In the urban thought emerging from Socioplastics, urbanism is decisively displaced from the conventional domains of planning, zoning and form-making toward a broader field of relational infrastructure and epistemic metabolism. Developed through the work of Anto Lloveras, frequently in collaboration with Paula Lloveras through URBANAS, the city is interpreted as a semiotic-metabolic system in which buildings, infrastructures, climatic forces, economic extraction and social bodies operate as dynamic agents rather than inert objects.

 

This perspective aligns partially with the infrastructural dispositions analysed by Keller Easterling and the critical spatial frameworks articulated by Jane Rendell, yet Socioplastics extends these approaches by constructing an operative mesh in which urban theory itself becomes a form of executable territorial protocol. Central to this model is Relational or Affective Urbanism, where spatial interventions function as devices of care and narrative repair, while Metabolic Urbanism conceives architectural envelopes as membranes capable of processing ecological, informational and affective flows. The Geology of Urban Permanence—a conceptual series developed in 2026—further reframes urban analysis through the reading of territorial pressure gradients, identifying phenomena such as rent extraction, tourism saturation and climatic stress as forces shaping urban stability. Within this framework, permanence no longer denotes static preservation but rather dynamic equilibrium under finite pressure. Complementing this analytical dimension is the speculative construct of the Fifth City, an urban imaginary articulated through the Trans-Lighthouse Manifesto that proposes a distributed network of biospheric humanism, relational repair and post-growth cooperation. In this synthesis urbanism becomes neither a regulatory discipline nor a purely spatial practice but a sovereign epistemic infrastructure, capable of reading, metabolising and recalibrating the complex pressures shaping contemporary territories.

Vital scaffolding for post-numeric storytelling

The metanarrative configures the pivot from mesh fabrication to its enunciation as autonomous occurrence, where infrastructural assembly yields to discursive sovereignty, engendering a self-reflexive topology that asserts narrative dominion over digital entropy METANARRATIVE. Arboreal paradigms manifest as polychannel operations, wherein foundational nodes coalesce into resilient trunks amid extractive cyberscapes, anchored in adversarial architecture and self-determination; dissemination ensues via redundancy and seepage, reconceptualizing digital realms as latent archipelagos, with polyglot mutations injecting cultural abrasions—English demoted to mere protocol—while AI underlayers invert to nutritive circuits through iterative feedbacks, proclaiming the mesh an encroaching tale adaptable sans hub orchestration ARBOREAL.

Socioplastics as Urban Epistemics: A Living System for Research and Intervention – The city is not a container but a metabolic intelligence in motion – Every urban fragment is a node in a contested epistemic field

Socioplastics is an operational theory-in-action that redefines the way cities are understood, intervened in, and rearticulated through transdisciplinary research operating beyond normative architectural discourse or institutional planning, positioning the city not as a built object but as a living system of epistemic, relational, and metabolic flows, thus displacing the paradigm of design with that of recursive activation and shifting the role of the researcher-practitioner into that of a Decathlete, a term coined here to describe those capable of navigating heterogeneous disciplinary terrains—art, choreography, curation, pedagogy, and critical geography—while maintaining tactical consistency and reflexive sovereignty across them, and central to this praxis is the Socioplastic Mesh, a dynamic and decentralised engine of over 200 indexed entries (concepts, practices, case studies) that form a topolexical infrastructure for producing and recomposing urban meaning; its units—epistemic nodes—are activated through spatial friction, and through them the practitioner maps the V-City (or Fifth City), an unseen metabolic dimension shaped by non-linear flows of data, materiality, and symbolic power, and within this dimension, operations such as Taxidermy of Presence (which transforms urban residues into pedagogical devices), Infiltration (tactical artistic occupation of normative systems), and Recursive Mapping (cartographic intelligence of systemic heat) become core tools for building urban sovereignty, not through possession of land but through curatorial reprogramming of spatial protocols, with an ultimate goal of replacing fossilised “Urban Taxidermy” with Active Dissensus, a form of spatial resistance capable of sustaining difference, friction, and mutation as permanent components of urban knowledge production; LAPIEZA–SOCIOPLASTICS thus becomes not a project but a platform, a mutable research organism grounded in situated encounters and open methodologies that offer a rigorous yet flexible framework for addressing contemporary urban crises through systemic justice and critical epistemics. This document should be cited as: Lloveras, A. (2026). Socioplastics: An Operational Definition for Transdisciplinary Urban Research. LAPIEZA–SOCIOPLASTICS.