Sacred Lotus

Photographed at the Historical-Botanical Garden in Málaga, the Sacred Lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) appears in a moment of delicate transition, its petals partially shed, revealing the unmistakable green seed pod—both a botanical marvel and a spiritual symbol. Native to Asia but cultivated globally for its ornamental and symbolic value, this aquatic perennial holds deep significance across Hinduism, Buddhism, and other Eastern philosophies, where it represents purity, spiritual awakening, and transcendence, emerging unstained from muddy waters to bloom with pristine elegance. The flower is often associated with the Sibyl, a prophetic figure in ancient mythology, suggesting a bridge between earthly existence and higher knowledge.

The City as Seasonal Simulacrum

Along Spain’s Mediterranean coast, what we’re witnessing is not urban growth but a temporal metastasis, a sprawling, cancerous expansion of built form detached from real, continuous life. These are not towns, not even cities, but architectural husks, inflated by speculation and emptied by design. They exist for a season, then collapse into silence. This is not tourism—it’s urban thrombosis. Concrete and glass accumulate like clots in the territorial bloodstream, blocking circulation, suffocating community, paralyzing any possibility of stable social life. These spaces are conceived not to be lived in, but to be rented, sold, exploited. The home becomes transaction; the city becomes a platform for absence. The horror lies not in aesthetic vulgarity—though there’s plenty—but in the void they normalize: places without children, without elders, without permanence. Schools close, public transport withers, and hospitals become seasonal utilities. The rhythm of life is broken, replaced by the artificial pulse of holiday calendars. What we’re left with is a false urbanism, one that mimics density but negates depth. There are buildings, but no neighborhoods; infrastructure, but no intimacy. The city, once a stage for collective meaning, becomes a facade of temporary presence, a simulation of urbanity. This is a structural failure—a political and cultural amputation. It is the direct outcome of a system that values occupancy rates over lived experience, profit over belonging. To confront it demands more than urban planning: it requires a radical ethics of the inhabited, a commitment to urban duration in a time of permanent displacement. * ALLO

The Transformative Potential of Urban Conflict

A multidimensional narrative on how conflict, far from being solely destructive, becomes a fertile ground for spatial reinvention and social reimagining. Through richly curated case studies and critical essays, the issue challenges the tendency to frame urban interventions as neutral or apolitical, arguing instead that urbanism is inherently conflictual, as Eve Blau asserts. The interplay between displacement and design is central: in Ukraine, grassroots initiatives convert war-torn structures into shelters for internally displaced people, embodying a form of architectural improvisation that resists victimhood through action. Ai Weiwei’s reflections complement this theme, insisting that the role of urban designers is not to solve conflict but to illuminate its conditions, turning visibility into resistance. Meanwhile, Greta Samulionyte’s experience in Lithuania highlights how psychological legacies of oppression—traced back to Soviet occupation—still constrain public space innovation, with institutional inertia blocking trauma-informed design efforts despite local engagement. Through these lenses, the magazine dismantles simplistic binaries between crisis and order, instead suggesting that conflict generates new spatial logics, often more adaptive, participatory, and inclusive than those produced in times of stability. It also surfaces the dangers of aestheticizing conflict without accountability, reminding readers that every temporary hut, fenced plaza, or surveillance grid reflects specific power dynamics. It makes clear that in cities shaped by war, migration, and inequality, the most meaningful responses are those that listen before building, adapt instead of imposing, and view conflict not as something to erase but to engage—with care, courage, and criticality.

Conflict-driven Urbanism

Reframes conflict not as mere disruption but as a generative force in the evolution of urban space. Amid a constant flood of negative news—wildfires, war, displacement—this issue urges a shift in perspective, spotlighting how cities like San Francisco, Kyiv, and Irpin reshape themselves through crisis. The 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, for example, triggered a wave of emergency shelter construction that ultimately expanded housing access and laid groundwork for more inclusive planning. In Jordan’s Al-Zaatari refugee camp, as explored by Rana Abudayyeh, displaced Syrians have built vibrant, self-organized urban systems, turning impermanence into agency and challenging the stereotypical narratives that frame refugees as passive burdens. This tension between public perception and lived resilience is also dissected in the dialogue between Ritts, Dhawan, and Castro Varela, which reveals how spatial policies often mirror systemic exclusion, such as the peripheral siting of refugee camps in Germany. Architect Eve Blau critiques the limitations of conventional architectural roles, arguing that post-conflict urbanism must move beyond physical reconstruction to address collective trauma and emotional landscapes. Urbanist Greta Samulionyte adds a Baltic perspective, reflecting on the post-Soviet legacy in Lithuanian microraions, where top-down governance stifles bottom-up initiatives—even when communities are ready to engage. Through case studies, interviews, and critical reflections, this issue positions conflict as an inevitable and even vital element of urban life. Rather than erasing tension, it suggests we must learn to work within it, treating crisis not only as a rupture but also as an opportunity for reinvention and social transformation.

