Qué complejas son las relaciones con la prensa: sus prisas, sus exigencias y sus formatos. Seguramente están muy ligadas a la precariedad y el saltar de tema en tema. Pero estas condiciones, qué poco permiten espacios para el pensar y el discurrir colectivo. ¿Cómo armar otras formas de la relación con lo público frente a las imposiciones de esa “divulgación científica” apresurada?
El contexto de esta reflexión es que, a mediados de octubre, me solicitaron una entrevista, bastante larga, que tendría por objetivo comparar la investigación de distintas personas interesadas en “cuidar el planeta”. Hoy supe que, de todo ello, sólo saldrán publicadas un par de frases, un poco fuera de contexto.
Con el resquemor de la ocasión perdida y la voluntad de aprovechar el trabajo ya hecho, que tenía por motivación suscitar posibles conversaciones sobre la relevancia de las ciencias sociales en la investigación sobre el cambio climático o el trabajo complejo de lo interdisciplinario, he decidido hacer disponible el contenido completo de mi respuesta. Ojalá sirva para algo.
Mi agradecimiento a Carmen Lozano Bright por su asistencia en este proceso.
Se habla mucho de que los más pequeños de la casa son los más concienciados para cuidar el planeta pero, ¿qué podemos aprender de nuestros mayores?
En el activismo siempre se suele poner el foco en las generaciones jóvenes, donde reside la esperanza de un mundo nuevo. Solemos atribuir a los mayores un cierto conservadurismo. Pero esto hace tiempo que se viene disputando. Las personas que hoy se encuentran en las edades más avanzadas son también las de la generación del 1968 y las luchas por la emancipación corporal. Y mucha de esa gente sigue batallando por abrir la posibilidad de un futuro en un momento aciago, complejo y donde podemos sentir cierta parálisis.
Dicho esto, quisiera recalcar que las generaciones no son homogéneas, los legados intergeneracionales siempre un reto y los aprendizajes nunca unívocos. Tenemos mucho que aprender de las luchas pasadas por la prosperidad, el estado social, la protección y la redistribución de la riqueza como un trabajo de lo que para ellos era su futuro y el de las generaciones venideras.
Pero también tenemos que olvidar, no hay herencia sin olvido: necesitamos deshacernos de una idea de bienestar caduca, con sus hábitos de uso energético, estéticas existenciales del gasto, formas de urbanización y movilidad desastrosas. Expresado de otra manera, necesitamos librarnos de un legado de lo que podríamos llamar, apoyándonos en el trabajo de Pierre Charbonnier, un “bienestar de carbono”, para imaginar otras formas de buena vida, otros territorios existenciales sostenidos también por el estado social, pero dentro de los límites planetarios.
Antes que nada es importante situarnos. Por una parte, la mayor parte de la humanidad vive en entornos urbanos extremadamente densos, tecnificados e intervenidos. Por otra parte, en los últimos cincuenta años la población mundial está alcanzando a vivir muchos más años que nunca anteriormente en la historia. Particularmente en la UE más de una quinta parte de sus habitantes tiene actualmente más de 65 años.
En este contexto, las preguntas del proyecto son dos. La primera es qué formas de urbanización han permitido que envejeciéramos como no lo hemos hecho nunca antes: en longevidad y calidad de vida o con salud. Pensemos en el logro social del transporte público o las calles accesibles para todos, fruto del trabajo de muchos activistas y técnicos.
España es un lugar donde la accesibilidad urbana está ampliamente desarrollada y en transformación. Si uno camina por una ciudad española, las calles están llenas de mayores y cuerpos diversos. Esto no es así en muchos otros sitios del planeta. Queda mucho por hacer, pero hay mucho bien hecho y debemos sentir orgullo.
La segunda pregunta remite a nuestro reto climático actual. Estamos en un proceso de fabricar ciudades amigables para las personas mayores y la diversidad funcional, pero lo hacemos muchas veces a través de infraestructuras desarrollistas, crecentistas y carboníferas.
Pensemos en nuestras calles de cemento, hormigón o granito, en esos pavimentos sellados hechos para poder caminar de forma segura para personas en silla de ruedas o ciegas. Esos mismos pavimentos son ahora el fundamento de muchos problemas, como el efecto isla de calor, que vulnerabiliza y expone a esos mismos cuerpos a los que se les quería restituir su derecho a la ciudad.
El reto actual es, por tanto: ¿cómo podremos pensar los futuros de estas ciudades que envejecen, demográficamente y como proyecto urbano? A través de talleres inmersivos y especulativos queremos aprender a pensar, junto con activistas mayores, urbanistas, técnicos municipales y legisladoras cómo construir ciudades para envejecer bien dentro de los límites del planeta.
¿Qué es lo más enriquecedor de trabajar desde la interdisciplinariedad para luchar contra el cambio climático?
Llevo muchos años en una conversación densa con activistas de la accesibilidad, arquitectas, diseñadoras y urbanistas. El trabajo de la interdisciplinariedad es duro, complejo, lleno de retos. Es un lugar de aprendizajes muy ricos, pero mentiría si dijera que es algo fácil. Al contrario, requiere de mucho trabajo, muchas veces friccional.
Sea como fuere, creo que es uno de nuestros principales retos en tiempos de mutación climática. Precisamente cuando alguna gente quisiera correr y darnos las soluciones es cuando más necesitamos aprender a ponerlas en común y explorar sus efectos, interesantes o desastrosos.
