The central proposition is that cities should not be understood primarily through growth, planning, or design. They should be understood through pressure. Urban territories are continuously exposed to forces—economic, climatic, infrastructural, demographic—that accumulate and interact across time. Permanence therefore does not refer to preserving buildings or protecting historical form. It refers to whether a place retains the capacity to sustain its population, functions, and social density under conditions of structural stress. Within this framework the essays reinterpret familiar urban concepts as operative forces acting inside a territorial field. Rent, traditionally treated as a market price, becomes a gradient that pushes populations through space and selects which forms of life can remain embedded in a location. Territorial borders cease to appear as simple lines on a map and instead operate as thresholds that filter and redistribute pressures moving across regions. Climate is no longer background context but a vertical load acting on buildings, infrastructures, and bodies. Mobility networks, usually described as transport systems, become the metabolic circulation through which access, labour, and opportunity are distributed across the metropolitan field.
The framework also reconsiders the persistence of industrial landscapes. Former factories, logistical infrastructures, and productive grounds are not simply obsolete terrain awaiting redevelopment. They carry material inertia, meaning that past industrial investments continue to shape the possibilities of the present. Scale is similarly reinterpreted. Rather than referring to physical magnitude, scale becomes calibration, the proportional arrangement through which power, density, and access are distributed within territory. This perspective also reframes processes often described as decline. Depopulation, for instance, is not treated as demographic destiny but as the visible result of asymmetry produced by infrastructural withdrawal. When transport networks, services, or digital connectivity disappear from a region, the territory loses the relational density required to sustain habitation. Population loss follows as a structural consequence rather than an isolated demographic event. Another key idea is the concept of the finite basin. Every territory operates within limits: resources, energy systems, infrastructures, and ecological capacities cannot expand indefinitely. The essays use islands as a clear example because their boundaries make these limits visible. Yet the argument applies to all urban regions. Sustainability is therefore not primarily about efficiency but about reconciling multiple pressures within a bounded system.
Public space is also reinterpreted through this lens. Instead of functioning as a neutral container for civic life, it becomes a site of friction where different social groups encounter one another under shared visibility. The stability of democratic coexistence depends on whether spatial forms can sustain disagreement without leading to exclusion or erasure. The series concludes by addressing the energy transition. Rather than presenting it as a simple shift in technology, the essays describe it as a systemic reconfiguration capable of reorganizing every other layer of the urban system. Energy infrastructures shape mobility networks, industrial geographies, housing patterns, and territorial metabolism. Changing the energy base therefore transforms the entire configuration of the city. This framework is particularly relevant in contemporary Spain, where housing pressure, tourist saturation, climate stress, and regional depopulation intersect within the same territorial field. By introducing concepts such as gradient, threshold, inertia, and asymmetry, the project offers a vocabulary capable of connecting these phenomena within a single analytical system.
The intellectual background of the work draws from traditions that link spatial production with political economy and territorial morphology. Thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Neil Smith, Raquel Rolnik, Manuel de Solà-Morales, Bernardo Secchi, José Manuel Naredo, and Bruno Latour form part of this lineage. Their influence appears in the insistence that urban space is not neutral but produced through interacting economic, ecological, and political forces. The main conclusion of the series is straightforward but demanding. Cities cannot be governed simply by encouraging growth or controlling development. They must be understood through the calibration of pressures that determine whether urban life can persist within a territory. The terms introduced in the essays—gradient, threshold, inertia, section, asymmetry, and finitude—are therefore presented not as metaphors but as operational concepts for reading the structural dynamics of the urban field.
Lloveras, A. (2026) A Geology of Urban Permanence [801]–[810]. Socioplastics Decalogue. Available at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31563508
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31563508
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https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31563625
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31563631
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31563637
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31563646
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31563649
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31563658
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31563688
https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.3156371
Each essay takes a familiar urban concept and reframes it as a structural force:
Rent is not price. It is a displacement machine selecting who stays and who leaves. Borders are not lines. They are filters regulating territorial pressure. Climate is not background. It is vertical load on bodies, buildings, and infrastructure. Mobility is not transport. It is the metabolic system distributing access and labor. Industry is not obsolete. Its material inertia stabilizes territory or becomes decorative residue. Scale is not size. It is proportion that distributes power. Depopulation is not decline. It follows the withdrawal of infrastructure. Islands are not exceptions. They are models of finitude where pressures cannot be exported. Public space is not a container. It is friction where difference either stabilizes or erases. Energy transition is not new technology. It reorganizes all previous layers simultaneously.