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August

 

Heat Wave

Heat Wave

Mapping as an Emancipatory Design Act

In a world overwhelmed by images and data, where satellite maps and digital renderings often replace direct spatial experience, cartography has shifted from being a purely technical tool to a political and creative device for territorial interpretation. This essay by Ricardo Nurko and Daniel Daou in Bitácora #51 argues that mapping, far from being neutral, is inherently a position-taking act, particularly in the face of the inequalities of the Anthropocene, where the entire planet has already been charted but remains misunderstood. Against the backdrop of a traditional cartographic paradigm in crisis, the authors highlight alternative methodologies, such as those of James Corner and Guy Debord, which advocate for participatory, experiential, and phenomenological mapping—placing the body, dérive, and perception at the centre of spatial understanding. Examples such as the work of Forensic Architecture, or the collective mapping manuals by Iconoclasistas, demonstrate how mapping can serve as a tool for denunciation, memory, and social rearticulation. Architectural diagrams are also reinterpreted as condensations of thought and action, rather than mere representation. Far from a flat and homogenised language, cartography expands into descriptive, creative, and critical modes, generating alternative spatial narratives from and for the margins. The map, understood as a cultural artefact, allows for the recovery of hidden meanings, the exposure of exclusions, and the formulation of spatial utopias—thus becoming a key instrument for a design practice committed to spatial justice and social transformation.

Nurko, R. & Daou, D. (2021). Cartografías críticas: el mapeo como acto de diseño emancipador. En Bitácora Arquitectura, No. 51, pp. 18–29. Facultad de Arquitectura, UNAM.

AUGUST

Ecologies of Suffering and Resistance

Madness has long been interpreted as an internal dysfunction of the subject, yet certain twentieth-century clinical practices revealed its roots may lie equally in physical, social, and symbolic environments. Geo-psychiatry, developed within the framework of institutional psychotherapy in wartime and postwar France, posits that mental healthcare must not target the individual alone but rather the milieu—the formative, relational, and affective environment. This approach was embodied in clinics like Saint-Alban and Blida-Joinville, where practitioners such as Tosquelles, Fanon, and Guattari reimagined the psychiatric hospital as a social laboratory. Instead of dismantling institutions, they sought to transform them into porous, participatory spaces, entangled with external social currents, collective therapy, and artistic experimentation. The hospital, thus reconfigured, became a productive environment: a node where subjective, social, and media ecologies intersected. A notable example was Saint-Alban during the Nazi occupation, where patients, doctors, artists, and resistants cohabited in a dense network of survival through mutuality. In this context, the environment was not just the setting of pathology but the very medium of alienation and healing. These experiences mapped an alternative trajectory for psychiatry, one where madness emerged as a symptom of a disrupted ecology, and cure began by treating the atmosphere itself.

(Vogman, E. (2024) ‘Geo-psychiatry: Media and the Ecologies of Madness’, Grey Room, 97, pp. 76–117.

Sunday

BYE BOB

In his interdisciplinary practice Bob Wilson emerged as a consummate visionary of minimalism and time‑sculpting whose performances defied conventional dramaturgy shaping the terrain of theatre and opera through slowness light and silence his trajectory from the 1960s founding the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds to landmark works like Deafman Glance and Einstein on the Beach with Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs shows a radical redefinition of stage language that privileges visual and sensory intensity over narrative in his Watermill Center established in 1992 in New York Wilson created a laboratory‑site for artist residencies and interdisciplinary experiments blending architecture sculpture performance and design as forms of collective inquiry the monolithic austerity of his stagings—glacial pacing geometrized movement and lighting conceived as sculptural material—reflects a poetics of presence where every gesture light shift or silence functions as composition and choreography of perception an emblematic case is his opera Einstein on the Beach lasting hours without conventional plot foregrounding visual architecture of sound and image to transform the spectator into an active interpreter of durational space ultimately Wilson’s legacy resonates beyond theatre into visual art pedagogy and performance studies redefining stagecraft as total artwork and affirming that time space and light can enact resistance to narrative norms and open new modes of sensorial engagement.

