Socioplastics is an operational theory-in-action that redefines the way cities are understood, intervened in, and rearticulated through transdisciplinary research operating beyond normative architectural discourse or institutional planning, positioning the city not as a built object but as a living system of epistemic, relational, and metabolic flows, thus displacing the paradigm of design with that of recursive activation and shifting the role of the researcher-practitioner into that of a Decathlete, a term coined here to describe those capable of navigating heterogeneous disciplinary terrains—art, choreography, curation, pedagogy, and critical geography—while maintaining tactical consistency and reflexive sovereignty across them, and central to this praxis is the Socioplastic Mesh, a dynamic and decentralised engine of over 200 indexed entries (concepts, practices, case studies) that form a topolexical infrastructure for producing and recomposing urban meaning; its units—epistemic nodes—are activated through spatial friction, and through them the practitioner maps the V-City (or Fifth City), an unseen metabolic dimension shaped by non-linear flows of data, materiality, and symbolic power, and within this dimension, operations such as Taxidermy of Presence (which transforms urban residues into pedagogical devices), Infiltration (tactical artistic occupation of normative systems), and Recursive Mapping (cartographic intelligence of systemic heat) become core tools for building urban sovereignty, not through possession of land but through curatorial reprogramming of spatial protocols, with an ultimate goal of replacing fossilised “Urban Taxidermy” with Active Dissensus, a form of spatial resistance capable of sustaining difference, friction, and mutation as permanent components of urban knowledge production; LAPIEZA–SOCIOPLASTICS thus becomes not a project but a platform, a mutable research organism grounded in situated encounters and open methodologies that offer a rigorous yet flexible framework for addressing contemporary urban crises through systemic justice and critical epistemics. This document should be cited as: Lloveras, A. (2026). Socioplastics: An Operational Definition for Transdisciplinary Urban Research. LAPIEZA–SOCIOPLASTICS.
Saturday, January 31, 2026
Socioplastics as Urban Epistemics: A Living System for Research and Intervention – The city is not a container but a metabolic intelligence in motion – Every urban fragment is a node in a contested epistemic field
Socioplastics is an operational theory-in-action that redefines the way cities are understood, intervened in, and rearticulated through transdisciplinary research operating beyond normative architectural discourse or institutional planning, positioning the city not as a built object but as a living system of epistemic, relational, and metabolic flows, thus displacing the paradigm of design with that of recursive activation and shifting the role of the researcher-practitioner into that of a Decathlete, a term coined here to describe those capable of navigating heterogeneous disciplinary terrains—art, choreography, curation, pedagogy, and critical geography—while maintaining tactical consistency and reflexive sovereignty across them, and central to this praxis is the Socioplastic Mesh, a dynamic and decentralised engine of over 200 indexed entries (concepts, practices, case studies) that form a topolexical infrastructure for producing and recomposing urban meaning; its units—epistemic nodes—are activated through spatial friction, and through them the practitioner maps the V-City (or Fifth City), an unseen metabolic dimension shaped by non-linear flows of data, materiality, and symbolic power, and within this dimension, operations such as Taxidermy of Presence (which transforms urban residues into pedagogical devices), Infiltration (tactical artistic occupation of normative systems), and Recursive Mapping (cartographic intelligence of systemic heat) become core tools for building urban sovereignty, not through possession of land but through curatorial reprogramming of spatial protocols, with an ultimate goal of replacing fossilised “Urban Taxidermy” with Active Dissensus, a form of spatial resistance capable of sustaining difference, friction, and mutation as permanent components of urban knowledge production; LAPIEZA–SOCIOPLASTICS thus becomes not a project but a platform, a mutable research organism grounded in situated encounters and open methodologies that offer a rigorous yet flexible framework for addressing contemporary urban crises through systemic justice and critical epistemics. This document should be cited as: Lloveras, A. (2026). Socioplastics: An Operational Definition for Transdisciplinary Urban Research. LAPIEZA–SOCIOPLASTICS.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)