This film (8:00min, 2021) presents excerpts of an interview that Bruna Fereria Montuori  conducted Eliana Sousa Silva, director of the NG Redes da Maré, as part of her research on activists working in the neighbourhood Maré in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil.

Eliana Sousa Silva moved with her family from the State of Paraíba to the neighbourhood Maré in Rio de Janeiro when she was seven years old. She grew up in Nova Holanda, one of the sixteen favelas that compose Maré, a territory of almost 140 thousand residents. Motivated by her experience with lack of public services, such as sanitation, electricity and water provision, she took part in different social movements that were litigating rights and better urban conditions for the territory. From president of the residents association of Nova Holanda in 1984 to current director of the NGO Redes da Maré in 2021, Eliana dedicated her life to the territory of Maré and its inhabitants. Her work as a pedagogue, researcher and militant of rights aims to create an imaginary for Maré that is not associated with violence, scarcity and neglection. Rather, it opens to narratives that reconfigure the representation of the territory in light of its potentialities, legitimising the plurality of knowledges , memories and stories. These narratives have a pivotal role in the residents’ imagination, allowing understandings of Maré beyond stereotypical conceptions. The effort of connecting space, education, imagination and rights allowed the NGO members to focus on policy advocacy. Their work embraces narratives emerging from within instead of prioritising hegemonic views. Departing from a conversation with Eliana, this paper inquires the role of narratives to rethink planning imagination and practice in contexts of favelas and urban peripheries of the Global South. Using theories from urban, decolonial and feminist scholars, I seek to navigate through Eliana's words and stories to discuss pathways that locate narratives in the center of knowledge production in urban planning. I address the recognition of spaces of insurgent citizenship in city making processes, and discuss what ‘decolonising planning imagination’ (Miraftab 2017) means in theory and practice in the context of Maré.

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Eliana Sousa Silva moved with her family from the State of Paraíba to the neighbourhood Maré in Rio de Janeiro when she was seven years old. She grew up in Nova Holanda, one of the sixteen favelas that compose Maré, a territory of almost 140 thousand residents. Motivated by her experience with lack of public services, such as sanitation, electricity and water provision, she took part in different social movements that were litigating rights and better urban conditions for the territory. From president of the residents association of Nova Holanda in 1984 to current director of the NGO Redes da Maré in 2021, Eliana dedicated her life to the territory of Maré and its inhabitants. Her work as a pedagogue, researcher and militant of rights aims to create an imaginary for Maré that is not associated with violence, scarcity and neglection. Rather, it opens to narratives that reconfigure the representation of the territory in light of its potentialities, legitimising the plurality of knowledges , memories and stories. These narratives have a pivotal role in the residents’ imagination, allowing understandings of Maré beyond stereotypical conceptions. The effort of connecting space, education, imagination and rights allowed the NGO members to focus on policy advocacy. Their work embraces narratives emerging from within instead of prioritising hegemonic views. Departing from a conversation with Eliana, this paper inquires the role of narratives to rethink planning imagination and practice in contexts of favelas and urban peripheries of the Global South. Using theories from urban, decolonial and feminist scholars, I seek to navigate through Eliana's words and stories to discuss pathways that locate narratives in the center of knowledge production in urban planning. I address the recognition of spaces of insurgent citizenship in city making processes, and discuss what ‘decolonising planning imagination’ (Miraftab 2017) means in theory and practice in the context of Maré.

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On February 10, 2004, Adrian Lozano sat down with Cherly Ganz and Peg Strobel to discuss his life in the context of the legendary Hull-House. It was only then that the Hull-House museum and archive had been reexamining their institutional processes of historical collection, valorization and narrativization. The Mexican community had been central to the Hull House, yet it had hardly been chronicled as part of its myth. An oral history of the Hull House, as well as a research project, was launched in an effort to expand the range of figures and objects in order to address those previously ‘outside history’. This was just another instance of Lozano having to perform as an outsider within.

Lozano's art and architecture help illustrate the cultural, territorial, and personal borders in his life. He navigated and challenged monocultural and monolingual mid-century Chicago. His work embodies what Gloria Anzaldua calls ‘the psychological and emotional states that occur when inhabiting these borders’.  In her seminal work on Borderlands, Chicana scholar Gloria Anzaldúa takes WEB Dubois notion of double consciousness and articulates it from a feminist and Chicanx perspective.  Under the guise of Mestizx Consciousness, Anzaldúa articulates how the Mestizx Consciousness is played out in matter. This paper will examine four objects of Adrian Lozano’s life and work which illustrate WEB Dubois and Gloria Anzaldua's notion of double consciousness from a Chicanx perspective. The paper begins with Lozano’s lost mural for the Juarez club at the Hull House as a point of departure. We then explore his subsequent work within Container Corporation of America in the company of artist Lee Lozano. Finally, we provide a close reading of his work adapting Pedro Ramirez Vazquez design for the Benito Juarez Community Academy and finalise with his work as an independent architect authoring the major landmarks of the Mexican community of Pilsen in central Chicago, as part of Adrian Lozano & Associates, by examining the Monumental Arch in Little Village.

