Leandro Minuchin | The University of Manchester (original) (raw)
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Papers by Leandro Minuchin
Urban Studies
Logistics, as the language and practice that organises the distribution of matter and value, not ... more Logistics, as the language and practice that organises the distribution of matter and value, not only scripts the infrastructural expansion of late capitalist urbanisations, it also informs the tactics of survivability and resistance that address the spatial and social disparities generated by the latter. Behind the arrangement of makeshift infrastructural set-ups for commercial exchange, food distribution and community support, there is a form of popular logistics, interventions put in place to articulate the circulation of resources, weave nodes of solidarity and navigate the bureaucratic and territorial distances that exist across institutional scales. The paper frames the integration of these forms of counter-logistical expressions as an emerging form of municipalism. Focussing on municipal responses to the pandemic, the essay describes the emergence of counter forms of logistics in Rosario, Argentina. It registers the material and virtual adaptations that social movements, neig...
Political Geography
The notion of prefiguration resurfaced in urban geography and social movement literature to descr... more The notion of prefiguration resurfaced in urban geography and social movement literature to describe the practices of social movements seeking to experience, in the present and through direct action, post-capitalist lifeworlds. The paper argues that the tactics that underpin prefigurative practicesthe focus on immediate transformations and the recuperation of the agency to act without the mediation of representative structures-not only typify a form of collective action, but serve to describe a distinct mode of producing urban space. The article introduces the notion of prefigurative urbanization to depict a territorial process where a plurality of selfmanaged infrastructural manifestations, replaces the role played by sovereign institutions and planning technologies in organizing spatio-temporal relations. The term captures how infrastructural scripts are used as repertoires to anticipate and project new regimes of subjectification, transform patterns of accumulation and prefigure modalities of spatial inclusion and exclusion. The article is structured in two parts. The first expands the notion of prefiguration form a type of collective action, associated with radical, anti-capitalist urban movements, to a logic of urbanization. It argues that prefiguration is practiced through the articulation of contrasting infrastructural repertoires that define both how territories are produced and urban politics is practiced. The second part draws on ethnographic material collected through an action research project conducted in Guayaquil (Ecuador) and examines how prefigurative urbanization unfolds through the infrastructural practices carried out by local improvement committees, NGOs, and private developers. The conclusions highlight how prefigurative urbanizations stage the conflict over the production, access and governance of urban and popular infrastructures as the ground for urban politics.
My doctoral research explores the relationship between architecture and politics in modern Buenos... more My doctoral research explores the relationship between architecture and politics in modern Buenos Aires. Drawing on elements from political theory, architectural history and urban geography, the thesis investigates a historical period in which architectural discourse problematised the production of the city’s material landscape and transformed it into a constitutive and defining element of urban politics. Between 1925 and 1949, members of the local architectural circle – through the assembling of contrasting projects – questioned the established spatial order of the metropolis and proposed for its transformation an integral revision of the city-nature relation. This thesis examines the articulation of a set of architectural interventions that found in the mobilisation of the city’s material sphere, a means through which to contest the existing spatialisation of the social. It investigates how the language and forms crafted through material and architectural productions scrutinised a...
The staging of post-neoliberal manifestations, revolts and unfinished transitions in South Americ... more The staging of post-neoliberal manifestations, revolts and unfinished transitions in South America and Europe, ignited a process of urban experimentations and accelerated the dissemination and replication of new urban practices and spatialities. The profusion and dynamism of these practices was matched within academic clusters by extending the notion of laboratories and engaging with modes of knowledge co-production. This paper seeks to deepen the frames for academic experimentation and political engagement by borrowing from urban activists and social movements the notion of prefiguration. It argues for the need to disrupt the contours of the syllabus and the classroom by positioning urban practices as sites of co-produced knowledge. This is supported through the analysis of two different research projects. First the setting up of a jointly taught knowledge platform between the Manchester Architecture Research Centre and the Faculty of Political Science in Rosario, Argentina. There,...
