Socioplastics 11875 A Familiar Street Can Make a Stranger
A resident can become a stranger in a street used for decades without changing address. A new identity check, the conversion of a public frontage into managed commercial space or the disappearance of informal meeting places can alter who is recognised as belonging. XenoCity studies this production of unfamiliarity within familiar space. It follows changing conditions of spatial recognition: who can remain, gather and move without explaining their presence. Nishat Awan’s work on diasporic spatial practices unsettles bounded accounts of dwelling. Ayona Datta examines urban citizenship through gender, aspiration and infrastructure. Mustafa Dikeç analyses the political production of urban space, while Doreen Massey understands place through relations that extend beyond fixed boundaries. Their distinct approaches help connect local experiences of recognition with wider histories of mobility and power. A street study could trace changes in access rules, commercial use, surveillance, meeting places and everyday routes. Interviews with long-term residents, newer arrivals and workers would show how belonging is practised and interpreted. Maps could record where people pause, where they are questioned and how altered thresholds affect familiar routines. The evidence would connect individual accounts with the spatial arrangements that shape them. XenoCity brings estrangement into architectural and urban analysis as a changing relation between people and place. It helps identify how small alterations redistribute recognition and permission. The concept can guide research into neighbourhood change, migration and public space by asking how familiar environments are reorganised and whose presence remains legible through that process.
REFERENCES
Awan, N. (2016) Diasporic Agencies: Mapping the City Otherwise. London: Routledge.
Datta, A. (2012) The Illegal City: Space, Law and Gender in a Delhi Squatter Settlement. Farnham: Ashgate.
Dikeç, M. (2007) Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy. Oxford: Blackwell.
Massey, D. (2005) For Space. London: SAGE.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html