Socioplastics 11885 The Edge Is Not Empty
Urban plans often place the centre where knowledge is collected and decisions originate, leaving peripheral areas to be surveyed, improved or incorporated. PeripheryReservoir attends to practices, skills, memories and environmental adaptations that accumulate in places treated as secondary by administrative systems. These resources have their own histories and forms of organisation; understanding them requires methods responsive to local conditions. Edward Soja’s work on spatial justice shows how inequality is organised through space. Loïc Wacquant examines territorial stigmatisation and advanced marginality. Filip De Boeck’s work on Kinshasa follows urban life through its material and imaginative relations. Sarah Whatmore develops hybrid geographies that connect human and nonhuman processes. Their approaches help researchers understand peripheral knowledge as situated and varied, with value that must be established through inquiry. A project could begin with questions generated by residents and local practitioners, then map how knowledge circulates through repair networks, food production, transport, care and environmental observation. Interviews, walking routes and material records could show which practices sustain daily life and how they relate to municipal services. The account would document differences within the area as well as connections to other parts of the city. PeripheryReservoir shifts the research question from what a centre must deliver to what knowledge is already produced across urban margins. It supports comparison without assuming that one place represents another. Local practices can inform planning when the process gives their authors a role in defining the problem and interpreting findings. The marker makes peripheral expertise visible as a resource for urban thought and decision-making.
REFERENCES
De Boeck, F. and Plissart, M.-F. (2004) Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City. Ghent: Ludion.
Soja, E.W. (2010) Seeking Spatial Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Wacquant, L. (2008) Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. Cambridge: Polity.
Whatmore, S. (2002) Hybrid Geographies: Natures Cultures Spaces. London: SAGE.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
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