How to Cite: Haiek Coll, Alejandro. "The future of urban forms. A re-reading of self-generating geomorphology". Dearq no. 39 (2024): 70-80. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq39.2024.07
How to Cite: Haiek Coll, Alejandro. "The future of urban forms. A re-reading of self-generating geomorphology". Dearq no. 39 (2024): 70-80. DOI: https://doi.org/10.18389/dearq39.2024.07
Alejandro Haiek Coll
Universidad de Umeå, Suecia
Pablo Souto
For this visual essay I had the good fortune to collaborate with the architect, photographer and colleague Pablo Souto, who documented Caracas in the late 1990s and early 2000s, a moment when the integration of self-constructed neighborhoods into the formal city1 was a significant topic in academic and political circles.
Not only do his photographs present a radical portrait of the landscape, but they also provide evidence that helps us understand its gestation, development and consolidation. They reveal the logical patterns of occupation, adaption protocols and symbiotic relations between infrastructure and the settlements. Situations of territorial conflict and violence are exposed by the compositional perspective of photography, particularly Pablo's, who attempts to recreate the dimensions of the landscape, transforming it into new collective imaginaries containing values that are immanent in discussions about the city. The images belong to an exhaustive catalog of almost one thousand photographs taken over a two-year period. The series presented in this essay is associated with specific phenomena that this article was interested in exploring.
The format of the photo essay is a meeting between image and text, aspects that are fundamental to a fresh conversation. Presenting these unpublished images two decades after they were made exposes the velocity and manner with which these territories have grown. Without doubt, these territorial photographs are of incalculable importance for urban research, above all if the temporal aspect they add to the discussion is borne in mind. It is in this register of geospatial research that we encounter a meeting point that enables us to evidence the conditions of scale and temporality of these territories, employing postulates that I have developed as a part of my doctoral thesis, which was supported by the Research Institute of Sweden and the School of Architecture at Umeå University.
Figure 1_ A typological encounter between two urban forms that define a line of tension. Different legal forms operate on each: while urban ordinances govern one, forms of consensus prevail over the other. ↓
Self-constructed environments are no longer understood as accidents. Today we can speak of them as collective experiments in transition, marked by numerous trials, successes and failures. I will refer to these urban phenomena as territories, using the prefix self to describe the emerging morphology, equipped with its own internal logic, and the intelligence associated with the act of inhabiting, offering refuge, mobility, distribution networks or communal experiences2. This complexity should not be understood from a formal perspective but through temporal narratives capable of associating such an intricate network of physical and intangible histories of citizenship, tradition and cultural emancipation, of histories of exchange and transfers of knowledge.
In order to become active, these autonomous territories must act cooperatively, developing collaborative processes. In other words, they require a fully developed civic machinery of power and exchange. In the course of the research for this piece I have attempted to immerse myself in these geomorphological contexts by using intersectional and multiscale methodologies. Territorial analyses intersect critical cartographies with urban chronicles or stories of citizenship, mapping the perimeter of temporal events that give shape to and, at times, even direct or govern these landscape forms. This visual, photographic, essay is an attempt to portray this phenomenon, validating the accidental, the imperfect, the inconclusive, or the indeterminate, as forms that can also be used to validate and motivate social effervescence and creativity. It provides an opportunity to test alternative models, an opportunity that emerges from the ability to de develop and discuss "prototypes". The critical models used here explore ways to respond to the instantaneous, the mestizo, and the hybrid, and to learn about real forms of resilience and cooperative adaptation.
Paradoxically, the new urban forms of local or municipal infrastructure and the network of services found in the formal city are experienced as accidental and paternalist endowments. However, despite this, they are much more interesting and complex than this: meta-dimensional and unconnected with urban networks and created based on new and subjective nuclei and configurations. Understanding the ways in which these spontaneous enclaves, constructed from industrial materials or derivatives have the potential to transform into vibrant cultural geographies capable of establishing planetary eco-transactions, has become an optimistic and critical obsession. The geopolitics of self-generated territories remain a pending topic and subject. The idea of accidental enclaves produced by the rapid process of rural-urban migrations is insufficient to describe such an intriguing phenomenon. Furthermore, beyond reductionist definitions, these are landscapes that have the potential to create new urban interfaces and zones of intermediation that might underpin future models of coexistence.
