The Ecology of Cohabitation

The city, viewed through the lens of sinecism, is not simply a conglomeration of buildings but an evolving cohabitation system rooted in reciprocal transformation. This concept reclaims a deep ecological and philosophical foundation where spatial intelligence precedes abstract knowledge, emphasizing bodily experience and mutual construction between organism and environment. Drawing on Lefebvre, Soja, and biological thinkers like Margulis and Sagan, the authors trace how the act of living together—synoikismos—is not only historical but ontological, predating even agricultural systems. In fact, urbanity itself gives rise to agricultural innovation as a response to the needs of collective living. This vision breaks with linear progress narratives and proposes an entangled model where spatial configurations, ecological adaptation, and affective ties co-create both territory and identity. The metaphor of the first cell’s feeding and reproduction as habitat-making underlines how life and space are inseparable. One compelling analogy is the indivisible bond between a city and its surrounding rural matrix, forming a socio-ecological system that cannot be reduced to administrative boundaries but must be understood as a living, co-produced mesh. Such insights challenge technocratic urban planning and advocate for forms of spatial reasoning grounded in interdependence, memory, and embodied intelligence.

Romero, J.M. and Mora, R., 2017. Sinecismo e inteligencia espacial y territorial. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 7(2), pp.93–96.

The City as Narrative

To exhibit the city is to tell a story—not only of architecture and infrastructure but of memory, desire, and power. This notion underpins the curatorial devices examined in three urban exhibitions that reframe the city as both object and subject of narration. Rather than presenting the city as a static backdrop, these exhibits activate it as a dynamic protagonist in a web of images, texts, and experiences. The authors argue that every curatorial gesture—what is selected, what is omitted, how things are displayed—produces a narrative about urban identity and collective belonging. These exhibitions, situated in Spanish and Latin American contexts, deploy maps, photographs, and testimonies not as neutral artifacts but as vehicles for political and cultural interpretation. They foreground tensions between past and future, visibility and exclusion, center and periphery. A particularly illustrative case is the use of archival materials in one exhibit to question dominant urban historiographies, revealing marginalized narratives and spatial injustices that persist beneath the city’s official façade. Thus, the city becomes legible not only through urban planning or statistical analysis but as a form of storytelling, where the politics of visibility determine whose voices shape urban imaginaries and whose are silenced.

Elizondo, G. and Rey, C., 2017. La ciudad como relato: tres dispositivos de exhibición para pensar la ciudad. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 7(2), pp.115–121.

The Right to the City

Henri Lefebvre’s The Right to the City is not merely a theoretical text—it is a political declaration, a call to reimagine urban life as a terrain of emancipation rather than commodification. Written during the centenary of Marx’s Capital, the book critiques the alienation of everyday life in mid-20th-century cities and proposes an alternative: reclaiming urban space as a site of use-value, not exchange-value. Lefebvre confronts the fetishism of commodified space by insisting on the centrality of lived time, affect, and collective creativity. Rather than replacing one system with another, he opens pathways for thinking and acting toward urban futures rooted in difference, pleasure, and autonomy. The work anticipates key dynamics of contemporary urban conflict, including gentrification, displacement, and speculative development, offering not definitive solutions but a critical methodology and a vocabulary for political intervention. An exemplary insight is his opposition between the city as a site of consumption versus the city as a space of becoming, where inhabitants do not merely reside but transform both space and self in a dialectic of mutual production. This vision continues to inspire movements that see the city not only as the locus of struggle but as the medium through which a more just and joyful society might be built.

Iglesias Costa, M., 2017. El derecho a la ciudad como reclamo de la vida urbana. Reseña de Henri Lefebvre (2017) El derecho a la ciudad. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 7(2), pp.129–132.

