Socioplastic Urbanism positions itself not as a new masterplan, but as an epistemological rupture—a shift from seeing the city as an object to be planned, towards understanding it as a living, contested process of meaning-making. This move, from “neutral object” to “living system,” explicitly aligns with the critical urban theory of thinkers like Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, while its methodological heart beats with the pulse of post-1990s relational and socially engaged art. However, to situate it merely within this lineage would be to miss its more provocative, and perhaps more valuable, intervention. Socioplastics does not simply apply artistic methods to the urban scale; it posits that the urban condition itself is an aesthetic condition—one of continuous, often antagonistic, co-production. Its central tenet, that the city is “never finished,” resonates with the open work of Umberto Eco and the institutional critique of artists like Andrea Fraser, who understood systems as inherently unstable and authored by power. Yet, Socioplastics pushes further by refusing the artist or planner as the sole authorial genius. Instead, it frames urban life as a form of diffractive practice, where multiple agencies—human, non-human, material, institutional—continually bend and reshape the social fabric, producing not harmony but a field of tensions. The city, in this view, is less a canvas and more an ongoing performance, its value measured not by its resolution but by its capacity to sustain critical attention and “situated agency” within its unfolding drama.
The conceptual linchpin of this practice, “urban taxidermy,” is its most potent and perilous contribution. Framed as a “critical mode of intervention,” it brilliantly transposes the artistic strategy of the readymade and institutional critique onto the urban palimpsest. Rather than demolish or design anew, it proposes a precise, surgical “cut” into the existing urban body to preserve, expose, and re-contextualise a specific social or material situation. This act of curatorial incision shares DNA with the forensic architecture of Eyal Weizman or the archival gestures of Ilya Kabakov, treating the city as both evidence and exhibition. The critical strength it claims lies in exposing the “internal structures” of power and exclusion embedded in the quotidian. Yet, this is where its most profound contradiction surfaces, and where it becomes most interesting. The text acknowledges that “preservation is never innocent” and that “every definition implies exclusion.” This self-awareness is crucial, for the taxidermist, no matter how critical, must still choose what to skin, stuff, and display. The act of framing the “commons” inherently risks aestheticising conflict, turning lived struggle into a curated specimen for pedagogical or artistic consumption. Thus, Socioplastic Urbanism oscillates uneasily, yet productively, between being a tool of emancipatory exposure and potentially becoming a technology of discursive capture, a dynamic that mirrors the central paradox of much institutional critique.
This tension amplifies within its pedagogical framework, which champions “learning embedded in walking, listening, [and] occupying” as a form of embodied praxis. This approach, indebted to the radical pedagogies of Paulo Freire and the dialogical art of Suzanne Lacy, rightly seeks to dismantle the academy’s walls and treat the “urban environment as a living archive.” However, the text astutely identifies the neoliberal trap lurking within: in an era of total connectivity, even radical learning can become “another form of extraction,” where experience is mined for data, content, or cultural capital. The proposal to “protect silence, refusal, and non-participation” is therefore not a romantic aside but a foundational political and aesthetic principle. It defends the right to opacity, as theorised by Édouard Glissant, against the coercive demand for transparency and engagement. This marks Socioplastics’ most radical departure from purely celebratory models of participatory art, insisting that a true commons must include the right to withdraw from the communal script. The unfinished city, therefore, must contain spaces that are deliberately unreadable and unproductive to the logic of the plan, the curriculum, or the art project—a silence that speaks volumes against instrumentalisation.
Finally, at the architectural and ecological register, Socioplastics advocates for an “austerity” and “porosity” that rejects iconic spectacle. This aligns with a broader shift towards post-human and materialist thinking in architecture, emphasising interfaces over objects. Yet, its insistence that “sustainability cannot be reduced to materials or energy performance alone” tethers this ecological sensibility firmly to the political. An energy-efficient building that exacerbates spatial inequality or relies on exploited labour remains, in this framework, unsustainable. Here, Socioplastic Urbanism reveals its ultimate stakes: it is a practice of critical maintenance rather than heroic creation. It seeks to design not conclusive forms but “spatial scores”—open, script-like structures that invite “reinterpretation, misuse, and critique.” Its aim is not to solve the city but to sophisticate our engagement with it, to keep the urban question agonistically open. In this, it offers a vital model for contemporary practice: an urbanism that is relentlessly aesthetic in its sensitivity to form and experience, and relentlessly political in its commitment to contestation, making its primary artifact the very process of critical, collective, and mercifully unfinished thought.
Conceptual Art in Urban Ecologies
Hyperplastic topologies of systemic sovereignty activate social innovation and digital humanities within the context of smart/green cities. Architecture theory and critical design converge with collaborative practices and collective creativity. This synthesis reclaims memory and memory-making, fostering alternative education and urban sustainability.