Figure 2_ Geomorphological biopatterns of self-constructed settlements. This phenomenon denotes models of growth that occur in proximity to the natural world, in contradiction to the regular frameworks of the formal system, which imposes a geometric order on geography. ↓
Self-constructed territories have developed and encouraged new forms of organization and governance. The new political and geomorphological structures they have engendered run in parallel to and at times intersect with established power structures, enabling them to evolve without necessarily being subject to legal frameworks but, instead, by more flexible, open, agreements. At the margins of territorial management policies, entire districts experiment with democratic instruments and procedures that are more intimate than those more usually found in the formal system; they develop regional assemblies and distribute themselves across a new structure of geopolitical cells. The self-generated model has territorial impact through which individuals, groups or collective actions may restore and rebalance relationships with the community and the environment, creating a regenerative culture that will eventually permit their consolidation as a future bioregion.
The new governance model, based on local networks, encounters ways to de-structure and "in-vertebrate" the state, eliminating the skeletal system that give structure to geographical control, and providing citizens with the opportunity to subjectivize reality, introducing thereby new forms of correlation and coexistence. Creativity and abstract thought emerge through cultural manifestations of daily life. Once the entire bureaucratic apparatus has lost control, people experiment as individuals, jointly with others, in free associations and in new effervescent forms of collectivism and cooperation. These connections also pass from generation to generation, whether through an expansion of the nuclear family or the addition of new domestic dependencies. Time is channeled through day-to-day objects but also through small programmatic and material variations and adjustments, culminating in their replication in a simple but effective domestic cell. The real-time reading of the territory may be perceived in patterns of growth, since each unit probably comes from, or represents, a new member of the family. This familiar progression in the self-constructed territories is revealed as a morphological manifestation of the urban, which is not the case behind the walls of massive modern housing complexes, where growth is contained. The ideal of the modern city, which sought to obliterate and stigmatize self-constructed territories as a valid model for territorial and regional planning, decays at greater speed than the self-organized communities. Indeed, this decline might be accelerated because of the technological dependence of the transport and comfort systems on which they are founded.
These narratives are imprinted on geography as stories, memories or cultural events, cosmologies or myths, but also in symbolism, terminology, chromatology, gastronomy or any other physical or immaterial manifestation that constructs identities.
Figure 3_ Early traces of settlement close to rural life. Work on the land is progressively replaced by the dynamics of production and consumption of the urban system, eradicating the knowledge and understanding of the soil. ↓
The landscape of the self-constructed is a free zone for imagining new models of autarchy and sovereignty: micro ecosystems regulating their metabolism in perfect coordination with the basic dynamics of its surroundings. This guarantees collective living, but also to produce a different variety of objects and cultural practices that recreate emerging forms of life in community. Time and urban dynamics in self-generated territories synchronize with meteorology, the periodicity of day-week-month, but also with the seasons and annual commemorative events, saints' days or cultural and religious activities. The metabolism of the neighborhood develops in harmony with the environment, despite the fact it is impacted by events and externalities, demonstrating their vulnerability to the infrastructures of power, which also lead to the collapse of the formal city. The systems and subsystems of the self-constructed city are also altered by micro- and macroeconomic flows that violate distribution and services networks. These alterations do not result in dysfunctions as they regularly do as a result of weak institutionalization in the formal system and are, contrariwise taken on, adapted and assimilated by internal processes of mediation and by open code transaction models. It is in the neighborhood that the interfaces that are capable of mediating between institutional and production forms occur, channeling and redistributing the flows that originate in the countryside through regional, district or community markets, driven by initiatives that have their origin outside the totalitarian structures of the formal system.
Agricultural practices and food production use self-organized territories to implement redistribution and service-integration models, frequently with no infrastructure at all, but with the capacity to adapt urban elements to the new programmatic task. The dependencies and co-dependencies between the 'informal' and formal urban systems are significant, even if they are not entirely clear or visible. Although these relationships are not explicitly connected or planned, they play a fundamental role as regional infrastructures. These two unequal structures remain in tension, neither assimilating the other. Their temporal intervals differ, with the speeds of the formalized system intersecting with the apparently decelerated conditions that prevail in the informal territories. The flows of the international market penetrate the physical boundaries of the self-generated territories, inserting technological devices, consumption protocols and cultural identities that are sometimes incorporated with subtle variations and at other times reinterpreted to the point that their apparent nature is altered entirely. This metabolism enables the re-generative territories to assert their presence within the larger urban landscape, while also anticipating a future in which both the self-generative and formal systems, as well as other hybrid urban forms might, symbiotically, establish a true structure of cooperation. In this envisioned future, each system would complement the other, jointly developing new intermediate models that operate not only in the space-time dimension but also in the realm of meaning and experience.