July

 

The Urban Wall as Political Surface

In the shadow of global flows and cultural standardization, urban space reveals its potential for resistance through localized inscriptions and everyday creativity. The graffiti “Sprinfil sucks” on the wall of a paper factory in Montañana, Zaragoza, is more than vandalism—it is an act of symbolic appropriation that exposes the tension between global forces and local subjectivities. Urban surfaces become canvases where hybrid imaginaries are contested and reformulated. Rather than a binary of global versus local, what emerges is a dynamic interplay where cultural flows do not merely override the local but are themselves reconfigured by it. The city, thus, is not a passive recipient of globalization but a crucible of negotiation, where new meanings and agents are continuously produced. Local practices such as street art, informal gatherings, or linguistic re-significations become acts of spatial agency, reasserting presence in the face of homogenizing processes. The case of Montañana’s factory wall reveals how a seemingly marginal space becomes a critical site of dialogue, where local grievances and identities inscribe themselves against the anonymity of global capital. These micro-resistances articulate a “global sense of place” that is not universal, but situated, affective, and deeply entangled with urban everydayness.

Sánchez Naudín, J., 2017. Imaginarios globales para reivindicaciones locales. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 7(2). 

The Mall as Urban Stage

In the urban fabric of Mexico City, shopping malls have emerged as emblematic sites of both visibility and anonymity, spaces where the production of urban life intersects with regimes of consumption and controlled interaction. These spaces, while privately owned and commercially oriented, paradoxically function as public arenas where bodies move, perform, and negotiate identity through the act of being seen and seeing. Drawing from microsociological and ethnographic methods, the study reveals that malls like Parque Delta and Centro Santa Fe are more than centers of retail—they are stages for a specific kind of urban experience, one shaped by architectural design, marketing strategies, and users’ embodied practices. While often perceived as sanitized and decontextualized, these environments stimulate diverse relational dynamics, from scripted encounters to spontaneous gestures of sociality. The mall thus becomes a hybrid zone, neither fully public nor entirely private, fostering a unique form of urbanity anchored in sensory perception and symbolic display. A clear instance is the architectural layout of Centro Santa Fe, designed to emulate a controlled yet open environment, where users—regardless of their social class—navigate spaces laden with visual cues that guide behavior and evoke aspiration, all while maintaining a degree of detachment emblematic of modern urban life.

Hernández Espinosa, R., 2017. Visualidad, urbanidad y consumo: producción microsocial del espacio en dos centros comerciales de la Ciudad de México. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 7(2), pp.55–70. 

Community Reconstruction Beyond Architecture

The reconstruction of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina stands as a paradigmatic case in urban recovery, revealing the complexities of post-disaster intervention. Far from a purely technical challenge, rebuilding demanded a multidimensional approach that balanced urgency, equity, cultural identity, and emotional resilience. The article critiques the predominance of architectural responses led by well-intentioned yet externally imposed projects such as the “Make It Right” foundation initiated by Brad Pitt. While the project aspired to sustainability and design excellence, its top-down methodology and reliance on globally renowned architects sometimes clashed with local needs and sensibilities. Crucially, the deep-rooted sense of belonging among the residents—many of whom were first-generation homeowners—challenged proposals for relocation or standardized housing. A notable example was the use of high-cost materials and advanced technologies in some housing prototypes, which while innovative, were impractical or symbolically discordant in a context still marked by trauma and displacement. The case illustrates that recovery is not merely about physical rebuilding but about enabling communities to reclaim agency over their spatial and social futures through inclusive and culturally sensitive processes.

Robles García, A., 2017. Reflexiones acerca de la reconstrucción de comunidades tras un desastre natural. El caso particular del Lower 9th Ward de Nueva Orleans. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 7(2), pp.71–79. 

The Dispersed City

Urban sprawl manifests not only as a spatial phenomenon but as a profound social fracture in the peripheries of megacities, where density and proximity fail to translate into social cohesion. In cities like Mexico City, peripheral developments often consist of compact yet poorly organized housing units, deprived of adequate infrastructure and detached from civic and cultural centers. These environments, described metaphorically as "stacked cages," reflect a commodified approach to urbanization driven by real estate speculation rather than human needs. The inhabitants, though physically close, remain socially isolated, caught in a survival mode that undermines any form of collective identity or public life. This model of expansion emphasizes quantitative growth while neglecting qualitative urban experience, revealing a deeper crisis of modern individualism where space no longer guarantees encounter or interaction. One telling illustration is the peripheral neighborhood’s absence of public squares or communal venues, reducing the city to a dormitory landscape shaped by isolation and daily commute, rather than shared memory or political presence. Such forms of development exacerbate spatial injustice and signal the urgent need for integrated, inclusive urban planning.

