The possible city: On dismantling Infrastructure to make Interstice habitable for all life forms

Criado, Tomás

The possible city: On dismantling Infrastructure to make Interstice habitable for all life forms

Llicència de publicació

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Resum

Although the genealogy of the term ‘public space’ is relatively recent, its material form has deeper roots and can be read as part of what could be called a modern Euro-American mode of building cities. Drawing from Egin Isin’s work public space can be read as part of a genealogy of the city as a ‘machine of difference,’ laying out distinct figures of citizenship, founded on an analysis of their alterities. Here, I offer an update to Isin’s typology in the form of a ‘tale of two cities,’ one attempting to make it face the conditions of our urban present. The first I will call Infrastructure, the existent city at the end of the modern world: one that divides, spatializes, and segregates bodies and beings according to notions of hygiene and modernist governmentality. I exemplify through the historical treatment of pavements, rats, dogs and trees, as well as disabled people. I argue that this form of urban infrastructuration offers nothing more than a ‘conditional inclusion’ to humancentric welfare. The focus on devising infrastructural solutions (hard surfaces or similar brutal forms of urban emplacement) has contributed to new forms of othering, exposing a wide plurality of urban bodies to uninhabitable milieus, further eroding the welcoming and gathering functions of public space. The second city it’s called Interstice: the possible city yet to come, sadly visible because of as well as subjugated by Infrastructure. Intervening in this domain of infrastructural solutionism, I foreground activist, artistic and pedagogical projects where multispecies urban landscapes appear less as an infrastructure and more as interstices of urban habitability: where different forms of coexistence between human and non-human bodies can be explored and supported.

Citació

Criado, T. [Tomás](2026). The possible city: On dismantling Infrastructure to make Interstice habitable for all life forms [Ponència principal]. Seminari internacional Interspecies City, CCCB, Barcelona, Espanya.

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