Affective Urbanism: A Trans Approach to the City

Mauro Gil-Fournier Esquerra

mauro@arquitecturasafectivas.com

ETSAM. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, España

Received: April 14, 2023 | October 12, 2023

In this article, we explore how the affects influence and shape urban processes, transcending the hierarchical organization of its agents. Bottom-up and top-down relationships represent organizational structures associated with power dynamics, ranging from more institutionally vertical to diverse and collective horizontal directions. However, neither of these approaches, nor their combinations, proves adequate to promote a trend that, due to wicked problems, inherently involves an affective connection with individuals, other entities, and the planet.

Critical affect theory provides a framework for contemplating urban processes from alternative perspectives. Building on Rittel and Webber's text (1973) addressing the challenges of urban planning in solving social problems, and Law's interpretation (2015) that turns wicked problems into benign problems, we can observe how the nature of urban social problems is inherently affective.

We propose a new path where affective urbanism can disrupt the bottom-up and top-down dualities based on the attributes that shape urbanism, as it is the affects that permeate all human and more-than-human bodies. If cities are machines of urbanization, extending their heterogeneous networks beyond their territories, we need to address the movement of affects so that urbanism becomes a tool for coexistence on an already wounded planet.

Keywords: Affective urbanism, affect theory, bottom-up, top-down, wicked problems, benign affects.

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In this article, we describe how the affective dimension permeates and shapes urban processes beyond the hierarchical organization of its agents. In other words, it explores how we observe affective dynamics that transform the modes of power distribution and inform them.

The modes of urban planning often stem from top-down institutional hierarchies, and in other cases, from more horizontally distributed collective processes that are bottom-up. There are also intermediate processes that enable hybrid practices, middle-out, or more "extitutionalized" activist networks (Gil-Fournier 2018). In recent decades, much time has been devoted to studying the various forms of exercising power in urban planning¹. However, one aspect that has been largely overlooked in urban and academic literature is the affective dimension (Thrift 2004, 57).

Thus, an affective urbanism is proposed that, regardless of being organized based on hierarchy or a more horizontally distributed arrangement of agents in the exercise of power, can be grounded in an affective declaration and a commitment to diversity. This commitment is centered not only on individuals but also on the affective dynamics that inform us. In other words, it advocates for the movement of affects (Massumi 2002) to be observed, investigated, and made transparent in the heterogeneous networks of people, objects, technologies, or governance tools to co-produce the urbanism we need. To do so, in this article, we engage in a reciprocal dialogue on the contributions that social studies of science and technology and critical affect theory can make to urbanism and how urbanism, viewed through this lens, can advance contemporary theories in these fields.

critical affect theory

With the publication in 1995 of the two foundational texts of what has been called the "affective turn" in cultural theory, namely Massumi's "The Autonomy of Affect" (1995) and Sedgwick and Frank's "Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins" (1995), some of the certainties we relied on to support our postmodern social and cultural theories have been displaced. Affects not only have a lot to say to us, but we find them at the basis of our decision making, both individually and collectively.

In the Spinozian origin of critical affect theory, affect is the outcome of an interaction, an encounter, affectus (Spinoza 2000), the active result of both being affected and affecting others. But if, as Deleuze puts it, unveiling Spinoza's scream, "no one knows what a body can do,"² then I propose that in this article, we consciously acknowledge the potential of what an affective urbanism can generate to tackle contemporary challenges.

Critical affect theory has a certain line of continuity traced from Spinoza, Bergson, Deleuze, to Massumi, from which this article is formulated³. It establishes stratigraphic relationships between affects, feelings, emotions, and the constellation of events in which they are intricately entangled. However, the focus here is to value the movement of what is felt, what constructs us, what structures us. And that is an affective movement because it is a movement that does not only displace but also transforms (Massumi 2002).