Gutiérrez Álvarez, F.C., 2017. Crisis de las ciudades desparramadas. In: URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 7(1). Universidad de Almería. 

Capitalist Urban Form in the Global Age

Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad—conceived, perceived, and lived space—remains a foundational lens through which to understand how cities function within the contemporary framework of globalization and capitalist accumulation. This rationality, originally formulated as an abstraction of Euclidean geometries and administrative logics, has not been surpassed but instead persists by adapting to the morphologies of global urbanism. The expansion of network societies and the emergence of fleeting, deterritorialized spaces do not negate spatial rationality; they exemplify its evolution as a mechanism of flexible control. The spatial logic of capitalism thus accommodates both fluidity and fixity, absorbing the symbolic and experiential dimensions of lived space into its operational terrain. Franco Farinelli’s insistence on distinguishing space as a rational construct, independent of place and culture, reinforces this reading, making clear that spatial rationality is not obsolete but recontextualized within a paradigm of urban fragmentation and global flows. An example lies in the coexistence of digital connectivity and physical estrangement, where city users navigate smart infrastructure while remaining alienated from the political and symbolic meaning of their spatial environments.

URBS Editorial, 2017. La racionalidad espacial en la era global. In: URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 7(1). Universidad de Almería

The Crisis of Symbolic Centers

In the evolution of contemporary urban forms, a critical rupture emerges between the spatial expressions of rootedness and the advancing erosion of symbolic urban centers. This condition is marked by a duality: on one side, monumental spaces that once served as energy condensers and loci of collective meaning now operate as inert symbols, disconnected from their communities; on the other, flexible, emergent spaces strive to adapt to evolving social and cultural logics, yet often lack the historical gravitas to sustain long-term belonging. The disarticulation of urban cores, as theorized in relation to the axis mundi, reflects a deeper sociocultural entropy wherein spaces lose their integrative function and instead become sites of alienation. This spatial estrangement generates a form of socio-existential rootlessness, in which individuals encounter urban environments as fragmented, superficial, and emotionally barren. A telling instance is the transformation of formerly sacred or civic spaces into commodified tourist spectacles, where façade and visual appeal override substance, displacing communal memory with aesthetic consumption. The symbolic vacuum thus left unfilled contributes to a broader urban pathology: cities that expand materially yet contract symbolically, proliferating placelessness and undermining civic cohesion.

Aguirre-Martínez, G., 2017. Una reflexión teórica en torno al espacio urbano como eje de enraizamiento/desarraigo. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 7(1), pp.31–40. 

Revisiting Kevin Lynch

Kevin Lynch’s seminal work The Image of the City continues to inform urban analysis through its clear methodological framework and perceptual categories that simplify the complex urban experience. His classification of paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks offers a structure to decode how individuals mentally map their environments, fostering legibility and orientation. However, while Lynch’s approach gained significant academic traction, it has also faced criticism for its tendency toward oversimplification and its reliance on visual order as the primary axis of urban understanding. The contemporary dialogue repositions Lynch’s ideas in a post-contemporary context, arguing that urban complexity today demands a broader sensorial and sociocultural engagement with space. The authors emphasize the necessity of interdisciplinary perspectives—merging architecture, psychology, and sociology—to grasp the evolving dynamics of urban identity formation. An illustrative case arises in the teaching of architecture, where Lynch’s categories are still used to map urban perceptions; yet, these exercises often lack critical depth and fail to incorporate factors like social fragmentation or symbolic dissonance, revealing the limits of a purely visual methodology in today’s heterogeneous and contested urban spaces.

