Bachelard, G. (1994) The Poetics of Space. Translated by M. Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press.

Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space offers a seminal phenomenology of intimate space, arguing that the house, the room, the corner, the drawer, the chest, the nest and the shell are not merely architectural objects but psychic instruments through which memory, imagination and being-in-the-world acquire depth. The book’s central proposition is that inhabited space exceeds geometric measurement: a house is not simply an arrangement of walls, floors and volumes, but a lived universe where childhood, reverie, protection, secrecy and desire become spatially sedimented. Bachelard therefore shifts architectural thought away from functional description and towards topoanalysis, the study of the sites of intimate life as they appear in poetic consciousness. His method is not historical, sociological or psychoanalytic in a reductive sense; rather, it is phenomenological and literary, drawing on poems, novels and images to reveal how spaces are experienced before they are rationally explained. The house is the privileged case because it shelters dreaming as much as it shelters bodies. It is, for Bachelard, the first cosmos: the place from which the imagination learns verticality through the contrast between cellar and attic, enclosure through cupboards and drawers, and intimacy through rooms that retain the emotional temperature of remembered life. The cellar descends towards obscurity, fear and unconscious depth, while the attic rises towards clarity, solitude and rational contemplation; together they show that domestic space is organised not only by structure, but by symbolic intensity. Bachelard’s attention to nests and shells extends this argument beyond architecture, demonstrating that the imagination discovers dwelling in natural forms of enclosure, fragility and withdrawal. A nest is not important because of its utility alone, but because it condenses images of warmth, care and precarious protection; a shell, similarly, becomes a metaphor for retreat, secrecy and the dream of perfect habitation. His analysis of corners, miniature spaces and intimate immensity further reveals the paradoxical scale of poetic space: the smallest recess may contain immense reverie, while vastness may be internalised as a state of consciousness. This is the book’s most enduring contribution to architecture and spatial theory: it shows that space is not neutral extension but lived imagination, continually enlarged by memory, language and affect. For designers, Bachelard’s work implies that architecture cannot be judged solely by programme, efficiency or visual form, since the deepest meanings of dwelling emerge through atmospheric, tactile and mnemonic experiences that resist calculation. Ultimately, The Poetics of Space transforms the house into a philosophical image of human interiority, insisting that to inhabit is also to dream, remember and poeticise. Its conclusion is therefore both modest and profound: the spaces that matter most are often the smallest, because they are the places where the imagination first learns how to belong.

Habraken, N.J. (1987) ‘The Control of Complexity’, Places, 4(2), pp. 3–15.

N. John Habraken’s ‘The Control of Complexity’ develops a rigorous critique of architectural authorship by arguing that large housing projects cannot be successfully designed through unilateral professional control, because the built environment is an intrinsically complex system whose vitality depends on differentiated decisions, multiple actors and long-term transformation. The essay’s central proposition is that complexity should not be eliminated through standardisation, total planning or rigid formal order; it should be structured through levels of responsibility that allow collective coherence and individual agency to coexist. Habraken begins from the problem that architects are often expected to determine the life of buildings in advance, anticipating the habits, preferences and future alterations of unknown inhabitants. This expectation produces either overdetermined environments, where residents have little capacity to adapt space to their lives, or chaotic situations where change occurs without shared rules. Against both extremes, Habraken proposes a theory of supports, infill, territorial organisation and hierarchical control. Durable collective frameworks—streets, structural systems, services, access routes and settlement patterns—belong to one level of decision-making, while rooms, partitions, finishes and domestic arrangements belong to another. This distinction does not diminish design; rather, it refines it by assigning each decision to the scale and actor most capable of making it responsibly. The visual material in the article reinforces this argument: the early diagrams of thematic transformations and support systems show how a shared structural logic can permit varied domestic outcomes, while later urban and housing studies demonstrate how complex settlements emerge through layered decisions rather than singular composition. Examples such as the Ismailia and Fort Point Channel studies illustrate that open systems can maintain intelligibility while allowing incremental development, adaptation and occupation over time. Habraken’s concept of levels is therefore the essay’s crucial intellectual instrument. It recognises that neighbourhoods, blocks, buildings, dwellings and rooms operate according to different rhythms of permanence, control and change; failure occurs when one level illegitimately dominates another. The inhabitant is consequently redefined not as a passive “user” of architectural form, but as an active participant in the continuing production of the environment. This has profound political implications: control over space is never merely technical, but social, because the distribution of decision-making determines whether architecture becomes authoritarian and brittle or plural, adaptable and resilient. Habraken’s approach also anticipates contemporary concerns with participatory design, open building, circularity and urban resilience, since it treats buildings not as finished objects but as evolving frameworks capable of absorbing future uncertainty. Ultimately, ‘The Control of Complexity’ proposes an architectural ethic of disciplined openness. The designer’s task is not to predetermine every outcome, nor to withdraw into laissez-faire informality, but to construct robust spatial orders within which others can meaningfully act. In this sense, Habraken transforms complexity from a problem to be suppressed into the very condition through which humane, durable and democratic environments become possible.

