Socioplastics 11950 An Absence Can Organise a Neighbourhood
When a place disappears, its relations can persist and reorganise. LossBond names attachments that continue, intensify or become politically active around a missing material support. A demolished cinema, closed workshop or vanished shoreline may acquire a new place in shared narratives once ordinary use ends. The same loss can hold different meanings for people whose histories with the site diverge. Deborah Bird Rose’s writing on ecological relations and mourning connects loss with histories of coexistence. Sarah Ives studies rooibos heritage and its racial politics in South Africa. Their work helps examine how absence becomes part of social relations, memory and claims to place. A lost site can remain materially consequential through recollection, political action and changes to neighbourhood use. A project could document a vanished building through photographs, planning records, former users’ accounts and the new arrangements occupying its site. Researchers would record differences in memory and identify what each source can establish. They could follow how the absence shapes gathering, local identity or demands for preservation, including cases where residents welcome the change or hold mixed responses. LossBond gives researchers a way to study absence as a relation with ongoing effects. It connects memory to material histories and public claims without assuming a unified community of grief. The marker can support oral history, heritage decisions and urban change analysis by showing how a missing place continues to organise experience, argument and responsibility. It gives institutions a way to record contested memories without compressing them into a single account of loss. That record can guide future use of a site and support discussions about restitution, preservation or change.
REFERENCES
Ives, S. (2017) Steeped in Heritage: The Racial Politics of South African Rooibos Tea. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Rose, D.B. (2011) Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
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