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, DOI: 10.1080/17547075.2024.2375453 | PDF
Editorial note: The City of Shades is the second issue in a series of urban explorations that are part of an ongoing collaboration between Tarde and xcol.org.
Our climate cultures are in crisis. Heat is no longer a distant or abstract event, something that happens to us. It is among us. And in its most extreme versions, it appears more like a chronic illness with profound, unequal, and devastating effects [1].
In a peculiar way, for a country like Spain, where I live, accustomed to sun and heat as a recurring seasonal issue, this places us before a crisis for which we can feel over-prepared. But summer after summer, heat wave after heat wave, inherited habits and practices do not quite work. It is no longer enough to walk under cover, wear sunscreen, drink a lot, dress lightly, lower the blinds, and wait for the worst to happen because the worst is yet to come on those torrid, tropical, and infernal nights, as meteorologists call them.
Modern infrastructures and construction methods, which made us feel at the avant-garde, appear today hopelessly problematic. We need a radical change. Different international and intergovernmental organizations have long warned that the response to climate change must start from cities [2]: increasingly populated settlements and complex-to-change infrastructures from which we need to rethink the habitability of the planet.
Anti-solar urbanism
The ongoing climatic mutation places us before the challenge of reconfiguring urban ideas of care, protection, or shelter, inventing more plural ways of living, and protecting those who could be more exposed or suffer more from its devastating effects [3]. In that sense, we live in a time of urgency and frantic searches for solutions. However, and this is my proposal, in addition to infrastructural or “nature-based” solutions, we have an important task before us: this requires, above all, redescribing what the urban might be.
In situations of great uncertainty, where how to respond is sometimes difficult to imagine, we may need to train themselves to pay attention to the seemingly irrelevant but crucial, such as urban shades and shadows: unimportant entities that articulate urban life and our daily relationships with the sun and heat.
Without a doubt, there is nothing more conventional than shades. As terrestrial beings we all have one. But thinking about urban shades can be something much deeper than it seems, since it forces us to pay attention differently to our everyday environments. Indeed, what is shade if not a changing relationship we enter with the Sun as it passes through our habitats throughout the day?
With Copernicus and Galileo, modernity put the Sun at the center. One of the many effects of this heliocentric turn and its profound cosmological effects is that we tend to attribute to the star that presides over our firmament a beneficent role, the ability to give life and irradiate us with its strength, but this regularly positive appreciation needs a counterpoint: What to do when it harms us or puts us at risk, such as in the conditions of extreme atmospheric heat or in the solar exposure that leads to melanoma? [4]
The modern philosophical tradition, but also our forms of artistic expression and folklore –– with innumerable children’s songs praising the Sun –– have difficulties treating without prejudice everything that remains outside of these irradiations: a solarized caricature treated as the archaic, the conservative, the dangerous, the murky hours of the night. However, and this is the hypothesis that I would like to share here, what if we have never been solar? What if, to breathe and think again, sheltered from wild solar power, we need to move the Sun away from the center?
This does not necessarily mean to stop considering the relevance of the Sun, nor resurrecting the Platonic distrust that condemns us to see nothing more than the shadows projected on the walls of a cave. The type of ‘sheltered thinking’ that we could begin to practice has, rather, shades at its center: What if shades were not the possibility of thinking negatively, taking things for what they are not, but a way of thinking protected from the Sun and its scorching heat and irradiation? In fact, as baroque painting amply showed, shadows are central to our perception, allowing figure/ground distinctions, but they are also key to our understanding of the world and our survival [5].
Climate shelter
Taken thusly, our terrestrial life could be re-read as a long interspecific story of how the living have learned to protect ourselves from solar irradiation. That is one of the most interesting arguments in the work of paleontologist and geologist Anthony J. Martin, Evolution Underground, which traces the evolutionary importance of burrows and underground architectures for the survival on the face of the earth of many animals since time immemorial, including human beings [6].
But, going further, the atmosphere itself, an initial bacterial achievement, with its complex circulation of air, or later in the history of the Earth, the seas and river banks, the iridescent tapestry of clouds and forests are nothing but aspects of a patchy system, with singular expressions, of ways to capture, regulate, dissipate or block the Sun’s rays. In this renewed centrality of shades, we cannot forget plants and their important role in making our planet habitable.
Cloud shade
Philosopher Emanuele Coccia expressed this very poetically in a recent conference titled “The Garden of the World.” One of his main arguments is that what we call Earth today cannot be understood but as a technical achievement of life, more precisely the work of plants, crucial to producing the atmosphere and orography, as well as the oxygen thanks to which other beings live:
“The Earth has the status of an artifact… a cultural production of all living beings that inhabit it and not only the transcendental precondition for the possibility of life. Gaia is Flora’s daughter. The Sun is Flora’s cosmic doll” (my translation) [7].
And what would have happened to the terraforming of our planet were it not for plants and, more particularly, trees: with their ability to transform soil and air, producing habitats or microclimates so that many animals could begin to crawl beyond the seas sheltered from the Sun [8]
Tree shade
In fact, many of our primary experiences of shade and protection from the Sun actually have to do with the delicate interweaving of tree foliage and the strange collage of plant cover. Thinking with trees allows us to venture another hypothesis about the habitability of our planet: What if shades have been more important than what we have told ourselves until now? What’s more, despite the fact that they are usually considered a secondary product of the Sun, its negative version, what if shades were the very condition of habitability on Earth and, therefore, in urban habitats troubled by climatic mutation?
The interesting thing is that even if shades are an old acquaintance, growing environmental concerns have caused administrations and professionals of all kinds to begin to recover this daily environmental relationship, long forgotten by modern forms of urbanization. For this reason, it has gained great importance in different technical solutions to face the extreme heat of the present: municipal shading plans, bioclimatic itineraries, or shade infrastructures [9]. This requires revitalizing ancient knowledges and techniques, as well as speculating and creating new solutions to mitigate and adapt to increasing heat.
Stating that we have never been solar, paying attention to shades also means restoring the violence exercised against many ancestral traditions by the moderns, with their hygienist obsession with clean air and wide, controlled streets intended primarily for traffic. This heliocentric or solar urbanism was the way in which Reason re-incarnated as a city project. In the aftermath of this, centering shades is also a way to restore their relevance for urban habitability, which allows us to admire the wrongly called ‘vernacular’ architecture with different eyes, seeking inspiration! Also, as Paloma Yáñez Serrano suggested in a conversation, it might lead us to understand trees and plan shades not just as ‘infrastructure’ but something part of a complex sentient ecology we should allow to thrive, something urban ecology and forestry schools are far from doing!
Solar Urbanism
However, to say that we have never been solar is not to throw modernist architecture overboard but rather to notice modernist urban formations for which shade has also been relevant. That is, it is about re-reading architecture and urbanism not from the blinding light of the Enlightenment but from the murky atmospheres of shades and shadows, as architect Stephen Kite proposes in his book Shadow-makers, a cultural history of shadows as a ‘shaping factor in architecture’, both in its traditional and modern forms [10].