What is stated here is that the "affective turn" is not only the title of the magnificent book edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (2007), which helps systematize this entire approach, nor is it just a trend that may be currently emerging. As Lara and Enciso emphasize, "This is not simply a fashion guideline; it is a simultaneous indicator of modifications in public life and subjective experience, based on which knowledge production is being transformed."⁴(2013, 101).

What I want to express is for us to turn affectively. In other words, to move our gaze, our heads, our bodies; to rotate in the places where we do things, to discover new perspectives from which to practice an urbanism that does not care whether it is top-down, bottom-up, or middle-out but can inquire whether environments are permeated by mobilizing and biodiverse affects. Where it does not matter if the process is more institutional or more informal. I propose that we place affects, not just people, at the center, and by doing so, simultaneously regenerate soils in cities and forests, decontaminate water in industries and aquifers, clean the air, and enhance mobility for those who need it while increasing their peace of mind. Where we can offer new ways to tackle the vast urban challenges that seem insurmountable and that we call wicked problems⁵.

the nature of urban social problems is affective

One of the most relevant yet lesser-known texts emerging from urbanism and permeating various disciplines is "Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning" by Rittel and Webber (1973). These authors explain that the scientific foundations to address the social problems of urban planning are bound to fail. This is precisely due to the "wicked" and intricate nature of these problems, and because we tend to treat them as if we have already tamed them (tamed problems) (Rittel and Webber 1973). The nature of these wicked problems is diverse and constitutes the body of contemporary challenges we face every day: gender violence, climate change, water pollution, obesity, inequality, or structural poverty, among others. Also, more specifically related to urbanism, issues such as gender-related concerns, the heat island effect, the loss of living soils, gentrification or touristification, or the expulsion of low-income populations from cities, to name a few. But, given their complex nature, "[…] policies that respond to social problems cannot be meaningfully correct or false; and it makes no sense to talk about optimal solutions […] there are no solutions in the sense of definitive and objective answers" (Rittel and Webber 1973, 155).

Critical affect theory and science and technology studies (STS) have already warned us about where to look to detect the heterogeneous nature of problems. Human and non-human actors co-produce an expanded spatiality where agencies are composed in a shared and hybrid manner. This complicates every detail and every issue, problematizes the assumptions generated in each situation, and networks form infinite interdependent chains (Law 2015). We also become entangled in them, confused, because the problem lacks a single, objective solution. So, how should we address this?

John Law (2015) provides certain keys in his review of the text by Rittel and Webber (1973) to work with wicked problems: (1) Observe the processes. (2) Understand that the working materials are heterogeneous: people, documents, protocols, living beings, technologies, institutions, environmental or urban settings. (3) Acknowledge that concerns are diverse and simultaneous: social, technical, political, and legal. (4) Recognize that the "good" and "bad" of the process are also heterogeneous compositions (Law 2015).

In this review, sociologist John Law (2015) suggests that to work effectively with wicked problems, we must turn them into benign problems and consider the conditions that bottom-up urbanism has traditionally raised. He suggests that we reflect on these questions:

How far can or should the world be reduced to a single mode of representation or reasoning? (Homogeneity and heterogeneity) […] How far we take wicked problems by drawing everything that is relevant together? (Centering and decentering) […] How open are we to the unexpected? or (the same question posed differently) How dogmatic should we be in claiming that we have the tools we need to tame the wicked? […] (Closing and opening) […] or in what measure begin problems and the tools, stories, and orderings that go with them have, or should have, imperialist ambitions. How far do or should they seek to extend their scope? (Hegemony and modesty) (Law 2015).

For example, in this last question, there can be a dual play on the hegemonic ambitions of the term "bottom-up" itself, and its dynamics in the urbanism of the Latin American context. In what we call bottom-up processes⁶, "Imperialist ambitions are insensitive to the wickednesses of specificities, handling theses poorly or damaging them" (Law 2015). This has generated much frustration for those involved in architecture and urbanism, guiding and mediating in bottom-up processes.