Figure 4_ Territorial violence exerted by infrastructural nodes. The highways deployed on multiple levels pierce the natural topography, segmenting the city's original geomorphology rooted in the valley system. ↓
For self-constructed territories, co-participation, collaboration, correlation and peaceful coexistence are necessary conditions for developing these meta-temporal structures. Geographic cultures develop as a result of experience in work and political agencies3. In self-constructed territories the landscape is a zone of neutrality that contributes to the construction of other potential urban imaginaries within the context of this conflict for the control of these spaces. The author's knowledge of these situations, acquired as a result of fieldwork carried out during the past three decades and through engagement in community-based practice. This work in the territories has explored collective infrastructures and their associated programs, reviewing in detail the ways in which they remain autonomous and independent from established power structures and analyzing the forces that drive, maintain and manage them. This research has focused on the complexities of the democratic instruments that lie behind decision-making, the management of resources and the horizontality of the microeconomic models, which are particularly constrained by the forces of the infrastructures of power and geography. In a climate of metropolitan integration, the self-initiated territories transform the frontiers into transactional interfaces, creating cultural networks that create bridges that connect with the formal system. These operations continuously reorganize agents or actors around these transformative boundaries. Creative capital develops cultural values distributed in the form of economies of labor on the margins of the system, but amplified by local, regional, continental, and global imaginaries. It is precisely in these intermediate instances that cultural hybridization constructs spaces of hospitality for both sides, and encounters affinities in the context of difference.
Self-constructed territories have developed new forms of cultural distribution. Cultural manifestations are self-initiated in collective agendas by creating cooperation networks that evolve independently of the cultural institutions of the formal system. The urban DNA is introduced and regulated by forms of power and institutional identity. However, in self-constructed territories, this code mutates into a replicating gene free of all controlling power, extending across the landscape, the roads utilized as a resource, the infrastructure being used in ways that have not been foreseen, and the disconnected gobbets of the social fabric becoming scenarios of public life4. Urban memory is dissociated from urban form, while this multi-scalar and meta-temporal dimension of the landscape continues to resist, immune to agents of perturbation. The code responsible for the formation of this non-institutional landscape, that attempts have been made to reproduce in simulated models, tests and exposes agents or attractors as well as models of penetration, mobility, and accessibility. Although these models are considered to represent an advance in the exploration of self-constructed territories, they remain insufficient to describe the phenomenon in its entirety.
Figure 5_ The Helicoide, which adheres to the geomorphological form of the mountain. Designed by architects Pedro Neuberger, Dirk Bornhorst, and Jorge Romero Gutiérrez in 1956, today it is the headquarters of the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service. ↓
The new social fabric created by self-initiated systems operates in the form of free zones that redefine boundaries, transforming them into thresholds of intermediation, where structures of knowledge and cultural practices spread, extend, and proliferate, through the deployment of artistic traditions and emerging cultural expressions. Modern hyperstructures and industrial landscapes have become metallic topographies and topographic lines embedded in concrete. The landscape of self-constructed territories is a self-governing zone. The city map is not a private laboratory5. New models of exchange and knowledge-transfer appear recurrently in response to the hierarchy of institutions, which establish a real presence in these territories with difficulty. Inter-institutional relations occur through mirror structures that reflect the image of constituted power to impact decisions, organizational forms and processes of self-management. Symbolic capital is produced outside the infrastructure of the cultural industry, creating other dimensions for artistic and creative expression to occur. The new structures run parallel to and sometimes intercept the over-planned city, establishing new forms of power, and distributing content in the form of symbolic capital. The constantly growing territories are self-managed in expressions of micro-urbanism that have developed their own models of governance and cooperation.
These territories experiment with new agendas of cultural distribution. Thanks to the creation of a cooperative network that evolves independently of formal cultural institutions, cultural manifestations are self-initiated in an itinerary of distributed actions. Self-managed territories have deployed a new set of citizen policies and value exchange, and of symbolic capital, that operate beyond the control of cultural institutions. These strategies generate new platforms of production and dissemination that alleviate geospatial conflict, consolidating local identities and deploying a novel referential imaginary. In both models of the city, time becomes apparent in the crumbling concrete and in the rusting of industrial materials. It is the temporality of the conflict that prevails over the territory; everything else, especially the physical dimension, is caught up in a process of constant decay, leaving in their wake spaces for alternatives to inscribe a new set of territorial dynamics on the geomorphological tapestry and to influence the way the communities that inhabit it govern themselves.
