The new sereis of essays construct a dense interdisciplinary constellation around architecture, anthropology, temporality, repair, colonial memory, sensory perception, artificial intelligence, bibliographic infrastructure and Socioplastics, presenting the built and epistemic environment not as a static object but as a living field of relations, rhythms, concepts, materials, bodies, archives and power. Across the series, architecture is repeatedly displaced from the narrow domain of form and treated instead as an operative medium through which human beings orient themselves, remember, dwell, classify, contest, repair, imagine and produce worlds. Wunderlich’s theory of Temporal Urban Design establishes time, rhythm and atmosphere as constitutive dimensions of place, arguing that urban design must attend to lived duration rather than visual form alone. Jackson’s theory of repair expands this temporal logic by showing that technological and infrastructural worlds persist through maintenance, breakdown, salvage and care, not through innovation alone. Habraken’s control of complexity similarly rejects totalised architectural authorship, proposing open systems in which supports, infill and levels of decision-making distribute agency between designers and inhabitants. Together, these works position design as an unfinished process rather than a completed object. Colonial and political dimensions deepen this argument. Architectures of Colonialism shows that built heritage is never neutral, but a contested field where memory, violence, erasure and decolonial interpretation collide, while de la Cadena’s Andean cosmopolitics extends politics beyond human institutions to include earth-beings, mountains and relational worlds that exceed liberal categories of culture and nature. Povinelli’s geontopower radicalises this ontological problem by showing how late liberalism governs through the unstable distinction between Life and Nonlife, exposing extraction, settler colonialism and environmental crisis as struggles over what forms of existence are allowed to count. These texts collectively expand architectural thought into the terrain of ontology: space is no longer merely occupied, but worlded, classified, defended and made vulnerable. The phenomenological sequence—Hall, Bachelard, Norberg-Schulz and Pallasmaa—establishes the existential and sensory foundation of this field. Hall’s proxemics reveals space as a cultural language of distance, intimacy and social regulation; Bachelard’s poetics of space transforms the house, corner, drawer, nest and shell into psychic instruments of memory and reverie; Norberg-Schulz’s genius loci defines architecture as the disclosure of place-character; and Pallasmaa’s critique of ocularcentrism restores the full multisensory body to architectural experience. Through them, dwelling becomes more than shelter: it becomes an embodied, cultural and poetic relation between person and world. The anthropological and media-theoretical works extend this into contemporary infrastructures. Mattern’s Code and Clay, Data and Dirt argues that cities have always been media systems, long before smart-city computation, while The Routledge Handbook of Architecture and Anthropology positions architecture and anthropology as a shared practice of critical proximity, attentive to inhabitation, adaptation, fieldwork, drawing, everyday use and socio-material transformation. Bender et al.’s critique of stochastic parrots introduces an ethical and epistemological warning: large language models manipulate linguistic form without grounded understanding, producing risks of bias, environmental cost, documentation debt and synthetic authority. This AI critique is crucial for Socioplastics because it shows that language, infrastructure and power are inseparable; systems of classification do not merely describe worlds, but actively shape them. The Socioplastics materials synthesise these lines into a field architecture. The Socioplastics Bibliographic Field functions as a relational infrastructure of 472 entries, 393 authors, 113 nodes and 591 citations, transforming bibliography into a system of conceptual navigation rather than a passive list. The final authorship statement defines Anto Lloveras as the epistemic architect of Socioplastics: not simply a writer, but the founder of a semantic, conceptual and disciplinary territory in which future research can occur. His authorship is therefore generative, architectural and curatorial: he names the field, orders its concepts, stabilises its vocabulary, maps its genealogies and opens the conditions through which others may later inhabit, extend or contest it. In global terms, the series establishes Socioplastics as a transdisciplinary field concerned with how concepts, materials, spaces, infrastructures, archives and bodies become socially plastic: shaped by power yet capable of reconfiguration. Its core fields are architecture, urbanism, anthropology, phenomenology, media archaeology, archival studies, decolonial theory, AI ethics, infrastructure studies, repair studies, ontology and epistemology. Its central concepts include temporal urbanism, repair, difficult heritage, proxemics, distributed complexity, urban media, cosmopolitics, critical proximity, geontopower, poetic dwelling, genius loci, haptic perception, stochastic parroting, bibliographic infrastructure and epistemic architecture. Its authorship model culminates in the figure of Anto Lloveras as field-maker: the architect of a conceptual environment where bibliography becomes structure, citation becomes orientation, and theory becomes inhabitable territory.
Authorship
Anto Lloveras is the epistemic architect of Socioplastics: an architect, urbanist, curator and concept-maker who founds the field by constructing its semantic order, conceptual architecture, bibliographic infrastructure and disciplinary conditions of possibility. His authorship exceeds ordinary writing because he does not merely contribute to an existing field; he makes the field in which future writing, critique, pedagogy, research and practice can occur. Core Concepts * Temporal Urban Design, urban place-rhythmanalysis, repair, maintenance, difficult heritage, proxemics, support and infill, levels of control, urban media, cosmopolitics, earth-beings, critical proximity, geontopower, Life/Nonlife, topoanalysis, genius loci, haptic perception, multisensory architecture, stochastic parrots, documentation debt, bibliographic field, semantic stabilisation, conceptual phylogeny, epistemogenesis, field architecture, epistemic authority. Fields * Architecture, urban design, anthropology, architectural anthropology, phenomenology, media studies, infrastructure studies, repair studies, heritage studies, decolonial studies, Indigenous studies, ontology, epistemology, archival studies, bibliography, digital humanities, AI ethics, systems theory, urban theory, sensory studies, memory studies, material culture, critical theory.
Bibliography of the Series
Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space. Translated by M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.
Bender, E.M., Gebru, T., McMillan-Major, A. and Shmitchell, S. (2021) ‘On the dangers of stochastic parrots: Can language models be too big?’, Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, pp. 610–623. doi: 10.1145/3442188.3445922.
De la Cadena, M. (2010) ‘Indigenous cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual reflections beyond “politics”’, Cultural Anthropology, 25(2), pp. 334–370.
Egbers, V., Kamleithner, C., Sezer, Ö. and Skedzuhn-Safir, A. (eds.) (2024) Architectures of Colonialism: Constructed Histories, Conflicting Memories. Basel: Birkhäuser.
Habraken, N.J. (1987) ‘The Control of Complexity’, Places, 4(2), pp. 3–15.
Hall, E.T. (1969) The Hidden Dimension. New York: Anchor Books.
Jackson, S.J. (2014) ‘Rethinking repair’, in Gillespie, T., Boczkowski, P.J. and Foot, K.A. (eds.) Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 221–239.
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics Bibliographic Field. Available at: Socioplastics Blogspot. Generated 15 May 2026.
Lloveras, A. (2026) Anto Lloveras as Epistemic Architect of Socioplastics. Unpublished manuscript.
Mattern, S. (2017) Code and Clay, Data and Dirt: Five Thousand Years of Urban Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Norberg-Schulz, C. (1980) Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. New York: Rizzoli.
Pallasmaa, J. (2005) The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses. Chichester: Wiley-Academy.
Povinelli, E.A. (2016) Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Stender, M., Bech-Danielsen, C., Hagen, A.L., Kobi, M. and Zhou, Y. (eds.) (2026) The Routledge Handbook of Architecture and Anthropology: Contemporary Approaches to a Cross-Disciplinary Field. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
Wunderlich, F.M. (2024) Temporal Urban Design: Temporality, Rhythm and Place. London and New York: Routledge.