Thus, Law proposes three corollaries to try to turn complex problems into benign ones: (1) Our desire for perfection must be contained, (2) we need to be sufficiently focused and detailed in defining the problem, and (3) to be flexible and malleable in working to interfere and adjust based on "modes of care"⁷. These three corollaries are certainly affective and can be developed as a "trans" urbanism that manages to overcome hierarchical directions of top-down, bottom-up, or middle-out to access an affective urbanism capable of traversing all the heterogeneous bodies and entities within the networks that shape each project or situation.

affective urbanism

In an attempt to provide a clear and simple yet inevitably incomplete definition, in my opinion, affects are the power of action we possess to care for life in all things and in all their manifestations. They are also everything that hinders us from achieving it. In other words, affects are the power of immaterial realities that shape our material actions. They are the substrate of our decisions. And the first thing is that our actions and decisions—as a heterogeneous ensemble of individuals, urban planning tools, political entities, designs, and ways of making in all their potential—go beyond the distribution of hierarchies that bottom-up processes promise and their temporal fragility. And thus, we must be very aware that "affects act in the nervous system not of persons, but of worlds" (Deleuze cited in Berlant 2020, 41; Deleuze and Guattari 1993). So, an affective urbanism is an urbanism that generates an observation on the movement of affects within an urban process, whether it is research, a project, or an intervention. We are concerned with revealing the movement of affects, both those we bring to the table and those we hide beneath it.

But today, affect is a territory in dispute. On one hand, affective urbanism is precisely an environment resisting the prevailing urban emotionality of the self, where individuals participate and communicate in social life. As observed by Jean Bethke Elshtain, "All points seem to revolve around the individual's subjective feelings—whether of frustration, anxiety, stress, fulfilment. The citizen recedes; the therapeutic self prevails" (Elshtain, Jean Bethke. 1992, 92), and this is where the first dispute on the affects arises.

On the other hand, affect today is also "the object of an active engineering that is becoming more akin to the networks of pipes and cables that are of such importance in providing the basic mechanics and root textures of urban life" (Armstrong cited in Thrift 2004, 58). Nigel Thrift has argued in urbanism that the shift to affect opens up new registers and political intensities, allowing us to work on them to develop new collective forms (2004, 58). From there, we can emphasize the notion of affect as an intelligence to shape different approaches to contemporary urbanism, where "affect is a different kind of intelligence about the world, but it is intelligence none-the-less, and previous attempts which have either relegated affect to the irrational or raise it to the level of the sublime are equally mistaken" (Thrift 2004, 60). So, in this situation, why promote a theory and practice of affective urbanism in our academic, research, and professional fields? Precisely because affect is a battle we must engage in when developing our closest urban environments. We need to begin to forge a politics of affect (Thrift 2004).

For it is quite clear that there are enormous emotional costs and benefits for individuals or groups in being shaped by particular institutions in particular ways. However, it is often quite difficult to show what is at stake for the individual or groups in submitting to such institutions and embracing certain affective styles that render them deferential, obedient or humble—or independent, aggressive and arrogant (Thrift 2004, 69).

These affects that come into play occur in both top-down hierarchical processes and the urban processes we call bottom-up, in which good intentions, activism, defense of rights, or the visibility of minorities entail enormous personal costs. We must then dissect the affects to locate them in the territory of individual, collective, and geographical bodies. Because what is at stake is not the way we establish processes and address the challenges posed by the wicked problems of which urbanism is a part. What is truly at stake are the affects we distribute in our urban processes. Which affects are mobilized and which are paralyzed? And how does one set of affects fight against another? For example, the very concept of the city as an urbanizing machine is a struggle between an affect we can call "soilsealing," closely linked to another that is "urbanistic expectation," generated in the drafting of urban plans and that, in the territory, clashes with soilhealing linked to the affects of care, repair, and social, ecological, and urban restoration in many bottom-up processes.