Povinelli, E.A. (2016) Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism advances a radical rethinking of power by arguing that late liberal governance can no longer be adequately understood through the familiar analytic of biopolitics, since contemporary regimes increasingly operate through the unstable distinction between Life and Nonlife. Povinelli proposes geontopower as a conceptual framework for analysing how liberalism governs not only living bodies, populations and deaths, but also the boundaries that decide what counts as alive, inert, extinct, animate, resource, ancestor, landscape or world. Her intervention begins by questioning the inherited Foucauldian emphasis on life as the privileged object of modern power, suggesting that this emphasis obscures a deeper ontological operation: the maintenance of a division between the lively and the non-lively upon which biopolitics itself depends. In the context of climate change, settler colonialism, extractive capitalism and Indigenous struggles, this division becomes increasingly fragile. Rocks, fossils, deserts, creeks, carbon deposits and ancestral lands are no longer passive backgrounds to human politics; they become sites where liberal governance, scientific classification, market extraction and Indigenous ontologies collide. Povinelli’s three figures of geontology—the Desert, the Animist and the Virus—crystallise the anxieties of late liberalism: the Desert names the imagined space of lifelessness awaiting governance or exploitation; the Animist marks those Indigenous and other worlds dismissed for refusing the Life/Nonlife divide; and the Virus troubles the stability of life itself by existing at the threshold between animation and inertness. The book is especially significant because it situates these abstractions within settler colonial contexts, particularly through Povinelli’s long engagement with Karrabing worlds and analytics. From this standpoint, geontopower is not a detached philosophical invention but an analytic emerging from the constrained conditions in which Indigenous communities must defend forms of existence that liberal law and capitalist markets often render unintelligible. The question “Can rocks die?” therefore becomes more than provocation: it exposes the inadequacy of political languages that recognise injury to persons, populations or ecosystems, yet struggle to apprehend the destruction of relations among humans, lands, ancestors, minerals and nonhuman existents. In this sense, Geontologies complements but also exceeds debates on the Anthropocene, Capitalocene and climate crisis by showing that environmental catastrophe is not only a matter of ecological damage, but of ontological governance. Late liberalism manages difference by deciding which worlds are real, which attachments are credible, and which existents may be sacrificed as mere matter. Povinelli’s contribution is thus both theoretical and political: she reveals that struggles over extraction, sovereignty, indigeneity and ecological survival are also struggles over the terms by which existence itself is classified and governed. Ultimately, Geontologies offers a demanding critique of liberal reason, insisting that any adequate account of contemporary power must confront the trembling boundary between Life and Nonlife, and the worlds that have long lived otherwise.

Gilroy, P. (1993) The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London and New York: Verso.

Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic redefines modernity by refusing to treat black culture as nationally bounded, ethnically pure, or peripheral to Western history. Instead, he proposes the Atlantic as a transnational space of movement, exchange, violence, memory, and cultural invention, shaped by slavery, migration, music, intellectual travel, and political struggle. His central concept, the Black Atlantic, challenges nationalist accounts of culture by showing that black identities were produced across routes as much as roots: ships, ports, exile, sound recordings, books, speeches, and political networks carried ideas between Africa, Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Gilroy’s argument is also a critique of racial essentialism, since diaspora culture emerges through mixture, translation, and discontinuity rather than through stable origin or ethnic authenticity. The case of black music is crucial: spirituals, jazz, blues, soul, reggae, and related forms become archives of memory and resistance, expressing histories of suffering while generating new political and aesthetic possibilities. His use of W.E.B. Du Bois’s double consciousness deepens this analysis, describing the divided yet productive condition of being both inside and outside Western modernity. Gilroy therefore insists that slavery was not an archaic exception to modern civilisation but one of its constitutive foundations. The book’s conclusion is both historical and ethical: black Atlantic culture exposes the violence hidden within modern reason while also offering alternative models of solidarity, hybridity, and unfinished identity beyond the prison-house of nation, race, and purity. 

Originality is often mistaken for novelty. Within conventional academic discourse, to be original is usually to contribute something new to an already recognised domain: a concept, a method, a dataset, a critique, or a theoretical refinement. The discipline is assumed to pre-exist the intervention, and the scholar’s task is to occupy a gap within its established architecture. In this model, originality is additive; it inserts a new node into a pre-given graph. Yet the argument advanced in Originality as Field Formation proposes a more demanding understanding: originality may consist not in contributing to a field, but in constructing the very field within which future contributions can become visible, legible, and operational. Socioplastics is presented precisely in this stronger sense: not as an isolated theory, but as an attempt to build an epistemic infrastructure.