A mí me preocupa mucho que no todos los saberes se presentan en ese encuentro interdisciplinar en igualdad de condiciones: hay saberes que se creen más racionales o justificados que otros en su deseo de definir los problemas e intervenir. Las disciplinas biomédicas o las disciplinas técnicas, por ejemplo, tienden a hacer esto.
Creo que tienen mucho que aprender de las ciencias sociales, las humanidades, las artes y muchas otras formas de expresión cultural: la sensibilidad por la pluralidad de sentidos y formas de vida, su respeto y cultivo. Pero nos involucran muchas veces únicamente en la detección de necesidades o en la validación de sus resultados. Creo que esto es un error de planteamiento.
Entonces, para que esa colaboración interdisciplinar funcione habrá que bloquear las soluciones fáciles y evitar relaciones donde las cartas están marcadas. Necesitaríamos abrirnos a colaboraciones genuinamente experimentales para poder abordar los muchos retos de cómo viviremos, cómo habitaremos democráticamente en un momento sin precedentes.
Las Becas Leonardo de la Fundación BBVA están destinadas a apoyar el trabajo de investigadores y creadores culturales que, encontrándose en estadios intermedios de su carrera, se caractericen por una trayectoria científica, tecnológica o cultural altamente innovadora.
Al dotar a estas becas con el nombre propio de Leonardo da Vinci se quiere enfatizar los atributos característicos de esa figura universal de la cultura, destacadamente la pasión por el conocimiento, la apertura y exploración de nuevos campos y problemas, la interacción entre trabajo teórico y observacional o experimental, así como el diálogo y realimentación entre los dominios de las ciencias de la naturaleza y de la vida, la tecnología, las humanidades y las artes.
En correspondencia con su nombre, las «Becas Leonardo» se dirigen a facilitar el desarrollo de proyectos individuales que aborden facetas significativas y novedosas de objetos y cuestiones científicas, tecnológicas y culturales del presente, elegidas libremente por sus autores.
[ES] Ciudades que envejecen: Los futuros del urbanismo de la edad avanzada en el litoral español desea estudiar el litoral mediterráneo español como un laboratorio presente y futuro de distintas versiones de la ‘buena vida’ bajo el sol, en un momento peculiar en el que las crisis demográficas, de vivienda y medioambientales confluyen en una tormenta perfecta. En los últimos cincuenta años, la costa mediterránea española –uno de los mayores enclaves para la ‘migración de retiro’ en el continente europeo– se ha enfocado en el urbanismo de la edad avanzada (‘late life urbanism’) a través de una enorme inversión en infraestructuras urbanas de cuidado y en la transformación de la accesibilidad en viviendas, así como en equipamientos urbanos (transporte público, parques, playas).
En este contexto crítico de formas urbanas de envejecimiento, el proyecto tiene dos objetivos principales: (i) estudiar la genealogía del urbanismo de la edad avanzada (trabajo de campo y de archivo) en uno de los siguientes enclaves: la Costa Blanca (Alicante), la Costa del Sol (Málaga), el Maresme (Barcelona) o Mallorca; y (ii) elicitar la imaginación de futuros para la vida urbana de las ciudades que envejecen dentro de los límites planetarios (a través de talleres especulativos e inmersivos).
El proyecto tiene lugar entre octubre de 2024 y marzo de 2026.
[EN] Ageing Cities: The Futures of Late Life Urbanism on the Spanish coast wishes to study the Spanish Mediterranean coast as a present and future laboratory of versions of the ‘good life’ under the sun, at a peculiar moment when housing, demographic and environmental crises are coalescing into the perfect storm. For more than fifty years, the Spanish Mediterranean coast, one of the main hotspots of ‘retirement migration’ in the continent, has developed a signature approach to late life urbanism: with a great investment in urban infrastructures of care and urban accessibility transforming dwellings, as well as urban equipment, such as public transports, parks and beaches. In this critical context of urban forms of aging the project has two main objectives: (i) studying the genealogy of late life urbanism (undertaking fieldwork and archival research) in one of the following enclaves: Costa Blanca (Alicante), Costa del Sol (Málaga), Maresme (Barcelona) or Mallorca; and (ii) eliciting the imagination around the futures of late life urbanism (by means of immersive speculative workshops) within planetary boundaries.
The project will run from October 2024 to March 2026.
[CAT]Ciutats que envelleixen: Els futurs de l’urbanisme de l’edat avançada al litoral espanyolvol estudiar el litoral mediterrani espanyol com un laboratori present i futur de diferents versions de la ‘bona vida’ sota el sol, en un moment peculiar en què les crisis demogràfiques, habitacionals i mediambientals conflueixen en la tempesta perfecta. En els darrers cinquanta anys, la costa mediterrània espanyola – un dels principals enclavaments per a la ‘migració de retir’ al continent europeu – s’ha enfocat a l’urbanisme de l’edat avançada (‘late life urbanism’) a través d’una enorme inversió en infraestructures urbanes de cura i en la transformació de l’accessibilitat a vivendes, així com en equipaments urbans (transport públic, parcs, platges).
En aquest context crític de formes urbanes d’envelliment, el projecte té dos objectius principals: (i) estudiar la genealogia de l’urbanisme de l’edat avançada (treball de camp i d’arxiu) en un dels enclavaments següents: la Costa Blanca (Alacant) , la Costa del Sol (Màlaga), el Maresme (Barcelona) o Mallorca; i (ii) elicitar la imaginació de futurs per a la vida urbana de les ciutats que envelleixen dins dels límits planetaris (a través de tallers especulatius i immersius).