An affective urbanism is also an urbanism in which there is a displacement of the personal and the collective spheres, and we gamble our own life experiences in urban processes. And in these places and processes is where affects are embodied. "Affects can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations ... ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other affects" (Sedgwick 1993, 19). This is why urbanism is one of the best territories to reveal affects, as the problem is always on our doorstep or on that of our relatives, in our street or our neighborhood.

Affective urbanism also arises from the unbearable urban extractivism to which we subject our cities and territories, creating new complex problems with the same intensity (touristification, urban heat island, etc.). If bottom-up processes emerge as a reaction to the absurdities of a petrochemical-based and extermination-oriented urban construction, we must reconfigure the affects that move us to define actions and policies for humans and more than humans. And we can only do this by shifting from wicked and paralyzing affects to more benign and mobilizing affects in all organizational and power modes of urban development. And here, some of the principles of bottom-up and top-down dualities are dismantled as we ask ourselves how many people working in institutions do so based on benign affects, and how many engaging in bottom-up processes do so through wicked affects? How many individuals wholeheartedly dedicate themselves to urban processes within the institution, and how many egocentric processes, seeking only recognition, hide within the collective? Affective urbanism does not focus on the hierarchical organizational model of urban processes but on the affects themselves that come into play. Affective urbanism asks, from where do we defend, develop, build the particular process we are initiating? What motivation drives us in processes beyond work, beyond the professional realm? What are the affects we mobilize in a specific urban process? What affective capitals do we set in motion?

two movements for the centrality of affects in urbanism

I propose two movements in an attempt to transform urbanism. The first is suggested in Patricia Ticineto Clough's text, where "The idea of the body-as-organism is replaced by that of the body-as-process of biological mediation that participates in the co-emergence of affect, but it is not its main location." In other words, "By shifting the body to another position, it gains significance by losing its centrality"⁸ (Lara and Enciso 2013). And this is where the first proposition of this article can also emerge. We can place affects at the center by shifting people and their power hierarchies to another position in the urban debate. By doing so, we establish the relevance of an affective perspective on urbanism, ensuring that other entities beyond humans also gain relevance by placing the movement of affects in focus.

Once affects are placed as protagonists, the second movement involves geographically situating them, locating them in their specific place. If affective urbanism has a particular difficulty, it is in territorializing affects in the sense of grounding them or bringing them to the surface in a specific geographic and urban location, putting them on-site. Critical affect theory does not make the task any easier, and this is also where the interest of this article lies.

on-site affects. three case studies

The first experiences referred to as Affective Urbanism emerged in Madrid as a way to observe the bottom-up and middle-out processes taking place in the city between 2006 and 2016. These originated from the conversations preparing a seminar at Intermediae-Matadero Madrid involving Professor Elke Krasny, cultural mediator Susana Jorgina, and the author of this article⁹, within the working environment of the Vivero de Iniciativas Ciudadanas¹⁰. This preparation sparked the encounter of these two magical words. Their interaction created a new space for thought and practice for the promoters and participants, which continues to develop to this day¹¹.

Figure 1_ Cartographies of Affective Urbanism. Madrid. 2015. Source: Vivero de Iniciativas Ciudadanas.

case one: affective cartographies. madrid, 2015

In this first encounter, we observed the practices of informal citizen initiatives through the lens of affects redistributed within them, a conjunction between the individual and the collective, always mediated by those engaging in conversation. The observation turned into a sort of mapped affective ethnography. The bottom-up projects we investigated then were not simply spaces of resistance or proposals for collective action in public spaces. Everything was driven by a less visible force but operated as an underpower (Castoriadis 2007), and this force was distinct in each analyzed practice. Behind the opening of the bottom-up urban planning processes that were taking place in the city of Madrid, there were a series of affects shaping these practices: the memory of the Tetuán neighborhood, the support of the DIY Institute in self-construction and material processes, and the empowerment of youth in Villaverde, among others. Beyond the collective and collaborative aspects, these initiatives were driven by a movement of affects that either aligned or conflicted within each urban project or practice¹².