 

Digital mobility and urban power

Amid growing calls for sustainable, efficient urban mobility, the region of Paris serves as a case study for the territorial reconfiguration of mobility governance through the lens of digitalisation. Kei Tanikawa Obregón’s research explores how the integration of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) platforms transforms not only the technical coordination of transport systems but also the political anatomy of urban decision-making. By embedding transport logic within digital infrastructure, the state and market actors recalibrate the delegation of public services, redefining the roles of public authorities, private operators, and users alike. The paper argues that digitisation is not a neutral tool but a strategic vector for the consolidation of power, shaping how mobility is administered, who controls it, and which forms of mobility are prioritised. Concepts like interoperability, platform governance, and real-time data flow become central, yet they also raise crucial questions around equity, surveillance, and democratic oversight. While digital solutions offer promise for multimodal integration and emissions reduction, they often sideline concerns over accessibility, institutional transparency, and local adaptability. Thus, the Parisian model exemplifies the global trend of treating urban transport as a techno-political experiment, where smartness is often conflated with progress, obscuring the deeper socio-political dynamics at play. Obregón’s work ultimately calls for a more reflexive urban governance model that recognises the non-neutrality of digital mediation and places democratic accountability at the core of mobility innovation.

Tanikawa Obregón, Kei (2022). La digitalización al centro de las reestructuraciones territoriales de los mercados de movilidad: el caso de la región Parisina. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 12(2), 95–101. 

Community storytelling and migratory archives

In cities shaped by migration, the emergence of community storytelling initiatives and migratory archives becomes a powerful instrument for narrative restitution and spatial justice weaving together oral histories, photo‑essays, and public exhibitions devised by migrant groups in cities like London, Barcelona or Toronto these projects function as counter‑archives, countering official histories by foregrounding self‑authored narratives and embodied itineraries through collective mapping and multimedia storytelling migrant women, elders and youth collaboratively curate memories of border crossing, labour, kinship and settlement translating marginal spaces—community halls, informal markets, neighbourhood squares—into symbolic stages where diasporic identities are articulated and exchanged the integration of digital platforms and pop‑up exhibitions amplifies narrative reach beyond immediate surroundings, enabling the co‑production of urban memory across geographies and generations These initiatives do not merely document displacement—they actively reinscribe presence, asserting migrant subjectivities as integral to the city’s symbolic and spatial order In doing so they challenge erasure, reclaim space and forge solidarity rhythms across difference, constructing urban imaginaries rooted in translocal belonging, historic resilience and the ethical imperative of inclusive memory practice 

Suárez, A., & Martínez, F. (2024). Diasporic memory and urban belonging: community storytelling in European cities. Journal of Migrant Cultural Studies, 5(2), 112–130

Phenomenology of urban experience

In architectural discourse, light is often celebrated as a universal value—synonymous with clarity, progress, and functionality—yet Marcos de J. Aguirre Franco provocatively repositions darkness not as absence, but as an essential complement to spatial experience. Drawing from both Western physics and Eastern aesthetics, particularly Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows, the article argues for a phenomenological approach to architecture that reclaims the perceptual interplay between light and darkness as foundational to how space is inhabited and understood. The dominance of light-centric design in modern architecture, Aguirre Franco suggests, reflects a deeper epistemological bias within Western thought that privileges visibility and abstraction over tactility and ambiguity. This results in an alienated spatiality, where built environments are reduced to containers of function, detached from the sensory richness of everyday experience. In contrast, darkness—as filtered through Tanizaki and Goethe’s optic theories—enables a form of intimate spatial immersion, allowing inhabitants to engage the world with nuance, slowness, and embodied sensitivity. This duality is not merely optical but deeply ontological, implicating the subject’s relation to space as an active process of co-constitution. By rejecting darkness, modern architecture risks eliminating the emotive and meditative dimensions of built space, reinforcing a split between inhabitant and habitat. Thus, the essay calls for a revalorisation of contrast, ambiguity, and atmospheric subtlety, proposing a spatial ethics grounded in perceptual complementarities rather than visual hegemony. Urban design, in this view, becomes not only a technical practice but a cultural poetics, where the aesthetic of shadow reveals the profound entanglement between space and subjectivity.

Aguirre Franco, M. (2022). Complementarity of opposites as perceptual principle in the experience of space: light and darkness. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 12(2), 9–17.

