2018-ongoing. The Possible City (Book Project)

The Possible City

Embodied Plurality and the Activation of Urban Design

Book project, in preparation: version December 2025
Expected: 2027

OUTLINE

One of the many crises of modern urbanism has had to do with the exclusion and the segregation it relegated many bodies to. But what if this crisis of modern urbanism was not just a moral or technical problem of inclusion or access, but a failure of sensitivity—in the material, affective, and epistemic sense? The Possible City is an anthropological exploration of embodied plurality and its impact in the material and knowledge politics of city-making. This is an ethnography of a range of versions of urban design that refuse the safety of calcified standards, with their particular legibility of bodies and their goal of achieving what might be called ‘petrified inclusion.’ Instead, The Possible City makes a plea for a perpetual consideration to the pre-conditions of design practice and how they can be activated otherwise when becoming attentive to what bodies bring. As a result, this isn’t just a book about how urban designers get to know and enforce accessibility regulations, but one devoted to exploring the effects on design of the radical vicinity of embodied plurality: the enactment of an activated epistemic spatial practice, an ongoing process of re-learning how to see, think, and build.

Drawing on field and archival work with independent-living and disability rights movements in Barcelona, and the design of pedagogical situations in Munich and Barcelona, I trace a wealth of activist initiatives caring for an epistemic, material and political activation of urban design. Resonating with Isabelle Stengers’ notion of care as the ‘activation of the possible,’ The Possible City suggests that these initiatives produce materially speculative situations through which designing technologies, urban infrastructures or institutions and political spaces is to be attempted from the appreciation and articulation of embodied plurality. In this framework, care is not a palliative measure for already-defined ‘vulnerable’ groups, but a speculative force that resists the demographic legibility and identification of bodily patterns, activating a concern for the rich singularities of divergent bodies.

In particular, the book wishes to unfold three ways in which a concern with embodied plurality opens up possible approaches to city-making: (i) activating prototypes – the story of an open design collective experimenting with technical aids to foster alliances beyond the ontological occupation of ableism –; (ii) activating infrastructures – an account of the political inventiveness deployed by ‘sensitised’ bureaucrats to make city-making more hospitable to embodied plurality whilst operating within a norm-driven technocratic milieu –, and (iii) activating pedagogies – a reflection on the impact that the previous work had when creating pedagogic situations whilst teaching architects as an anthropologist in Munich or attempting to sensitise urban experts back in Barcelona, mobilising these ethnographic resources to design procedures whereby to un-learn and re-learn how to design being affected by the radical vicinity of plural embodiments.

In describing these activations, The Possible City wishes to contribute to an agenda of ‘uncommoning’ urban design practice, making it attentive to the plural iridescence of bodies that should never cease to amaze us. Thus paving the way to approaches to urban design where the body doesn’t act as a spatial machine for unifying or creating ready-made common grounds (such as in Le Corbusier’s Modulor or in the DIN and ISO standards), but as a site of explorations of material approaches to what it might mean to divergently live together. Hence eliciting a ‘politics of wonder’, a fascination for the possible cities, practices of urban planning or ways of designing urban life brought about by embodied actors usually neglected or yet to come. Such an experimental and pedagogical impulse would demand searching for inspiration in the manifold forms of living crushed by modern ways of infrastructural inhabitation. Indeed, perhaps there are no better guides, no better way to proceed than to inquire on what it might mean to inhabit together with unknown diverse bodies—‘inhuman’ beings, be they materials, people, non-human animals, plants, ghosts or deities—left behind by the modern urban project.

Learning, thinking, and doing in their vicinity might not only mean to draw from their received wisdom, but to open to the unknown with them, in the hope to render a time without guarantees actionable. Resonating with these concerns, The Possible City wishes to suggest a possible way: inviting us to imagine pedagogic spaces for urban designers to re-learn what it might mean to live in a city today in the company of those bodies, neglected or yet to come. Not secluded institutions where to learn what there is to be known, but porous sites devoted to making the plural conditions of urban habitability thinkable and liveable as a problem not yet fully known. That is, as an ‘urban pluriverse.’ Each of the activations here recounted discusses how such an urban pluriverse appears as a mode of city-making articulating distinct social urban forms with their political and moral capacities, as well as urbanites. But why three and not four or twenty-seven modes in which the possible city is activated? This is indeed a simplification, and three is not a random figure: rather, it is part of the book’s rhetorical device, and as such it resonates with an attempt at making the argument easy to remember, as well as summarising the most important aspects in a conventional Euro-American logic. In that sense, three is where this book has settled to make an argument, but it’s not the end of things, perhaps just a possible beginning?

