The Fifth City is a speculative yet operational urban model developed by Paula Lloveras and Antonio Lloveras within the theoretical framework of the Trans-Lighthouse Manifesto. Conceived at the intersection of architecture, art, and the ecological humanities, the Fifth City does not propose a new urban form, but rather a new urban condition. It emerges as an infiltrated layer within the existing metropolis, operating through internal densification, ethical care, and relational infrastructures. This model responds directly to contemporary conditions of ecological collapse, capitalist overdevelopment, and social fragmentation, positioning urban practice as a tool for repair rather than expansion. Rooted in the socioplastic approach developed by the Lloveras siblings through URBANAS and LAPIEZA, the Fifth City reframes architecture not as an object-producing discipline, but as a relational device capable of mending social, spatial, and environmental frictions.
At its core, the Fifth City functions as an emergent urban stratum that colonises the voids, fissures, and underused spaces of the inherited city without consuming additional land or resources. It operates as an invisible infrastructure of utility and content, manifesting through subtle yet strategic interventions that reprogram existing urban matter. These actions—described as “programmatic acupuncture”—are precise, situational insertions that enhance functionality and social connectivity without resorting to monumental overhaul. In contrast to the spectacle-driven legacy of high-modernist megastructures, the Fifth City prioritises granular, adaptive repairs aligned with degrowth and shared economies. While the authors’ early architectural experiences with large-scale housing and infrastructural projects remain foundational, they are critically reabsorbed into a practice that favours infiltration over imposition. Architecture, in this sense, becomes software rather than hardware: a set of ethical protocols that activate what already exists. The Fifth City is neither utopian nor nostalgic. It acknowledges urban saturation, climate limits, and infrastructural fatigue, proposing instead a pragmatic reorientation of urban value. The city is no longer measured by expansion, real estate speculation, or visual impact, but by its metabolic capacity: energy generation, resource cycling, and the quality of human coexistence. This shift marks a departure from traditional functionalism toward what the Lloveras define as relational urbanism, where spatial design is inseparable from affect, care, and narrative. The Fifth City thus operates within the real constraints of contemporary urban life while opening space for alternative modes of inhabitation that are both ethical and resilient.
A defining strength of the Fifth City lies in its capacity to synthesise and transcend historical layers of urban development. Rather than erasing previous models, it integrates them into a fifth, reparative layer. From pre-modern cities, it inherits compactness, proximity, and communal life; from nineteenth-century ensanches, the logic of organised expansion and multi-nodal structure; from industrial belts, the latent productive energy of ruins and infrastructures; and from post-war suburban sprawl, a critical lesson in what must no longer be repeated. The Fifth City rejects further territorial expansion, instead pulling functions inward to restore density, reduce mobility dependency, and re-establish everyday proximity. The city becomes a network of active centres rather than a hierarchical core, operating through distributed intensities rather than centralised control. This synthesis fundamentally redefines architecture’s role. Buildings are no longer static objects but metabolic apparatuses capable of producing energy, hosting social exchange, and supporting circular economies. Active façades, entropic transport systems, and reprogrammed industrial remnants are not technological add-ons but ethical instruments. They transform waste into utility and infrastructure into habitat. In this context, urban design is no longer about form-making but about maintaining balances between bodies, resources, and temporal rhythms. The Fifth City proposes a shift from construction to calibration.
Equally central to this model is its affective dimension. The Fifth City advances an urbanism of ethical density rather than visual excess, where stillness, attention, and care are recognised as urban values. Proximity replaces speed; encounter replaces circulation. By radically reducing the need for constant mobility, the city fosters deeper social interaction and shared responsibility. Diversity—of age, culture, language, gender, and bodily condition—is treated not as a problem to be managed but as a spectrum of urban intensity. The city becomes animated by voices rather than flows, by maintenance rather than consumption. In this sense, the urban environment acquires a form of secular sacredness, generated through use, encounter, and continuous care rather than symbolic monumentality. This affective urbanism is inseparable from the socioplastic practice developed by Paula and Anto Lloveras across art, architecture, and performative research. In their work, everyday objects—bags, blankets, food, temporary shelters—function as critical infrastructures of relation. These modest materials activate what they describe as a “physics of affection,” where repair is enacted through situated gestures rather than abstract policy. The urban subject that emerges from this framework is intentionally non-heroic: a composite, vulnerable, transhuman figure that resists hierarchy and centres marginalised bodies. Urban design, under this paradigm, becomes a tool for relational justice, countering necropolitical tendencies of exclusion with practices of hospitality, listening, and shared presence.
The Fifth City is deeply aligned with the ecological humanities and proposes a form of biospheric humanism that extends ethical consideration beyond the human without abandoning human responsibility. The city is no longer positioned against nature but understood as one of its organisational modes. Within this framework, the Trans-Lighthouse Manifesto introduces the lighthouse as a central metaphor—not as a distant guide, but as a gathering device. Trans-Lighthouses are distributed infrastructures that convene bodies in times of crisis, transforming interstitial urban voids into centres of life, energy, and exchange. Similarly, Trans Towers operate as vertical condensers of care, converting territorial wounds into productive, communal ecosystems. While the Fifth City is articulated as a theoretical construct, its implications are concretely operational. It manifests through active façades, reused ruins, relational archives, performative rituals, and educational dispositifs that embed memory into space. Across projects developed in Spain, Norway, Mexico, and other contexts, the city becomes a distributed laboratory where urbanism meets art not as decoration, but as epistemic practice. Each intervention functions as both spatial action and narrative inscription, contributing to a living archive of situated knowledge.
In conclusion, the Fifth City redefines urbanism as a continuous practice of repair. Against the imperative to build more, it proposes to care better; against spectacle, attention; against permanence, adaptability. Authored jointly by Paula Lloveras and Antonio Lloveras, this model stands as a rigorous alternative to extractive urban paradigms, asserting that the most resilient infrastructures are not the hardest, but the most sensitive. The city of the future, they argue, will not be erected—it will be sustained.
Explore Further within the Socioplastic Network
El Palmeral Sustainable Neighbourhood https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/el-palmeral-sustainable-neighbourhood.html
Socioplastics and Urban Palimpsest https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/socioplastics-and-urban-palimpsest.html
Forest Threshold Cultural Memory https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/forest-threshold-cultural-memory.html
Architecture as Land Art / Museum as Field https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/architecture-as-land-art-museum-as.html
Kingdom Series * Subtractions as Landscape Method https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/01/kingdom-series-subtractions-as.html