New insights and the opportunity to develop an urban theory based on practical experience emerged through affective observation and listening to these projects. For me, all these experiences create an impasse in urban knowledge and its dimensions: an environment (off-site) to disseminate the learnings that have occurred in each place (on-site) that can gradually shape a new affective theory of urbanism based on its localized practices. In the words of Berlant, it is necessary to follow "the course from what's singular—the subject's irreducible specificity—to the means by which the matter of the senses becomes general within a collectively lived situation" (2020). By doing so, we can allow ourselves to observe our own practice as an environment of affective knowledge, something that also interests Berlant in terms of how a process is extracted from the singular, from its location in the history of a person, a collective, or something very local, and set into circulation as evidence of something shared. That is, trace the becoming general of singular things, elucidate their materiality through inquiry into their resonance in different scenes, be they verbal, bodily, or gestural (2020). This first case reveals "not knowing what affective urbanism can do" but begins to generate a more careful consideration of the affects that we mobilize in urban processes.

case two: affective heritage. montevideo, 2018

What happened in the Affective Heritage Seminar, held in Montevideo¹³ provides a second example. Solange, the owner of Casa de Bernarda Castilla in Ciudad Vieja, described how an abandoned building adjacent to hers affected her newly restored house. The clogged pipes of that building overflowed with the rain and caused her property, built in 1811, a heritage and material memory that she looked after, to grow damp. And there, in that observation, we realized that we could not define abandonment as a simple lack of care but as a practice in itself, with its protocols, procedures, etc., an affective urban practice and, in this case, destructive of heritage. In the simple example of Solange's house and the neighbor's clogged pipe, something that was being practiced on many scales and in different territories is made explicit. This eventually led to expulsion, land devaluation and urban violence, only to become processes of gentrification and city redesign later. Understanding that abandonment was an affective practice added knowledge that needed to be investigated as an urban practice, as we observed in the small case study of Solange's house in Montevideo.

Figure 2_ Affective Heritage Seminar in Ciudad Vieja. Montevideo. 2018. Source: Lucía Segalerba.

These processes of knowledge based on the observation of the movement of urban affects in different cities of the Ibero-American context such as Madrid, Mexico City, Montevideo or Santo Domingo also give rise to practices in shared institutional and informal agencies for the materialization of urban and architectural projects that reveal that we all have an affective and urban agenda. And, from that agenda, we generate alliances and connections.

case three: mares de madrid. madrid, 2016-2019

Mares de Madrid¹⁴ is a project that mobilizes five areas for urban innovation, which are the acronym of its name: movilidad, alimentación, reciclaje, energía and cuidados (mobility, food, recycling, energy, and care). It is an urban innovation and entrepreneurship project that promotes the transition towards an ecological citizenship based on care in a program that supports the sustenance of the most activist and bottom-up practices towards places where an affective economy can also come into play (Gil-Fournier 2019). In other words, it is intended to sustain the bodies involved in processes of urban innovation in political, urban, and ecological terms. Because, as Judith Butler states, "We cannot talk about a body without knowing what supports that body, and what its relation to that support-or lack of support-might be. In this way, the body is less an entity than a living set of relations; the body cannot be fully dissociated from the infrastructural and environmental conditions of its living and acting" (2017). And it is here that a project like Mares de Madrid, which does not fit into the classifications of bottom-up or top-down, is capable of opening a new space for the comprehensive practice of an affective urbanism. An urban program where the infrastructural conditions of life (mobility, food, etc.) are not only investigated and observed but affectively assembled among activist, formal, and informal entities; businesses; cooperatives; social economy; technological, and digital entities in material and spatial architectural environments that give new names to the innovative practices developed there.