Although much of Kite’s book is devoted to the importance of shadow in defining the cavities of buildings and interior spaces, there is a wonderful chapter on the Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Islamic city because what is the medina –– an architectural conglomerate formed by deep canyon adobe buildings, together with canopies and the use of damp fabrics –– but a great ode to shade as a principle of urban habitability?[11].
But there are also interesting examples of urban treatments of shades and shadow in different modernist traditions that have developed in hot and arid climates. This is extensively covered in a recent exhibition on tropical modernism in Africa and India curated by Christopher Turner at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London [12].
In Barcelona, where I reside, there is also a history to be reconstructed of modernist shade architectures, of which the two umbracles (shadow buildings) of the modernist Ciutadella and Montjuic parks stand out: Siamese structures, but that operate on the inverse principle of the greenhouse, even if conceived as part of the same colonial impulse. This is far from being a local story: a similar twin architecture can be found in Lisbon’s signature Estufa Quente and Estufa Fria. Indeed, umbracles or estufas frias and greenhouses can be read as key to what architectural historian Lydia Kallipoliti calls the grammars of ‘colonial acclimatization,’ which allowed the fragile transportation, and the massive relocation of plants, animals and people from different regions of the world, for the purposes of trade and exhibition, sometimes also starting out a new troubled life in the metropolis [13].
Umbracle de la Ciutadella (Ciutadella Park’s shade building)
And yet, the great ‘achievements’ of the past, no matter how problematic or interesting, cannot be ‘the’ solution. We have entered an experimental moment, one of great stupor. Our cities have become what the French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour calls “critical zones”: complex unknown territories where living beings are literally risking their lives, but also where they rush the most to continue making liveable worlds in their irreducible plurality [14]. The challenge we face in what Latour calls the “new climatic regime” in these critical urban zones is, therefore, to engender plural forms of habitability in a frankly complex and problematic moment without guarantees [15].
To tentatively respond to this major challenge, I believe we need to experiment with forms of urban transformation. This may sound paradoxical, I know because we are at a moment where we feel like we have to run to do something to fix the problem right away. But we must be careful not to turn this rush into a technocratic project governed by experts or elites who impose on us how to live, as in the colonial period. No doubt, terrible things are underway, but there is a great danger of confusing the diagnosis with the solution, especially when we do not know how we could live and with whom.
Precisely in this moment of pressing urgency, we need more than ever an experimental culture to rethink the city. With this precaution concerning technical solutions, I do not mean that countless infrastructural arrangements –– such as porous and reflective pavements or shaded spaces to protect us from the Sun and the heat island effect ––are not important. We also need to learn to leave space for plants to develop or allow animals to thrive in cities on an equal footing. This is all key, but we need to go further.
Street canopy
At a time like this, we also need to address the social and material life of atmospheric and climatic phenomena, such as shades, whether already existing or designed. In a heated present, where the ability to shelter ourselves from the scorching Sun is a poorly distributed good, revitalizing their knowledge and generative practices may be crucial to relearning to live as earthly beings.
To do this, perhaps we need a ‘Department of Umbrology’ in each of our territories. This notion was developed by writer Tim Horvath in his short story The discipline of shadows, where he explores the complex relationships in a comically absurd university department devoted to the study of the life of shadows, where physicists, shadow theater dramaturgs and Platonic philosophers coexist without understanding each other, generating funny situations in their mutual incomprehension [16].
Collateral shade
However, in an absurdly tragic moment like the one we find ourselves in, we might need to explore how to make the type of space inspired by that story exist, but not as a university department. Rather, taking inspiration from the description and intervention work of artivist collectives such as the Los Angeles Urban Rangers [17] or the dramaturgical speculative experiments of the Crisis Cabinet of Political Fictions [18], what if we imagined it as a workspace devoted to the study of and intervention in the urban life of the shades: hence developing umbrology as a practice addressing both physical and material aspects as well as social and cultural relationships.
To make it exist, we would need to train ourselves to appreciate the intricacies of this environmental relationship: devoting ourselves to the study of the complex relationships between the Sun and buildings, the street or trees, as well as the role that different types of shadows can have for different people or groups and their ways of surviving the scorching heat. I would like to appeal to the relevance of ethnography for this task because of how it foregrounds an investigation of the embodied and situated study of practices, the senses, and ways of life. Ethnography would also allow a different approach to inquiry, enabling an understanding of environmental phenomena beyond two well-trod paths in which we render shades readable and discussable: [19]
On the one hand, climatological and meteorological practices that foreground their temperature and other atmospheric variables (such as humidity), leaving in the shadows their lived or cultural dimensions, the forms of life from which they arise and those that make them emerge, enabling or disabling different urban climates;
On the other hand, the practices of spatial legibility, from a bird’s eye and in Euclidean terms, undertaken by projects such as ShadeMap or Shadowmap, geographic information systems (GIS) that, through geolocation, allow us to simulate the inclination of the Sun and the shades and shadows cast by the urban environment on our digital devices.
Bird safe glass, using shades
To study how to make our cities habitable again in the face of increasing heat, we also need to learn to describe with many more nuances, both symbolic and ephemeral, taking into account other knowledges and ways of articulating problems, the new terra ignota that our cities have become: undertaking experimental cartographic endeavours such as the one suggested by Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes and Axelle Gregoire in their magnificent Terra Forma, hence allowing us to re-center our bodily implications in the urban climates we inhabit and the plurality of our ways of inhabiting them [20].
The importance of the lived body in ethnography is a key aspect since it can help us stop thinking about atmospheres or climate and, more specifically, heat as res extensa: as an external thing or issue, detached from our actions. Rather, as different recent works in the fields of history and social studies of science and technology have argued, climate, atmospheres, and heat are something humans have partaken in their making: by omission and commission, in more direct or more distant ways, in our daily practices, embodied and mediated by different technical gadgets, but also by the ways in which we consume and build cities: our clothing, our buildings with air conditioners. Put differently, as a result of deeply mediated collective practices [21].
The sociality of shades
Thus considered, shades cease being a mere natural effect and acquire relational cultural properties because there is no shadow equal to another, and its uniqueness depends on how we observe, practice, and interrogate it in its site-specificity. This sensitivity seems important to me because it would allow repopulating shades and shadows: not, to say it again, as the negative presentation of what can be seen or as empty places [22], but as sites that enable many living beings to thrive: hiding from the blinding light of both the Sun and the Enlightenment as a project.
This version of shades as protecting other life-forms deeply resonates with the antiracist work of radical Black Caribbean thinker Édouard Glissant, who coined ‘a right to opacity’ as a condition of survival for all forms of difference in the long tail of slavery [23]. But also, in a more clearly environmental sense, with the proposals of architectural historian and disability activist David Gissen [24]. Gissen defends the need to rethink cities from many forms of bodily vulnerability, commonly removed from the centrality of urbanism: Black communities, older people and children, people with chronic illnesses and disabilities. Particularly because of how the Sun and heat endanger them: like the older people suffering in silence the ‘fatal isolation’ of heat waves or the uncountable Black bodies of outdoors workers exposed to brutal conditions of heat and insolation [25]. This would dispute the Sun’s centrality in public space design, making shade into a careful urban design principle.
