martes, 26 de agosto de 2025

Beyond Rights, Towards Practices

The city is not merely a geometric container for social relations, but a living and unstable entanglement where both domains support and transform each other. This emphasis dismantles the modernist presumption of space as neutral ground and replaces it with a field of friction, reciprocity and invention (España, 2021). The notion of softness is crucial. Against the hard clarity of daylight and its disciplinary grids, softness evokes the “cotinocturnal”: an everyday nocturne where urban experience unfolds less through spectacle than through the muted, unattractive perforations of ordinary life. By foregrounding these subterranean dynamics, the thesis challenges architecture’s obsession with form, permanence and order, proposing instead a porous understanding of the urban fabric. In this view, revolutionary possibility is not something staged at the monumental scale, but rather something that emerges through the sub-communal and the ephemeral. Such a shift implies that the right to the city cannot remain confined to juridical recognition or to reformist demands on existing structures. It becomes, instead, a practice of invention: a daily, situated, and collective reworking of urban conditions. The city, in this sense, is never finished; it is perpetually “punctured” by practices that resist capture, open breaches, and sustain subsistence against dominant logics of attraction and control (España, 2021). The thesis thus reframes the urban as a contested crossroads. On one side, the centripetal forces of capital, planning and governance seek to stabilise the city’s identity. On the other, subsistent forces—weak, peripheral, nocturnal—erode these structures and affirm the possibility of another urbanity. By privileging invention over preservation, and practices over rights, España articulates a radical continuity with Lefebvre: the city is not to be claimed, but continually reinvented.


España, K. (2021) (El derecho a) Inventar la ciudad. PhD thesis. Universidad de Sevilla.