City and Anthropocene: Horizons of Urban Reconfiguration
Manoel Rodrigues Alves1, Julio Arroyo2
1Instituto de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, Universidade de São Paulo, Brasil mra@sc.usp.br https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6935-0477
2Universidad Nacional del Litoral, Santa Fe, Argentina jarroyo47@hotmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7852-1629
https://dx.doi.org/10.12795/astragalo.2025.i40.01
Certain moments in history are lived in a precipitate way, as if they were the vertigo produced by a sudden acceleration that blows apart arrangements that had until then remained relatively stable within their intrinsic complexity. When episodes of migrants and displaced people due to wars, famines, or despair repeat themselves; when extreme climatic phenomena multiply; and when scientific-technological developments signal a civilizational shift that compromises humanist ethics, the experience of living in a historical time of transition becomes forcefully established.
This time is that of contemporaneity, understood as a historical condition and a cultural framework. It reformulates problematics and introduces new themes of study, conditioning the revision of procedures and theoretical frameworks that appeared to be consolidated. The awareness of living in new eras opens hypotheses of transition toward a posthuman world in which the city and the territory, public space and social practices, architecture and the aesthetics of everyday life are confronted as the end of a historical cycle, giving rise to a different state.
This time of contemporaneity is historically determined by financial, transnational, neoliberal capitalism; by environmental and humanitarian crises; by the intensification of inequality and inequity; and by the development of technology and digital culture. The processes that constitute it affect the planet and humanity as a whole, which is not in itself new, were it not for the fact that now the anthropic factors are decisive. Therefore, epistemologies, heuristics, and axiologies established until now prove to be insufficient and force us to look with renewed attention at the world in transition that we face.
Giorgio Agamben refers to contemporaneity as something that, while inscribed in chronological time, bursts within it and transforms it. He adds that this urgency is untimeliness, the anachronism that allows us to grasp our time in the form of a “too soon” that is also a “too late”… (Agamben 2008, 16). The contemporary subject is obliged to
…perceive in the darkness of the present that light which seeks to reach us and cannot do so; this is what it means to be contemporary. It means being capable not only of fixing one’s gaze on the darkness of the epoch, but also of perceiving in that darkness a light which, directed toward us, moves infinitely far away from us (Agamben 2008, 13).
The contemporary subject seems to be compelled to live out of sync and yet clings to that which confounds and overwhelms them, glimpsing in the complexities of the present some truth which, nevertheless, they cannot discern, since an intelligent man may hate his time, but understands in each case that he belongs to it irrevocably; he knows he cannot escape his time (Agamben 2008).
Trapped in this time, it becomes necessary to pay attention to two ongoing processes that synthesize major critical lines of contemporaneity: on the one hand, ecosystemic alterations, observable in natural environments threatened by anthropic action; and on the other, the social and cultural transformations of the human world due, among other causes, to the development of digital technology.
Expanded cities, understood as urban territories, are proposed as the fields of observation of the present. They are the spaces where contemporaneity is dramatized with greatest intensity, but also spaces of new opportunities to rethink the meaning of emancipation and buen vivir. In cities, half of humanity is concentrated, major tendencies that foreshadow a change of epoch intersect, and existential crises take bodily form in everyday life. There, too, the intangible and volatile order of ideas intersects with the inertial order of physical things — contemporaneity.
Collapse
Through two systems, the ecological and the environmental, we arrive at the hypothesis of collapse, a notion that connotes rupture but also decline, exhaustion. If the term itself admits different lexical meanings, these multiply even more so when they refer to environmental, urban, and architectural critique. In the first case, collapse as rupture refers to an irreversible and abrupt failure of scarcely foreseeable consequences; in the second, to a process with the same outcome, but gradual. Accordingly, it becomes necessary to think, metaphorically but also materially, of the time of environmental and human collapse both as the instant of the break and as the duration of a passage toward another historical era. A manifestation of rupture may be an atmospheric or human catastrophe, implying collapse as the immediate and intense experience of the break. But the extensive informatization of processes so different yet so intimately affected —those related to social control, means of production, or commercial logistics— implies another notion of collapse, closer to a process underway, as diffuse in space as it is accelerated in time.