These four material registers of Lozano’s life and work explore an understanding of difference, of how he negotiated between his insider and outsider status, and what his architecture can tell us about his capacity of operating through design, what Anzaldua would call "resonant forms of oppositional culture or consciousness within a matrix of domination".

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Pere Riera's (1945-2017) statement in his PhD (“To Impart is to Share, ETSAB, 1987) evidenced his pedagogical approach as tutor and co-coordinator of the first year experimental course during 1978-1980 in Vallès School of Architecture (ETSAV), which aimed a shift in architecture pedagogy from a practicing-after-theory towards a learning-by-doing approach. To Riera, architecture knowledge could not emerge from theory but from evidence and direct experiences over own’s body. Over years, this approach has experimented a gradual growth in the school, which under a younger generation of tutors like Coque Claret or Dani Calatayud included a dimension of sustainability and social awareness. Over the last decade, the academic achievements developed by ESTAV studios trespassed the boundaries of academia and aimed an impact in “the real world” with agreements with local communities and municipalities, and included the construction of community spaces, housing energetic refurbishment or improving street accessibility. As opposed to ETSAV’s progressive evolution, Barcelona School of Architecture (ETSAB), underwent a drastic protest against social welfare cutbacks in 2013. Both students and tutors claimed for a more committed social and political role of the school in the city, for which tested an exceptional “altered pedagogy” and developed an alternative Plan of Studies. Despite significant changes did not take place due to ETSAB’s conservative inertia nature of power relations ecosystem, the protest became the seed of “Arquitectos de Cabecera”, a studio unit that questions the traditional disciplinary roles and education assumptions and teaching methods. Their approach based on paying attention to immediate city needs and a socio-political awareness resulted in a short-term transformative impact in the city by supporting social movements and transforming heritage buildings against planned deterioration.These action pedagogies become the exemplification of Hakim Bey’s Temporary Autonomous Zone, in which tactical urban operations are camouflaged as harmless pedagogical exercises in the eyes of administration. Academia’s apparent neutrality, with an underlying social and political commitment, enhances the role of the architect as mediator and allows a unique opportunity to operate in the city. This paper examines the minor but relevant pedagogical shift of Barcelona public schools of towards pedagogies that include a more socially committed approach, include student’s direct experience as fundamental method for learning and aim a short-term direct impact in the city. Although similar approaches have a long tradition starting in the 20th Century, as analysed by Beatriz Colomina (Radical Pedagogies, 2015) and Awan, Schenider & Till (Spatial Agencies, 2011), in Barcelona participatory approaches have been largely perceived as “minor architecture” and ignored by academia, hidden behind the narrative of the role that ETSAB played in the so celebrated – and criticized – “Barcelona Model”. By the confrontation of reality outside of the white and predictable walls of academia, action pedagogies inevitably involve taking a stand. Thus, education becomes as political as the practice of architecture is. Students collaboration and cooperation in the studio – rather than usual competition for a higher recognition – enables to learn a number of different skills, such as conflict handling, divergences negotiation, ethical awareness or adaptation to unexpected and abrupt changes. Besides the fact that number of young architects’ professional cooperatives emerged from these academic studios – like Arqbag from ETSAV or Oasiurbà from ETSAB, the question that emerges is how academic pedagogies have an impact in further practice, whether architects should use different disciplinary tools in different scenarios and where are the limits of mutual impact between academia and the city that hosts it. ‍

Soil is a complex entity. In it multiple scales of time and matter converge. Being born from geological processes and the movement of the Earth’s crust, washed down to its mineral components, it is the container and sustainer of webs of relations, of living organisms, and the trace materials of their metabolisms. Following Bellacasa “it carries Earth’s material memory and that of its creatures”. But soil is not recognised as a living being, it is a non-entity, invisible, excluded, a commodified condition, a subcategory under the pinnacle of life - Man, the anthropos. As such put into its place in the order of being, its reality is one of extraction, of exploitation, of processes of industrial management of lifeworlds, and its continuous colonial destruction. Recognising soil is, thus recognising its blackness. Soil is blackness colonised by Man, appropriated and reappropriated in the processes of commodification, of making property, sold as resource, used for extraction and its life-giving labor. What if we could recognise soil as “beingness”? What if we could listen to the soil, to the non-human, more-than human, and not impose again the hierarchy of being, the subduction of the non-human under Man, but rather rethink the world and its relations from the position of soil? In such a reversal of perspective the paper takes Aflenz an der Sulm - a small peri-urban town in Southern Austria, close to the Slovenian border, as its point of departure. It will unpack and listen to the manifold complexities - i.e processes of commodification, agro-capitalist extraction, the material world of law and fascism, and the reproduction of whiteness in racial regimes of ownership, told by and through the relations of its soil with the human. Recognising its being in geological time frames, thus across human centuries, aims at troubling the idea of discrete events of history. Articulating soil rather gives witness to a fractured, disjunct, soiled continuity of practice, politics, of systemic violence enacted on and through the blackness of soil in the world of anthropocentric life, inhabiting what Moten and Harney call the broken. ‍