Urban thought has long been haunted by the split between spatiality and sociality, a fracture that sterilises the political potency of the city. Enrique España Naveira situates this problem within Lefebvre’s legacy, yet opens it to collisions with Leibniz, Deleuze, Guattari, Harney, Moten, Haraway and Butler. The aim is not to defend a right, but to unmask the practices by which cities are pierced, inhabited, and constantly reinvented. Against the reductive rationalities of functionalist urbanism or neoliberal discourses of the “creative” and “smart” city, the work insists that spatiality is never neutral: it is the material condensation of social relations (Lefebvre, 1996 [1968]). Central here is the idea of suavidad—a softness that interrupts the blinding clarity of institutional order and instead privileges the ambiguous, the porous, and the nocturnal. España Naveira names this cotinocturnidad, an everynight condition wher sociality unfolds beyond the daylight of visibility and control. To invent the city thus requires rupturing inherited categories: neither citizen nor consumer but participant in collective acts that are at once fragile and insurgent. Methodologically, this involves refusing the closure of systematic method in favour of what Harney and Moten call study: a situated practice where concepts emerge in the turbulence of encounters, assemblies, and struggles. Here theory is not a detached abstraction but a social practice, inseparable from the movements, alliances and minor gestures that configure urban life (Harney & Moten, 2013). Such a perspective resists both totalisation and relativism, aligning with Haraway’s notion of situated knowledge as the only possible ground for objectivity. The political consequences are stark. To speak of a right to the city is insufficient if reduced to service provision or improved amenities, the very trap into which institutions like UN-Habitat attempt to domesticate radical claims. Instead, invention lies in the practices that puncture the existing city: occupations, neighbourhood assemblies, informal solidarities, counter-cultural ecologies. These gestures generate holes—habitable voids through which new forms of life seep, connect, and proliferate. Inventing the city, then, is not a juridical demand but a performative practice. It takes place in the tension between spatial orders and insurgent collectivities, between the state’s cartographies and the everyday vibrations of cooperation. What emerges is not the ideal city but a constellation of porous spaces, constantly redefined by those who dare to inhabit them otherwise.