Originality is often misunderstood as the appearance of a new idea inside an existing discipline, but the deeper form of originality is the construction of the field that allows ideas to become visible, repeatable and legible. In this sense, Socioplastics should not be read only as a corpus of concepts, texts, nodes or platforms, but as an attempt to build the conditions under which a knowledge field can recognise itself. Its precedents are clear. Bourdieu described fields as structured spaces of power and symbolic capital; Foucault excavated the rules that make discourse possible; Kuhn explained how paradigms organise scientific communities; Deleuze and Guattari proposed the rhizome as a figure of non-linear connection; Luhmann analysed self-reproducing systems; and transdisciplinary research methodologies developed ways to work across disciplinary boundaries. Socioplastics does not reject these genealogies. It absorbs them and shifts their function. Where Bourdieu describes the field, Socioplastics constructs one. Where Foucault studies the archive as a historical condition, Socioplastics builds the archive as active infrastructure. Where Kuhn analyses paradigm shifts, Socioplastics designs continuity, transition and maintenance. Where the rhizome celebrates open connectivity, Socioplastics adds scalar grammar, numbering, DOI anchoring and governed distribution. Where transdisciplinarity often remains project-based, Socioplastics becomes field-based: a long-duration architecture of nodes, books, cores, channels, indexes and datasets. Its originality therefore does not lie in claiming absolute novelty, but in making field formation explicit as practice. The important distinction is this: Socioplastics treats originality not as invention alone, but as epistemic architecture. It builds routes, thresholds, references, scales and memory systems so that thought can accumulate without becoming noise. The field is not born; it is assembled, indexed, stabilised and made traversable. That is the central contribution:

Whitehead, A.N. (1978) Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Corrected edn. Edited by D.R. Griffin and D.W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press.

Whitehead’s Process and Reality constructs a speculative cosmology in which reality is not composed primarily of enduring substances but of actual entities, momentary occasions of experience whose being consists in becoming. Its central proposition is that philosophy must frame a coherent, logical, necessary, applicable, and adequate scheme through which every element of experience can be interpreted; hence the “philosophy of organism” rejects vacuous actuality, the subject-predicate model, and the notion that relations are secondary to qualities. The development of the argument pivots on prehension, Whitehead’s term for the way each occasion feels, incorporates, and transforms the world it inherits: the dead past becomes objectively immortal by entering the living immediacy of new becoming. A useful case synthesis lies in his reinterpretation of nature: space, time, causality, perception, value, and even God are not isolated doctrines but recurrent problems gradually redescribed within one relational scheme. The image of thought is therefore not a static map but a cosmological process in which creativity names the ultimate principle of novelty, concrescence names the gathering of many data into one occasion, and perishing names actuality’s passage into future relevance. Whitehead’s conclusion is at once metaphysical and methodological: reality is a creative advance of interdependent events, and philosophy’s task is not to mirror finished facts, but to articulate the generative pattern through which facts become, perish, and continue to matter. 

The Socioplastics Bibliographic Field should be read as an epistemic infrastructure through which a discipline-in-formation renders its internal metabolism visible.

Its decisive operation is the distinction between references already absorbed into numbered Socioplastics nodes and unnumbered materials retained within an open peripheral layer, awaiting future DOI anchoring, conceptual recomposition, or node assignment. This produces a bibliography with architectural agency: it stabilises hardened cores while preserving the plasticity of emergent edges. The corpus is strikingly transdisciplinary, assembling archive theory, urban studies, artificial intelligence, media archaeology, cybernetics, architectural discourse, digital humanities, metadata studies, epistemology, infrastructure theory, and ecological thought into a searchable intellectual terrain. Its case synthesis lies in the bracketed reference system itself: works such as Bowker and Star, Latour, Lefebvre, Luhmann, Haraway, Manovich, Galloway, Ostrom, and Mattern function not simply as authorities, but as load-bearing coordinates in a broader field architecture, while parallel entries—blogs, theses, working papers, and pending publications—remain mobile and generative. The bibliography therefore becomes a public epistemic surface: crawlable, indexable, recombinable, and capable of guiding future theoretical accretion. Its conclusion is methodological: Socioplastics does not merely cite sources; it designs the conditions under which sources become operative, relational, and progressively institutionalised within a living knowledge system.