El projecte tindrà lloc entre l’octubre del 2024 i el març del 2026.
Anthropogenic atmospheric phenomena (heat, hurricanes, pollutants, wildfires) pose increasing challenges to multispecies inhabitation. How is care re-invented when undoing the patchy effects of environmental violence? We aim to discuss anthropological experiments with ‘ecologies of support’.
Long Abstract
Due to anthropogenic intervention atmospheric phenomena, such as air pollutants, heat, hurricanes, thunderstorms or wildfires are every day more – albeit in some contexts more than others – posing impossible challenges to collective inhabitation, human, and other-than-human. This panel wishes to ask what forms of care and enduring are being repurposed and invented when relating to the many challenges these atmospheric conditions pose, attempting to undo the patchy effects of environmental violence.
In approaches to human and multispecies care in anthropology, environmental humanities and STS, the use of ecological tropes (e.g. landscapes) abounds to describe changing or complex social and material configurations, but what might it mean to re-think care as an atmospheric matter? Talking of ‘ecologies of support’ we wish to account for experimentation with generative and unsettled care responses to atmospheric phenomena that are hard to apprehend, due to their sheer phenomenological ungraspability (because of either their temporal or spatial scales: too fast, too slow, caught in between deep and shallow time, microscopic or gigantic, happening in non-coherent or non-unitary ways), hence requiring a vast array of devices and collective work to articulate or to become sensitized to them.
Beyond conceptual takes, we seek to foster a range of explorations and responses where anthropology could become an atmospheric care practice. Thus, we would also like to welcome approaches to collaborative, public, more-than-textual ethnographic works in a wide variety of guises and atmospheric topics experimenting with setting up ecologies of support in their own right.
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?
Gracias a la amable invitación de María Martínez, Maite Martín Palomo e Iñaki Rubio, en el marco del seminario permanente del proyecto “Mundo(s) de víctimas 3: Proyecto Vidas Descontadas. Refugios para habitar la desaparición social”, el próximo 15 de junio a las 11:00 estaré compartiendo mi trabajo en torno a: “Problemas de cuidado y el cuidado de los problemas“.
Para ello, revisitaré algunas publicaciones propias recientes (Care in Trouble & Anthropology as a careful design practice?) donde he estado interrogándome sobre la noción de cuidado como concepto y como cualidad de ciertas prácticas “cuidadosas” vinculadas al diseño. Esta indagación ha tenido lugar en un contexto de generalización presente de sus usos, no sólo en la jerga académica de campos como la antropología o los estudios de la ciencia y la tecnología (donde suelo habitar y pasar mi tiempo). A pesar de la relevancia de recuperar sus orígenes combativos e inclusivos prometedores en el pensamiento feminista, la expansión del cuidado más allá de los contextos de salud o cuidado interpersonal ha dado lugar a la aparición de un vocabulario político en toda regla, reivindicado en discursos muchas veces securitarios, trascendiendo a lenguajes institucionales del orden y el mantenimiento, así como alegatos etno-nacionalistas. A pesar de que esta generalización pudiera hacernos pensar en el éxito del término y la gran suerte de vivir en un presente más habitable, la violencia ambiente en que vivimos no parece augurar que esta popularidad tenga un fácil correlato en nuestra cotidianidad, ¿quizá como síntoma de un deseo o una aspiración evanescente? Antes que sugerir arrojar el término por la borda, me gustaría abordar los problemas de cuidado ante los que nos sitúan intervenciones sobre lo social en nombre de una aspiración cuidadosa que parecen tener claro lo que se necesita y cómo, donde la violencia efectiva también aparece como una violencia epistémica. Más allá de usos paliativos o vinculados a la reparación de órdenes existentes, quizá la única vía para que el cuidado no sea parte del problema, pudiera pasar por tratarlo como una práctica del cuidado de los problemas: un modo de abrirnos a los contornos de lo posible de frágiles ecologías de soportes, con conocimientos y maneras de hacer muchas veces relegadas al olvido, cuando no invisibilizadas, donde antes que vidas con contornos claros, la especulación de lo por venir participa de la ingente tarea de construir entornos para la vida plural en el presente (donde, muchas veces, antes que reparar o continuar, necesitaremos desarmar y tirar abajo). Una tarea que, en mi propio trabajo, ha ido vinculada a repensar la etnografía como práctica de diseño cuidadoso (de la que pondré algunos ejemplos vinculados a participar de colectivos de diseño activista desde el montaje de ecologías de documentación abierta, o el trabajo pedagógico para re-sensibilizar a profesionales del diseño urbano a que re-aprendan colaborativamente su práctica ante la radical presencia de quienes suelen hacerse cargo de sus designios). Esto es, una tarea donde el cuidado aparece no tanto como un concepto que clausura, sino como práctica emergente para las ciencias sociales, re-equipando o engendrando formas y dispositivos de indagación cuidadosa (atenta al cuidado de los problemas), para participar de la problematización conjunta de ecologías de soportes en condiciones de violencia ambiente.