Desacatos 61, septiembre-diciembre 2019, pp. 8-21 E n dos textos seminales para los estudios urba... more Desacatos 61, septiembre-diciembre 2019, pp. 8-21 E n dos textos seminales para los estudios urbanos, El derecho a la ciudad (Lefebvre, 1969) y La revolución urbana (Lefebvre, 2003), el filósofo y sociólogo francés Henri Lefebvre presenta una tesis que disloca tanto a la escuela estructuralista marxista, como los modelos de sociología urbana que consideraban la ciudad una unidad administra-tiva y política delimitada con claridad. Para Lefebvre, el espacio de la ciudad ya no podía concebirse como una suma de lugares o una cate-goría subordinada y dependiente en la que se emplazan relaciones de producción. De acuerdo con él, a finales de la década de 1960 comen-zaba a cristalizarse una transición a escala planetaria que transformaría para siempre la relación entre territorios urbanos y dinámicas socioe-conómicas. En estas dos publicaciones, Lefebvre delinea el pasaje hacia una sociedad urbana; tras agotar los patrones fordistas de acumulación, en los que los espacios suburbanos servían como meros contenedores para la producción, describe una actualización en la lógica del capital. El advenimiento de la sociedad urbana convierte el espacio en un pro-ducto, en el objeto mismo de las relaciones de producción. Así, la transformación del suelo urbano, su intercambio y producción termi-nan por constituirse en dimensiones centrales de una nueva etapa del capitalismo (Harvey, 2001). Cuando Lefebvre escribe estas reflexiones, los síntomas de una sociedad urbana aparecen dispersos y fragmentados. En términos de-mográficos, faltaba mucho para cruzar la barrera simbólica de 50% de la población mundial instalada en zonas urbanas y la tensión entre lo rural y lo urbano parecía contener capacidad descriptiva (Brenner y Schmid, 2014). En este sentido, las tesis de Lefebvre deben verse co-mo anticipaciones teóricas, construcciones lógicas articuladas a partir de la evidencia que aportaban casos y procesos singulares (Marcuse, 2009). Estos textos surgen en un contexto de expansión creciente de las formas de consumo, en el que las prácticas de intercambio y comercialización impregnaban las esferas más íntimas de la vida co-tidiana. En una crítica que comparte con el colectivo situacionista, Repertorios prefigurativos: urbanización y acción colectiva en Latinoamérica LEANDRO MINUCHIN Y SALVADOR MARTÍ I PUIG
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2016
This paper seeks to position construction as a platform and practice for the articulation of a ne... more This paper seeks to position construction as a platform and practice for the articulation of a new type of urban politics. The argument is presented in four steps, and each supported by an analysis of the work of social movement Grupo Independiente Rosarino Organizado Solidariamente (GIROS) in Rosario. The first part describes how construction introduces prefiguration as a means of reconfiguring the spatialities and temporalities of urban politics. The second part presents an analysis of the processes of de-institutionalisation and de-commodification that emerge from the involvement of urban social movements with construction practices in peripheral settlements. I then illustrate how the politicisation of construction operates through a simultaneous recuperation of what is described as techno-popular knowledges and a disruption of hegemonic constructive epistemologies. Lastly, the paper introduces the notion of material articulation to examine how construction, as a prefigurative ta...
Urban Studies
Logistics, as the language and practice that organises the distribution of matter and value, not ... more Logistics, as the language and practice that organises the distribution of matter and value, not only scripts the infrastructural expansion of late capitalist urbanisations, it also informs the tactics of survivability and resistance that address the spatial and social disparities generated by the latter. Behind the arrangement of makeshift infrastructural set-ups for commercial exchange, food distribution and community support, there is a form of popular logistics, interventions put in place to articulate the circulation of resources, weave nodes of solidarity and navigate the bureaucratic and territorial distances that exist across institutional scales. The paper frames the integration of these forms of counter-logistical expressions as an emerging form of municipalism. Focussing on municipal responses to the pandemic, the essay describes the emergence of counter forms of logistics in Rosario, Argentina. It registers the material and virtual adaptations that social movements, neig...
Political Geography
The notion of prefiguration resurfaced in urban geography and social movement literature to descr... more The notion of prefiguration resurfaced in urban geography and social movement literature to describe the practices of social movements seeking to experience, in the present and through direct action, post-capitalist lifeworlds. The paper argues that the tactics that underpin prefigurative practicesthe focus on immediate transformations and the recuperation of the agency to act without the mediation of representative structures-not only typify a form of collective action, but serve to describe a distinct mode of producing urban space. The article introduces the notion of prefigurative urbanization to depict a territorial process where a plurality of selfmanaged infrastructural manifestations, replaces the role played by sovereign institutions and planning technologies in organizing spatio-temporal relations. The term captures how infrastructural scripts are used as repertoires to anticipate and project new regimes of subjectification, transform patterns of accumulation and prefigure modalities of spatial inclusion and exclusion. The article is structured in two parts. The first expands the notion of prefiguration form a type of collective action, associated with radical, anti-capitalist urban movements, to a logic of urbanization. It argues that prefiguration is practiced through the articulation of contrasting infrastructural repertoires that define both how territories are produced and urban politics is practiced. The second part draws on ethnographic material collected through an action research project conducted in Guayaquil (Ecuador) and examines how prefigurative urbanization unfolds through the infrastructural practices carried out by local improvement committees, NGOs, and private developers. The conclusions highlight how prefigurative urbanizations stage the conflict over the production, access and governance of urban and popular infrastructures as the ground for urban politics.
