Inhabiting a field of shades

Abstract

The climatic mutation of extreme heat has plunged modern cities into their greatest design crisis in centuries. This mutation challenges our cultural conceptions of urban habitability and demands a profound shift in our conceptual and political institutions. What is the role of the humanities in this context? My recent ethnographic work seeks to reverse the technocratic trend of seeking quick techno-fixes. In an era of urgency, how can we prioritize collective thinking, when reflection is often dismissed as a hindrance to decision-making? How can we shape future urban spaces without imposing a singular vision, accounting instead for the multiplicity of human and non-human life?

As I see it, we must reclaim experimentation and ways of ‘groping in the dark’ to reimagine future habitability. One such space is the Department of Umbrology, a speculative institution for the study of and intervention in the urban life in the shades. This project unites Barcelona-based partners across humanities, architecture, arts, and environmental sciences: the CareNet and DARTS groups (UOC), Arquitectura de Contacte, Nusos Coop, and the Laboratori de Pensament Lúdic. Beginning in January 2026, through a series of seminars, multimodal workshops and a festival the project collectively wishes to work out ‘darkness’ of the present: highlighting intergenerational and interspecies knowledge to reclaim the popular sovereignty of shades and the protection they offer in a changing climate.

Speaker

Tomás Criado is an anthropologist and STS scholar, especially interested in urban environmental phenomena. He works as a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the CareNet group of the Social and Cultural Transformations Interdisciplinary Research Centre (TRÀNSIC) at the Open University of Catalonia. In his ethnographic and public engagement work, he has inquired on different forms of material and knowledge politics in environments where care is invoked as a mode of urban intervention: either as a peculiar form of techno-scientific activism (democratising knowledge, design practices and infrastructures) or as a practice of articulating peculiar ecologies of support (accessible and late life urbanism, urban heat mitigation plans, multispecies architecture).

Chair/discussant: Dr Angela Marques Filipe (Sociology, Durham University). Email: angela.m.filipe@durham.ac.uk.

The Zoom link will be circulated closer to the event. If you have any access requirements, please get in touch with us at imh.events@durham.ac.uk.

Please note that this event is free to attend.

This talk is organised by the Institute for Medical Humanities' Weather, Climate, and Health Research Theme, co-led by: Jed Stevenson (Anthropology), Maximilian Hepach (Geography) and Angela Marques Filipe (Sociology).