Sargolini, M. et al. (2025) ‘Integrating Urban Design, Healthy Habits, and Socio-Ecological Networks: A One Health and Well-Being Framework for Sustainable Cities’, Sustainability, 17(22), 10014.

Sargolini et al. propose that sustainable urbanism must move beyond conventional planning towards a One Health framework in which human, social, animal, plant, and ecosystem well-being are treated as inseparable dimensions of the same urban metabolism. The article’s central contribution lies in triangulating urban design, the Healthy Habits model, and socio-ecological networks, thereby linking short- and medium-term behavioural improvements with long-term biodiversity preservation. Its development is explicitly transdisciplinary: European environmental policy is traced from the early separation of humanity and nature, through sustainable development, towards a holistic model of interdependence, while the Healthy Habits framework operationalises this shift through four evolutionary pillars—physiology, psycho-relational well-being, nutrition, and environment. The case study synthesis is especially persuasive in the San Marino school programme, where teacher training, outdoor activity, family engagement, green-space redesign, and routine formation coincided with measurable reductions in childhood obesity, illustrating how urban and educational environments can function as preventive health infrastructures. Figures 2 and 3 reinforce this argument visually: the former presents the four pillars as an integrated circular system, while the latter contrasts life-course trajectories shaped by healthy or unhealthy habits. The article concludes that resilient cities require adaptive, participatory, and relational design: green spaces, walkability, food access, biodiversity corridors, benches, shade, and social nudges are not amenities, but public-health mechanisms and ecological connectors.  

EpistemicLatency

A field does not appear when it is born. It appears when it is recognized. The EpistemicLatency names the temporal gap between a corpus's structural existence and its epistemic visibility: the delay between what the field has built and what the world can see. In the Socioplastics architecture, this latency is not a failure. It is a structural condition. The field has existed since 2009. Its 3,000 nodes, 30 Books, and 60 DOIs constitute a massive epistemic infrastructure. But its visibility — its citation rate, its disciplinary recognition, its institutional uptake — lags behind its structural mass. This is epistemic latency. The field is heavy before it is visible. The EpistemicLatency makes this condition explicit. It asks: how long does it take for a field to become visible? What factors accelerate or retard this process? What is the relationship between structural density and epistemic visibility? The answers are not trivial. A field that achieves visibility too early may be captured by premature institutionalization. A field that remains latent too long may be buried by accumulated neglect. The latency is not merely temporal. It is scalar. A field may be visible at one scale and invisible at another: known to practitioners but unknown to institutions, recognized in blogs but ignored in journals. Node 2501 places this concept at the opening of Core IV — Field Conditions — because latency is the fundamental condition under which all field emergence occurs. It is not a problem to be solved. It is a parameter to be managed. Without this concept, the field misunderstands its own invisibility as failure. With it, the field understands its invisibility as a structural phase. 

HelicoidalAnatomy

A field does not grow in a straight line. It spirals. The HelicoidalAnatomy names the helical structure through which a corpus advances: not linear progression, but spiral return — each turn revisiting earlier territory at a higher level of organization. In biology, the helix is the fundamental form of growth: DNA coils, shells spiral, horns corkscrew. In epistemic architecture, the helix is the fundamental form of field development: concepts return to earlier nodes but transformed by the distance traveled. The Socioplastics corpus demonstrates this structurally. Tome I establishes foundational concepts. Tome II returns to those concepts but at a developmental scale. Tome III returns again but at an expansive scale. Each return is not repetition. It is helical ascent. The HelicoidalAnatomy makes this explicit. It identifies the pitch of the spiral: how much vertical advance occurs per turn. It identifies the radius: how far the field expands laterally with each cycle. It identifies the chirality: whether the spiral winds clockwise or counterclockwise — whether the field advances by consolidation or by dispersion. These are not decorative metaphors. They are structural parameters. A field with too tight a pitch becomes dense but narrow. A field with too wide a radius becomes broad but thin. The HelicoidalAnatomy is the diagnostic tool that measures these parameters. Node 996 places this concept in Core II — Structural Physics — because the helix is a structural form, not a thematic content. It is the shape that the field's growth takes. Without this concept, growth is understood as accumulation. With it, growth is understood as spiral ascent.