Community museums as counter-hegemonic agents

In the midst of urban marginalisation and territorial stigmatisation, community museums have emerged as potent tools for cultural empowerment and visibility, particularly within vulnerable districts like Isla Maciel in Buenos Aires. Aldana V. Epherra’s ethnographic study of the Isla Maciel Community Museum foregrounds the museum's role not only as a repository of local memory, but as a transformative agent contesting the dominant narratives of violence and decay historically projected by mainstream media. Through initiatives such as muralism, community-led tours, heritage displays, and intergenerational storytelling, the museum strategically reconstructs local identity and challenges the spatial stigma that undermines residents’ dignity and access to opportunities. These cultural practices do not merely preserve history—they re-signify space, turning a once-invisibilised and criminalised territory into a platform for recognition and collective pride. The museum thus functions as both a symbolic and practical intervention into the politics of representation, bridging the gap between cultural production and urban justice. At its core, this model asserts that territory is not only physical but deeply socio-affective, and that the control of narrative is just as vital as the control of space. As social imaginaries are constantly shaped by visual and discursive regimes, the community museum actively reconstructs urban perception, offering an embodied and participatory alternative to hegemonic cartographies.

Epherra V., Aldana (2022). Cultural practices and territorial visibility. Experiences from a community museum in Buenos Aires. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 12(2), 87–93.

Palimpsestic cities

 

Contemporary cities operate as living archives, where layers of symbolic debris and artisanal resurgence reveal an ever-shifting negotiation of meaning. In this light, Avendaño’s reading of urban stickers in Madrid portrays them as visual palimpsests, once-functional adhesive media now rendered obsolete by the dominance of digital screens. Affixed to metal surfaces—mailboxes, pipes, shop shutters—these stickers outlive their original advertising purpose, becoming remnants of past commercial wars and unintended urban ornamentation. Their stratified presence, some torn and others artfully layered, now serves as a metaphor for a city that forgets and remembers simultaneously, where analogue traces challenge the totalising presence of screen-mediated interaction. Parallel to this urban sedimentation, Ocejo's ethnographic study of old trades in post-industrial economies highlights a contrasting trend: the symbolic elevation of manual labour. Barbers, butchers and bartenders—once low-prestige, working-class occupations—have been reframed by a professional, often white, middle-class as desirable, artisanal expressions of identity in the context of creative economies. This process of upscaling, where authenticity and performativity are commodified, shows how cities repurpose not only spaces but also the social value of labour. The juxtaposition of outdated advertising mediums and the revival of traditional crafts illustrates how cities negotiate both nostalgia and novelty, embedding aesthetic resistance into everyday encounters. Together, these elements chart a poetics of urban transformation where what is dismissed becomes decorative and what was once ordinary turns into curated cultural capital.

Avendaño, G. E. (2021). Pegatinas, palimpsesto y publicidad. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 11(2)

The Feminine City

Cities, often feminized in name and narrative, embody not just physical structures but symbolic spaces of care, memory, and identity. Drawing from Barcelona amb nom de dona, Vivas i Elias (2021) contemplates how urban policies can emulate the nurturing role of mothers, arguing that urban environments should protect, educate, and support their inhabitants with the same inclusive and empathetic logic. The marginalization of women in urban memory—evident in place names and spatial representations—is interpreted as a form of structural violence that must be actively redressed through toponymic justice and gender-conscious planning. The essay positions the city as a potential maternal space, one capable of embracing its citizens through socially responsive infrastructures and symbolic recognition of historically silenced voices. By framing urban planning through maternal ethics, the text promotes a reimagination of urban governance rooted in values of equity and affection rather than control and exclusion. This vision demands cities that are not only smart or sustainable but also caring and inclusive, where diversity is not tolerated but celebrated, and where public spaces are reshaped to reflect the multiplicity of those who inhabit them. The city, thus, becomes a living archive of collective care and recognition, reflecting the interplay between gender, space, and social justice).

Vivas i Elias, P. (2021). La ciutat: mare nostra. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 11(1).