Saga, M. and Fernández Ramírez, B., 2017. Debate interdisciplinar. #Leer la ciudad: la imagen de la ciudad. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 7(1), pp.125–136

The Aesthetics of Forgetting

Postmodern cities embody an aesthetic and ontological break from modernist paradigms, constructing urban landscapes that prioritize image over substance and simulacrum over memory. The theoretical framework underpinning this shift rejects the stylistic constraints of the International Style, giving rise to urban forms that are fragmented, thematized, and temporally unstable. These spaces, characterized by architectural eclecticism and symbolic superficiality, lack the historical anchoring that once shaped collective urban identity. The city thus becomes a stage for visual consumption, where the built environment is not designed for habitation but rather for spectacle and transient engagement. In this context, architecture loses its dialogical relationship with its inhabitants, producing environments that alienate rather than integrate, places that are simultaneously recognizable through signs yet devoid of meaning. This transformation reflects a broader postmodern condition—marked by the commodification of culture and the erosion of spatial continuity—that renders the city a mosaic of themed fragments, severed from historical narrative. The clearest example lies in the proliferation of shopping malls and themed districts, where neon signs and surface embellishments simulate urban experience, reducing the city to an orchestrated illusion, a “non-place” that resists memory and communal rootedness.

Barreiro León, B., 2017. Urban Theory in Postmodern Cities: Amnesiac Spaces and Ephemeral Aesthetics. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 7(1), pp.57–65.

Between Rootedness and Estrangement

The contemporary city unfolds as a contested field where space either fosters existential belonging or manifests profound detachment, revealing a dialectic between rootedness and estrangement. This theoretical reflection identifies two core urban spheres: first, the monumental city, composed of historically fixed structures that, having lost their symbolic vitality, act as inert objects devoid of social dynamism; second, the malleable urban space, capable of embodying the cultural and emotional intentions of its inhabitants, thereby operating as a true axis mundi. The city, understood as a site of ongoing crisis, reflects a fragmentation where centers—once sources of symbolic energy—are displaced or neutralized, becoming mere façades. Urban growth thus gravitates toward peripheral developments increasingly alien to any symbolic core, producing spaces that are simultaneously overpopulated and dislocated. This spatial disarticulation triggers a form of collective disorientation, wherein individuals fear the centralizing logic of power yet remain deprived of places that foster meaningful attachment. The subject, caught in this ambivalence, risks being objectified by the very urban forms that were meant to anchor identity. A paradigmatic illustration can be found in the transformation of central nodes into lifeless landmarks, detached from communal memory and unable to reflect collective desires, thus undermining both spatial coherence and social resonance.

Aguirre-Martínez, G., 2017. Una reflexión teórica en torno al espacio urbano como eje de enraizamiento/desarraigo. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 7(1), pp.31–40.

Structural Persistence in the Global Era

The configuration of modern space, articulated through the spatial rationality developed by Henri Lefebvre, emerges as a conceptual device that not only endures but adapts to the contemporary transformations of globalization and postmodern urbanism, maintaining its effectiveness in a context defined by networks and symbolic displacements. This rationality, grounded in Lefebvre’s spatial triad—conceived, perceived, and lived space—persists through reconfiguration, not by abandoning its abstract logic, but by embedding itself in new urban lifeways that demand flexibility while simultaneously reproducing capitalist modes of accumulation. Space thus functions as a vehicle of ideological continuity, capable of smoothing or striating itself depending on capital’s demands, concealing its contradictions under the guise of lived, sensory, and evanescent spaces. The notion of transduction arises as an analytical alternative, mediating between praxis and representation, offering a path to transcend the epistemic closure of rationalized space through the co-creation of different places imbued with affect and meaning. This spatial shift suggests a dialectical transcendence that does not reject previous logic but rather tensions it to inaugurate a new mode of critical appropriation of urban dwelling. A case in point is how contemporary urbanism continues to legitimize its interventions through maps and technocratic discourse, while everyday practices strive to re-signify space through experience, desire, and identity.

Bailey, G., 2017. La racionalidad espacial y su persistencia en la era global. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 7(1), pp.89–108. 