 

Architecture Load Bearing Structure

A field needs walls that hold. The ArchitectureLoadBearingStructure names the structural principle that allows a corpus to support its own weight: the distribution of conceptual mass across load-bearing elements that prevent collapse under the pressure of accumulated density. In building construction, a load-bearing wall is not decorative. It carries the weight of everything above it. In epistemic construction, a load-bearing concept is not ornamental. It carries the weight of everything that depends on it. In the Socioplastics corpus, certain concepts function as load-bearing structures: FlowChanneling supports the entire urban essay series; RecursiveAutophagia supports the metabolic books; ScalarArchitecture supports the cross-scale operations that allow the field to function at multiple magnifications simultaneously. The ArchitectureLoadBearingStructure makes this explicit. It identifies which concepts bear weight, how that weight is distributed, and what happens when a load-bearing concept is removed or transformed. If FlowChanneling were abandoned, the entire urban analysis layer would collapse. If ScalarArchitecture were abandoned, the field would fragment into disconnected local operations. The load-bearing structure is not static. It adapts. As the field grows, new concepts assume load-bearing functions. The ArchitectureLoadBearingStructure sits at Node 1505 in Core III because architecture is one of the seven integrated disciplines. But the concept is not about buildings. It is about the architectural logic of epistemic construction: the principle that every field, like every building, must distribute its mass or fall. Without this concept, the corpus is a pile. With it, the corpus is a structure.

Frei, H. and Johnston, P. (trans.) (2016) ‘The Mathematics of the Shinohara House’, AA Files, 73, pp. 145–153.

Hans Frei’s reading of Kazuo Shinohara presents the house as a disciplined fiction rather than a calculable object: although Shinohara abandoned mathematics for architecture in 1949, mathematical thought remained central to his work, not as numerical computation but as a way of inventing spatial relations beyond ordinary measurement. Frei distinguishes this from applied calculation, arguing that Shinohara’s architecture operates closer to pure mathematics, where rules are intuitively discovered and logically intensified. This is why Shinohara could claim that architecture begins where calculation no longer has access: the house becomes a mental space, a fictive construction through which reality is reapprehended. His domestic projects develop this thesis through successive “space-machines”: symbolic, functional, affective and chaotic. The House in White transforms Japanese tradition into a silent symbolic apparatus; the Higashi-Tamagawa House converts function into an abstract correlation of fissures and shells; the Tanikawa Residence produces affect through the incompatibility of roof, sloping earth and bodily occupation; and the later Yokohama House introduces chaos, randomness and visual cacophony as new spatial principles. The drawings reproduced in the article reinforce this argument, showing plans and sections where domestic elements are less composed as rooms than as relational fields of voids, thresholds and discontinuities. Shinohara’s importance therefore lies in his refusal to treat mathematics as a servant of construction: for him, it becomes an autonomous imaginative discipline, enabling architecture to invent fictional realities that disclose the everyday world anew.

Roy, A. (2005) ‘Urban informality: Toward an epistemology of planning’, Journal of the American Planning Association, 71(2), pp. 147–158.

Ananya Roy defines urban informality as a mode of metropolitan urbanisation rather than a marginal sector separate from the formal city. Informality organises housing, land, labour, infrastructure, and property through flexible relations of legality and illegality, making it central to contemporary urban growth. Roy’s argument redirects planning theory towards cities of the Global South, where informal settlements, elite subdivisions, peri-urban expansion, and irregular land markets reveal how the state actively produces the state of exception. Planning power determines which illegalities are tolerated, upgraded, regularised, demolished, or protected, thereby transforming informality into an instrument of urban governance. A specific case emerges in land titling and slum upgrading policies: formalisation promises market access and security, yet it can intensify displacement, debt, gendered hierarchy, and unequal property ownership. Roy’s discussion of the “politics of shit” offers a sharper alternative, since infrastructure becomes a political process shaped by residents’ knowledge rather than a merely technical improvement imposed from above. Her comparison of Third World informality policy with American poverty policy also shows that planning repeatedly treats poverty as a spatial disorder to be corrected, while deeper questions of wealth distribution remain unresolved. The conclusion is decisive: urban informality teaches planners to move from land-use order towards distributive justice, from best-practice models towards critique, and from property rights towards the right to the city.

Lewis, D.W. (2020) A Bibliographic Scan of Digital Scholarly Communication Infrastructure. Atlanta, GA: Educopia Institute.

Lewis’s A Bibliographic Scan of Digital Scholarly Communication Infrastructure maps the fragmented ecosystem of tools, services, projects and organisations that sustain digital scholarship, presenting scholarly communication not as a single publishing pipeline but as a distributed infrastructure spanning research workflows, repositories, data, publishing, discovery, assessment and preservation. The report identifies 206 projects, distinguishing nonprofit and commercial actors, and situates them within a broader concern: whether the future of scholarly communication will be governed by market consolidation or by community-controlled open systems. Its central argument is that digital scholarship depends upon infrastructure whose sustainability, ownership and interoperability are as consequential as the publications and datasets it circulates. Lewis shows that commercial providers increasingly seek end-to-end integration across the research workflow, raising the risk that universities may lose control over core academic functions, while open and nonprofit initiatives face collective-action problems, unstable funding and the difficulty of long-term governance. The workflow map near the beginning of the report visually synthesises this ecology by placing researcher tools, repositories, publishing systems, discovery services, assessment mechanisms, preservation projects and general services within the scholarly process. As a case-study synthesis, the report’s treatment of repositories, open access publishing, research data management and preservation reveals that openness alone is insufficient unless supported by durable business models, shared standards, community investment and institutional commitment. Ultimately, Lewis concludes that scholarly communication must be understood as a collective infrastructural problem: the academy’s ability to preserve autonomy, equity and openness depends on coordinated funding, bibliodiversity and governance structures that protect knowledge production from commercial capture while sustaining the tools on which research now relies.