Carlos Taibo, after examining the concept of collapse across different disciplines, summarizes certain defining features of that notion, among which he mentions:
…a very strong blow that disrupts many relationships; the irreversibility of the ensuing process; profound alterations with respect to the satisfaction of basic needs; significant reductions in the size of the human population; a general loss of complexity in all spheres, accompanied by a growing fragmentation and a retreat of centralizing flows; the disappearance of previously existing institutions; and, finally, the breakdown of legitimizing ideologies and of many of the mechanisms of communication of the preceding order (Taibo 2019, 31).
Of the characteristics he identifies, irreversibility is particularly important when associated with technical processes such as digitalization. But this irreversibility also occurs when processes become normalised in a society whose negative effects, even when known, are tolerated. This could be the case of abusive extraction of natural resources, whose consequences seem remote to most people, absorbed in the contingencies of everyday life. The irreversible is then associated both with the definitive change that has taken place and with the gradual and unnoticed adaptation to that change.
Anthropic impact on the planet has been widely addressed from various disciplinary fields. There is broad agreement in identifying the risk of irreversible changes on a planetary scale that would put the very conditions of life into crisis. The greenhouse effect, the consequent climate change and global warming have generated a chain of systemic alterations such as loss of biodiversity, acidification and increase in sea levels, desertification of land, extreme climatic phenomena, etc., whose consequences are perceived within the limited temporal scale of a human life.
These processes are present in conceptual debates on the anthropocene (Latour 2017), capitalocene (Moore 2022), chthulucene (Haraway 2019), terms which, beyond the debate they have opened for more than two decades now, denounce the primacy of the human in the relation humanity/earth, culture/nature, society/environment. This primacy is deeply anchored in the metaphysics on which the Western edifice is raised, a metaphysics that needs to establish hierarchies and domains in order to construct the truth of the world. The ecological critique that has been denouncing the damage caused by humanity to the planet does not escape this metaphysical condition and is therefore neutralized and loses effectiveness, as the facts demonstrate. Consequently, a debate emerges, urged by the environmental crisis, recognizing several fronts and authors, some of whom are discussed here to place the question of collapses in context.
Bruno Latour recognizes the problem but proposes a new ethical and philosophical perspective that begins by overcoming the dichotomies and antinomies that have led us to understand nature as the subordinate term in the relation, due to the ontological superiority of the human. On the contrary, Latour proposes this relation as a continuity and synthesizes it in the notion of Gaia, an entity he describes as:
…an evolutionary system, a system composed, on one hand, of all living objects and, on the other, of their superficial environment: oceans, atmospheres, the Earth’s crust; the two parts being tightly coupled and inseparable. It is an emergent domain in the course of the reciprocal evolution of organisms and their environment over billions of years of life on Earth. In this system, the self-regulation of climate and of chemical composition is entirely automatic. Self-regulation emerges as the system evolves, which implies neither foresight, nor anticipation, nor teleology (Latour 2008, 155).
In Gaia there is no primacy of the human; nor of Nature (a human construct that reduces the natural to an available resource), but rather an entity external to the determinations of subjective intentionality, to the teleology of progress, and to instrumental reason. This understanding not only radically displaces the dichotomy but, more importantly, displaces the metaphysical centrality of the human. In doing so, it also distances itself from ecological critique, since, although it proposes actions of restoration and mitigation of the damage caused, it fails to be effective insofar as it remains trapped in the antinomy Man versus Nature which, precisely, is causal to the crisis.
In arguing for such a radical change in perspective, Latour achieves a better correspondence to the magnitude of the problem that Gaia faces, but this implies abandoning paradigms and advancing toward a transition to others yet to be discovered (Pardo 2011), a transition so deep that it demands the revision of all fields of knowledge constructed in modernity, from geology and biology to philosophy and the humanities, passing through engineering, technology, and the arts. These changes are necessary but unforeseeable in the current context of the rightward shift in international politics.