Distances That We Are

Urban distance is more than a question of metres—it is perceived, lived, and embodied, often shaped by gender, class, race, and emotional geography. In this study, spatial relationships in the city are interrogated not through Cartesian logic but through affective cartographies, where walking a block may carry radically different meanings depending on who is walking and under what conditions. The authors propose that urban proximity does not guarantee connection, and that cities are composed of invisible thresholds marked by fear, trust, desire, and vulnerability. Using ethnographic fragments, sensory narratives, and feminist urban theory, the article shows how distance is generated not by space alone but by layers of emotional dissonance, systemic exclusion, and symbolic violence. Children are kept indoors due to insecurity, neighbours remain strangers despite physical closeness, and daily routines are choreographed around avoidance. These dynamics reflect deeper structures of segregation, both social and affective. Rather than seeking objective metrics, the authors advocate for an urban epistemology attentive to bodily geographies, where what is near might be emotionally unreachable, and what is far can be longed for or feared. This approach reframes the concept of urban planning, shifting from infrastructural optimisation to a politics of recognition and care, where cities must be read not only by their built form but by the emotional landscapes they generate and conceal.

Cociña, C. and Gaitán Almeida, P. (2019). Las distancias que son en la ciudad: percepciones, espacios afectivos y cuerpos urbanos. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 9(1), 117–128.¡

Urban Palimpsests and the Symbolic Afterlife

The urban landscape of Madrid bears the silent traces of a bygone era of analog advertising, encapsulated in layers of adhesive stickers once used to promote locksmith services and other trades. These remnants, now obsolete in function due to the rise of digital search culture, remain as palimpsests—visual testimonies of temporal strata within the city. Avendaño (2021) interprets these sticker clusters on traffic lights, mailboxes, and metal surfaces as urban archaeology, where the deterioration and overlapping of stickers mirror the chaotic yet structured logic of street-level competition and the evolution of public communication. Although no longer consulted in emergencies, these neglected pieces of paper still participate in the visual culture of the city, marking the transition from physical to digital modes of engagement. Their persistent presence highlights the contrast between the ephemeral nature of street advertising and its unintentional permanence, suggesting that cities, through such overlooked details, store collective memory in everyday materials. This transformation—from utility to artifact—positions the sticker not just as residue, but as a symbolic index of shifting urban semiotics, where analog remnants become part of a visual dialogue with the present. The analysis extends to how these obsolete markers anticipate the visual saturation of digital screens, offering a tangible precursor to the continuous visual occupation of urban space (Avendaño, 2021).

Avendaño, G.E. (2021). Pegatinas, palimpsesto y publicidad. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 11(2). 

Craftsmanship and Urban Identity

 

The transformation of manual labor into symbolic capital is a defining trait of the postindustrial urban economy, where formerly low-status occupations are repackaged as prestigious vocations through processes of aestheticization and class repositioning. Richard E. Ocejo’s ethnographic study Masters of Craft dissects this shift by examining how professions like butchery, bartending, and barbering are elevated in contemporary cities. These crafts, traditionally linked to working-class identity, are now practiced by educated, often white, middle-class individuals who embrace them not only as employment but as lifestyle and self-expression. The book argues that these revalorized jobs are performative, publicly staged, and deeply entwined with urban gentrification and the creation of "authentic" consumer experiences. These new artisans not only perform technical labor but also curate taste, educating clientele and shaping cultural hierarchies through interaction and presentation. This exclusive repositioning of craft reflects broader urban dynamics, where certain neighborhoods and commercial zones become cultural hubs for elite consumption, while the traditional functions of these trades are subtly displaced. Ocejo reveals that identity, labor, and value are no longer fixed to economic necessity but instead orbit the realm of symbolic performance, where work becomes a stage for enacting social distinction. The study underscores how urban redevelopment is as much about semiotic innovation as spatial transformation, positioning craftsmanship as both an economic strategy and a cultural discourse (Espinoza, 2020).

Espinoza, G.E. (2020). Reseña de Richard E. Ocejo (2017) Masters of craft: Old jobs in the new urban economy. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 11(1), pp.119–122

Memory in Havana’s Chinatown

The application of visual anthropology in photojournalistic practices allows for an innovative exploration of identity and cultural expressions within Havana’s Chinatown, a historically rich and interculturally dynamic space. Through methods such as participant observation and ethnographic photography, researchers from the University of Havana have illuminated how cultural practices in this neighborhood reflect both continuity and transformation across time. The study identifies five symbolic practices—religious rituals, interpersonal relations, spatial interactions, cultural memory, and consumption habits—as key expressions of identity formation. Notably, the memory of Chinese migration and its integration into the Cuban sociocultural matrix is evidenced in the hybrid practices that persist despite the demographic decline of the Chinese population. The tension between ethnic heritage and broader national identity surfaces in the photojournalistic narrative that seeks not only to document but to interpret and engage with the lived reality of the community. A significant case is the Group Promotor del Barrio Chino, which, during the 1990s, aimed to recover endangered traditions like the Lion and Dragon dances. Though this initiative eventually faded, it marked a pivotal effort in heritage preservation. Ultimately, the camera becomes a tool of both cultural insight and advocacy, emphasizing that urban identity is not static but constructed through practices, memories, and symbolic negotiations, especially in areas where ethnicity, commerce, and memory converge in complex urban layers (Carvajal Suárez et al., 2021).