Starosielski, N. (2015) ‘Against Flow’, in The Undersea Network. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 1–25.

Starosielski’s “Against Flow” argues that the apparently immaterial, wireless and deterritorialised Internet is in fact sustained by undersea fibre-optic cables whose routes are material, political, ecological and historically sedimented. Rather than treating global communication as frictionless circulation, the chapter insists that signals move through grounded infrastructures shaped by coastal politics, cable stations, fishing practices, military interests, colonial histories, environmental risk and corporate secrecy. Its central intervention is to replace the fantasy of digital flow with an account of networked transmission as precarious, territorial and dependent on extensive labour. The maps of transpacific cable routes from 1922, 1982 and 2012 visually reinforce this argument, showing that contemporary systems do not simply dissolve geography, but often repeat older telegraph, telephone, trade and military pathways. Starosielski’s case of Arctic Fibre synthesises the chapter’s method: the proposed Arctic route appears innovative, yet its feasibility depends on climate change, indigenous and governmental relations, oil interests, ice movements, fishing activity, cable protection, interconnection points and maintenance logistics. Through this example she develops key concepts such as turbulent ecologies, pressure points, strategies of insulation, strategies of interconnection and traction, all of which show how networks must both separate themselves from and attach themselves to their environments. Ultimately, the chapter concludes that digital media systems are not abstract diagrams of nodes and vectors, but ecological infrastructures embedded in rural, aquatic and coastal worlds. Its decisive claim is that the experience of global fluidity depends on fixed, vulnerable and unevenly distributed routes whose histories and material conditions must be made visible.

Bryson, J.J. (2016) ‘Patiency Is Not a Virtue: AI and the Design of Ethical Systems’, Proceedings of the AAAI Spring Symposium Series, pp. 202–207.

Bryson’s “Patiency Is Not a Virtue” argues that the ethical status of artificial intelligence is not a discoverable fact about machines, but a normative design decision for which humans remain responsible. The paper rejects the assumption that advanced intelligence, linguistic capacity or social responsiveness automatically entitles AI to moral agency or patiency, insisting instead that ethical systems and artefacts are co-constructed by societies. Bryson’s central claim is that because machines are designed objects, the question is not merely what moral status they deserve, but what kinds of entities we ought to build in the first place. Her account of morality centres on socially recognised choice, sanctioned action and responsibility, yet she argues that attributing such responsibility to AI would often function as an evasion of human accountability. The case of robotics is therefore not analogous to natural moral subjects: unlike children, animals or other humans, artificial agents can be specified so that they do not suffer, compete for status, fear death or require moral protection. The discussion of the EPSRC Principles of Robotics synthesises this position, especially the claims that robots are tools, humans are responsible agents, robots are products, machine nature should remain transparent, and legal responsibility should remain attributable. Ultimately, Bryson concludes that AI should be treated as a manufactured extension of human agency rather than as an autonomous moral subject. Her decisive ethical proposition is that creating machines to which we owe patiency would be avoidable, disruptive and morally incoherent, because it would shift responsibility away from the humans and institutions that design, deploy and profit from them.

Rheinberger, H.-J. (2018) ‘On Science and Philosophy’, Crisis & Critique, 5(1), pp. 341–347.

Rheinberger’s “On Science and Philosophy” advances a historical epistemology in which philosophy of science can no longer claim to organise knowledge from above, but must instead follow the concrete, changing and experimental practices through which scientific objects come into being. Beginning with Cassirer and Bachelard, the essay argues that the age of grand philosophical systems has passed, since the sciences themselves have diversified so radically that only historically situated reflection can grasp their development. Cassirer’s importance lies in replacing metaphysical system-building with an account of knowledge as a problem-oriented process, where objects are not simply given but mediated through specific instruments, practices and conceptual forms. Bachelard radicalises this position by insisting that every hypothesis, problem, experiment and equation demands its own philosophy, because scientific reason is not fixed in advance but transformed by the very activity of research. Rheinberger’s own contribution emerges from this lineage: modern science must be understood through experimentation, not as a subordinate test of theory, but as the generative space where epistemic things take shape within experimental systems. These systems stabilise objects enough to make them researchable while preserving the ambiguity that drives inquiry beyond its existing limits. The specific case of experimental molecular biology underpins this view, demonstrating that scientific knowledge advances through apparatuses, procedures, materials and uncertainties rather than through speculation alone. Ultimately, Rheinberger concludes that philosophy remains vital only when it accepts its entanglement with scientific practice and becomes a historical reflection on how research risks, reorganises and renews reason itself.