Solar playground
Considering the social and material shade arrangements from the practices of diverse bodies in need of urban supports, allows us to think of shades not only as a ‘civic resource’, but also as an ‘inequality index.’ Shade is, indeed, subject to different conditions of unequal access, both in troublesome everyday negotiations of spatial production and in the legal regulations of who is allowed to produce or live in the shadows and how in different contexts. Shade, thus, appears a key infrastructure for urban habitability. And that is the main reason why journalist Sam Bloch suggests shades should be turned into a mandate for urban designers, or even more radically by urban theorist Mike Davies, into a collective urban right [26].
But how to study shades ethnographically? Faced with this challenge, therefore, we actively need to relearn how to describe and dimension the problems we face – also the problems of solutions –in order to be able to test many proposals to make the plural habitability of our urban environments possible. We need, therefore, to cultivate urban speculation, not real estate! I am referring to our ability to think and rethink the many possible ways that the urban could have to make it habitable again. This would require both (i) the invention of devices to carry out field research, giving a new meaning to the term ‘shadowing’, and (ii) taking inventory of everyday spatial practices, focusing on the relationship that different people have with our perpetual companions as inhabitants under the Sun [27].
Shade on a notebook
Hence, experimenting and speculating on how to articulate a Department of Umbrology: a confederation of singular forms of thinking and intervention, a self-constituted entity from where we could liberate, imagine, and cultivate new urban sensibilities and responsibilities on how to make more livable cities. We need such a space to take responsibility for describing, protecting, and bringing to dimmed light many underground forms of knowledge and forms of collective intelligence that need opaque supports to flourish. That is, to discuss the multiple needs of a large number of unique actors often displaced by solar urbanization. I do not only mean those who cannot pay the air conditioning bill or those who need support to transform their homes and workspaces into more energy-efficient and comfortable. I also mean those who, like homeless people, appear as second-class humans, in addition to many non-human urbanites, like dogs or birds, we rarely think of when imagining climate policies.
For this proposal to work, we need very different professional and collective knowledges –– not just academic or institutional –– to work together. This mutual exchange and cross-contamination would allow exploring and trying out devices for urban inquiry, drawing on the plural sensibilities and knowledges to imagine how to equip these strange professionals of umbrology: between the natural and the cultural, with a particular interest in the analysis and politics of shades; devoting themselves to understanding the social and material complexity of shades, the multiplicity of actors and assemblages constituting them; the practices of generating shade, by and for whom, as well as the forms of sociality that they allow as regions or territories [28]: attending to their temporalities, their rhythms, and their spatial dramaturgies.
If we are successful in setting up such an experiment in the ways we encounter and describe shady urban worlds, we might make another city appear, one usually overlooked: the city of shades!
[3] My argument draws on and is deeply inspired by the work of the late French philosopher and anthropologist Bruno Latour and many of his collaborators. In his work of the last decade, there is a central notion: “New Climatic Regime,” which refers to the problems as a way of life, production, and its dependence on fossil energies that a particular has thrown us into. A destructive regime that has transformed our environments, shaped our knowledges and political institutions for more than a century, putting the habitability of the planet at risk. At the same time, this characterization suggests the possibility of its transformation from an old regime (ancien régime) to a new one: this requires searching for other horizons of meaning to engender plural forms of habitability. For an introduction to these ideas, see Latour, B. (2017). Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Polity.
[4] For an attentive look at the elemental plurality of human and non-human practices, or the scalar paradoxes of the multiple spatial, corporal, temporal, historical-cultural configurations of our omnipresent relationship with the sun and the dissipation of its rays or what we could call “solarities” –– from the infrastructural forms linked to the photovoltaic energy transition to anthropogenic catastrophes induced by the carbonification of the atmosphere (where the sun appears as “the source of withering and desiccation, a maker of monstrous heat”, p.18), not to forget the planetary centrality of photosynthesis or diurnal cycles, or its effects in the production of fossil energy or our very visual perception systems –– see Howe, C., Diamanti, J., & Moore, A. (Eds.). (2023). Solarities: Elemental Encounters and Refractions. punctum books.
[5] The most detailed attempt to restore the philosophical centrality of shadows that I am aware of is that of Casati, R. (2003). Shadows. Unlocking their secrets from Plato to our time. Vintage Books.
[6] Martin, A.J. (2017). The Evolution Underground: Burrows, Bunkers, and the Marvelous Subterranean World Beneath our Feet. Pegasus Books.
[8] Albert, B., Halle, F., & Mancuso, S. (2019). Trees. Thames & Hudson; Coccia, E. (2018). The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture. Wiley; Coccia, E. (2021). Metamorphoses. Wiley; Leonardi, C., & Stagi, F. (2019). The Architecture of Trees. Princeton Architectural Press; Mattern, S. (2021). Tree Thinking. Places Journal, https://doi.org/10.22269/210921
[9] Such as the ones developed by an architectural contest and experimental prototyping process put together by Barcelona’s City Council that I have been accompanying since the summer of 2023: https://bithabitat.barcelona/es/proyectos/sombra/
[10] Kite, S. (2017: 5). Shadow-makers: A cultural history of shadows in architecture. Bloomsbury Academic.
[11] Ludovico, M., Attilio, P. & Ettore, V. (Eds.) (2009). The Mediterranean Medina. Gangemi Editor.
[12] Turner, C. (Ed.) (2024). Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence. V&A Publishing.
[13] Kallipoliti, L. (2024). Histories of Ecological Design: An Unfinished Cyclopedia. Actar.
[14] Latour, B., & Weibel, P. (Eds.). (2020). Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth. ZKM/MIT Press.
[15] Latour, B. (2018). Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime . Polity; Latour, B. (2021). After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis. Polity.
[16] Horvath, T. (2009). The Discipline of Shadows. Conjunctions , 53 , 293-311.
[17] Bauch, N., & Scott, E.E. (2012). The Los Angeles Urban Rangers: Actualizing Geographic Thought. Cultural Geographies , 19 (3), 401-409; Kanouse, S. (2015). Critical Day Trips: Tourism and Land-Based Practice. In E.E. Scott & K. Swenson (2015). Critical landscapes: Art, space, politics (pp. 43-56). University of California Press.
[19] Hepach, M.G. & Lüder, C. (2023). Sensing Weather and Climate: Phenomenological and Ethnographic Approaches. Environment and Planning F 2 (3): 350–68.
[20] Aït-Touati, F., Arènes, A., & Grégoire, A. (2022). Terra Forma: A Book of Speculative Maps. MIT Press.
[21] Calvillo, N. (2023). Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds. Columbia Books on Architecture and the City; Fressoz, J.-B., & Locher, F. (2024). Chaos in the Heavens: The Forgotten History of Climate Change. Verse Books; Hsu, H. L. (2024). Air Conditioning. Bloomsbury; Parikka, J., & Dragona, D. (Eds.). (2022). Words of Weather: A glossary. Onassis Foundation; Starosielski, N. (2021). Media Hot & Cold. Duke University Press.