Carvajal Suárez, E., Ferrán Fernández, Y., Hernández García, L. and Martín Pastrana, A. (2021). Acercamiento a las prácticas culturales del Barrio Chino habanero desde la antropología visual en la producción fotoperiodística. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 11(2), pp.115–126. 

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August

The Banished Latin City

 

The spatial exclusion and symbolic resistance of Latinx communities in U.S. cities is vividly illustrated by Magnolia Park in Houston, Texas, where ethnic enclaves evolve into sites of both marginalisation and cultural assertion. This barrio, interpreted through a critical ethnographic lens, unveils the persistent segregation mechanisms affecting Latinx residents, mirroring—though distinct from—those historically endured by African American ghettos. These neighbourhoods, often portrayed by public discourse as inherently disorganised, are shaped by a complex interplay of geo-political forces, migratory flows, and urban policies that treat the Latin presence as simultaneously invisible and threatening. Unlike the “voluntary ghettos” theorised by Louis Wirth, Magnolia Park reveals a condition of forced segregation, where the barrio becomes a paradoxical space: stigmatised by external powers yet internally cherished as a bastion of identity, autonomy, and resilience. The symbolic function of the barrio, especially in the narrative of the Mexican-American diaspora, resides in its capacity to absorb hostility while fostering collective pride and mutual care, transcending its role as a mere residential cluster. The author contends that such barrios, shaped by recurrent migratory pressures and historical discrimination, must be understood not only as urban leftovers but as vital nodes in the social fabric of American cities, embodying struggles over representation, space, and belonging. Through this nuanced portrayal, the study contributes to urban anthropology and challenges normative urbanism that ignores racialised spatial experiences, calling for greater scholarly and policy attention to the everyday lives within these invisible cities.

Trapaga, I. (2019). La ciudad latina trasterrada. El caso de Magnolia Park en Houston, Texas. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 9(2), 25–37.

August

 

Time and Silence

A singular figure in contemporary theater—a dramaturge of silence, geometry, and temporal abstraction. Rooted in architecture, his practice transcends disciplinary boundaries to forge a theater of images, where light becomes narrative and space, a character. Born in Waco, Texas, Wilson’s early artistic awakening came not from traditional exposure but from visceral, lived encounters: with a deaf child he adopted, with institutional resistance, with the elemental power of dance and gesture. His work refuses interpretation in favor of inquiry—“What is it?” rather than “What does it mean?” Like Beckett or Cage, Wilson thrives in ambiguity. This posture is most evident in works like Deafman Glance or Einstein on the Beach (with Philip Glass), where structure replaces plot and perception replaces message. His theater is anti-literary, anti-psychological—preferring stillness to dialogue, duration to climax. He draws from the body, gesture, and light in ways that echo Japanese Noh, Bauhaus rigor, and Balanchine’s abstraction. Silence, for him, is not absence but density. Wilson’s iconic use of chairs—sculptural, symbolic, and spatial—recurs as mnemonic devices, emotional anchors, and architectural markers. They embody memory, grief, and presence. His oeuvre is saturated with visual thinking: every gesture calibrated, every scene composed like a canvas. Europe embraced him early; America, suspicious of his non-narrative rigor, lagged behind. Ultimately, Wilson’s radical legacy lies not only in his works but in the Watermill Center—a laboratory for interdisciplinary creation. He leaves us with an ethics of slowness, a call to see, not solve. In a world addicted to immediacy, Wilson’s theater is a sanctuary of contemplative time.