Jason Moore, while acknowledging the usefulness of the concept of the Anthropocene for questioning environmental problems, argues that it cannot adequately respond to them. He therefore introduces other lenses to explain the environmental crisis beyond what he calls Green Arithmetic, the idea that our histories can be narrated and understood as the sum of Humanity (or society) and Nature, or even Capitalism and Nature (Moore 2016, 2). He proposes the concept of the Capitalocene as the convergence of political power, natural resources, and capital accumulation in an unstable dialectical unity (Moore 2016, 4) that explains the current crisis.
Since the dawn of capitalism, Moore argues, the system has enacted a cheapening of nature in a twofold sense: first, by treating nature as an inexhaustible reservoir of resources whose sheer abundance supposedly makes them low-cost; and second, by degrading the ethical and political status of nature and, by extension, of certain human beings who are themselves pushed into a condition of inferiority comparable to that of raw resources (Moore 2016, 2). According to Moore, historical processes such as imperialism, capitalism, industrialization, commodification, patriarchy, and racism (Moore 2016, 4) produced this devalued understanding of both nature and particular human lives. This in turn enabled capitalism to develop by layering human and natural processes on top of one another.
Capitalism was premised on excluding most humans from humanity: Indigenous peoples, enslaved Africans, almost all women, and even many white-skinned men (Slavs, Jews, Irish). They were classified as part of nature—alongside trees, soils, and rivers—and treated accordingly (Moore 2022, 79).
Moore argues that this understanding of the human as separate from nature—and, within it, of certain human beings as excluded in turn—proved highly productive for the development of the system over the last 500 years. Hence there is an inescapable relation between environmental change and the socio-political processes of class, race, gender, sexuality, and nationality, which can be understood as inherent to nature (Moore 2022, 78). For the author, the present moment requires thinking about:
...how to move from doing the political ecology of colonialism, neoliberalism, or some other social process to understanding those social processes that are central to modernity—such as capital accumulation, colonialism, nation-building, and the formation of the nation-state—as socioecological processes and projects in their own right (Moore 2022, 108).
To this end, he requires recognizing that the world’s problems have not been caused by generic humanity, as is inferred from the concept of the Anthropocene, but by capitalism, which acts not only upon nature but upon the fabric of life—a notion with which he encompasses everything humans do within a larger totality, while recognizing that the human species has a high capacity to produce environments, to the point of resembling biological and geological processes. By contrast, looking at the crisis from the Capitalocene entails adopting new ethical and political conceptions that, taking as references environmentalist, feminist, postcolonial, and trade-union movements that represent positions of resistance and confrontation with the system, foster, from care work and reproductive work proper, the integration of a world-ecology.
Donna Haraway (2019), for her part, proposes the notion of the Chthulucene to explain the interrelation and reciprocal responsibility of species within the fabric of life, among which, without any hierarchy that sets it apart, is the human. She invites us to understand the world as a web of symbiotic and tentacular relations between humans and non-humans at a moment when life on Earth is under threat. She proposes the concept of sym-poiesis, implicit in that of the Chthulucene, which means making and feeling with others, among others, thereby denying the autopoiesis of beings. The term is not new, but, added to others such as the cyborg, a hybrid specimen of human and cybernetic, it opens the possibility of thinking a transhuman condition. If we add to this feminist criticism of which she is leading figure, Haraway becomes a multifaceted and assertive intellectual reference for younger generations who no longer find in fixed categories and dialectical methods a valid form of critique. Here too, a profound ethical and epistemological change is necessary, but the post-ideological strategies for moving from discourse to action remain unresolved.
An autopoietic Gaia, a world-ecology, a multispecies world are some of the notions that accumulate in favor of a new academic construct to confront the environmental side of collapse. These notions have in common that human history is measured alongside a history of nonhumans on the same ontological plane, which must begin to be recognized in order to act accordingly.