Figure 6_ Two heterogeneous systems confront each other, cushioned by the space of the street. While both systems have technical flaws, updates are accessible for one, while the other is subject to specialized processes of maintenance. ↓
Self-constructed territories have become surfaces of interaction, sensitization, and exchange. They are transactional machines with complex itineraries. These are machines of affection that originate with actions rather than in built foundations. They are rarely finished; only infrastructural limitations and physical fences stop them, not topographical features or the complexity of the geography. They are assimilated using creativity and technical astuteness, but in particular, through experimentation and responses appropriate to each set of circumstances. In reality, they are fragile assemblages that are born and die; they transform, move, are installed or dismantled, and they reprogram themselves. Self-constructed territories are more than a mere collection of objects: they are open, complex and inclusive temporal systems that develop spatially and in density in the same way that any city or urban model does, but according to a decelerated, conscious, and cautious timescale. For growth, time is a resource, not a limiting factor. Self-constructed territories are open classrooms, collective experiments in transition. They are imprecisely defined, proceeding with caution but with determination and consensus. They provide support to a society in permanent repair. The buildings are skeletons, the bones of a social body made up of invisible forces.
The self-generated, self-constructed, and self-managed territory has deployed a new set of citizenship policies and exchanges of values, as well as constituting symbolic capital outside the control of cultural institutions. Adapting the impact of cultural programs and observing growing economies, the settlements evolve and consolidate as effective forms of urban life. Day by day the new autonomous enclaves for the future reimagine the social dynamics, environmental values, and technological challenges as manifestations of an integrated ecosystem, whose care and empathy might build legacies for future generations.
By contrast, the facades of structures belonging to the formal system are exposed to the deterioration and apathy inherent to hierarchical systems. Elevators, conduits and other integral services collapse if they are not maintained. The sports or cultural infrastructure is not capable of bringing itself up to date or optimizing itself in the absence of institutions or government institutions. By contrast, the intelligence born of the landscape of self-constructed territories provides protocols and forms of mediation to assimilate decline over time or to update its systems and mechanisms of co-creation. All of this leads to less paternalistic models, to cultural landscapes that are capable of generating solutions despite the existence of material or technical restrictions, in the form of innovative, creative, responses that emerge from the built environment.
Figure 7_ Settlement in a nascent state. The logic of the plots focuses on productive soils. The locations respond to exposure to the sun and soil characteristics. The mountain ridge is used for access. ↓
Self-constructed landscapes are apparatuses6, devices; culturally sophisticated, structured, artifacts with access to industrial materials. They are logical performative structures that describe geospatial patterns that are not easy to understand. In their origins, favelas are more rural than urban. Cultivation practices, socio-spatial relations, even the dynamics of construction can indicate organizational patterns inherent to the footprint of the territory. The buildings constructed on plots are temporary, implying progressive growth in the future. Neighborhood relations can be complemented by practices of resource exchange, as in rural areas. The phenomena of density and expansion operate simultaneously, even when they occur at different rates. The same can be said of their frequencies and intervals. Expansion implies the arrival of new participants, who settle on the perimeters or, in the ideal case, negotiate to find a place that is more central. Density, on the other hand, represents a growth in the family nucleus that complements work, even extending at time along the vertical axis. Growth in the X and Y coordinates occurs at different rhythms and according to different timescales and motivations. The process is akin to an epidermis that grows along two axes and as it extends across the territory may receive grafts, prostheses, or acquire new functions.
Gardens may also take the form of community orchards or self-managed green spaces where children, adolescents, families, and the elderly find opportunities to participate in community life, going beyond the contemplative passivity offered by public parks in the formal system, which municipal authorities generally find difficult to maintain.
Figure 8_ Entrances to the tunnels Planicie 1 and Planicie 2. This infrastructure, built in 1962, pierces the mountains to gain access to the Caracas valley. The first tunnel is 735 meters long, and the second 660 meters. ↓
The process of territorial occupation and activation does not only occur, as has been mentioned, in the physical dimension; according to its own integral logic, which activates a machinery of power and exchange, it also occurs in response to meaning and legacy7. Even when marginalized, self-managed landscapes represent an alternative to the formal, centralized, hierarchical model they deploy mechanisms of self-management and self-determination that are fundamental to thinking about an open, inclusive, and diverse city.