Mapping affect and resistance

Solitude in modernity, far from being a monolithic experience, is mediated by the socio-spatial logics of urban and rural environments. As Cerrillo Vidal argues, urban solitude emerges as a paradoxical state—where isolation propels individuals toward the search for symbolic connection, fostering creativity amidst anonymity, whereas rural solitude manifests as a form of stoic permanence, shaped by depopulation and spatial inertia. This duality of solitude reveals the affective geographies of space, where the same emotional state adopts distinct rhythms depending on whether one remains by choice or necessity. Meanwhile, Bloomfield’s ethnography of squatted spaces in Concepción offers a contrasting narrative of collective engagement. The okupa centres, through their diverse and inclusive practices—art, debate, social action—forge an alternative public sphere, challenging dominant neoliberal urbanisms. Using floating observation and semi-structured interviews, the study uncovers how these spaces not only provide shelter but become symbolic laboratories for participatory citizenship, drawing actors from varied social and educational backgrounds into communal modes of interaction. Where solitude isolates in both city and countryside, squatted spaces invite convergence, difference, and affective solidarity. Together, these studies underline a central tension of urban life: while modern spaces may fragment social bonds, they also offer terrains for reconstruction of relationality, whether through introspection or collective inhabitation. Solitude thus becomes not only a symptom but a terrain for social critique, and squatting, not only resistance but also a blueprint for urban cohabitation.

Cerrillo Vidal, J. A. (2021). Estar solo en el campo, estar solo en la ciudad. URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 11(1), 9–23.

Art-Based Urban Inquiry

In Pensar la ciudad desde la investigación en artes, Patricia Mayayo and Beatriz Cavia argue for the transformative potential of artistic research as a mode of urban inquiry capable of contesting the epistemic closures of technocratic urbanism. The authors examine how artistic methodologies—installation, performance, spatial intervention, audiovisual ethnography—can reorient how cities are perceived, problematised, and reimagined. The text operates at the intersection of visual culture, critical geography, and feminist urbanism, framing the city not as a finished product but as an ongoing process of negotiation and symbolic contestation. Drawing from their experience as curators and researchers in art-activist projects, Mayayo and Cavia underscore the capacity of artistic practices to reveal invisible urban dynamics—affect, care, micro-politics of space—that elude traditional analytical tools. Artistic research, they propose, is inherently site-specific and situated, privileging embodied knowledges and intersubjective engagement over generalisation or objectivity. In a context marked by gentrification, displacement, and commodification of space, the aesthetic becomes a tool of urban critique, not by illustrating problems, but by reconfiguring spatial experience itself. The article also reflects on pedagogical practices, showing how collaborative art-based research can activate new urban pedagogies, fostering civic dialogue and critical spatial literacy. Rather than merely inserting art into the city, the authors advocate for turning the city into a laboratory of collective imagination, where research is a form of making and knowing that resists appropriation by dominant urban regimes.

Mayayo, P. and Cavia, B. (2020) ‘Pensar la ciudad desde la investigación en artes’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 10(2), pp. 105–113. Available at: http://www2.ual.es/urbs/index.php/urbs/article/view/mayayo_cavia (Accessed: 1 August 2025).

Spatial Hegemony in Latin American Cities

Vera Córdova develops a powerful critique of urban formation in Latin America, arguing that many contemporary spatial arrangements are rooted in a colonial juridical logic—the “right of conquest”—that continues to structure ownership, governance, and legitimacy in the city. The essay draws upon postcolonial legal theory, urban sociology, and the critical writings of René Zavaleta and Aníbal Quijano to interrogate how conquest is not merely historical but ongoingly enacted through processes of displacement, expropriation, and urban disciplining. Cities, Vera Córdova contends, are not neutral agglomerations of infrastructure and capital; they are spatialised expressions of domination, built upon the erasure of indigenous geographies, peasant knowledges, and informal territorialities. The article revisits legal figures such as the “res nullius” and the “empty land” doctrine, showing how urban planning often reinscribes colonial hierarchies by masking dispossession under developmentalist or modernising discourses. Using the example of housing policies and spatial reforms in Mexican cities, Vera Córdova reveals how legal and spatial violence intertwine to marginalise the urban poor while consolidating elite control over central spaces. The concept of the “right to the city” is redefined not as an abstract humanist ideal but as a struggle against the persistence of conquest logics embedded in zoning, property regimes, and urban aesthetics. The author calls for a decolonial urban praxis that recognises alternative forms of land tenure, collective memory, and epistemic plurality, proposing a city that does not merely include, but is radically reimagined from those historically excluded.

Vera Córdova, A. (2020) ‘La ciudad y el derecho de conquista’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 10(2), pp. 70–83.