The expansion of information sciences, cybernetics, and computing has triggered a civilizational turn that demands a revision of the status of the real and of the physical condition of reality in view of the possibility of another world that alters the ways people relate to one another and to the things of the material world. The coupling of these techno-scientific developments also enters into synergy with those of other fields of knowledge such as neuroscience, quantum physics, and nanotechnologies, whose effects are amplified, significantly altering the parameters of the real.
The speed with which these technologies have spread across the world by means of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its devices in networks that cover the planet is striking. In fact, the possibility that the concept of the real expands to accept that life—human and non-human—can unfold not only in current reality but also in an expanded one and even in another, virtual one, is quite concrete. The experience of ubiquity and the virtuality of relations expose people to dystopian and dyschronic situations that require renewed perceptual, cognitive, and evaluative competencies on the part of subjects.
This accelerated expansion of digital technologies, like financial capital, ignores political borders and reaches vast social bodies indiscriminately in all the planet’s geocultural regions. Large population groups, involved in their own socioeconomic and cultural processes, incorporate—or aspire to incorporate—digital media, but the result is inevitably the production of new forms of inequity and inequality, on the one hand, and cultural conflict, on the other, with particular impact in less developed countries.
The extensive and intensive diffusion of the digital through networks, in turn, has modified the culture of dwelling due to equally expanded notions of space and time. In everyday life, people move back and forth between the extremes of Cartesian and cybernetic space and between chronological and incidental time, implying alternating experiences that, more often than not, occur unnoticed. These experiences become naturalized and socially legitimized, stimulated by hegemonic discourses that promote individualism and the primacy of the private sphere. Against this backdrop of generalized acceptance, the irruption of artificial intelligence—especially in its self-generative versions—produced an unprecedented cognitive explosion.
Eric Sadin views this phenomenon with concern and argues that this technology is far more than a mere resource; it comes to constitute a new metaphysical foundation of human existence. He puts it as follows:
There is a phenomenon destined to revolutionize our existences from end to end. It crystallized barely a decade ago. It concerns a change in the status of digital technologies—more precisely, a change in the status of one of their branches, the most sophisticated, which takes on a function we had never thought to assign to it: that of enunciating the truth (Sadin 2020, 17).
The capacity of computers to handle quantities of data that are ungraspable for the human mind and to process them with unusual speed so as to generate an unsuspected production of knowledge in the form of texts, images, or sounds leads him to suppose that:
The digital erects itself as an aletheic power—an intelligence devoted to exposing aletheia, truth, in the sense defined by Greek philosophy as unveiling—an organ enabled to appraise the real more reliably than we ourselves, as well as to reveal dimensions hitherto hidden from our consciousness (Sadin 2020, 17).
Such a situation has been possible because these transformations have taken an anthropomorphic path by imitating the neural networks of the human brain. The developments achieved have meant that technology exceeds the condition of a prosthesis that augments human capacities to become a possible substitute for cognitive capacities themselves, even going beyond consciousness.
Placed in the dominant context of neoliberalism, this technology becomes a technoliberalism, a techno-ideology that confuses cerebral processes with socioeconomic logics (Sadin 2020, 70). Sadin introduces a differentiated angle into the already challenging condition of the digital—and in particular of self-generative algorithmic intelligence—of constituting a new axiomatics of the real. Faced with this situation, he proposes expressing dissent and generating counter-imaginaries that are satisfied with the contingency of becoming, as opposed to the will to exercise integral dominion over the course of things (Sadin 2020, 43). This proposal implies new political approaches to confront a posthumanism that the author regards as a historical devaluation that compromises the very meaning of humanity.
Rosi Braidotti (2015), rather than perceiving the present as a loss of anthropocentrism grounded in classical humanist thought focused on the individual human subject, offers the possibility of thinking a relational and collective posthuman subjectivity, with which it becomes possible to reconstruct more flexible and multiple identities.