[22] In the same way that deserts are not empty either, a colonial representation commonly associated with the justification of the savage exploitation of arid lands: Henni, S. (Ed.) (2022). Deserts Are Not Empty. Columbia Books on Architecture and the City
[23] Glissant, E. (1997). For Opacity. In Poetics of Relation (pp.189-194). University of Michigan Press.
[24] Gissen, D. (2022). Disabling Environments. In The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes Beyond Access (pp. 95-114). Minnesota University Press.
[25] Keller, R. C. (2015). Fatal Isolation: The Devastating Paris Heat Wave of 2003. University of Chicago Press; Macktoom, S., Anwar, N.H., & Cross, J. (2023). Hot climates in urban South Asia: Negotiating the right to and the politics of shade at the everyday scale in Karachi. Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980231195204
[26] Bloch, S. (2019). Shade: An Urban Design Mandate. Places Journal, https://doi.org/10.22269/190423 ; Davis, M. (1997) The radical politics of shade. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism 8(3): 35–39; Macktoom, S., Anwar, N.H., & Cross, J. (2023). Hot climates in urban South Asia: Negotiating the right to and the politics of shade at the everyday scale in Karachi. Urban Studies, https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980231195204
[28] In the rich ethological sense explored by Despret, V. (2021). Living as a Bird. Wiley. A proposal that breaks with the idea of territory as something that can be explained away either in functional and economic terms or as property, ownership and exploitable resources, claiming instead the need to describe it from multiple practices of inhabiting that constitute it and the arts of coexistence that they make possible. This idea is further developed by Latour, B. (2021). After Lockdown: A Metamorphosis. Polity. Latour’s proposal is to undertake a cartographic practice of territories different from the ideas of ‘blood and soil’ that have underpinned European traditionalisms and nationalisms. This is crucial, in his words, to orient oneself in the New Climatic Regime, which requires understanding ‘where we live’ and ‘what we live off’ by listing our affiliations.
Zine: Kit, Roles & Devices for the Department of Umbrology
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.
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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.
Hace no tanto, la política era una fiesta. Una verbena sostenida en el encuentro vivaz de organizados y desorganizados que, en cada uno de sus actos, abría espacios de encuentro por doquier y desplegaba prácticas generativas donde cualquiera podía explorar otras formas de vida posible. Hoy, una parte sustancialde aquella vida encantada ha quedado reducida a una representación distante y sospechosa sobre la que opinamos con inquina revanchista en el abismo en que se han convertido las redes. ¿Qué ha pasado? ¿Qué nos ha pasado? Ante un mundo nuevo que nos desafía con un sinfín de amenazas y horizontes apocalípticos, se extienden el malestar y la angustia. Aunque muchas veces no resulte sencillo discernir su origen, navegando entre la teoría psicoanalítica y el pensamiento ecológico de Bruno Latour e Isabelle Stengers, queremos tantear una genealogía posible del malestar de la época y sus efectos políticos paralizantes.
Larva and chrysalis of Papilio creshontes (Giant Swallowtail). Digitally enhanced from our own publication of Moths and butterflies of the United States (1900) by Sherman F. Denton (1856-1937).
Hace no tanto, poco más de diez años, la política era una fiesta. Esto es, una verbena sostenida en el encuentro vivaz de organizados y desorganizados que, en cada uno de sus actos, abría espacios de encuentro por doquier y desplegaba prácticas generativas donde cualquiera podía explorar otras formas de vida posible. Lo llamativo de este fenómeno es que no se trataba de una cuestión eminentemente regional; vivimos y hablamos con personas amigas que entraron en procesos parecidos en una constelación de ciudades de todo el mundo: desde Santiago de Compostela a Santiago de Chile, pasando por Belo Horizonte, Salvador-Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, Estambul o Barcelona. Hoy, una parte sustancial de aquella vida encantada ha quedado reducida, particularmente en el Estado español, a una representación distante y sospechosa sobre la que opinamos con inquina revanchista en el abismo en que se han convertido las redes. ¿Qué ha pasado? ¿Qué nos ha pasado? A este respecto, un amigo que tuvo una responsabilidad importante en un “gobierno del cambio” compartía por WhatsApp una reflexión con aires de epitafio: “Mi generación política se ha convertido en un vertedero de ombligos desalmados”.
Hace ya más de diez años, la inestabilidad, la falta de horizonte, la ruptura de sentido o, dicho de otro modo, la falta de suelo –por no hablar de su desahucio–, precipitó en el Estado español –aún no sabemos bien cómo– un vórtice generativo de intentos y tentativas de salir al encuentro del otro. Esa fuga permitió elaborar en común lo que nos pasaba con relación a la crisis que bloqueaba nuestras vidas desde 2008. Hoy, sin embargo, esa falta de suelo común nos sitúa en un vacío del que nos defendemos desde el yo, a donde parecemos habernos desterrado.
Entre los impasses de la época y la desorientación generalizada ante un mundo que nos desafía con un sinfín de amenazas y horizontes apocalípticos, se extienden el malestar y la angustia. La angustia es un afecto que pasa por el cuerpo, pero quizá convenga pensarlo como señal de un momento inquietante o, incluso, como síntoma de un malestar compartido. Por otra parte, el malestar social entendido como un bloqueo de las formas de subjetivación políticas capaces de operar disensos en un mundo hostil –cerrado en términos sensibles y existenciales– ha sido analizado desde hace años por colectivos de pensamiento antagonista como El Comité Invisible, Espai en blanc y, también, por autores como Peter Pál Pelbart y Suely Rolnik o, más recientemente, por Amador Fernández-Savater.
Aunque muchas veces no resulte sencillo discernir el origen de la angustia, en este texto –navegando entre la teoría psicoanalítica y el pensamiento ecológico de Bruno Latour e Isabelle Stengers– queremos tantear una genealogía posible del repliegue yoico en el que, a nuestro juicio, resuena una dimensión del malestar de la época que nos conduce a la impotencia política. Reflexionar sobre algunas de las condiciones de ese malestar nos parece crucial en un momento en el que, en diferentes lugares del mundo, desde Argentina o EE.UU. a diferentes estados europeos, una oleada conservadora sin precedentes prolifera alimentándose de la obstinación maníaca del resentimiento.
Crítica de la razón angustiada
En 1926, Freud (2013a) señaló que existen dos modos habituales de dirimir la angustia: la inhibición y la descarga motriz. La inhibición remite a la inacción y la pasividad: es el no pensar, el no participar, el mutismo. La descarga motriz supone el pasaje al acto incesante, un actuar todo el rato para no pensar: scrollear y twittear sin descanso o una motricidad desbordada que, al mismo tiempo que llena gimnasios, impone el mandato de caminar, salir a correr o viajar sin parar como receta para ablandar la angustia. Pero, más allá de eso, a nuestro juicio, el malestar político de la época hace síntoma a través de dos modos prevalentes que tienen que ver con la proliferación de la crítica y con su rechazo.