Reframing Urban Ethnography

In their review of Spatializing Culture by Setha Low, Mercedes Caravaca Barroso underscores the book’s pivotal contribution to reorienting anthropological inquiry towards the spatialities of culture. Low offers a compelling synthesis of social production and social construction of space, bridging the material and symbolic dimensions of urban life. The work proposes an expanded ethnographic methodology that incorporates embodied spatial practices, movement, sensory data, and the political dimensions of emplacement, arguing that culture is not merely enacted in space but actively constituted through it. Caravaca highlights how Low's approach transcends disciplinary silos, blending phenomenology, critical theory, and urban anthropology to offer a dynamic framework for studying cities not as static backdrops but as contested terrains of meaning, identity, and power. The book is structured as both a theoretical exposition and a methodological guide, with case studies ranging from gated communities to public parks, illustrating how ethnography must move through and with space. Particularly salient is Low’s insistence that the ethnographer's body is not a passive recording instrument but a site of epistemic co-production, enabling a more nuanced reading of urban affect and spatial justice. Caravaca notes that Spatializing Culture functions as a critical intervention in debates on urban neoliberalism, privatisation, and spatial exclusion, offering tools to analyse how power circulates through the built environment and bodily experience. This work is indispensable for scholars seeking to understand space not as a container but as a relational and politicised field of cultural production.

Caravaca Barroso, M. (2020) ‘Reseña de Setha Low (2019). Spatializing Culture. The Ethnography of Space and Place’, URBS. Revista de Estudios Urbanos y Ciencias Sociales, 10(2), pp. 141–143.

Affective Machines

The postwar expansion of psychiatry beyond the clinic opened a space for understanding subjectivity not as a fixed entity but as a dynamic process shaped by affective, spatial, and technological vectors. At the heart of this shift was the idea that bodily movement—gestures, postures, muscular tensions—could reveal internal states prior to verbal articulation, challenging the primacy of language in psychoanalysis. Building on the work of Emilio Mira y López and Gestalt psychology, psychiatrists like François Tosquelles approached the body as a field of expression, where motor activity constituted a form of knowledge. This understanding was operationalised in therapeutic settings through ergotherapy, where repetitive or novel movements disrupted pathological fixations, enabling new affective and cognitive configurations. Movement was not random but trajectorial—a way of tracing subjectivity across space, marked by migration, exile, and the right to roam. In this sense, Tosquelles envisioned the human as fundamentally a migrant figure, whose freedom resided in mobility rather than stasis. His “hypocritical method”, developed through surrealist photomontages and psychiatric experimentation, inverted dominant perceptual hierarchies by placing feet above the head, emphasising the groundedness of thought in corporeal, earthly movement. This revaluation of movement as both therapeutic and political subverted colonial and institutional logics that equated stability with order and pathology with displacement. Instead, the act of walking, wandering, migrating became not only a gesture of resistance but a condition for the reconstitution of selfhood within oppressive environments.

(Vogman, E. (2024) ‘Geo-psychiatry: Media and the Ecologies of Madness’, Grey Room, 97, pp. 76–117. 

The Automation of Perception

In the mid-twentieth century, the convergence of visual technologies and military needs catalysed a radical transformation in the logic of image-making, giving rise to what would later be called operational images—visual entities that do not merely represent but actively perform perception. Developed through projects like the CIA’s MARK I Perceptron, these early artificial neural networks sought to emulate aspects of human visual cognition in order to automate target recognition within indistinct, data-rich environments. This shift rendered perception a domain of technical labour, delegating interpretive tasks to machines designed to collapse the delay between seeing and acting. The foundational influence of James J. Gibson, with his ecological theory of vision, is evident: perception is not passive reception but a spatiotemporal negotiation shaped by one's embodied relation to objects. In military contexts, this meant preparing human operators—pilots, gunners—to respond reflexively to visual cues, thereby forging a seamless interface between recognition and aggression. Simultaneously, training programmes used photographic and cinematic image datasets to instil in soldiers a predictive, automatised posture—images became not just illustrations but instruments of behavioural conditioning. The perceptron, thus, did not merely process data but instantiated a machinic embodiment of institutional vision, where the line between human and machine blurred. Far from displacing the human, these systems incorporated human perception as an infrastructural element, producing a military epistemology rooted in speed, prediction, and preemption. In this way, operational images inaugurated a new regime of machine-mediated vision, where looking was indistinguishable from targeting.

(Irwin, J.A. (2024) ‘Artificial Worlds and Perceptronic Objects: The CIA’s Mid-century Automatic Target Recognition’, Grey Room, 97, pp. 6–35.