Socioplastics 11865 The Broken Corner Belongs to Four Departments
A damaged crossing can remain unusable while every municipal office fulfils its assigned duty. MunicipalShards studies the spatial evidence left when permits, budgets, service territories and responsibilities fail to meet. It follows a small urban defect through the institutions that produced it, manage its edges and inherit its consequences. A street becomes a useful scale for seeing how divided administration shapes everyday conditions. Consider a narrow strip between a bus stop and a planted verge that floods after rain. Transport manages the stop, parks maintains the soil, a contractor oversees drainage and another department controls the pavement. Each office can describe its formal boundary, while the person crossing the flooded strip experiences one continuous route. The defect persists where the public consequence crosses the limits of administrative responsibility. Teresa Caldeira’s work on urban peripheries and everyday citizenship attends to contested forms of city-making. Jennifer Robinson’s comparative urbanism takes ordinary cities seriously as sources of theory. Their approaches help read the broken corner through situated experience and institutional comparison. The aim is to identify how responsibility is distributed and how locally specific conditions become obscured by general administrative categories. A MunicipalShards investigation could map ownership, maintenance contracts, complaint records, budget lines and the movement of water at the site. Interviews with residents and workers would show how the defect affects actual use and how responsibility is understood in practice. The resulting account could support coordination across departments by making the shared material consequence visible. A small fragment of damaged pavement can reveal the institutional arrangements through which a city becomes usable.
REFERENCES
Caldeira, T.P.R. (2017) “Peripheral Urbanization: Autoconstruction, Transversal Logics, and Politics in Cities of the Global South”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35(1), pp. 3–20.
Robinson, J. (2006) Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development. London: Routledge.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html