The Trans Lighthouse Manifesto emerges as a speculative yet operational text situated at the intersection of ecological humanities, critical urbanism, and socioplastic theory. Presented at the I International Congress of Ecological Humanities (UAM, 2023), the manifesto proposes a radical reorientation of urban imagination through the figure of the lighthouse—not as monument, but as distributed infrastructure of care. The text advances a long-range horizon, projecting a species-scale ethics beyond individual temporality. This future-facing stance is neither escapist nor naïvely utopian; rather, it mobilises speculative literature as a pragmatic cognitive tool. By articulating a vision for the “hundred largest cities” as interconnected nodes, the manifesto reframes global urbanity as a dispersed, transnational body. The city is no longer a bounded entity but a rhizomatic condition. Within this framework, realism governs daily survival, while utopia governs orientation. The manifesto’s strength lies in holding these antagonisms together, proposing a conceptual breadth adequate to civilisational crisis. Its tone is deliberately programmatic, yet poetic, positioning architecture as an epistemic device capable of hosting new forms of social contract, collective dwelling, and planetary responsibility.
Central to the manifesto is the notion of the transhumanoid: a composite subject that contains all bodies without hierarchy. This figure operates as both ethical premise and design parameter. The transhumanoid is not an abstract universal but an algorithmically trained, materially situated body whose rights are continuously updated through data infrastructures. Here, algorithmic governance is reimagined away from surveillance toward solidarity. The Trans Lighthouse becomes the spatial embodiment of this shift, offering housing independent of biography, origin, age, or identity. In this sense, the manifesto confronts the necropolitical tendencies of contemporary urban systems by placing the most vulnerable at the centre of architectural discourse. Age, colour, culture, and sexuality are treated as gradients within a shared spectrum rather than as fixed categories. The metaphor of colour—where generations blend into social greens—articulates a transecological humanism grounded in coexistence. The city becomes a human forest, sustained by transgenerational proximity. This reconfiguration of citizenship challenges liberal individualism, proposing instead a commons-based ontology where each body is understood as a gift requiring collective care.
From an urbanistic perspective, the manifesto’s proposal of the “Fifth City” constitutes a critical synthesis of historical urban forms. Moving beyond the compact historic core, suburban expansion, and automobile-driven functionalism, the Fifth City operates through multinodal densification and healing infill. The Trans Towers occupy interstitial urban voids, transforming waste spaces into active centres of life, energy, and exchange. Mobility is radically reduced; stillness becomes an urban value. Proximity replaces speed. The manifesto aligns with contemporary degrowth thought by rejecting speculative land economies and prioritising shared infrastructure. Active façades generate energy; transport becomes entropic and productive. Architecture is thus repositioned as metabolic apparatus rather than inert object. The lighthouse image—retrofuturistic and monumental—functions symbolically as a new cathedral, yet one devoid of transcendence. Its sacredness lies in use, encounter, and maintenance. The city is not beautified through style but animated through voices, languages, and difference. This is an urbanism of ethical density rather than visual excess.
As a cultural project, the manifesto extends beyond architecture into curatorial and pedagogical space. The proposed anti-symposium, populated by voices across time and discipline, rejects academic closure in favour of a living archive. Texts, images, and data coexist in a deliberately austere aesthetic, privileging clarity over seduction. This curatorial strategy mirrors the manifesto’s broader ambition: to operate as a “scene of the real within the real.” The Trans Lighthouse is not framed as laboratory but as inhabited prototype, a socioplastic device where art, philosophy, and policy converge. In aligning itself with ecological humanities, the project articulates a biospheric humanism attuned to collapse without surrendering agency. Its radicality is infrastructural rather than rhetorical. By insisting that the future of architecture lies in care, data ethics, and collective responsibility, the manifesto offers a viable grammar for post-capitalist urban life. The lighthouse does not guide ships; it gathers bodies. In doing so, it asserts that the most urgent architectural task today is not representation, but the construction of conditions for shared survival.
The Trans-Lighthouse project conceptualizes the emergence of the Fifth City. This urban stratum is not predicated on peripheral growth or territorial expansion, but on a rigorous logic of infiltration into the four preceding stages of urban development: the medieval core, the 19th-century ensanches, the industrial belt, and the subsequent suburban sprawl. Unlike its predecessors, the Fifth City does not require additional land; instead, it develops through the internal widening of existing urban fabrics. This city operates as a dense, functional layer of programming inserted into the voids and fissures of the inherited metropolis. By peeling back the layers of the urban palimpsest, the Fifth City reveals itself as an invisible infrastructure of utility and content. It does not manifest through monumental architectural gestures, but through a "programmatic acupuncture" designed to maximize the utility of the pre-existing built environment. It is a strategic response to urban saturation, where the architectural project functions as software—colonizing and regenerating the system from within to create a more compact, efficient, and resilient metropolitan organism.
Lloveras, A. and Lorenzo, E. (2023) FAROS_TRANS: The Trans-Lighthouse Manifesto. [Paper presentation] I International Congress of Ecological Humanities: Thought, Art and Education in the face of the Crisis of Civilisation. Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Campus Cantoblanco, 22–24 May. Available at:
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