Opinamos todo el rato, emitimos mensajes –sin parar– y, en definitiva, actuamos para no pensar. Decía Lacan (1971), en un texto publicado en el primer volumen de los Escritos, que el yo es una función de desconocimiento del ser: un objeto al que acudimos para imaginarnos hechos de una única pieza, sin división subjetiva, sin agujeros y sin falta. Hoy, tal vez, el yo hiperbólico y sin dudas obtura la falta de empleo, la falta de alegría, la falta de vínculos, de amor, de espacios, de saberes o de certezas. En ese sentido, quizá ejercitar el yo que opina de manera maníaca sobre cualquier cosa nos permite imaginarnos soberanos, dueños de nuestros designios a través de nuestras palabras: ¿una ficción de dominio? Ahora bien, ese dominio del yo que prolifera en las redes sociales se despliega sin el otro –sin la presencia de otros cuerpos y sin otras palabras audibles que no sean la propia–. Así, la energía libidinal que propulsa esa crítica solitaria que excluye al otro –incluso, a todo lo otro de uno mismo que resulte incongruente con el yo– resuena como un goce autoerótico: una mezcla de satisfacción y pesadumbre en la que cada uno se entretiene con su objeto en soledad.
En este sentido, la supuesta razón crítica puede, paradójicamente, volvernos estúpidos. ¿Qué fabrica, qué articula o qué permite enunciar que el mundo está condenado, sin remedio, o que no hay ninguna posibilidad de transformación relevante, sino un goce triunfante de la debacle –un fin de mundo– en el que siempre pervive el yo? ¿Qué posibilidad de vida común o de articulación colectiva se activa al considerar que la única posibilidad relevante pasa por nosotros mismos, porque nos den la razón a toda costa, porque los otros acepten un código que solo unos pocos conocemos y que, además, mostramos solo a medias, instalando perpetuamente a los otros en la ignorancia, o lo que es lo mismo, en el afuera?
En unos pasajes que nos resultan muy esclarecedores del documental Cuentos para la supervivencia terrenal, Donna Haraway señala que, en algunas ocasiones, la crítica del capitalismo –denunciar la miseria del mundo y señalar a los culpables de la explotación– también puede ser un tóxico: made in Criticalland, como bromeaba Latour (2004) en un texto, precisamente, sobre los límites políticos y epistémicos de la crítica para la transformación del mundo. A pesar de que, ciertamente, esta reflexión no invalida la relevancia de la crítica, nos lleva a pensar en aquellos momentos donde la crítica deviene en un veneno narcisista que desvitaliza y condena al mismo tiempo que nos vuelve adictos a él; sólo nosotros sabemos, no nos hacen falta los otros y, de ese modo, no necesitamos movernos de nuestra posición: nadie se mueve. Como señala Haraway, a veces nos embobamos de tal manera con la penúltima crítica del capitalismo que podemos llegar a creer que no hay ninguna posibilidad política digna en el mundo que no esté contenida en esa crítica. En otras palabras, cuando una perspectiva crítica emerge y opera desde el yo, cuando su despliegue afirma una posición singular, pero también busca señalar, acallar y ridiculizar al otro –a los que “no saben”–, el veneno puede matar cualquier posibilidad de emergencia de lo colectivo.
Desterrados en el yo
Así las cosas, la crítica de la razón angustiada desactiva y, de alguna manera, sólo revela la impotencia que ella misma genera. No existen demasiadas pruebas, ni efectos verificables, de que la denuncia de la opresión remueva conciencias, como gusta decir muchas veces la teoría crítica. Eso mismo señaló Jacques Rancière (2010) a propósito del distanciamiento brechtiano. Imaginar, como proponía Brecht, que aquello que sucedía en el espacio de una obra teatral –que lo normal pueda resultar absurdo– condujera a acciones políticas transformadoras era una asunción problemática. Para Rancière, la supuesta transmutación del principio de desestabilización de la percepción corriente en una pedagogía política emancipadora nunca habría tenido efectos políticos verificables, más allá –eso sí– de la producción de un canon sobre lo que podría ser el arte político en su dimensión representacional.
En ese sentido, Isabelle Stengers y Philippe Pignarre (2018) sugerían en su libro La Brujería Capitalista que: “si el capitalismo corriera riesgos por el hecho de ser denunciado, se habría desintegrado hace tiempo” (p. 43). Por no hablar de cómo, bien al contrario, estas riadas de tuits y comentarios lapidarios acaban reforzándolo, engrosando las arcas del cryptobro de turno, detentando el cargo de capitalista de plataforma.
La otra cara sintomática de esa razón angustiada es, sin embargo, no la del ruido incesante, sino la del silencio abismal del rechazo: una desafección propia de cuerpos blindados y a la defensiva. Esta posición se fundamenta en un supuesto no querer saber que, al mismo tiempo que permite distancia y desimplicación, genera una posición de dependencia que recuerda al voyeur: el goce de la debacle por inacción que, en nuestra aparente distancia, nos instala, progresivamente, en un estado de soledad, letargo y mortificación. “¿Has visto el tweet de x?”. “¡Qué horror!”. “No, yo es que paso, ya no lo sigo”. “Yo lo he silenciado”. Un supuesto desentenderse que mantiene la fijación en lo que nos daña: una atracción fatal que alimentamos con nuestras acciones. La neurosis del sujeto que rechaza el mismo mundo en el que desea participar. Con todo, la paradoja es que, si bien decimos que no aguantamos más y, de hecho, sentimos que no aguantamos más, tampoco dejamos de querer más.
Así, nos aislamos y nos convertimos en figuras de destierro y autoexilio: apostamos por mantener el sitio, como crisálidas de mariposa que deciden paralizar neuróticamente la necesaria transformación que requiere la vida. Quizá de ese aislamiento es de donde procede el malestar profundo: ¿la crisis de las crisálidas?
La intrusión de Gaia
A todo esto, el mundo de los modernos ya no es lo que era –no está dado ni garantizado– y el futuro se ha convertido en una incógnita inquietante. En las dos últimas décadas, una superposición de crisis en curso ha instalado entre nosotros algo así como una tormenta perfecta, que nos desafía y abruma al mismo tiempo que nos interpela. Ahora bien, como apunta Bruno Latour (2017) en su libro Cara a cara con el planeta, no estamos apenas en un período difícil y prolongado de crisis y catástrofes que en algún momento pasará, recuperando así “nuestra vieja normalidad”. Más bien, asistimos a una mutación del mundo, a un corrimiento de tierras profundo, cuyo estupor no hace sino sublimar las respuestas angustiadas. De hecho, no son pocas las llamadas neuróticas a la acción ecológica que se plantean o se arman desde la inminencia de un fin de mundo, argumentado con vehemencia científica, que nos llegará: “¡ahora!, ¡ya!, ¿no lo veis?”. Y, sin embargo, como en el Esperando a Godot de Samuel Beckett, no nos movemos ni un ápice, paralizando el encuentro con el otro en el goce de la angustia.