This is not a question of fantastic imaginaries or a fascination with poverty; these are mechanisms intended to produce empathy as well as to recognize the individual in the small spaces in which we live, in which we hope to imagine other possible futures. Based on interpretive readings of these phenomena, we cannot stop speculating about what would happen if we were to envision opportunities rather than failures, to discover and categorize many of the expressions of intelligence they produce, and if we were to understand them as the DNA of future habitats, using them as the basis to build hypotheses and imaginaries of potential future ecologies.
Self-constructed territories are post-industrial machines; they are fragments of industry: reversible, changeable, but also reprogrammable. After centuries of tabula rasa, delusions of massive housing complexes, and regional infrastructure plans, the dream of a comprehensive territorial solution will come true, taking into account many other dimensions of the landscape that, unfortunately, we are only now beginning to explore.
These landscape forms are hybrid entities, governed and ruled by other political, economic, and social frameworks. These self-constructed territories are meta-temporal apparatuses, hyper-structural socio-spatial structures that encompass not only very diverse physical structures but also semantic and systemic aspects that require in-depth exploration. Not only has this disciplinary intersection turned Pablo Souto's photographs into an accurate document that established the bases for the construction of the records and antecedents used in this research, but it has also enabled us to rethink these forms of hybrid representation as mechanisms capable of evidencing realities that we do not yet understand, that remain alien, outside the margins of our perceptual capabilities. As a result, the question may be posed: how might this information be transformed into embodied experiences? How might the translation of interpretive data into textual spaces and the artistic domain continue to nourish ecosophical perspectives? The hope is that this visual narrative will open lines of investigation that, in turn have the potential to inspire other critical, artistic, and theoretical positions that encourage discussion and convert the topic into a recurrent object of study in classrooms and academic departments.
Figure 9_ Modern tower blocks surrounded by an extensive array of self-constructed settlements. Founded at the end of the 17th century as an encomienda, the town was initially home to the slaves who worked its land. ↓
By examining these transitional experiments from an intersectional and meta-scalar perspective, we can cross-reference and correlate the situations and events that have emerged from them. This involves exploring the stories present in the landscape, based on research and knowledge of the terrain, in addition to cultural geography. It also requires reviewing the ways in which the land was settled, in order to reclaim and transform it in response to the needs and aspirations of the community. This comprehensive approach makes it easier to understand the ways these experiments not only alter the physical landscape but also influence the historical narrative and cultural identity of the community and even the memory of the entire city. By observing these elements as a whole, it is possible to appreciate how these experiments take place in multiple dimensions, from the revision of the tangible footprint left on the landscape to the intangible phenomena that are made invisible by the absence of representation and biased observation. It is here that the responsibility to reflect on ways to capture the relationship between community and territory and to analyze the parameters that determine the construction of cultural identities resides. This is the only way we can re-evaluate the ways in which this formless territory has been able to shape a model of life based on rules and norms rooted in common sense and tolerance, delineated outside the institutional framework.
Whatever they may be called (favelas, barrios, poblaciones, villas, canterías, rancherías…) these self-constructed territories are without doubt living systems with higher-order structures. We have seen how they function as social organisms integrating different parts of the landscape as extensions of a bio-synthetic body. Self-managed territories activate micro-economies that are the fruit of the population, fostering new systems of exchange and value that, in turn, nourish cultural and symbolic capital —which may be considered future assets. This transition towards new relational models in the urban system occurs holistically at neighborhood level. Self-organization and self-creation are driven by autonomous forms of governance and coexistence, developing cooperative network models and participatory re-engineering methodologies, which we consider fundamental to the metabolism of the landscape. In essence, autonomy and self-determination are the sparks that ignite the process of thinking about and managing vibrant communities within the urban fabrics of the future.
The physical incarnations that are produced and that intersect the narratives and images presented in this form of critical research play a fundamental role in how we perceive, understand, and interact with the world around us. The principal idea behind this visual essay has been to portray this hybrid landscape by juxtaposing narrative passages with photographic records of recent history that enable us to produce critical manifestations that can be used as forms of communication and experience. The intention is to produce these mediations in order to communicate the temporal and meta-scalar dimensions associated with these urban phenomena. The result is a critical representation that fluctuates between the temporal and scalar dimensions of a living territory, introducing novel viewpoints from which to perceive the socio-ecological complexity of these territories, which are defining a new landscape for the public sphere and cultural production.
