Papers by Nerea Calvillo
Diseña, 2017
Despite the fact that architecture has always been linked to issues such as hygiene, shelter, wel... more Despite the fact that architecture has always been linked to issues such as hygiene, shelter, well-being and physical protection, the concept of care has only been incorporated into the concerns of architecture in recent years. Tender Infrastructures is a pedagogical experiment carried out at the University of Alicante, which takes as a frame of reference the work of some authors from the studies of science, technology and society (STS), feminist studies, posthumanism, and especially the ideas of María Puig de la Bellacasa in what she calls ‘Matters of care’. Appropriating this frame, this experiment sets out to show that care is an activity directly associated with design and the sociomaterial networks in which architecture is directly involved.
The sociological Reivew, 2019
The air is, in many urban contexts, polluted. Governments and institutions monitor particles and ... more The air is, in many urban contexts, polluted. Governments and institutions monitor particles and gas concentrations to better understand how they perform in the light of air quality guidance and legislation, and to make predictions in terms of future environmental health targets. The visibility of these data is considered crucial for citizens to manage their own health, and a proliferation of new informational forms and apps have been created to achieve this. And yet, beyond everyday decisions (when to use a mask or when to do sports outdoors), it is not clear whether current methods of engaging citizens produce behavioural change or stronger citizen engagement with air pollution. Drawing on the design, construction and ethnography of an urban infrastructure to measure, make visible and remediate particulate matter (PM2.5) through a water vapour cloud that we installed at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017, we examined the effects and affects of producing a public space that allows for physical interaction with data. In Yellow Dust, data from PM2.5 were translated into mist, the density of which was responsive to the number of particles suspended in the air. Data were made sense/ible by the changing conditions of the air surrounding the infrastructure, which can be experienced in embodied, collective and relational ways: what we call 'molecular intimacies'. By reflecting on how the infrastructure facilitated new modes of sensing data, we consider how 'data intimacies' can re-specify action by producing different forms of engagement with air pollution.
Social Studies of Science, 2018
In Madrid, as in many European cities, air pollution is known about and made accountable through ... more In Madrid, as in many European cities, air pollution is known about and made accountable through techno-scientific monitoring processes based on data, and the toxicity of the air is defined through epidemiological studies and made political through policy. In 2009, Madrid's City Council changed the location of its air quality monitoring stations without notice, reducing the average pollution of the city and therefore provoking a public scandal. This scandal challenged the monitoring process, as the data that used to be the evidence of pollution could not be relied on anymore. To identify the characteristics of some of the diverse forms of public's participation that emerged, I route theories of environmental sensing from STS and feminist theory through the notion of attuned sensing. Reading environmental sensing through processes of attunement expands the ways in which toxicity can be sensed outside of quantitative data. This mode of sensing recognizes how the different spontaneous attunements to and with air pollution and the scandal acknowledged Madrid's chemical infrastructure, rendering visible qualitative conditions of toxicity. This mode of sensing politicized the toxicity of the air not through management or policy making, nor only through established forms environmental activism, but through contagion and accumulation of the different forms of public participation. All together, they made air pollution a matter of public concern. They also redistributed the actors, practices and objects that make the toxicity not only knowable, but also accountable, and most importantly, they opened up spaces for citizen intervention.
Social Studies of Science, 2018
Toxicity has become a ubiquitous, if uneven, condition. Toxicity can allow us to focus on how for... more Toxicity has become a ubiquitous, if uneven, condition. Toxicity can allow us to focus on how forms of life and their constituent relations, from the scale of cells to that of ways of life, are enabled, constrained and extinguished within broader power systems. Toxicity both disrupts existing orders and ways of life at some scales, while simultaneously enabling and maintaining ways of life at other scales. The articles in this special issue on toxic politics examine power relations and actions that have the potential for an otherwise. Yet, rather than focus on a politics that depends on the capture of social power via publics, charismatic images, shared epistemologies and controversy, we look to forms of slow, intimate activism based in ethics rather than achievement. One of the goals of this introduction and its special issue is to move concepts of toxicity away from fetishized and evidentiary regimes premised on wayward molecules behaving badly, so that toxicity can be understood in terms of reproductions of power and justice. The second goal is to move politics in a diversity of directions that can texture and expand concepts of agency and action in a permanently polluted world.
The cosmopolitical proposal has pushed social sciences and the humanities to re-think our co-habi... more The cosmopolitical proposal has pushed social sciences and the humanities to re-think our co-habitation with non-humans. But what is at stake when those entities invited to partake in our social life threaten to annihilate it? We attempt to enrich a cosmopolitics of the urban by thinking how tsunamis and atmospheric pollution, or water and air in their excessive and unwanted condition, are projected, managed and contained to make urban life possible, through the inquiry of two planning documents. We propose that these entities suggest two different forms of conviviality with non-humans: territorial and tactical cosmopolitics.
Public Culture, Volume 25, Number 2, 2013
In a series of groundbreaking studies conducted in the late 1930s at the Iowa Child Welfare Resea... more In a series of groundbreaking studies conducted in the late 1930s at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, the émigré German psychologist Kurt Lewin and his graduate student Ronald Lippitt transformed the relationship between social-scientific experimentation and political design. In the controlled, confined space of the laboratory they were able to produce, they claimed, distinct political 'climates'. Authoritarian, laissez-faire and, most precarious and precious of all, democratic 'atmospheres' were the observable effect of subjecting small groups of children to different styles of 'leadership' under artificial conditions of work-play. In this essay, we reconstruct the practical set-up that allowed Lewin and Lippitt to render political forms observable and manipulable under experimental conditions. We will analyze the physical configuration and material furnishings of the experimental setting, as well as the self-affected practices of 'leadership' that the experimenters deployed in their attempts to change the political valence of groups. The discovery of a set of technical procedures for the realization of localized but tangible forms of democratic life was a startling and welcome discovery in the bleak years of totalitarian ascendancy. We conclude by revisiting the significance of these experiments for our understanding of how the social sciences can generate spaces and situations of political experimentation.
Other writings by Nerea Calvillo
The analysis, management, and interaction with air pollution data has been generally relegated to... more The analysis, management, and interaction with air pollution data has been generally relegated to experts based at scientific or government institutions. There is an increasing need to make such air-related data public; where air-related data has been obtained visualizations have emerged all over the world dealing with air quality representation. The aim of this paper is to make a historical review of air quality cartographies and then to analyze these visualizations from different perspectives. Our objective is to deploy this review and analysis to cover the following topics: To whom is the information addressed and toward what purpose? Which kind of graphic and physical interfaces are being used? What are their properties, opportunities, and shortcomings in terms of communication effectiveness?
Videos by Nerea Calvillo
This presentation at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard aims to open up other ways of takin... more This presentation at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard aims to open up other ways of taking air quality into account from an architecture perspective, questioning what is it at stake from a conceptual, technical and design point of view. Thinking with the air will enable us to challenge notions of sustainability, public space, digital infrastructures or toxic environments, through steel boxes, bodies, markets, fines, maps and many other agents of the aerial socio-technical assemblage.Innovation occurs on multiple scales, frequently crosses disciplines, and occasionally changes lives, cities, and culture. It is not a science, but requires design skills and must be informed by an eye for opportunity. "Innovate," a noontime talk series, features 20-minute presentations followed by discussions with faculty and students. Moderated by Iñaki Abalos, Chair of the Department of Architecture.
This presentation at TEDx Madrid presents the the sociotechnical assemblage of Madrid´s air.
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Papers by Nerea Calvillo
Other writings by Nerea Calvillo
Videos by Nerea Calvillo