In this process, which includes the bodily, the infrastructural, and a range of possibilities for business management in different areas, we were able to discover how each community has its own urban agenda. We all have an urban agenda, and it is important to unveil the affects—not only institutional and informal—that revolve around them. In this space, the visibility of the affects that mobilize agendas is key to overcoming the processes we analyze in this article as bottom-up and top-down. It is also crucial for bringing transparency to what is behind the urban economy that today offers solutions beyond ownership in the areas of mobility, food, recycling, energy, without a care for life and society.

Figure 3_ Mar de Alimentación in the Villaverde district. Madrid. Source: SIC / TXP / VIC Architects.

Just as each individual has an urban agenda, every collective, every book, and every work always expresses an intention. The agenda actually consists of the affects that underpin an urban decision. Thus, affective urbanism poses the following questions: From where do we do what we do? What is the affective purpose of the project being initiated, whether institutional, collective, or in any other variant? What do I want from it? On the other hand, we should ask ourselves, how many entities does it affect? How biodiverse is it? How many disciplines does it intersect? At how many different scales in time and space does it affect? How many species does it mobilize? Is it an extractive project, or does it serve an even greater purpose? With the answers to these questions, we can determine whether our project creates lasting alliances and connections with life or only favors an idea of the city as an urbanizing machine, a predator of bodies and territories, and an eliminator of diversity. This can also be observed in what many infrastructure companies linked to top-down processes offer. Or in an emancipatory ideal that is unable to sustain itself, precarious, and short-lived in a bottom-up process.

the affective turn in urbanism: benign affects

In conclusion, it is important to highlight some of the points already discussed in the article to trust in the proposed path. The first would be that to address the effects of wicked problems—echoing John Law—it is crucial to have the ability to shift the current trajectory of urbanism. We have explored the considerations about what drives us that we could bring to our projects. To the human movement driven by desire, but also about the responsibility for what we can change. "Indeed, we are in the midst of a biopolitical situation in which diverse populations are increasingly subject to what is called precaritization. Usually induced and reproduced by governmental and economic institutions, this process acclimatizes populations over time to insecurity and hopelessness" (Butler 2017). From this standpoint, how can we offer security and hope in an urban and wounded planet?

Figure 4_ Bosque Metropolitano Expo. Madrid 2020. Source: Luis Díaz Díaz.

Being aware of the attributes to work with benign problems, for example, containing the desire for perfection, being detailed in the problem, and interfering and adjusting from the care modes promoted by Law, is the first step towards benign affects as a place to experience hope in an environment of growing uncertainty.

In this context, the second step would be to explore how to create an affective urbanism where everything is laid out on the game board, based on three basic attributes that follow those offered by John Law: (1) Honesty with ourselves and our environment: Genuine innovation arises from candidly expressing our thoughts and feelings. (2) Elimination of judgment from the processes in which we participate: Fostering an atmosphere of respect becomes the facilitator for each urban program. (3) Allowance for love, encompassing biodiverse forms of urban love¹⁵, to serve as the propelling force for the development of a life deemed worthy of living.

Based on these three attributes to co-produce benign affects, the third step involves being able to modify the terms of value upon which we have built our common life. Let us turn affectively, confidently and with hope, that is, without fear of turning and expressing our turn, so that these mobilizing affects can bring forth, even more strongly, a trans-affective urbanism that permeates everything and thus provides approaches to the contemporary challenges facing our cities and societies in order to attain a different life. May urbanism always be a driving force for life, not a place of destruction.

Thus, the paths toward the development of affective urbanism are open. They are increasingly evident in students' demands, community practices, and organizations' aspirations, and we need to build new spaces for their development. An obsolete model is collapsing: we see it in bodies, in mental health states, in widespread fatigue, and in efforts that fail to establish a more balanced and biodiverse life. The scenarios may seem pessimistic, but we remain hopeful, working to foster the creation of places infused with mobilizing affects to craft a life that is truly fulfilling.

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