Abstract: In this presentation I would like to discuss with you a book project on what I am calling ‘an uncommon city.’ The book is an anthropological exploration of bodily diversity and its impact in the material and knowledge politics of city-making. Drawing on field and archival work of independent-living and disability rights movements, paying attention in particular to their urban accessibility struggles as well as their pedagogic interventions in the training of architects, city planners, and designers (with materials mostly from Barcelona, but also from Munich), I trace a wealth of activist initiatives caring for an epistemic, material and political activation of urban design. These initiatives have or had at their core the production of singular situations—made out of policy documents and building codes, infrastructures and standards, collaborative design processes and prototypes, and manifold sensitising devices and documentation interfaces—through which designing technologies, urban landscapes or institutions and political spaces is to be attempted from the appreciation and articulation of bodily diversity: from the demographic identification of bodily patterns to the invention of inclusive and universal design, also connecting with the contested history of urban accessibility struggles, or the perpetual emergence of many access issues in contemporary forms of city-making where bodily diversity appears as the main concern to address by different actors. In particular, the book wishes to unfold three ways – (i) activating prototypes, (ii) activating public infrastructures, and (iii) activating design studio projects – in which a concern with bodily diversity mobilises the uncommon prospects of the city, opening up other possible urbanisms.
I was kindly invited to take part in the webinar POWER TO CO-PRODUCE: Careful power distribution in collaborative city-making, hosted on September 14th 2020 by Burcu Ateş, Predrag Milić, Laura Sobral and Sabine Knierbein at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space (SKUOR), Technische Universität Wien. As part of a session on ‘co-production practices’, I shared 15′ of my research on Democratising Urban Infrastructures: The technical democracy of accessibility urbanism (see full text below).
In this intervention I summarise my particular urban anthropological interest in accessibility urbanism as a peculiar form of a technical democratisation of city-making. ‘Technical democracy’ is a term used in STS to discuss different approaches participatory forms of technoscience, where an expansion of expertise to knowledges beyond hegemonic technical ones has been approached and experimented upon. It has many versions, but nearly all of them are concerned with the need to reverse the effects of technocracy and expertocracy. This has been done in a wide variety of ways: from searching to make science and technology amenable for public discussion and deliberation to expanding the who and the how of technoscientific practice (for an overview, see Callon, Lascoumes & Barthe, 2011).
This concern is particularly important in a context of planetary urbanisation with its concomitant development of urban infrastructures. A concern with technical democracy becomes crucial when these urban infrastructures are not only heavily managed by all kinds of experts, but are redefining in uncertain ways the scopes and practices of urban modes of togetherness. Following also in this an STS concern, rather than as large technical systems, infrastructures should be appreciated as sites for the controverted relational re-articulation of social and material worlds: that is, particular forms of bringing together and apart agents, material entities, knowledges… Or, to say it better, relational configurations that foreground some of these agents, material entities, knowledges neglecting or, even, excluding others (Farías & Blok, 2016).
Precisely because of this, urban infrastructures are also the sites where new forms of the demos are emerging: Indeed, multitude of concerned groups and affected publics mobilise and undertake research around these highly technical issues; sometimes they train themselves to become quasi-experts in order to challenge expert control, when not searching to manage those urban infrastructures themselves. Contemporary urban infrastructures are one of the most crucial sites where an experimentation and a reinvention of particular forms of technical democratisation are taking place: not just because of how urban infrastructural design might need to be democratized, but also because of how we might be engaging in and designing infrastructures of urban democratization (Harvey, Jensen & Morita, 2016).
In what follows I will show you a few instances from my work on the technical democracy of accessibility urbanism. Since 2012, I have been doing research on urban accessibility issues in Spain and Germany, with a comparative European gaze: in particular, I have been studying and engaging in a variety of emergent publics mobilised around accessible design and urbanism. As a pioneering field in the democratisation of urban infrastructures, urban accessibility teaches us that in order to democratize infrastructures, we might need to engage in the experimentation with and implementation of different infrastructures for urban democratisation. As I will show: (a) To manage complex socio-technical issues like this one requires the creation of infrastructures for inclusive policy-making, engaging publics and concerned groups in different forms of participatory governance; (b) The democratization of modes of designing and doing urban infrastructures also implies setting up infrastructures for epistemic collaboration with emergent publics; (c) But as I will suggest, in closing, for any of this to make any sense, we also need to intervene expert education: experimenting with pedagogic infrastructures for the ‘sensitization of experts.’
II. Participatory Governance
Since the 1970s, and through different forms of contestation, disability rights advocates have been searching to create public concern on the discrimination they suffer, making their bodily experiences of exclusion palpable to articulate more inclusive urban infrastructures (Hamraie, 2017; Williamson, 2019).
Allow me to give you an example. In what was known at the time in Barcelona as the cripples’ revolt diverse small associations of people with disabilities united to hold public demonstrations demanding ‘a city without barriers.’ These protests paved the way for the creation of a newly democratic municipal institution governing these matters in a participatory fashion since the early 1980s (the Institut Municipal de Personas amb Discapacitat, or Municipal Institute of People with Disabilities, IMPD, in its last denomination): in whose ‘hybrid’ board politicians and technical staff are joind by elected representatives of people with disabilities (IMPD, 2019).
The IMPD was quintessential in re-designing Barcelona’s urban infrastructures in preparation for the 1992 Olympics: this hybrid institution engaged in a comparative search for urban accessibility and inclusive design policies around the world; it was also a fundamental site for the legal training of disabled representatives to address highly complex technicalities, as well as the experiential training of professionals. This combination of comparative policy analysis, together with experiential and technical forms of knowledge exchange was important to develop new urban standards, building and technical codes that became a model in the country; a lasting urban infrastructure developed thanks to the participatory engagement of disability rights advocates.