Hello

Antonio Tàpies, Gerardo Rueda, Pablo Palazuelo, Manuel Mompó, Jorge Oteiza, Donald Judd, Jeff Koons, Jackson Pollock, Edward Hopper, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol, Robert Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Serra, Asger Jorn, Paul Klee, Josef Albers, Anni Albers, Herbert Bayer, Marianne Brandt, Gunta Stölzl, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, Oscar Schlemmer, Lyonel Feininger, Johannes Itten, Lucia Moholy, Inger Sitter, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Erik Bryggman, Sigurd Lewerentz, Erik Gunnar Asplund, Reima Pietilä, Raili Pietilä, Arne Korsmo, Ove Bang, Fritjof Reppen, Arnstein Arneberg, Magnus Paulsson, Harald Hals, Arne Jacobsen, Lars Backer, Hans Linstow, Herman Munthe-Kaas, Gudolf Blakstad, Renzo Piano, Massimiliano Fuksas, Aldo Rossi, Filippo Brunelleschi, Alessandro Mendini, Giuseppe Terragni, Donato Bramante, Carlo Scarpa, Andrea Palladio, Pier Luigi Nervi, Jørn Utzon, Rick Joy, Javier Sáenz de Oiza, Enric Miralles, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Josep Lluís Sert, Alejandro de la Sota, Antoni Gaudí, José Rafael Moneo, Konstantin Melnikov, Ivan Zholtovsky, El Lissitzky, Álvaro Siza Vieira, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Fernando Távora, Gonçalo Byrne, Alberto Pessoa.

July

 

The Enchantment of Place and Rural Transformation

This article delves into how metaphor and narrative function as central tools in the cultural and emotional understanding of rural landscapes, particularly in contexts of socio-economic transition. Drawing from case studies in Spanish villages, the author investigates how storytelling, local rituals, and spatial metaphors construct a collective sense of place, sustaining community identity amidst depopulation, modernisation, and policy shifts. The article argues that the magic attributed to rural life is not a romantic fiction, but a symbolic framework that supports social cohesion and resilience. It emphasises how residents draw upon symbolic figures—saints, spirits, animals—as well as narrative motifs such as the journey, the return, or the transformation, to give meaning to their lived environment. These metaphors act as cognitive and affective maps, allowing inhabitants to interpret change and contest external impositions, particularly those framed by technocratic rural development models. The study ultimately proposes that rural regeneration must include an engagement with local epistemologies and cultural grammars, recognising that what is at stake is not merely infrastructure but the imaginative architecture of belonging.

Ortega, A. (2015) ‘Metáfora y narrativa: la magia de los pueblos, un relato para el cambio’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 5(2), pp. 109–116.

Cities that Refuse to Die

This analytical piece reconsiders the fate of Los Ángeles, not as a decaying periphery but as a site of resilience, memory, and unyielding identity. Challenging dominant narratives that frame certain urban spaces as obsolete or failed, the author constructs a portrait of the city as a living archive, whose streets and structures bear witness to decades of struggle, creativity, and everyday survival. The article blends ethnographic vignettes, historical fragments, and literary references to narrate the counter-histories embedded in the urban fabric—from the legacy of social movements to the persistence of informal economies and subcultures. Central to the text is the idea that some cities do not die, even when neglected or marginalised; instead, they mutate, remember, and resist erasure, embodying a form of temporal insurgency. The city is understood not as infrastructure alone, but as a palimpsest of desires, losses, and unfinished dreams, constantly reimagined by those who dwell within its folds. In this framing, urbanism becomes a narrative act, and memory a form of spatial resistance.

Sánchez, D. (2015) ‘Los Ángeles nunca mueren’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 5(2), pp. 117–126.

From Smart Cities to Smart Citizens

 

This text challenges the technocentric model of smart cities, arguing for a shift toward a civic model centered on active, empowered citizens. It critiques how dominant narratives reduce the role of individuals to data producers and passive service recipients, ignoring the collective intelligence and participation necessary for true urban resilience. Drawing on examples such as urban gardens, the article illustrates how community-based initiatives not only foster ecological awareness but also redefine the meaning of being “smart.” The author contends that urban innovation must not be limited to technological efficiency but rather should be embedded in social justice, equity, and participatory governance. By reorienting the discourse from top-down control to bottom-up agency, the concept of "smart citizens" becomes a counter-narrative to surveillance-driven urbanism, emphasizing the co-creation of public space, inclusive decision-making, and community resilience as hallmarks of truly intelligent cities.

URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales. (2016) ‘De las smart cities a los smart citizens’, URBS, 6(2).

