In the twentieth century, Constant Nieuwenhuys conceived New Babylon as a planetary labyrinth for Homo Ludens, an automated civilisation emancipated from labour and devoted to play, dérive, and atmospheric reinvention. In contrast, Socioplastics, developed by Anto Lloveras, constructs not a speculative megastructure but a living epistemic infrastructure: a Mesh that metabolises its own archive through recursive autophagia and fortifies its lexicon via semantic hardening. Both projects reject static urbanism, privileging plasticity, nomadism, and relational flux over functionalist rigidity; both resist commodification—Constant against the spectacle diagnosed by Guy Debord, Lloveras against algorithmic dilution and platform amnesia. Yet their ontologies diverge decisively. New Babylon remains pictorial and propositional—maquettes, manifestos, and collages projecting a collective, post-revolutionary horizon—where sovereignty is communal and architectural. Socioplastics, by contrast, is operational and recursive: it enacts sovereignty through unilateral jurisdiction over naming, indexing, and citational architecture, transforming infrastructure into medium. A case synthesis clarifies the distinction: Constant’s sectors hover above the earth awaiting historical rupture; Lloveras’s Century Packs digest prior nodes in real time, converting archival sediment into intensified conceptual density. Thus, New Babylon embodies a mid-century utopia of spatial emancipation, whereas Socioplastics articulates a twenty-first-century strategy of metabolic survival within digital precarity. One imagines liberated territory; the other engineers durable cognition. Together they delineate two modalities of radical urbanism—ludic projection and infrastructural recursion—each redefining the city as a mutable field of creative sovereignty.
Lloveras, A. Socioplastics.