But what this case shows is that a public engagement in the field of urban accessibility cannot just be an issue of merely allowing people to take part in, or to give very vulnerable people the means to appropriate technical knowledge or to transform technologies through consumption and user-led innovation. In a context in which regulation tends to happen in the extrastatecraft form of market-based building standards, ISO or DIN (Easterling, 2014), public institutional infrastructures are crucial to bring together concerned publics and experts to regulate, and assemble together inclusive forms of policy-making. Not only to be able to deal with the legal technicalities that policy-making on these issues requires, but also to ensure their implementation and sustainability for neglected actors. This is far from being an easy task. And it has usually entailed shaking the grounds of the classic means by which experts produce knowledge about these bodies.
III. Documentation interfaces
In the last decades, emergent publics and concerned groups with accessibility urbanism have been crucially developing particular infrastructures to mobilise and articulate their experiential knowledges, many times mobilising spatial registers going beyond expert-based Euclidean notions (Hall & Imrie, 1999; Imrie, 1999). I have been addressing them as ‘documentation interfaces’ (Criado & Cereceda, 2016): that is, not only as situations to frame, elicit and discuss diverse bodily experiences and the environmental and material affordances to host them; but also as situations that produce a trace in different kinds of media, forms of record whereby their experiential knowledge is mobilized to have an impact in design situations, such as in: (1) video-camera records to show what it means to move using a wheelchair; (2) urban explorations with blind people to discuss in situ whether different pavement textures, light settings or colours can be distinguished; (3) not to mention the increasing use of digital platforms for the audio-visual documentation of inaccessibility experiences by all kinds of disability experts, such as collaborative mapping apps.
These documentation interfaces are also interesting empirical sites to understand how particular alliances between concerned groups and experts or technicians are attempted, sometimes way beyond state-run institutional frameworks. One of the most interesting domains for this techno-political experimentation are the many do-it-yourself initiatives, makerspaces and hacklabs emerging throughout the world, and seeking to ‘democratize’ the access to technical knowledge and the users’ engagement in prototyping. I have collaborated in such endeavours as part of my long ethnographic engagement between 2012 and 2016 with the Barcelona-based open design collective En torno a la silla: part of a wider DIY network in the country including engaged professionals and technicians as crucial allies for people with disabilities.
Being able to work together in those settings entails implementing and managing infrastructures of documentation, requiring particular events and digital platforms. These infrastructures, in turn, have allowed intensive learning experiences of collaborative doing and making creating the conditions whereby alternative urban accessibility arrangements can be critically explored and tried out. Yet, despite the crucial importance of DIY forms of engagement for the democratisation of design they are far from being a ‘solution for all’. As we’ve also learnt, these engagements are extremely exhausting and time-consuming for people who also need many social and technical supports to take part in them. Also, without some degree of institutionalisation they prove fragile. Hence, they do not necessarily serve the purpose of bringing into existence safe, economically sustainable, and lasting urban infrastructures for personal autonomy and independence. Nevertheless, they are very relevant as documentation interfaces: that is, as infrastructures of epistemic collaboration where not just a redistribution of technical skills is being attempted, but where an exchange of knowledges becomes possible.
IV. Expert Education
But engaging in infrastructures of more inclusive policy-making or epistemic collaboration are not the only forms in which to create conditions of technical democracy. In closing, I would like to highlight another strategy that we could learn from accessibility issues: perhaps a more important one that we tend to overlook, even though it might open up fertile avenues to play a crucial role as scholars in technical universities like this one. What if democratizing technical decision-making did not just require citizens or lay people to become experts or hackers, but that professional experts in the private and public sector would be aware of the limits of their own expertise? What if technical democracy had to do with building pedagogic infrastructures to train these experts to open themselves to other forms of sensing, knowing and valuing?
Indeed, most urban designers do not usually receive proper accessibility training. This hinders the use of existing accessibility codes and policies. Beyond that, understanding the singular experiences and conditions of diverse bodies neglected by design disciplines is something that needs to be learnt by doing. When confronting with these issues many designers have to ‘retrain’ themselves, challenging their own expertise. For this they need to develop other skills as another kind of practitioners: not only inventing or adapting multi-sensorial gadgets to make possible co-design situations, but also creating collaborative devices to learn from disability advocates what it means to be different kinds of bodies. To make this process easier would require intervening early on in formal training and curricula, as in the ground-breaking experiments of Raymond Lifchez incorporating accessible concerns in design studio teaching (Lifchez, 1986): where disability rights advocates rather than being treated as end users in projects addressed at them were engaged throughout the duration of the course as design consultants of any kind of projects students were working on.
This became a key concern when having to teach at the Department of Architecture at the TU Munich between 2015 and 2018, together with my colleague Ignacio Farías (Farías & Criado, 2018). We realized that the space of the classroom and the training of future design professionals were largely unattended but critical aspects of the project of ‘technical democracy.’ In fact, training professionals to commit to other forms of producing knowledge and making things might be crucial to make more democratic forms of science and technology possible. But this requires inverting the so-called ‘deficit model’ of participation that aims to enhance the public engagement in science and technology: that is, we need to address the potential knowledge deficits of experts.
In the nearly three years we worked there, we plunged in the development of a series of teaching experiments called Design in crisis. In them we felt the need for STS to move from the ‘expertization of laypersons’–a classic public engagement trend, such as in citizen science–to the creation of pedagogic infrastructures for the ‘re-sensitization of experts.’ One example of what this might mean could be the ManualCAD:
“a portable game for architectural design in which both blind or visually impaired architects, and architects who have the sense of sight can participate and create together.”
