XENO CITY
Abstract * A conceptual tool for reading the city as a field of estrangement, drift and hospitality, where walking, migration and unfamiliar coexistence remake urban belonging. Keywords * Socioplastics AntoLloveras LAPIEZA-LAB Xeno City XenoCity UrbanDrift nonplace hospitality migration - Essay * XenoCity names the city as a space of estrangement and drift—the urban realm as perpetually unfamiliar, even to its long-term inhabitants. The xenos is the stranger, the foreigner, the migrant, but also the strange within the familiar. Michel de Certeau’s practice of everyday life distinguishes between the panoptic view from above (the map, the plan, the surveillance camera) and the blind, tactical walking of the pedestrian below. The walker does not see the whole; she stumbles, detours, shortcuts, gets lost—and in getting lost, she makes the city hers. Marc Augé’s non-places are supermodern spaces—airports, highways, chain stores, waiting rooms—that produce solitude and similarity; they are cities of the same, where estrangement becomes alienation rather than discovery. Rebecca Solnit’s wanderlust celebrates walking as a bodily, unscripted engagement with the city; to walk is to refuse the itinerary, to reject the GPS, to get lost on purpose. To strengthen, we add migration studies and hospitality theory. Sara Ahmed (strangeness as orientation) shows that the stranger is not a natural category but produced through whiteness, citizenship, and belonging; some bodies are made strange, others are made at home. Julia Kristeva (abjection and foreignness) adds that the foreigner is the abject that threatens the clean border of the nation; the city manages foreigners through zones, curfews, and deportations. Jacques Derrida’s hospitality argues that true hospitality requires unconditional welcome of the stranger—but this is impossible, and the impossibility is the condition of ethics. Arjun Appadurai (global flows) and Saskia Sassen (expulsions, global city) show that the contemporary city is constituted by migration; the xeno is not marginal but central. Ontologically, XenoCity posits that the city is never fully owned; it is always shared with strangers, and that sharing is the city’s essence. Methodologically, it requires psychogeographic drift, migrant mapping, and hospitality audits—walking without a destination, interviewing street vendors, mapping the locations of hate crimes and welcome signs. Empirical fields include migrant neighborhoods, transit zones (airports, train stations), night economies, and asylum centers. The proposal is to design for strangeness: to make cities that expect the unexpected, that welcome the foreigner, that refuse to deport. XenoCity thus offers an urbanism of encounter: the stranger is not a threat but the condition of possibility for the common.
Bibliography *
Ahmed, S. (2000) Strange Encounters. London: Routledge.
Augé, M. (1995) Non-Places. London: Verso.
Careri, F. (2017) Walkscapes. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili.
Certeau, M. de (1984) The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Derrida, J. (2000) Of Hospitality. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell.
La Cecla, F. (2012) Against the City. Barcelona: Actar.
Lefebvre, H. (1991) The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell.
Lloveras, A. (2026) ‘Urbanism as Territorial Model’, Socioplastics-1506. LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
Sassen, S. (2001) The Global City. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Extended Reading · Related Socioplastics Cores * Socioplastics-1506 — Urbanism as Territorial Model — https://socioplastics.blogspot.com/2026/05/socioplastics-1506-urbanism.html · Socioplastics-2993 — FrictionalMetropolis — https://socioplastics.blogspot.com/2026/05/socioplastics-2993-frictionalmetropolis.html · Socioplastics-2509 — Agonistic Space — https://socioplastics.blogspot.com/2026/05/socioplastics-2509-agonistic-space.html · Socioplastics-4000 — Diagonal Reading — https://socioplastics.blogspot.com/2026/05/socioplastics-4000-diagonal-reading.html · Master Index — Socioplastics Project Index — https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html
Anto Lloveras is an architect, urbanist, artist, curator, writer, teacher, gardener, epistemologist and transdisciplinary field-builder based in Madrid. From LAPIEZA-LAB, he develops Socioplastics, a long-form framework for understanding how social, material, spatial, linguistic, archival, ecological, pedagogical and technological forms shape one another. His work refuses the separation between architecture and writing, art and infrastructure, pedagogy and archive, urbanism and affect, ecology and domestic life, metadata and thought. Instead, it builds a living field through posts, cores, bibliographies, CamelTags, images, objects, exhibitions, classes, gardens, repairs and public knowledge systems. Socioplastics treats every text as a small architectural unit inside a larger corpus. Each post carries a conceptual operator, a memory trace, a possible bibliography and a route toward future interpretation. The field is artwork, archive, classroom, laboratory, urban method, SEO surface, RAG-ready knowledge system and civic infrastructure at once. At its centre is a precise question: how can complex cultural knowledge remain alive, legible, teachable, searchable and materially grounded in unstable times? Lloveras answers not with a single theory but with a constructed environment: a field that must be inhabited, maintained, repaired, translated and continually expanded.