The environmental crisis, social movements, digital technologies, bioengineering, and other equally disruptive developments have generated intersectional problem fields so interwoven that they do not allow us to distinguish—either in their causes or in their effects—the human from the non-human. This demands adopting an epistemology of the multiple and political practices alternative to those admitted by representative systems, capable of prioritizing the performativity of direct action in the becoming of processes.
Braidotti’s feminism assigns a special place to questions of gender, women’s rights, and the ethics of care in facing, with optimism, the critical condition of a contemporaneity that fits neither the categories of modernity nor the relativism of last century’s postmodern critique. It is necessary to make a more relational and less categorical observation of processes, with the aim of generating an affirmative politics and an ethics of life that articulates the complexity and diversity of the contemporary condition, far from any nostalgia for a humanism she considers obsolete.
Between Sadin’s warnings—seeing artificial intelligence as the alienation of the human—and Braidotti’s activism—holding anthropocentrism to be inevitably surpassed—there extends a dense debate whose terms call into question the fundamental concepts of the West. In the face of this suspicion of the exhaustion of the West and the consequent civilizational collapse on the horizon, different forms of ancestral knowledge of Indigenous peoples gain strength, subsisting beyond and in spite of the great structures of Western humanism.
Ailton Krenak (2019) contributes a different and alternative worldview, centered on the harmony of life in which every being is part of a living totality, fully interconnected. In that fullness of existence, the human being lives in community with other beings, including non-humans, without the need or will to exercise dominion over the world. The position is so distant from the Western, modern understanding of human existence in the world that it also demands a new ethics. The author’s Indigenous condition and his Amazonian origin provide him with a legitimacy and credibility that renew the hope that collapse can be avoided. In turn, in affinity, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (1984), grounded in the geoculture of the Bolivian Altiplano, recovers and disseminates the concept of Vivir Bien, centered on respect for and enjoyment of communal life, contemplation, and the unfolding of life in accordance with nature—again, without aspirations of domination or control. What is interesting about these worldviews is that, because they live in fine correlation with nature, collapse is not conceived, since human action is not oriented toward practices that produce harm.
These voices multiply and amplify, proposing ways of life that, for the broad population majorities reached by the transformations under way, entail drastic changes whose feasibility is doubtful insofar as they require an ethical and epistemological scaffolding not accessible to most. Boaventura de Sousa Santos and María Paula Meneses (2014) recover these knowledges that subsist despite the histories of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism—the three pillars with which Europe controlled the world and that have enabled the construction of a dominant epistemology. Santos and Meneses focus attention on the ways in which ancestral and Western knowledge are articulated beyond the abyssal line that separates valid knowledges from those that are denied. He advocates an ecology of knowledges whose integration is only possible in the South.
Humanist collapse thus presents itself as evidence of exhaustion, but also as the possibility of recovering knowledges from varied provenances, articulated and perhaps paradoxically facilitated by digital technologies.
Is there a particular place from which to generate critical action that could halt collapse? The Global South immediately emerges, with its own force, as both a possibility and a constraint for speculative thought and alternative practices. The strongest possibility derives from the intrinsic conflictivity in countries generally grouped under the category of the Global South, where inequalities and inequities reach higher levels. There, the system’s structures are more flexible, allowing processes of different nature and scale—from the planetary to the local, from the structural to the conjunctural—to articulate, giving rise to hybridizations and cross-breeding that are already part of their political and cultural history. This conflictivity is likewise a condition of possibility for the emergence of practices of contestation and resistance within a climate of urgencies and open debates, of activism and protest that, nonetheless, do not achieve sufficient organicity to bring about significant change.
At the same time, these hybridizations and cross-breeding, understood as multiplicities that resist antinomies and dialectics, are possible anywhere and at any moment in which systemic conflictivity intensifies to the point of mobilizing action. What is particular to the transformations underway is that these actions no longer depend exclusively on categorically determined situations but on conjunctural situations that produce effects in the becoming of processes. These are actions that oscillate among different concepts of the real, facilitated by technological supports and new conceptual corpora that allow us to look beyond the human, inaugurating horizons of possibility from which to think—with concern but without fear—about the possible collapses of contemporaneity.