Mattern, S. (2015) ‘Deep Time of Media Infrastructure’, in Parks, L. and Starosielski, N. (eds.) Signal Traffic: Critical Studies of Media Infrastructures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 94–112.

Mattern’s “Deep Time of Media Infrastructure” argues that media infrastructure did not begin with telecommunications, electronic networks or contemporary smart cities, but with the earliest urban forms that organised communication, ceremony, inscription and public address. Her central intervention is to stretch media history backwards into archaeology, urban history and architectural history, showing that cities have always been communicative environments whose streets, walls, plazas, facades, voids and acoustic volumes function as media systems. Rather than treating infrastructure as a modern technical layer, Mattern presents it as deep time: a long historical accumulation in which oral, written, architectural, graphic, sonic and digital forms coexist, overlap and reshape one another. Her examples range from the agora and Roman Forum as acoustic infrastructures for governance, to public inscriptions on ancient buildings, Fatimid Cairo’s exterior texts, Chinese stone writings, Yemeni spiral urban forms and New York’s Union Square as a democratic space of assembly. The illustrated plans and urban images in the chapter reinforce this argument visually, showing how public space itself becomes a communicative apparatus rather than a neutral container. As a case-study synthesis, the smart city becomes the negative example: when contemporary developments privilege seamless digital systems while suppressing informal, residual and embodied communication, they risk becoming over-rationalised machines rather than living cities. Ultimately, Mattern concludes that media infrastructures must be studied as layered techno-socio-spatio-material entanglements, shaped by path dependency, informal practices, human labour, scale and historical residue. Her decisive claim is that to understand media cities adequately, one must excavate not only cables and screens, but also voices, walls, streets, inscriptions and the longue durée of urban mediation.

Brenner, N. and Schmid, C. (2017) ‘Elements for a New Epistemology of the Urban’, in Hall, S. and Burdett, R. (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City. London: SAGE, pp. 47–66.

Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid’s ‘Elements for a New Epistemology of the Urban’ argues that contemporary urbanisation can no longer be understood through the inherited image of the city as a bounded settlement opposed to countryside, wilderness or hinterland. Their central claim is that the urban is not an empirical object but a theoretical category, meaning that it must be constructed through concepts rather than simply observed as a visible form. Against city-centred approaches, they propose planetary urbanisation as a framework for understanding how capitalism reorganises territories far beyond dense metropolitan cores. Mines, logistics corridors, data centres, agro-industrial zones, energy grids, waste sites, oceans and former wilderness areas are all incorporated into urban processes because they sustain the metabolism of distant agglomerations. The chapter distinguishes concentrated urbanisation, where people, infrastructure and capital cluster in cities; extended urbanisation, where remote landscapes are operationalised to support urban life; and differential urbanisation, where inherited spatial arrangements are repeatedly destroyed and remade. This triad is crucial because it shows that the urban is a process, not a fixed form. The authors also insist that urbanisation is multidimensional, involving spatial practices, territorial regulation and everyday life. This means that the urban is produced not only through buildings and infrastructures, but also through governance, labour, displacement, routine and struggle. Ultimately, Brenner and Schmid make an epistemological and political intervention: if urbanisation has become planetary, then urban theory must abandon the rural/urban binary and analyse the uneven, contested networks through which contemporary life is organised. The urban is therefore not merely where people live; it is the planetary fabric through which capitalism extracts, connects, regulates and transforms the world.

Rossi, A. (1982) The Architecture of the City. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.