Taken from https://designincrisis.wixsite.com/designincrisis2017
It was developed by students in the MA in Architecture in a studio project I taught in 2017. After a several weeks’ intensive training to raise awareness of the need to re-appreciate the multi-sensory features of the built environment they had to undertake a group assignment: to collectively prototype a new architectural toolkit for a blind architect. This led them to explore and do research about multi-sensory devices, methods, and skills. Rather than a solution for an almost impossible challenge, the device they came up with was an interesting object to ask good questions or, rather, to open up design as a problem: A tool, perhaps, to re-learn what it might mean to engage in non-visual forms of architecture?
After engaging in this and many other similar teaching experiments, I have come to believe that for technical democracy to take place in city-making, it has to be always reinvented in specific terms from within the technical practices of experts, sensitizing them through different pedagogical experiments and interventions to be another kind of professionals, more open to the wide diversity of actors they could be designing with.
References
Callon, M., Lascoumes, P., & Barthe, Y. (2011). Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Criado, T. S., & Cereceda, M. (2016). Urban accessibility issues: Techno-scientific democratizations at the documentation interface. City, 20(4), 619–636.
Easterling, K. (2014). Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso.
Farías, I., & Blok, A. (2016). Technical democracy as a challenge to urban studies. City, 20(4), 539–548.
Farías, I., & Criado, T.S. (2018). Co-laborations, Entrapments, Intraventions: Pedagogical Approaches to Technical Democracy in Architectural Design. DISEÑA, 12, 228–255.
Hall, P., & Imrie, R. (1999). Architectural practices and disabling design in the built environment. Environment and Planning B, 26, 409–426.
Hamraie, A. (2017). Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press
Harvey, P., Jensen, C. B., & Morita, A. (Eds.) (2016). Infrastructures and Social Complexity: A Companion. London: Routledge.
IMPD. (2009). Barcelona, una ciutat per a tothom : 30 anys treballant amb les persones amb discapacitat. Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, Institut Municipal de Persones amb Discapacitat (IMPD).
Imrie, R. (1999). The body, disability and Le Corbusier’s conception of the radiant environment. In R. Butler & H. Parr (Eds.), Mind and Body Spaces: Geographies of Illness, Impairment and Disability (pp. 25–44). New York: Routledge.
Lifchez, R. (Ed.). (1986). Rethinking Architecture: Design Students and Physically Disabled People. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Williamson, B. (2019). Accessible America: A History of Disability and Design. New York: New York University Press.
In 2018-2019, my colleague Vincent Duclos and I worked on different versions of an essay that was given green light by the Medical Anthropology Quarterly last August and has now been included in the 34(2) issue. It was a hard process, but also a wonderful occasion to learn from the inspiring work of many colleagues and a joyful opportunity to experiment together with a conceptual writing repertoire.
Titled “Care in Trouble: Ecologies of Support from Below and Beyond” the article wishes to map out how care has proliferated as an analytical and technical term aimed at capturing a vast array of practices, conditions, and sentiments. As we argue in our exploratory orienting essay–rather than a deep dive ethnography–care seems to have also expanded to many other reproductive domains of life, where it has been mobilized as a conceptual lens that affords privileged access to the human condition.
This essay is premised on the conviction that, in spite of and perhaps also because of its rising popularity, the analytics of care is in trouble. Drawing inspiration from STS, “new materialist” work, and the writings in black, Indigenous, anticolonial, feminist, and crip studies, we suggest that discussions within anthropology might benefit from opening care from both “below” and “beyond” in what we are calling “ecologies of support.”
Ecologies of support are not to be mistaken for all-encompassing environments. Their protective effects more often than not are discontinuous and unevenly distributed. Thinking about ecologies of support entails placing a new focus on how different kinds of bodies are differentially supported, cared for, and capable of influencing their own conditions of support. Because spaces of care and safety can also easily morph into forms of containment and exclusion, what is needed are more accurate cartographies of the many intersections and frictions between the enveloping and the diverging, the protecting and the containing, the enduring and the engendering, as they play out in care practices.
Our proposal is for anthropology to not simply seek to represent or bear witness to these practices, but also to reinvigorate care by experimenting with modes of inquiry and intervention that operate along new axes of movement and new relational possibilities—a dynamic ecosystem if you will.
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We would be happy and eager to learn from your comments and reactions to it, if you had any.
Over the last decades, care has proliferated as a notion aimed at capturing a vast array of practices, conditions, and sentiments. In this article, we argue that the analytics of care may benefit from being troubled, as it too often reduces the reproduction of life to matters of palliation and repair, fueling a politics of nationalism and identitarianism. Picking up the threads of insight from STS, “new materialisms,” and postcolonial feminist and indigenous scholarship, we discuss care from “below” and “beyond,” thus exposing tensions between the enveloping and the diverging, the enduring and the engendering, that play out in care practices. We propose “ecologies of support” as an analytic that attends to how humans are grounded in, traversed by, and undermined by more‐than‐human and often opaque, speculative, subterranean elements. Our proposal is for anthropology to not simply map life‐sustaining ecologies, but to experimentally engage with troubling modes of inquiry and intervention.
[EN] How to care for the opening of care infrastructures?