In this context, ecosystemic and humanist collapse implies an epistemological turn associated with reflection on the foundations, limits, and procedures of knowledge. It entails a displacement in the way knowledge is produced and legitimized across different fields of knowing. This issue of Astrágalo highlights not only what we know, but how we know it, proposing approaches contextualized by the notion of the Global South, which consider knowledge as something not separated from the social, political, and cultural context in which it is produced.
Within a framework of situated knowledge, the ecosystemic and humanist turn does not deny scientific or factual knowledge but reinterprets it, underscoring how it is influenced by historical, social, and cultural context. Aníbal Quijano (2000) differentiates colonialism—a specific historical event of conquest and territorial domination—from coloniality—a pattern of power, knowledge, and social classification that continues to sustain relations of domination after the end of formal colonialism—and from the coloniality of power, a process by which colonial power structures continue operating in modernity.
In this sense, Western epistemological hegemony is expressed, among other aspects, in the reproduction of models imposed or adopted in countries of the Global South on the basis of referents established by the Global North. According to Farrés Delgado and Matarán (2012), territorial coloniality manifests in three interrelated dimensions: the coloniality of territorial being, of territorial knowledge, and of territorial power. Likewise, for Walter Mignolo (2007), decolonization is not only a theoretical matter but also a praxis and a political action that questions structures of knowledge, power, and violence, encompassing practices of resistance and re-existence, as advocated by Ailton Krenak and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, who distinguish epistemologies of the Eurocentric North from those of the Global South and highlight the need to rethink modes of knowledge production in order to transform practices and forms of knowing.
Confronting ecosystemic and humanist collapse is an opportunity to rethink knowledge not as something given but as a situated practice that opens possibilities for new ways of understanding and transforming reality. Contemporary urban processes require the interweaving of perspectives from different fields, exploring counterpoints and seeking to establish an analytical dialogue around the diverse processes of the production and formation of space. In this way, theoretical frameworks related to tensions and linearities in the re-signification of urban space are interrogated, expanding the understanding of its processes of production and configuration.
The contemporary city—an expression of the power of globalized capitalism—is produced through the displacement of the triad city–work–politics toward city–management–business. We ask: what are the possibilities and limitations of the South in the face of the complexity of contemporary trends that entail a significant civilizational transformation? To what extent does the Global South propose, or can it propose, a situated epistemology adequate to confront the challenges of the contemporary moment? What emerges from this turn as the development of such an epistemology in relation to the values, elements, and procedures of design disciplines such as Architecture?
Attentive to an ecology of knowledges of the Global South—both possible and necessary—the texts in this issue of Astrágalo develop a transversal vision of urban space, its transformations, and its multiple dimensions. In a context of irreversible changes, more or less general and abrupt, Astrágalo proposes four reading “turns”: “Architecture, Limits, and Transformations,” “Architecture, Gender, and Otherness,” “Architecture, Nature, and Culture,” and “Architecture, Design, and Society.”
In the first section, Beatriz Toscano presents the article Can Architecture repair the planet?: fractures, discontinuities, synchronies and other epistemological dislocations necessary for the post-carbon city, in which she interrogates the limits of architecture, proposing the abandonment of utopian projections of a decarbonized future. Enrique Ferreras Cid, in Dialécticas de la Autenticidad: neopopulismo arquitectónico en América Latina contemporánea y estrategias de legitimación global, examines contemporary transformations of Latin American architectural practice at a moment when categories of cultural resistance have been transmuted into devices of symbolic accumulation, revealing how the modernity–tradition dialectic has become a simulacrum in which local specificity functions as a communicative effect. He therefore proposes the concept of americopolitanismo, through which he articulates three analytical dimensions: the systematic inversion of the categories of critical regionalism; the mechanisms for producing authenticity as a commodity; and the operations that neutralize cultural difference by means of its global codification. Renan Duarte Specian, João Marcos de Almeida Lopes, and Henrique Duarte Ferrari, in Vivência Mineral: uma reflexão sobre a produção das cidades no Sul Global a partir da cadeia produtiva da indústria da construção, investigate how architecture is produced today and to what extent the exploitation of labor and of nature is tied to a colonizing mode of thought, within which the construction industry’s supply chain becomes a useful tool for the Capitalocene.