En un intento por resignificar el absurdo en el que parecemos instalados, el esperanzador ¿Dónde estoy? de Bruno Latour (2021) abre con una analogía de la Metamorfosis de Kafka, en pleno confinamiento pandémico. Como Gregor, quizá también nosotros seamos el síntoma de un nuevo mundo, donde aquello que nos parecía normal –como los padres de esa cucaracha que muchos fuimos durante esa época– necesite ser profundamente repensado. Para quienes suscriben este texto, nacidos ambos en el año en que llegamos a 340,12 ppm de CO2, en pleno éxtasis del consumo sin límites, ungidos en plástico desde nuestra infancia y ahora sometidos a la ascesis moral del veganismo, la modernidad siempre se nos presentó como un relato de progreso continuo: una esperanza que se asentaba en el dominio infraestructural del mundo, trabajado por una cosmología que dividía el mundo entre naturaleza y cultura, opinión y verdad; o, en el plano de los agentes, entre humanos y no humanos. Los primeros, dotados de subjetividad y capacidad de acción, podían existir a distancia de los segundos: objetos, seres y entidades inmundas (sin mundo, weltlos, como los llamaba Heidegger) y conocidos por una ciencia interesada por los fenómenos distales.
Uno de los rasgos más característicos de esa transformación en curso tiene que ver con la relación cambiante que los modernos establecemos con el planeta, entendido en su dimensión terrestre y, también, viviente. Algo de esto tiene que ver con recuperar una conexión con algo muy antiguo. Al decir de Emanuele Coccia (2021), si hay algo que pueda definir a la vida es su perpetua capacidad metamórfica, donde unos seres crean condiciones para la habitabilidad de otros. En una divertida conferencia pronunciada recientemente en el CENDEAC, titulada “El jardín del mundo”, Coccia ejemplificaba esta idea hablando de cómo eso que hoy llamamos Tierra, no puede entenderse sino como consecución técnica de la vida o la labor de las plantas, cruciales para la producción de la atmósfera y la orografía, así como del oxígeno gracias al cual otros seres vivimos:
Lo que llamamos paisaje es el trabajo y el resultado de muchos arquitectos paisajistas diferentes. Lo que llamamos jardín es sólo un ejército de jardineros (las plantas)
la Tierra tiene un estatuto de artefacto… una producción cultural de todos los seres vivos que lo habitan y no sólo la precondición trascendental para la posibilidad de la vida. Gaia es hija de Flora. El sol es la muñeca cósmica de Flora
Y, sin embargo, hay algo de la mutación reciente que trasciende ciertas capacidades metamórficas de hacer mundo o “terraformar”, que nos coloca en una crisis profunda. En uno de los capítulos de Dónde aterrizar, Latour (2019) explicaba esa transformación de la siguiente manera. El acontecimiento colosal que necesitamos entender se corresponde con el desvelamiento de la potencia de actuar de lo Terrestre. Lo Terrestre —con T mayúscula, para subrayar que se trata de un concepto— es un nuevo actor político. Es decir, la tierra ha dejado de ser el telón de fondo de la acción humana y ha pasado a afirmar un poder de actuar que los modernos le habíamos negado. En ese sentido, la irrupción de la Tierra en lo político estaría transformando la misma noción de política, convirtiéndola en una suerte de geopolítica. Para Latour, aunque la inercia y el sentido común nos conducen a seguir hablando de geopolítica como si el prefijo “geo” designase solamente el marco en el que se desarrolla la acción política; “geo” designaría, ahora, un agente que participa plenamente de la vida pública. Así las cosas, la Tierra ya no es una trascendencia muda y obediente, sino una multiplicidad de entidades no humanas con las que interaccionamos y de las que dependemos para vivir.
Isabelle Stengers se ha referido a esa irrupción de la Tierra en lo político como la “intrusión de Gaia”. Sin embargo, la Gaia de Stengers no remite a la idea de sistema estable –una suerte de Madre Tierra protectora de la vida–. Gaia sería el nombre de la Tierra transformada por los vivientes: un ente en metamorfosis que podemos conocer por sus intrusiones. Un ser susceptible de reacciones imprevisibles y ciego a los daños que provoca. Una cita extraída de su libro En tiempos de catástrofes (Stengers, 2017)puede ayudarnos a enmarcar políticamente este escenario:
Luchar contra Gaia no tiene ningún sentido, hay que aprender a componer con ella. Componer con el capitalismo tampoco tiene ningún sentido, hay que luchar contra su dominio (p. 47).
La intrusión de Gaia exige de nosotros nuevos arreglos a la altura de las amenazas. Pero, en lugar de explorar junto a otros alguno de esos desafíos –cómo mantener los territorios habitables y cómo luchar contra los que los vuelven inhabitables– pareciera que persistimos en nuestros síntomas y preferimos malgastar una parte significativa de nuestras energías en prácticas yoicas con las que nos intoxicamos.
Una mutación siniestra
Quizá esté ahí, en la irrupción de lo Terrestre en la política, parte de la angustia y la desorientación política de nuestra época. Sin embargo, aquí radica nuestro punto: pese a las esperanzas depositadas en la pandemia por Latour, aquí seguimos, pegados a un suelo que se resquebraja. Mientras el mundo de la modernidad cambia brutalmente, reventando los goznes de cualquier intento de fundar una protección ad eternum, las mariposas que un día fuimos –aún lo recordamos–, tomando las plazas o haciendo la revolución de los cuerpos, parecen haber entrado en un movimiento inverso: una involución crisálida, emitiendo opiniones o quedando en un silencio paralizante desde el aparente confort de sus vainas. Una mutación siniestra.
En su conocido trabajo sobre “Lo siniestro” [das Unheimliche], publicado en 1919, Freud (2013b) habla de todo aquello que, debiendo permanecer en secreto, se ha manifestado. Lo siniestro aparece como lo espantoso que se revela de modo inesperado en lo más cotidiano: algo que se presenta y que no debería estar ahí. Freud pone el ejemplo de los autómatas, los muñecos que parecen cobrar vida. Pero también se refiere a la impresión causada por las figuras de cera: el desasosiego ante la duda de que un objeto sin vida esté de alguna forma animado. Por su parte, Lacan (2007) destaca en el Seminario 10 que lo siniestro resuena con la idea de un huésped desconocido que aparece de forma inopinada en nuestro imaginario –en un marco dónde no debería estar–. En un pasaje del mismo seminario, Lacan se refiere a ese huésped hostil como “inhabitante”, como aquel que ya habita dentro, aunque eso nos resulte inasimilable y parezca venir del exterior.
Si nos paramos a pensar en el tipo de eventos y situaciones contemporáneas que pueden despertar en nosotros esa sensación de lo siniestro, no parece descabellado considerar como siniestra la potencia de actuar de lo Terrestre. La irrupción unilateral de toda una serie de procesos materiales que amenazan a los vivientes —incendios, inundaciones, olas de calor, acidificación de los océanos, desigualdades, etc.—, desencadenados por la intrusión en nuestras formas de vida de una multiplicidad de agencias propias de un planeta alterado, desbarata la cosmología moderna y muestra, de manera siniestra, lo que no se debería ver. Ya no estamos en un mundo en el que los humanos actuamos con distancia y control sobre un trasfondo no humano, sino en un mundo poblado por una infinidad de vivientes cuyos cursos de acción se superponen constantemente, cuando no se desestabilizan mutuamente. Un mundo inhabitante, que responde a los modos en que lo hemos cambiado.