(Versión en castellano más abajo)
The mess we’re in has accentuated two recurring concerns, perhaps with newer nuances: (1) the importance of tinkering and opening up care infrastructures and equipment; (2) the relevance of experimenting with their documentation (precisely in the distance of a remote confinement)
(1) Here we are again in an austerity crisis, again care as the main mode of response, and yet again in need of proprietary equipment, closed down by patents and strict rules of circulation (where the health expertocracy & free market meet). But there are also mismatches…
The previous crisis brought out a wealth of forms of tinkering and inventiveness, DIY hacks and 3D printed contraptions in all kinds of initiatives. That crisis deeply impacted architecture and design, but health systems protected themselves from what was though to be a dangerous experiment …
Health struggles revolved around supporting public infrastructures, but beyond a discussion around generic drugs, the ‘question concerning technology’ did not seem to pop up much, even though its importance was highlighted (e.g. open orthopedics and technical aids)
The urban experimentation of many DIY urbanism, collective architecture and handmade urbanism… made emerge a context to explore other ways of opening up the city’s infrastructures and their rights. All of this has been sadly crumbling: too much personal – and too little institutional – an effort
Now a new techno-political field seems to emerge, even more closed than the previous one: Will this situation of health infrastructural collapse allow for an experimentation with seizing the means of care, opening up an inquiry on how this might be supported by public infrastructures? Time will tell
(2) Now, as it happened, those findings and practical solutions need to be traced and circulated, knowledge of an expert and experiential kind sprout and turn ideas that come and go. We document to share, but also not to forget…
And, also, a great variety of digital platforms erupt, wishing to centralise the archiving of such experiences, their tagging and categorization: websites, telegram channels, but also Twitter as an archive of a tinkering society in need of auto-inscribing to endure, when not just to be…
With a big difference: ten years ago, online presence was treated as a mere support, an aid, main-staging embodied togetherness. However, in the distance of a remote confinement digital documentation takes on a different – and greater – relevance
Many of the insurgent archives documenting the critical experiences of years ago have now disappeared: we didn’t have the time, the will, the conditions to work to maintain and care for all of them – some have survived, many thanks to the use of commercial platforms whose servers are still intact
Will we forget and obliterate what we have learned, the traces of the new that emerge, the timeless solutions that always reemerge, the dramas of the moment? Sure, we need to forget in order to go on, but digital records are deeply fragile. Will we let the same thing happen to us again? What to do?
P.S. This thread is a testimony of many conversations in the last years with @entornoalasilla @adolfoestalella @acorsin @cboserman @jararocha @blancallen @birrabel @dlopezgom @ CareNet_IN3 @zuloark @Makeatuvida @Alephvoid @autofabricantes @ alafuente @ janinakehr @SaraLF @crinamoreno
P.S.2. But also a reflection after witnessing what @frenalacurva @ItaliaCovid19 @CovidAidUK @nwspk are making emerge, together with the great number of health practitioners and makers documenting their inventiveness – here on Twitter, for instance – around the globe
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Slightly amended version of a thread published on Twitter
[ES] ¿Cómo cuidar de la apertura de las infraestructuras del cuidado?
Este momento delirante ha acentuado dos preocupaciones recurrentes, con nuevos matices: (1) la importancia del cacharreo o la apertura de infraestructuras y equipamientos del cuidado; (2) la experimentación con su documentación (en la distancia de un confinamiento a distancia)
(1) De nuevo una crisis por austeridad, de nuevo la centralidad del cuidado como respuesta, de nuevo la necesidad de equipamientos cerrados por patentes y reglas estrictas de circulación (donde cruzan la expertocracia sanitaria y el libre mercado). Pero con algunas diferencias…
La anterior crisis sacó la inventiva cacharrera, un despliegue de ñapas, makeos, impresión 3D e iniciativas do-it-yourself para todo tipo de actividades. Esa crisis afectó de lleno a arquitectura y diseño, pero el mundo de la salud se protegió: era una experimentación peligrosa…
La lucha de la salud se centró en torno a su sostenimiento público, pero más allá de la discusión sobre los medicamentos genéricos, la pregunta por la tecnología no parecía abrirse, aun cuando se planteó su importancia con fuerza (e.g. ortopedias y ayudas técnicas abiertas)
La experimentación urbana de lugares como Can Batlló o el Campo de Cebada, el handmade urbanism… generaron un contexto para explorar otros modos de hacer ciudad con infraestructuras abiertas. Todo eso ha ido cayendo tristemente en desgracia: mucho esfuerzo y poca institución
Ahora se abre un nuevo campo tecno-político, todavía más clausurado que el anterior: ¿Permitirá esta situación de colapso sanitario abrir a indagación y sostenimiento con infraestructuras públicas la experimentación con la reapropiación de los medios del cuidado? El tiempo dirá
(2) Ahora, como entonces, eso hallazgos y soluciones prácticas necesitan abrirse y circular, saberes y conocimientos experienciales que brotan y se convierten en ideas que vienen y van. Se documenta para compartir, pero también para no olvidar
Y, de nuevo, comienza la panoplia de plataformas digitales para su archivado centralizado, su etiquetado y categorización: webs, canales de telegram, pero también Twitter como archivo de una sociedad cacharrera que busca auto-inscribirse para subsistir, cuando no existir…
Con una gran diferencia: hace diez años, lo online era un apoyo o soporte, quedando el vínculo corpóreo en una centralidad; en la distancia de un confinamiento a distancia, sin embargo, esa documentación digital cobra una importancia nuclear
Desaparecieron muchos de esos archivos insurgentes de la experiencia crítica de hace años: no les pudimos meter ganas, esfuerzo, manutención y cuidado a todos ellos – algunos han subsistido, muchos gracias al uso de plataformas blog cuyos servidores siguen en activo
¿Olvidaremos y haremos caer en el olvido todo lo aprendido, los trazos de lo nuevo que emerge, las soluciones atemporales, los dramas del momento? Cierto, necesitamos olvidar para vivir, pero el registro digital es frágil ¿Dejaremos que nos pase lo mismo otra vez? ¿Qué hacer?