In the second turn, Javiera Francisca Palacios Olivares publishes Territorios no Binarios: hacia una espacialidad disidente desde el Sur Global, a text that proposes the non-binary territory as a critical tool for rethinking and transforming our spaces, understanding territory as a living entity grounded in interdependence, care, and collective responsibility. Using a qualitative methodology, she explores two cases—Valparaíso and the Mapuche Wallmapu (Chile)—to examine dissident territorial expressions that resist logics of control and homogenization. For his part, Mathias Velasco, in La muerte del otro o la externalización del riesgo, problematizes collective insensitivity to global crises and the threat of extinction, analyzing how philosophical-existential dynamics become intrinsic conditions of modern capitalism and ecological colonialism. The article presents empirical data and explores how fragmentation and territorial domination have served as tools of internal colonialism and the marginalization of Indigenous peoples, with architecture and urbanism playing a key role in the materialization of these forms of violence.
In turn 3, ‘Arquitectura, Naturaleza y Cultura’, Carlos Gómez Sierra signs the article Esteros del Iberá. Entre la poesía ambiental y la práctica posthumana, in which he explores this ecosystem as a laboratory for examining connections among ecology, culture, and nature. Drawing on the metaphysical and surrealist poetry of Francisco Madariaga, he strains interconnections and transfers between the human and the non-human, and between global theories and local poetics, which are presented as possible strategies for a better understanding of current phenomena from a local perspective. Sylvie Nguyen, in The Hybrid Network Model for a Water Ecosystems Paradigm Shift in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta, analyzes the transformations resulting from human action in the Mekong Delta territory, using cartographic analysis to identify dominant territorial configurations. The work reviews socio-ecological systems as instruments for fostering resilience through the integration of livelihoods, infrastructures, and natural ecosystems. In the last text of this section, Alternativas relacionais entre espécie vegetal e humana para una continuidad sob una perspectiva pós-humanista e ecológica, Juan Carlos Zambrano Pilatuña, Indira Yajaira Salazar Silva, and Serafina Amoroso analyze, from a transdisciplinary standpoint, the relationship between the human species and the plant world in the context of the Anthropocene, proposing three critical strategies that configure spaces of resistance against the instrumentalization of nature; they also offer platforms for imagining fairer futures: the use of endemic vegetation, the application of the principle of minimal intervention, and the integration of ancestral knowledges.
Finally, in the fourth turn, Isabela Batista Pires and Anja Pratschke, in the text Participação Social como Sistema Adaptativo: reflexões acerca de uma ecologia autopoética participativa para o planejamento urbano, analyze social participation in urban planning from the perspective of systemic complexity, with an emphasis on the concept of autopoiesis. The proposal, therefore, is to understand social participation as an autopoietic system, capable of regenerating collective practices and fostering autonomous citizenship, contributing to the implementation of a socioecological transformation. In the last text of this issue, El Viable Inédito: directrices para enfrentar el colapso eco sistémico y social en el Frente Fluvial de Asunción, Juan Carlos Cristaldo Monis de Aragao, Silvia Paola Arévalo Ferreira, María Auxiliadora Benítez Fernández, and Guillermo Bretes present guidelines for resilient and sustainable urbanization in Asunción based on two case studies: the fluvial front of the city of Villa Hayes and the sector between Atá Pitá Punta and the Puerto Viejo of Asunción, on the left bank of the Paraguay River. In both cases, they problematize an unsustainable urbanism marked by the privatization of access to the river and the destruction of wetlands. Methodologically, the article uses systematic mapping of the two cases to identify key trends and processes and to propose guidelines for the development of sustainable urban projects.
Good reading.