XenoCity names the city as a structure of exteriority. Urban knowledge does not emerge only from belonging, identity or stable familiarity. It also emerges from estrangement, displacement, partial access, friction, difference and the capacity to read from an oblique position. The stranger is not an exception to the city; the stranger reveals the city’s rules. Within Socioplastics, XenoCity defines urban space as an epistemic test. A city shows itself through thresholds, misreadings, exclusions, invitations, failed orientations and unexpected routes. Hospitality becomes more than ethical sentiment: it becomes a condition for public legibility. A city is knowable when it allows different bodies, languages, speeds and forms of attention to enter its system without erasure. XenoCity connects urbanism, difference and knowledge formation, framing estrangement as method and civic exteriority as an essential condition of urban intelligence.
This operation is anchored through FrictionalMetropolis, AgonisticSpace and LateralGovernance. FrictionalMetropolis defines the city as a knowledge system produced through resistance, delay and unequal access. AgonisticSpace gives exteriority its political and epistemic pressure. LateralGovernance names the informal, transversal and distributed forces through which urban legibility is negotiated beyond central authority, making estrangement a method of civic reading.
Anto Lloveras, architect, urbanist and theorist, studies cities as epistemic environments and public infrastructures.
Bibliography:
Simmel, G. (1950) ‘The Stranger’, in Wolff, K.H. (ed.) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Glencoe: Free Press, pp. 402–408.
Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: Sage.
Simone, A. (2004) ‘People as Infrastructure’, Public Culture, 16(3), pp. 407–429.
Sassen, S. (2001) The Global City. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Amin, A. (2012) Land of Strangers. Cambridge: Polity.
Socioplastics — https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html · Anto Lloveras — https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q139532324 · LAPIEZA-LAB — https://lapieza-lab.es/inicio-ingles/ · ORCID — https://orcid.org/0009-0009-9820-3319 · Hugging Face — https://huggingface.co/datasets/AntoLloveras/Socioplastics-Index · Bibliography — https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-bibliography.html · Wikidata LAPIEZA-LAB — https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q139504058 · Wikidata Socioplastics — https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q139530224 · Wikidata Anto Lloveras — https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q139532324