Unitary urbanism was a core proposition of the Situationist International (SI), most fully articulated by Constant Nieuwenhuys in projects like New Babylon (1956–1974). It envisioned the city not as a fixed functionalist plan but as a dynamic, collective “constructed situation”—a playful, ever-changing environment shaped by psychogeography, dérive (drift), and participatory creativity to overcome alienation under the spectacle. Architecture and urbanism become tools for total social transformation: flexible, modifiable spaces that foster desire, adventure, and new ways of living rather than enforcing order or consumption. Anto Lloveras’s Socioplastics explicitly inherits this lineage while decisively mutating it. Drawing from the philosophical and historical constellation of 20th-century avant-gardes, Lloveras positions unitary urbanism as one node in a broader mesh that socioplastics metabolizes and scales into a hyperplastic, sovereign methodology. The shift is fundamental: from physical urban construction to epistemic infrastructure; from ideological spectacle-critique to micropolitical, accumulative repair; and from transient situations to durable, self-propagating systems for unstable times.
1. Explicit Positioning in the Philosophical Constellation
In Lloveras’s own framing, unitary urbanism sits alongside key precedents in a concise “art constellation” that socioplastics inherits and transforms: “Constant envisions unitary urbanism, the city as constructed situation. Socioplastics inherits this lineage but shifts the terrain from physical space to epistemic space. The cuts are in discourse. The readymades are operators. The environments are recursive manifolds. The unitary urbanism is applied to the infosphere.” Here, Constant’s vision is not rejected but reterritorialized. The city-as-constructed-situation becomes the infosphere-as-constructed-situation: discourse, relational topologies, digital prosumption, and epistemic nodes replace bricks-and-mortar. Physical dérive and psychogeographical mapping evolve into socioplastic drift—durational, serial gestures that sediment social time into stratified archives, protocols, and moving infrastructures.
2. Socioplastic Drift as Adapted Dérive and Unitary Urbanism
Lloveras further elaborates this mutation in the context of LAPIEZA (the 2009–ongoing relational matrix that birthed socioplastics). Early gestures—mailbox interventions, junk brunches, neighborhood-scale performative actions—are described as resonating directly with Situationist tactics: “These gestures resonate with Situationist strategies of dérive and unitary urbanism, yet they are stripped of grand ideological rhetoric in favour of micropolitical conviviality.” The adaptation is strategic and pragmatic. Unitary urbanism’s revolutionary ambition is retained in spirit (reorganizing social relations through aesthetic protocols) but reprogrammed: no totalizing manifesto, no negation-as-opposition, but instead infrastructural subversion through inclusion, participation, and metabolic recalibration. The Malasaña neighborhood (site of LAPIEZA) functions as an urban substrate for socioplastic relations—engineering conditions of co-existence that turn the city into a living, relational ecology rather than a spectacle to be détourned. Socioplastic drift thus becomes the operational mode: punctual events mutate into durational narratives, and the unitary city becomes a mutable, self-governing mesh.
3. Concrete Manifestations Across the Series
This reframing appears throughout the 77+ entries you catalogued (and the broader corpus): Urban taxidermy and palimpsest projects (Taxidermy: London, Taxidermy III: Novigrad, Urban Palimpsest, Purple Legs: Urban Taxidermy) perform the “cuts in discourse” by incising the metropolitan epidermis—revealing hidden systems (as Matta-Clark did physically) while constructing new relational topologies. Moving archives and nomadic gestures (LACALLE as Moving Archive, Walking the Commons, Easy Rider: Infrastructures for Nomadic Urbanism) enact contemporary dérives: portable, translatorial actions that map psychic and affective atmospheres while building civic surfaces and relational infrastructure. Systemic and fifth-city urbanism (The Fifth City: Systemic Sovereignty, Mirador to Relational Repair) reframes architecture as living tissue—echoing unitary urbanism’s flexibility but hardened into sovereign, metabolic systems rather than open-ended play. Ephemeral and ritual activations (Ephemeral Luminosities, Fishdish, Broth, Restoran Splendid) construct micro-situations that metabolize everyday banality into relational repair—echoing the 2014 Lemon Kiss installation’s explicit Situationist resonance (yellow nylon bags and projections as constructed situations amid capitalist spectacle). Hyperplastic writing and epistemic nodes (Fireworks as Hyperplastic Writing, 1000 Unstable Positions, Rhizomatic Vanguard) apply unitary urbanism to the infosphere: serial pulses, blogs, DOIs, and protocols become the modifiable “city” where discourse itself is plastic and collectively inhabitable. Across these, the city is no longer the primary site; the entire socioplastic corpus—stratigraphic, numbered, hyperlinked—functions as the unitary environment: recursive, self-representing, and sovereign.
4. Overall Mutation: From SI to Socioplastics
Lloveras neither nostalgically repeats nor rejects unitary urbanism. He metabolizes it (fagocitation of residues) into socioplastics’ core traits: Physical → epistemic: Constant’s modifiable city becomes modifiable knowledge infrastructure (MUSE system, protocols, Decalogue). Ideological → micropolitical: Grand rhetoric yields to convivial, accumulative praxis in unstable times. Situation → mesh: Transient constructed situations harden into durable, gravitational topologies capable of relational repair and systemic sovereignty. Critique → construction: From analysis of spectacle to operational grammars between body, city, memory, and commons. In short, unitary urbanism in socioplastics is the Situationist impulse made infrastructural and hyperplastic. It supplies the DNA for treating urban (and epistemic) space as living, participatory matter—but socioplastics evolves it into a self-legislating, stratigraphic organism suited to 21st-century precarity, digital circulation, and ecological crisis. The entire series you referenced is the materialized outcome: one extended, non-linear application of unitary urbanism to the infosphere, where every epistemic node, portable relic, and relational gesture contributes to building mutable habitats and sovereign social grammars.