PD. Aquí acordándome mucho de cientos de conversaciones con @entornoalasilla @adolfoestalella @acorsin @cboserman @jararocha @blancallen @birrabel @dlopezgom @CareNet_IN3 @zuloark @Makeatuvida @Alephvoid @autofabricantes @alafuente@janinakehr @SaraLF @crinamoreno
PD2. Pero también pensando en todo lo que están abriendo @frenalacurva @ItaliaCovid19 @CovidAidUK @nwspk y la cantidad de profesionales del mundo sanitario documentando su inventiva
PD3. Y también muchas de las conversaciones recientes con @janinakehr @SaraLF @crinamoreno – fuente de tantas reflexiones interesantes
Adaptación de un hilo publicado originalmente en Twitter
Drawing together a wide variety of contributions and approaches to different strategies of repair and recovery in post-crisis Portugal, Francisco Martínez has compiled the volume Politics of Recuperation, a comprehensive anthropological approach to the meanings of the crises in Southern Europe. As explained in the back cover:
How did Portuguese society recover after the economic crisis? Through a range of ethnographic case studies focusing on the Portuguese recovery, this book begins a conversation about the experience of recuperation and repair. It addresses how the recovery of relations creates something transcendental, adds a human dimension to the public sphere and expands our conception of what constitutes the political.
Located in the cracks and gaps between the state and society, recuperation appears as a social and infrastructural answer linked to reciprocity, critical urbanity, generational interweaving, alternate ordering and reconnection of different bodies and histories. With chapters looking at public art in Lisbon and recuperative modes of action, this collection takes a thorough look at a society in crisis and shows how the people of the community create micro-politics of resistance. Ultimately, Politics of Recuperation reflects on the meaning of personal and collective resilience in Europe today, as well as on the limits and interstices of contemporary politics.
Repair as repopulating the devastated desert of our political and social imaginations
In my contribution––originally conceived as a comment in a workshop where the different chapters were discussed, and here framed as a conclusion to the volume––, I reflect on how the different works resonate with a growing series of recent works addressing Southern Europe in/as Crisis. Indeed, the recent post-2008 crises have rekindled the fear of ‘going backwards,’ still very vivid in migration tropes from the 1960s–70s. However, this assessment of ‘backwardness’ unfolds a wider European genre of telling ‘what the problem is’, with peculiar connotations for Southern Europe: where ‘modernity’ and its alleged univocal drive towards ‘progress’ comes centre stage: Europe, here, appears as a particular poetics of infrastructure.
But these crises have also rekindled a ‘slight orientalism’ of Southern Europe: a nearby place conjuring images of the far away or, more precisely, a slightly far away nearby place. This slight orientalism has been over the years conveniently mobilised over and over again in the ways in which tourism is branded and marketed. Interestingly, it has also served later on to underpin the ‘exceptionality of Europe’ trope and its violent incarnation in the perceived threats of non-European migration: fierce – when not most of the time overly brutal – border and sea control, detention and containment or racialised police checks. Southern Europe as both leisure resort and boundary-maker of ‘Fortress Europe’.
However, beyond these tropes, and in a context of experimentation with ‘neoliberal’ forms of government the financialisation of life and the expansion of indebtedness have also brought with them other explanations for what the problem was and what to do about it. Indeed, to many, the Common Market, and later the European Union, have been quintessential mechanisms for that economic transformation. One in which the developmental issue of Southern and Eastern Europe was addressed beyond explicitly racialised terms, yet forcefully reinstating a particularly modernist ontology of the social: a scalar one, which not only classifies actors in terms of a grid of the big and the small (macro and micro; the state and the people; society/group and the individual), but also creates concomitant orders of worth and causality with regards to what it might mean to take political action.
Against this background, the works here compiled offer alternative accounts. Notably, the Portuguese verb reparar has a nuance that the English ‘to repair’ does not have: one that goes beyond ‘to fix something that is broken or damaged’ and ‘to take action in order to improve a bad situation’ (the two main definitions found in the Macmillan English Dictionary). Reparar also means ‘to observe’, ‘to pay attention’. The descriptive repertoire that this anthology brings forward would thus help us shed light on the distinct nuances that different groups, people and collectives might be bringing about, unsettling unified narratives around what might have happened and what to do with it. Observing, paying attention to the forms of repair, hence, might be the best antidote to ready-made explanations of the ‘what’ and ‘why’, and any ready-made concepts or frameworks suggesting what should be done and how: an unsettled response to an unsettling condition, perhaps?
In my opinion, what is at stake in the particularly reparative practices and relations beyond scale, assembled in this anthology (dances, moneylending, the retrieval of ancient legacies, caring for discarded goods or engaging in different forms of urban activism) is a dispute of the actual definition of ‘welfare’. In other words, the works here compiled might portray a reinvention of ‘welfare society’ that does not bear the mark of disaster, but of hope: a hope that in these particularly disastrous times of ours – when crises do not seem to have an end – they might be ‘repopulating the devastated desert of our [social and political] imaginations’, to say it with Stengers.
As I see it, the allegedly small has never been more important to recasting our hopes, to repopulating our imaginations of the greater good, devastated by austerity and the path-dependency of neoliberal rule. Especially when everything seems lost, these modes of repair show the hopeful character of how things might be created anew: not going back to ‘what we were’, but experimenting with modes of togetherness yet to be defined.
