings, architectural diagrams, and an explanation of the urban intervention, I took a very fast decision: I put away my phone, which I used only to take my own pictures, mostly to remember the details they were talking about as well as the steps, and I opted to scribble on top of the brochure. I followed them for about three hours (from nine in the morning to noon) as they went about different aspects: the tactile differentiation of the creative pavements, the color differentiation of the pavements, and a few other things. My scribbled notes were rather nonlinear interjections, taken at different moments in the brochure. The pictures I took with my phone allowed me to have a sense of sequence afterward.
Micol Rispoli y Ramon Rispoli han editado la maravilla de compilación “Design, STS e la sfida del più-che-umano | Diseño, STS y el desafío de lo más-que-humano“, bilingüe en italiano y castellano.
Terraformazioni es un proyecto fascinante, publicado por la editorial italiana Cratèra edizioni, que tiene por objeto poner en diálogo investigaciones científicas y artísticas en un espacio abierto a la reflexión sobre la cultura del proyecto arquitectónico.
Junto con Ignacio Farías y Felix Remter colaboramos en este espectacular número inicial, rodeados de mucha gente querida e inspiradora, con un texto reflexionando sobre nuestra experiencia pedagógica en Múnich.
¿Cómo diseñaríamos con animales si hiciéramos el contrato correcto?
Resumen
En respuesta a las complejas crisis medioambientales de origen antropogénico, recientes desarrollos en arquitectura y urbanismo buscan explorar otros materiales, tecnologías, recursos y modos de colaboración. Pero, ¿y si lo que estuviera en juego no fuera el rediseño de las formas arquitectónicas y de los paisajes urbanos, sino el rediseño de las prácticas arquitectónicas y de diseño urbano? Este capítulo muestra una especulación colectiva para hacer esta cuestión pensable, un trabajo en el que lo “más que humano” supuso algo más que el contenido de un brief de diseño, requiriendo más bien abrirse a las competencias ‘no sólo humanas’ en procesos de codiseño y a las incertidumbres que se derivan de las interdependencias terrestres y multi-especies. ¿Cómo cuidar, pues, en la práctica arquitectónica de los complejos enredos terrestres que articulan los espacios de cohabitación humana y más que hu- mana? Este texto no proporciona directrices o principios generales para ha- cerlo, sino que describe un enfoque experimental orientado a re-aprender la práctica de la arquitectura por medio del encuentro con animales. Dialogando con los estudios de ciencia y tecnología o las humanidades ambientales y sus reflexiones sobre las relaciones multi-especies, describimos un experimento pedagógico en el que ciertos animales fueron tratados como acompañantes epistémicos para repensar la práctica arquitectónica, involucrando así sus competencias para intentar diseñar con ellos.
WASTE WHAT? explores how we can think about materials differently, trying out many ways to keep stuff in use. In the game you play as a material recovery initiative. Your goal is to creatively find new uses for discarded things, closing loops and reducing the amount of waste that is burned.
A constant avalanche of materials flows through our cities every day: packaging, food that is never eaten, electronics that are quickly outdated, cheap textiles to feed the fast fashion frenzy, furniture and construction materials for temporary spaces. From production to recycling or disposal, these industrial-scale material flows produce emissions and other negative environmental impacts, and take a lot of labor to handle!
In many places around the world, citizen projects are working to do something about it, trying out many ways to keep stuff in use. These initiatives many times struggle to decide what is waste and what is not.
Your city is such a place, what will you do about it? Form a material recovery initiative and fight against things being turned into waste!
WASTE WHAT?An open-source cooperative game for 2 players or 2 teams.
As you repair, recombine and repurpose things, your knowledge and skills grow.
To maximize your impact you can also work together with other initiatives!
You can be specialized in different areas: Textile, Furniture, Bikes, Food, Construction and Electronics.
YOU WIN: If you finish 6 rounds, while keeping low CO2 levels.
YOU LOSE: If any player can’t pay rent at the end of a round or you emit all 3 CO2 tokens in the waste burning facility.