Technologies, Institutions, Ideologies

This theoretical piece dissects how the Smart City is not merely an urban policy model but a discursive construction, shaped by institutional ambitions, technological promises, and ideological investments. Medina and Sánchez examine how urban governance in Spain has embraced smartness as a catch-all solution for economic growth, modernization, and environmental stewardship—yet without critically interrogating the origins, beneficiaries, or contradictions of this narrative. The Smart City discourse mobilizes seductive images of efficiency, sustainability, and innovation, but often bypasses the messy realities of urban inequality, surveillance, and gentrification. Through discourse analysis, the authors show how key actors—municipal governments, tech companies, and planning agencies—co-produce a hegemonic story that aligns with neoliberal rationalities, favoring private-public partnerships and data-driven management. This story is not neutral: it defines what counts as progress, who is heard in urban planning, and how urban futures are imagined. By unpacking the symbolic power of this language, the article calls for critical urban pedagogy, capable of exposing the exclusions embedded in “smartness” and opening space for alternative imaginaries of justice, collectivity, and urban agency.

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Medina, R. and Sánchez, M. (2016) ‘La construcción del discurso de la Smart City’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 6(2), pp. 7–24.

Biophilic sensibility

In their study, Lumber, Richardson and Sheffield propose that a genuine connection to nature transcends factual knowledge or species identification and is instead built through five experiential and emotional dimensions: contact, emotion, meaning, compassion, and beauty. These pathways, identified through empirical research, were shown to significantly increase nature connectedness, a state linked to both human well-being and pro-environmental behavior. The authors conducted three studies, including a field intervention, where participants engaged in walking activities that incorporated emotional reflection, aesthetic attention, and symbolic meaning-making. The results indicated that those who actively participated in these activities developed a deeper connection to nature compared to those who simply walked through natural settings without guided engagement. This model challenges traditional conservation strategies that rely heavily on ecological education, suggesting instead that subjective, emotional, and symbolic engagement—such as appreciating natural beauty, feeling empathy toward living beings, and finding metaphorical meaning in natural elements—are more effective in fostering a sustainable, respectful relationship with the environment. The authors emphasize that in an increasingly urbanized and distracted world, fostering these five pathways can counteract the disconnect from nature, offering a route not only to individual fulfillment but also to collective ecological responsibility. Thus, the “why” of connecting with nature lies in reawakening an innate biophilic sensibility that is not taught but felt, shared, and lived.

Lumber, R., Richardson, M. and Sheffield, D., 2017. Beyond knowing nature: Contact, emotion, compassion, meaning, and beauty are pathways to nature connection. PLOS ONE, 12(5), 

The Fourth Industrial Revolution

In this incisive deconstruction, José Pérez de Lama explores how the so-called Fourth Industrial Revolution—popularized by Klaus Schwab and embraced by Silicon Valley—functions as a techno-political narrative that masks the persistence of extractive, neocolonial, and precarious systems. Far from heralding a new emancipatory era, the revolution is shown to reproduce the same material logics of control, inequality, and environmental degradation as its predecessors. The article meticulously contrasts the fantasy of digitized, decentralized progress with the grounded realities of labor exploitation, planetary resource exhaustion, and algorithmic governance. Drawing from critical theory, STS (science and technology studies), and posthumanist philosophy, Pérez de Lama reveals how the “revolution” is less a rupture than a rhetorical innovation, a narrative device to legitimate new forms of capitalist accumulation under the guise of transformation. The critique is not anti-technology per se, but calls for political imagination and situated practices that resist technocratic fatalism and reclaim technoscience for democratic and ecological purposes. Rather than passively accept disruptive innovation, the author urges scholars and activists to recode the future by re-grounding technological discourse in material realities, collective agency, and socio-environmental justice.

Pérez de Lama, J. (2016) ‘La Cuarta Revolución Industrial. Un relato desde el materialismo ecológico y la ciencia política’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 6(2), pp. 47–67.