My doctoral research explores the relationship between architecture and politics in modern Buenos... more My doctoral research explores the relationship between architecture and politics in modern Buenos Aires. Drawing on elements from political theory, architectural history and urban geography, the thesis investigates a historical period in which architectural discourse problematised the production of the city’s material landscape and transformed it into a constitutive and defining element of urban politics. Between 1925 and 1949, members of the local architectural circle – through the assembling of contrasting projects – questioned the established spatial order of the metropolis and proposed for its transformation an integral revision of the city-nature relation. This thesis examines the articulation of a set of architectural interventions that found in the mobilisation of the city’s material sphere, a means through which to contest the existing spatialisation of the social. It investigates how the language and forms crafted through material and architectural productions scrutinised a...
The staging of post-neoliberal manifestations, revolts and unfinished transitions in South Americ... more The staging of post-neoliberal manifestations, revolts and unfinished transitions in South America and Europe, ignited a process of urban experimentations and accelerated the dissemination and replication of new urban practices and spatialities. The profusion and dynamism of these practices was matched within academic clusters by extending the notion of laboratories and engaging with modes of knowledge co-production. This paper seeks to deepen the frames for academic experimentation and political engagement by borrowing from urban activists and social movements the notion of prefiguration. It argues for the need to disrupt the contours of the syllabus and the classroom by positioning urban practices as sites of co-produced knowledge. This is supported through the analysis of two different research projects. First the setting up of a jointly taught knowledge platform between the Manchester Architecture Research Centre and the Faculty of Political Science in Rosario, Argentina. There,...
Desacatos 61, septiembre-diciembre 2019, pp. 8-21 E n dos textos seminales para los estudios urba... more Desacatos 61, septiembre-diciembre 2019, pp. 8-21 E n dos textos seminales para los estudios urbanos, El derecho a la ciudad (Lefebvre, 1969) y La revolución urbana (Lefebvre, 2003), el filósofo y sociólogo francés Henri Lefebvre presenta una tesis que disloca tanto a la escuela estructuralista marxista, como los modelos de sociología urbana que consideraban la ciudad una unidad administra-tiva y política delimitada con claridad. Para Lefebvre, el espacio de la ciudad ya no podía concebirse como una suma de lugares o una cate-goría subordinada y dependiente en la que se emplazan relaciones de producción. De acuerdo con él, a finales de la década de 1960 comen-zaba a cristalizarse una transición a escala planetaria que transformaría para siempre la relación entre territorios urbanos y dinámicas socioe-conómicas. En estas dos publicaciones, Lefebvre delinea el pasaje hacia una sociedad urbana; tras agotar los patrones fordistas de acumulación, en los que los espacios suburbanos servían como meros contenedores para la producción, describe una actualización en la lógica del capital. El advenimiento de la sociedad urbana convierte el espacio en un pro-ducto, en el objeto mismo de las relaciones de producción. Así, la transformación del suelo urbano, su intercambio y producción termi-nan por constituirse en dimensiones centrales de una nueva etapa del capitalismo (Harvey, 2001). Cuando Lefebvre escribe estas reflexiones, los síntomas de una sociedad urbana aparecen dispersos y fragmentados. En términos de-mográficos, faltaba mucho para cruzar la barrera simbólica de 50% de la población mundial instalada en zonas urbanas y la tensión entre lo rural y lo urbano parecía contener capacidad descriptiva (Brenner y Schmid, 2014). En este sentido, las tesis de Lefebvre deben verse co-mo anticipaciones teóricas, construcciones lógicas articuladas a partir de la evidencia que aportaban casos y procesos singulares (Marcuse, 2009). Estos textos surgen en un contexto de expansión creciente de las formas de consumo, en el que las prácticas de intercambio y comercialización impregnaban las esferas más íntimas de la vida co-tidiana. En una crítica que comparte con el colectivo situacionista, Repertorios prefigurativos: urbanización y acción colectiva en Latinoamérica LEANDRO MINUCHIN Y SALVADOR MARTÍ I PUIG
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2016
This paper seeks to position construction as a platform and practice for the articulation of a ne... more This paper seeks to position construction as a platform and practice for the articulation of a new type of urban politics. The argument is presented in four steps, and each supported by an analysis of the work of social movement Grupo Independiente Rosarino Organizado Solidariamente (GIROS) in Rosario. The first part describes how construction introduces prefiguration as a means of reconfiguring the spatialities and temporalities of urban politics. The second part presents an analysis of the processes of de-institutionalisation and de-commodification that emerge from the involvement of urban social movements with construction practices in peripheral settlements. I then illustrate how the politicisation of construction operates through a simultaneous recuperation of what is described as techno-popular knowledges and a disruption of hegemonic constructive epistemologies. Lastly, the paper introduces the notion of material articulation to examine how construction, as a prefigurative ta...