En ese sentido, Latour (2019) señala que la noción misma de suelo está cambiando de naturaleza. El mismo suelo que debería sostener nuestros proyectos —también la lucha antagónica entre ellos— parece desvanecerse bajo nuestros pies al calor de la emergencia climática. De ahí que la angustia sea tan profunda: el suelo no nos sostiene. El punto de referencia de la política parece haberse transformado por completo. La crisis ecológica nos lanza abruptamente a otro mundo donde el excepcionalismo humano moderno se muestra impotente. Los mismos seres que, hasta ahora, habíamos tratado como meros recursos son ahora actores políticos de primer orden con los que tenemos que aprender a componer los territorios, en otros términos; concretamente, en términos de habitabilidad cuando las condiciones de habitabilidad ya no están garantizadas.
Abrazar el deseo de ser otra cosa
Quizás, para prestar atención a ese huésped hostil y negociar con la angustia debemos habilitar no sólo una conciencia de la mutación, sino intervenir en el plano del deseo, de la relación con el otro, cambiar de deseo: necesitamos un deseo nuevo que no pase por el resentimiento. El deseo no es del orden de la voluntad y, por tanto, no es una región del yo, no pertenece al campo de la lógica, ni del razonamiento. Antes bien, es del campo de lo sensible, de los mundos encarnados y de sus devenires. Cambiar de deseo, asumir una metamorfosis, exige un acto de fe, un arrojarse: lo que hace la oruga que forma su crisálida sin saber en qué se convertirá. Algo que remite al universo del riesgo y la incertidumbre, pero que también implica relacionarse de otra manera con lo indeterminado y lo convulso. Recuperar el deseo es, por tanto, recuperar los modos de decir y hacer que puedan hacer sitio a lo posible no pensado, permitiéndonos desprendernos de fines caducos que suponen una amenaza para nosotros y para el mundo. A nuestro juicio, entendernos como crisálidas y, por tanto, abrazar esa condición, pudiera contener la oportunidad misma de construcción de ese deseo. La marca de un antes y un después, arrojarse a la transformación para encontrar una salida. No en vano, el deseo, en palabras de Lacan (1971), es el “deseo del Otro”: entendámoslo aquí como deseo de ser otra cosa.
Poco tiempo antes de morir, Bruno Latour concedió una larga entrevista en el canal Arte cuya transcripción ha sido publicada como Habitar la Tierra. En una de las piezas, titulada “El fin de la modernidad”, Latour discurre sobre una pregunta: ¿cómo es posible que toda una civilización enfrentada a una amenaza que conoce perfectamente no reaccione? Para contestar a esta paradoja, se refiere a la modernización como un imperativo que, particularmente desde los años 1950, operó como un mandato que nos exigió abandonar nuestro pasado y separarnos de la Tierra a cambio de participar del mito del progreso. Lo terrible de la idea de la modernización es que, una vez se ha puesto en marcha, “es ciega e impide completamente preguntarse a qué renunciar”. Sabemos, de acuerdo con la orientación lacaniana, que el deseo siempre está ligado a una falta, por lo tanto, si nada nos falta, no hay deseo posible: hay más de lo mismo.
De algún modo, progresar suponía acercarse a lo global, sin mirar para otro lado. Para acceder a la abundancia, la libertad y la emancipación, debíamos despegarnos de los territorios locales y desvincularnos de las comunidades. Sin embargo, la emergencia climática ha hecho que la misma idea de progreso, entendida como un futuro mejor y siempre disponible en algún lugar, esté hoy en entredicho. Asimismo, ese despegue hacia lo global no sólo trastocó los ecosistemas y sistemas climáticos, sino que provocó un epistemicidio, la muerte de muchos saberes y prácticas que nos relacionaban con el complejo tejido de interdependencias de lo terrestre: erradicando otras maneras de vivir, de sentipensar como diría el antropólogo Arturo Escobar, limitando drásticamente nuestra capacidad de reacción, imaginación y cooperación.
El capitalismo –nombre quizá más específico para hablar de la modernidad– opera, en la definición de Pignarre y Stengers en La brujería capitalista, como un “sistema brujo” que expropia nuestra capacidad de hacer que las cosas nos conciernan, ya sea en nuestros propios términos o, incluso, fuera de nuestras prácticas habituales. A juicio de ambos autores, no se trata de que el sistema capitalista nos mienta, ni de que nos engañe o manipule, sino de que su modo de existencia se inscribe en el linaje de los embrujos, montando una ecología depredadora que desactiva prácticas cruciales de interdependencia. ¿Quizá sea esto lo que nos hace agarrarnos a las paredes de la crisálida para no querer abrir un pequeño agujero con nuestras antenas de mariposa? Sin embargo, frente a un embrujo, no sería suficiente la denuncia de la captura –como se denuncia una ideología o la falsa conciencia–, porque la captura fabrica un agarre, un éxito, una legitimidad, una necesidad, un zócalo común “y lo hace sobre algo que importa, que hace vivir y pensar a aquel o aquella que es capturado” (Pignarre y Stengers, 2018: 84). Para salir de esta crisis, por tanto, el desvelamiento no funcionará. Antes que definirnos a la contra de ese sistema de captura, deberíamos aprender de sus modos de agarre, identificar su vulnerabilidad e inventar un agarre diferente que haga sensibles otras posibilidades: esto es, conducir la atención hacia las condiciones ecológicas que permitan resquebrajar las paredes de nuestras crisálida, librarnos de la mierda del yo y echar a volar, esperando que el mundo fuera pueda albergar nuevos encuentros, participando en fabricar la habitabilidad junto con otras.
En busca del suelo perdido
Pero, ¿cómo hacer pensables esos agarres? ¿cómo convertirlos en un asunto relevante para reavivar una ecología política? El asunto no parece requerir, como hemos intentado argumentar,trabajar en el plano yoico de llevarnos las manos a la cabeza ante una situación que podríamos pensar como una irresponsabilidad intolerable o, simplemente, denunciar. Quizá, más bien, tengamos que volver a pisar el suelo, como la mariposa se posa en una flor. No en vano, en los últimos años, el suelo ha recuperado fuerza como activador de la ecología política. Su rescate como concepto coincide con la evidencia de una profunda erosión del suelo común –tanto literal como metafórica–, al mismo tiempo que con un cierto interés causado por la propuesta latouriana de “hacer aterrizar” a los modernos, una vez que la emergencia climática ha revelado la ausencia de suelo para sostener el proyecto modernizador.
A pesar de que el suelo y su cuidado han estado asociados a menudo a tradiciones políticas reaccionarias y antropocéntricas –formas de excepcionalismo humano que anclan sus raíces en la ideología nacionalista del Blut und Boden, atesorada por la extrema derecha y que la Europa fortaleza no desmiente–, la corrosión de los suelos contemporáneos contiene también una posibilidad afirmativa para pensar su reconstrucción. Así, mientras ciertas élites ya fabulan con una vida sin suelo compartido –en su casa-búnker con reservas de hectómetros de oxígeno para sobrellevar la hecatombe planetaria–, proliferan también comunidades de prácticas que ligan la posibilidad de la habitabilidad a la restauración y repoblación de suelos devastados. Ahora bien, si hemos cambiado de mundo y, además, el suelo parece estar en vías de desintegración: ¿qué podemos hacer?