Aldo Rossi frames the city as a collective artefact whose architecture accumulates historical duration, civic meaning and psychological resonance. In the uploaded excerpt, Peter Eisenman’s introduction clarifies that Rossi’s project treats the city as an autonomous object of knowledge, composed of urban artefacts that persist through time while absorbing changing uses, memories and symbolic values. The visual material on page 2, juxtaposing the amphitheatre at Nîmes with Daedalus’ labyrinth, condenses Rossi’s analogical method: architecture becomes intelligible through correspondences between form, myth, permanence and urban destiny . Rossi’s central proposition turns on permanence, understood as the capacity of certain monuments, plans and urban fragments to survive functional change and become repositories of collective consciousness. The case study of the locus is especially decisive: Eisenman presents it as a component of the individual artefact, determined by space, time, topography, form and memory, through which the city transforms from physical settlement into a legible structure of human experience. In this sense, the city appears as a theatre of accumulated lives, where monuments, streets and districts operate as mnemonic instruments, preserving traces of civic identity while enabling future transformations. Rossi’s urban theory therefore gives architectural form a disciplinary dignity beyond immediate utility: type, monument and analogy become instruments for reading the city as both material fabric and historical mind. Ultimately, The Architecture of the City establishes urban architecture as a house of memory, where the endurance of form sustains the collective will of history. 

Mumford, L. (n.d.) The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. Spanish translation.

Lewis Mumford defines the city as a historical organism of human association, shaped by symbolic, domestic, economic and political energies. From the preface onwards, his inquiry moves from the archaic city conceived as “symbolically, a world” towards the modern world converted, in practical terms, into a city, thereby establishing a comprehensive genealogy of urban forms and their civilisational possibilities . His central proposition locates the origin of urbanity in the sanctuary, the cemetery, the cave, the village and the ritual place of assembly, where humanity first rehearsed civic institutions through memory, pilgrimage, art and reverence for the dead. The Neolithic village becomes the decisive case study: Mumford presents it as the matrix of permanence, nurture, storage, neighbourliness and cooperation, from which the house, granary, cistern, altar and public way gradually emerged. The city thus appears as a container of containers: a condensation of material techniques, ecological adaptations and moral bonds. Its historical development culminates in the tension between Megalopolis, with its vast administrative and technological apparatus, and the humanly scaled city capable of sustaining organic community. In conclusion, Mumford calls for an urban image that integrates technology, memory and personhood, so that the city may serve as an instrument of human fulfilment, civic continuity and cultural renewal. 

Hayles, N.K. (2017) Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

N. Katherine Hayles’s Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious radically revises inherited assumptions about cognition by arguing that thought is not confined to conscious human reflection but distributed across nonconscious, biological, and technical processes. In the opening chapter, Hayles distinguishes thinking from cognition: thinking refers to higher mental operations such as reasoning, abstraction, and verbal formulation, whereas cognition is a broader faculty of interpreting information in ways that enable adaptive action. This distinction permits her to include humans, animals, plants, and technical systems within a wider ecology of cognitive activity, without reducing all cognition to human self-awareness. Her concept of the cognitive nonconscious is especially significant because it names the rapid, embodied, interpretive processing that precedes consciousness and makes conscious thought possible. For instance, she notes that nonconscious cognition processes sensory and environmental information faster than consciousness, enabling action before reflective awareness intervenes. A specific case study emerges in her discussion of technical cognition, where automated systems parse information, make selections, and generate outcomes through programmed yet adaptive processes. Such systems do not “think” like humans, but they participate in cognitive assemblages that bind people, machines, environments, and infrastructures into dynamic interpretive networks. Hayles therefore compels the humanities to abandon anthropocentric models of mind and to recognise cognition as relational, material, and distributed. Her conclusion is not that consciousness is obsolete, but that it is only one layer within a larger architecture of meaning-making.

 

Caldeira, T.P.R. (1996) ‘Fortified enclaves: The new urban segregation’, Public Culture, 8, pp. 303–328.

Teresa P. R. Caldeira defines fortified enclaves as privatised, enclosed, and monitored spaces for residence, consumption, leisure, and work, produced through walls, surveillance, guards, controlled access, and the rhetoric of security. These spaces transform urban segregation by replacing older centre–periphery divisions with a fragmented landscape in which rich and poor may live physically near one another while remaining socially separated by visible barriers. In São Paulo, Caldeira shows how economic crisis, democratic transition, urban restructuring, fear of crime, and rising police violence generated a city of walls where the affluent retreat into protected condominiums, malls, and office complexes. The case of closed residential condominiums is especially revealing: real-estate advertisements sell isolation, homogeneity, services, leisure, nature, and “total security” as markers of prestige, turning separation itself into a status symbol. These enclaves do more than protect; they reorganise public life by withdrawing elite sociability from streets and squares, leaving public space to those excluded from private worlds. Caldeira’s comparison with Los Angeles demonstrates that this is a global urban form, though São Paulo makes its inequalities unusually explicit through armed guards, fences, and stark proximity between luxury and poverty. The political consequence is profound: public space, once associated with openness, circulation, encounter, and democratic citizenship, becomes fractured by suspicion and exclusion. Caldeira’s contribution lies in showing that fortified urbanism corrodes citizenship by teaching social groups to inhabit separate worlds rather than recognise one another as co-citizens.