WHY

 

The act of posing the question “why” is portrayed not as a simple inquiry but as a transformative mechanism that unlocks purpose and clarity, guiding both personal reflection and collective direction. This fundamental interrogation serves to dismantle superficial assumptions and reveal the underlying motives that drive actions, choices, and beliefs, positioning the “why” as a compass that aligns values with intention. By returning to this essential question, as emphasized in the quote “Why is the question that opens the door to clarity and purpose,” one cultivates a deeper awareness that transcends mere problem-solving, allowing for intentional, meaningful engagement with the world and oneself.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yw7HBKr8rgQ

The Liquid Interactions Model

 

The Liquid Interactions Model, developed by Forest Therapy Hub (FTHub), is a structured framework consisting of four concentric circles that outline the multilevel interplay between personal, environmental, and social determinants of well-being. The first circle encompasses immutable personal traits such as heredity, age, and gender, while the second circle addresses dynamic health states—mental, social, physical, and spiritual—that can be positively influenced by contact with nature, as shown through extensive scientific research (De Vries et al., 2003; Maas et al., 2006; Capaldi et al., 2014). The third circle, a core layer of active interaction, focuses on embodied and sensory experiences with nature, emphasizing mechanisms like biochemical exposure, tactile stimuli, and light, which prompt immediate psycho-physiological responses such as awe and relaxation (Shiota et al., 2007). This level also incorporates the Five Pathways to Nature Connection—Contact, Beauty, Meaning, Emotion, and Compassion—developed by Richardson et al. (2017), which deepen the affective bond with natural environments, and the Five Ways to Wellbeing from the New Economics Foundation, which promote sustainable mental health through everyday actions like connecting and being active. The fourth circle refers to the macro-environmental contexts—socioeconomic, cultural, and natural systems—influencing individual and collective health, mediated by technological and societal structures (Kuo, 2015). 

Forest Therapy Hub (2021) Manual para el FTHub Guía de Baños de Bosque Certificado: Módulo 6 – El Método FTHub: Modelo de Interacciones Líquidas.

Post-Touristic Landscapes

This piece critically examines the thematization of cities in the age of global tourism and cultural commodification. Using Madrid as a reference, the article analyzes how urban spaces are increasingly shaped by narrative homogenization, driven by tourist markets, event planning, and spectacular aesthetics. These logics produce sanitized and market-friendly urban experiences, erasing local complexity, resistance, and marginal voices. However, the author also identifies a series of counter-hegemonic practices—often led by cultural collectives and neighborhood alliances—that reclaim public space through temporary occupations, performances, and spatial interventions. Drawing on theories of urban spectacle, post-Fordist capitalism, and cultural resistance, the text argues for a radical reinterpretation of urban thematization not as cultural programming but as a political battleground, where alternative imaginaries and dissident uses of space can emerge. These practices resist the narrative fixity imposed by branding and suggest a more dynamic, inclusive vision of urban identity.

Sánchez, A. (2015) ‘Turismo, tematización de la ciudad y urbanismo contrahegemónico’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 5(2), pp. 245–254.

From Touristic Modernity to Symbolic Escape

This critical reflection dissects the layered and often contradictory discursive constructions of the Costa del Sol, revealing how official narratives have historically masked underlying dynamics of power, exclusion, and speculative urbanism. Chema Collado Segovia argues that while tourism was framed as a national salvation strategy during the Franco regime, it was also seen as morally threatening and spatially marginal, leading to a paradoxical encouragement of its expansion in “peripheral” regions like the Costa del Sol. Through an archaeology of media, academic, and governmental discourse, the article exposes how the so-called “miracle” of touristic growth is constructed through mythologized pioneers and depoliticized heroism, obscuring state orchestration and the capitalist reconfiguration of territory. In particular, the author denounces the erasure of collective agency and the transformation of urban planning into an opaque mechanism of speculative interests, where citizens internalize narratives of emancipation and modernity that justify uneven development. The text culminates in the metaphorical act of fleeing the N-340 road, a spatial symbol of the imposed linearity and developmental logic that governs the coast, inviting instead a gaze towards the margins and unrecorded voices of the urban experience. In doing so, it proposes a re-politicization of urban memory, one that acknowledges the symbolic violence of its erasures and reclaims the capacity to inhabit critically and narratively.

Collado Segovia, C. (2016) ‘Representaciones colectivas de la Costa del Sol, discursos oficiales y puntos de fuga’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 6(1), pp. 35–50.