It is hoped that the concept of text as incarnation will provide a lens through which to analyze the complex interactions between the physical, digital, symbolic, cognitive and biological dimensions of territorial violence, and the socio-ecological injustices that have affected these territories. The hope is also to experience life in close proximity to these resilient communities.
↓ Figure 1_ "Lomas de Urdaneta" / 8061-22a / CCS2001VL03. Canon 35mm Ef 50-200. Photo: Pablo Souto (2001).
↓ Figure 2_ "Los Mangos" / 8048-9a / CCS2001VL03. Canon 35mm Ef 50-200. Photo: Pablo Souto (2001).
↓ Figure 3_ "Niño Jesús" / 3651-2a / CCS2001VL02. Canon 35mm Ef 50-200. Photo: Pablo Souto (2001).
↓ Figure 4_ "La Araña" / 853817a / CCS2001VL03. Canon 35mm Ef 50-200. Photo: Pablo Souto (2001).
↓ Figure 5_ "El Helicoide" / 1523-6a / CCS2001VL01. Canon 35mm Ef 50-200. Photo: Pablo Souto (2001).
↓ Figure 6_ "San Antonio" / 8528-15a / CCS2001VL03. Canon 35mm Ef 50-200. Photo: Pablo Souto (2001).
↓ Figure 7_ "La Estrella" / 8047-34a / CCS2001VL03. Canon 35mm Ef 50-200. Photo: Pablo Souto (2001).
↓ Figure 8_ "La Planicie" / 8061-22a / CCS2001VL03. Canon 35mm Ef 50-200. Photo: Pablo Souto (2001).
↓ Figure 9_ "La Vega" / 3651-22a / CCS2001VL01. Canon 35mm Ef 50-200. Photo: Pablo Souto (2001).
* This article is an adapted extract from A. Haiek's doctoral thesis for the University of Genoa, May 2024, supervised by Dr. Manuel Gausa.
1 In 1996 Josefina Baldo and Federico Villanueva proposed a plan for a Physical Rehabilitation of Neighborhoods. The plan was inspired by the extensive research of Prof. Teolinda Bolívar and her associate Iris Rosas among many other collaborators from Centro Ciudad de la Gente. This is an academic piece without points of reference or precedent that declares the need to see the neighborhood not only from an inclusive perspective, but also with a sense of hospitality that emerges from scientific and sociological research. Although this represents a shift in the way we perceive and comprehend the phenomenon, years later government policies tend to revert to the same approach that has been used since the mid-20th century. These policies are based on tabula rasa (blank slate) operations that replace existing settlements with apartments. However, many end up abandoned or sublet by their new owners, who then return to their original neighborhoods and ways of life.
2 I use the term formal city to describe the programmed urban fabric, not in order to approach the phenomenon according to a dialectic between the formal and the informal, but to denote the form in which these oppositions have been perpetuated in the imaginary of the urban.
3 For Keller Easterling, "Disposition does not describe a constant but rather a changing set of actions from which one might assess agency, potentiality, or capacity". See Extrastatecraft: The Power of infrastructure space.
4 See Anarchitecture: Architecture as a Political Act in which the author Lebbeus Woods, considers free zones to be territories that encourage "new ways of living in" rather than "new ways of building".
5 See Dispute Plan to Prevent Future Luxury Constitution, in which the author Benjamin H. Bratton describes the speculations of J. G. Ballard concerning non-pulsed temporal landscapes in which humanity continues its dizzying race to merge with the mechanical, the elemental, and the non-organic: with geo-, techno-, and cosmological systems.
6 See What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Giorgio Agamben develops his concept of "apparatus" to describe a heterogeneous set that encompasses a wide range of elements, both linguistic and non-linguistic. These include discourses, institutions, buildings, laws, police measures and philosophical propositions. Furthermore, he emphasizes that the apparatus always fulfils a specific strategic function that becomes evident at the intersection of power and knowledge relations.
7 See Henri Lefebvre's spatial triad in his The Production of Space, especially the third component of the triad, "spaces of representation" (lived space), which refers to the emotional and experiential aspects of space, where social meanings are constructed and where, according to the author, there is room for counter-narratives to emerge in opposition to dominant spatial practices and representations.