In particularly fraught times—with new totalitarian divides and unprecedented more-than-human challenges for urban life—perhaps it is more important than ever to continue attempting to materialise possible cities everywhere: generating speculative ecologies of support, offering the possibility not only to thrive in cities whose rampant violence cannot be denied any more – precisely at a time when Welfare ideals mostly appear in the guise of a ‘social technocracy’ –, but also to envision urban forms where we could attempt to relate with one another, even at the hinges of unrelatability. This unprecedented demand requires new approaches to learning and education, both for experts as well as for regular urbanites. Although with a caveat: any pedagogic initiative we might imagine can no longer keep existing in the ‘enlightened’ modality of being certain of where we stand, wielding our knowledge as a weapon to convert others, or to tell them they are wrong. Rather, departing from our stupor and uncertainty of many things, also of what a city ‘could be’, we need to find other ways to re-equip ourselves, activating other ways of city-making.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction: Urban Design in the Radical Vicinity of Plural Embodiments

ACTIVATING PROTOTYPES

An account of 4 years operating as ethnographer-cum-documenter in the En torno a la silla collective, here narrated as a radical approach to care: undertaking DIY endeavours, searching to prototype and experiment with modes of of togetherness

2. Joint problem-making

1. Diverse non-normative alliances: Fragile atmospheres of collective self-experimentation beyond the ontological occupation of ableism
2. The indignados functional diversity commissions: Materialising alternative arrangements in the crisis of Welfare
3. Going beyond ‘the catalogue’? Inappropriate/d people prototyping, rethinking and troubling market-driven solutions
4. Radicalising care: Tinkering (cacharrear) with relations, materials, and environments

3. Technologies of friendship

1. Functional diversity: A politics of design?
2. Technologies of friendship: The ‘how to’ of relations beyond ableism
3. Fragile ecologies of DIY: Attempting to become ‘self-managed guinea pigs’, and documenting the experience
4. Wild research: Re-learning urban anthropology with others
   • Fieldwork devices: Engendering ecologies of open documentation
   • The pharmakon of collaboration: Thresholds and limits of experimentation

ACTIVATING INFRASTRUCTURES

A genealogically-enriched study of Barcelona’s Municipal Institute of People with Disabilities: a unit of the City Hall that came to articulate the participation of people with disabilities since the 1980s in the development of versions of urban accessibility laws, regulations and infrastructures; also showing observation materials accompanying its workers in their attempts at sensitising citizens and professionals alike

4. Infra-statecraft

1. Urban elements: The contested urban infrastructuration of disability rights
2. Petrified inclusion: The transformation of accessibility regulations into a market-driven extrastatecraft

5. Sensitised technicians

1. Cultural access: Sensitising citizens and professionals, or how small actors try to affect a big and distributed city hall and beyond
2. The problems of technical solutions: Bodily diverse revolts and the limits of a sensitised bureaucracy
3. The perils of ‘social technocracy:’ From an issue of political representation to one of knowledge politics

ACTIVATING PEDAGOGIES

A series of ethnographic reflections on the modes of undertaking anthropological pedagogical work beyond the ‘predicative mode’: mobilising ethnographic material in variegated ways when having to teach architects in training in Munich (Germany) and creating sensitising conditions for urban professionals in Barcelona, experimenting with the spaces of the design studio and the participatory workshop; creating exploratory ‘briefs’ and realistic simulations, becoming fascinated by the power of participatory and speculative toolkits or the design of situations and pedagogic atmospheres whereby to un-learn and re-learn how to design, being affected by a concern for embodied plurality.

6. Architectural intraventions

1. Architecture in crisis
   • A DIY anthropologist in a department of Architecture: Teaching in a ‘predicative’ mode
   • Experimenting with ‘technical democracy’ in design studio projects
2. Fascinating toolkits: Making speculative devices to experiment with architectural practice otherwise
   • Learning not to see: Prototyping a ManualCad
   • Approaching neurodiverse spatial practices: In search for an alternative to the Bauentwurfslehre
   • An ode to guidelines: The infimum design of converging singularities?
3. Pedagogic atmospheres: Speculative games to learn to be affected by embodied plurality

7. A school for the urban pluriverse

A manifesto for the creation of spaces or porous sites a space where urban experts and their technical knowledges, might get acquainted, when not utterly ‘sensitise’ themselves to embodied plurality as a problem not yet fully known. Thus learning to work with manifold urban actors and practitioners, to think collectively what to do with the existing modern urban infrastructure, from hacking to repairing and repurposing it.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

8. Uncommoning city-making

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PICTURE CREDITS

Broken cracks, floor tiles (2018) by BURO 341 (description: a detail picture of a grey smashed floor tile)