La propuesta de Latour (2021), transmutado en geógrafo, remite a la necesidad de re-describir nuestros territorios, inspirándose en los Cahiers de doléances previos a la Revolución francesa: “La descripción relocaliza, repuebla, pero también, y es lo más imprevisto, restituye el poder de actuar” (p. 95). Abundando en esa idea, en una reciente entrevista en la revista francesa de psicoanálisis Mental (Hoornaert, Leblanc-Roïc y Roïc, 2022), Latour habla de que “sólo la descripción permite pasar de la angustia primera a la segunda” (p. 90); de una angustia frenética o paralizante a un hacer colectivo que hace pensar y actuar. Como sucede con la transferencia en el dispositivo psicoanalítico, describir es avanzar hacia el otro: no opinar desde el yo, no fundar un nuevo culto crítico, sino socavar el yo. Describir es arrojarse al mundo para conocerlo y, ahí, trabajar en sus agarres.
Para describir es necesario asumir un cierto no saber, abandonar nuestra posición de dominio y reconocer que, en un mundo en metamorfosis, no conocemos bien ni el suelo que pisamos. Describir, por tanto, es una tarea inacabable, reiterada, un modo de vida. Esto no prescribe un modo de descripción como una actividad desgajada del mundo (las hay más o menos intervencionistas). Tampoco su carácter representacional (las hay más alegóricas o más realistas, en el modo del periodismo o en el de las artes). Sea como fuere, cualquier modo de descripción implica una forma del deseo: un salir de sí. Por tanto, en lugar de intentar nombrar y acallar el mundo y su sintomatología; describiendo, que es lo mismo que decir viviendo, podemos ir en busca del suelo perdido, para recomponerlo, reactivando, también, su potencia política (Stengers 2017), incluso cuando no nos queda esperanza.
Pero, la esperanza es el vuelo que describe una mariposa cuando, en su sutil aleteo para salir de la crisálida, desea la transformación compartida del mundo.
Referencias
Coccia, E. (2021). Metamorfosis. La fascinante continuidad de la vida. Siruela.
Freud, S. (2013a). “Lo ominoso”. En Obras completas, Volumen XVII (1917- 19). Amorrortu.
Freud, S. (2013b). “Inhibición, síntoma y angustia”. En Obras completas, Volumen XX (1925- 1926). Amorrortu.
Hornaert, G; Leblanc-Roïc, V. et Roïc, T. (2022). “Rencontre avec Bruno Latour: Nous sommes des squatteurs alors que nous pensions être des propriétaires”. Mental: Revue Internationale de psychanalyse, nº 46 (Écologie lacanienne), pp. 81-96.
Lacan, J. (1971). Escritos 1. Siglo XXI.
Lacan, J. (2007). El seminario 10: La angustia. Paidós.
Latour, B. (2004). Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry, 30, 225–248.
Latour, B. (2017). Cara a cara con el planeta. Una nueva mirada sobre el cambio climático alejada de las posiciones apocalípticas. Siglo XXI.
Latour, B. (2019). Dónde aterrizar. Cómo orientarse en política. Taurus.
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.
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.
Welfare states and market actors across the world have transformed what ageing as a process and being old as an embodied identity might be today, through a wide range of equipment, services and infrastructures. This ‘material’, when not ‘materialist’ drive is the object of analysis of the proposals gathered in AJEC‘s 32(1) special issue, which features different case studies aiming to foreground hitherto under-analysed ‘age-related matters’ to offer conceptual and ethnographic proposals to better understand what the editors call ‘landscapes of ageing and pressing gerontological concerns.’ The backbone of this special issue addresses how ‘material culture’ works in anthropology might be affected by what in other neighbouring disciplines like STS and Ageing studies is being addressed as a ‘socio-gerontechnological’ approach: that is, a joint attention to how ageing is a material process, as well as how materials inscribe or support peculiar meanings or ontologies of ageing.
Drawing from the recent experience of teaching the Studienprojekt ‘Ageing Cities: The Crisis of Welfare Infrastructures’ – and particularly reflecting on a field trip where we visited Benidorm and other ageing enclaves in the Costa Blanca (Alicante, Spain) – in my editorial response I wish to take issue with the need to widen this material agenda around ageing bodies and their situated enactments, thinking beyond classic ‘material culture’ objects of study – the home and everyday technologies – and venturing into wider and more convoluted urban arenas, with their variegated scales and material entities. These problematisations, I believe, would force us to provide less metaphorical uses of ecological vocabularies, hence addressing the challenges that these materialised ‘landscapes’ entail for to our conceptions and practices of care: perhaps pushing us to consider the very environmental effects of ageing-friendly modes inhabiting and terraforming, and the new forms of care these landscapes – deeply affecting, in turn, ageing processes — might need?
Martin Tironi, Marcos Chilet, Carola Ureta and Pablo Hermansen have edited a gem of a compilation, opening a space to think about the design of worlds that are not only human.
As the editors state, the book Design For More-Than-Human Futures: Towards Post-Anthropocentric Worlding, explores a “search for a transition towards more ethical design focused on more-than-human coexistence”, being “an invitation to travel new paths for design framed by ethics of more-than-human coexistence”. For this “Questioning the notion of human-centered design is central to this discussion. It is not only a theoretical and methodological concern, but an ethical need to critically rethink the modern, colonialist, and anthropocentric inheritance that resonates in design culture. The authors in this book explore the ideas oriented to form new relations with the more-than-human and with the planet, using design as a form of political enquiry”.
It was a luxury to be able to participate with a collective proposal that is as fun as it is challenging, together with long-time collaborators and mates Ignacio Farías and Felix Remter.
Our contribution describes a pedagogic experiment – part of the Design in Crisis: Sensing like an animal design studio at the TU Munich’s MA in Architecture in 2017 – where beavers were treated as epistemic partners for rethinking architectural practice, thus engaging their capacities in attempts at designing with them.
How would animals and architects co-design if we built the right contract?
In the face of multifaceted environmental crises of anthropogenic origins, recent developments in architecture and urbanism aim to explore other materials, technologies, resources, and modes of collaboration. Yet, what if what was at stake was not the redesign of architectural forms and urban landscapes, but the very redesign of urban design and architectural practice themselves? This chapter offers a collective speculation of this, where the “more-than-human” is treated as more than the content of a design brief; demanding instead an opening to other-than-human capacities in co-design processes and to the unpredictabilities resulting from terrestrial and multispecies interdependencies. How to care, then, in architectural practice for terrestrial and multispecies entanglements? Rather than providing guidelines or general principles to do so, this chapter describes an experimental approach to relearn architecture practice from animals. Following STS and environmental humanities multispecies concerns, it describes a pedagogic experiment where urban animals were treated as epistemic partners for rethinking architectural practice, thus engaging their capacities in attempts at designing with them.
