Dr  Leandro Minuchin - Research

Leandro's research focuses on the politics of construction and the role materials and local spatialities play in the consolidation of extended networks of solidarity and association. He investigates how social movements, construction firms, local agencies and developers use the moment of construction to assemble and project alternative urban futures. His recent research focuses on architectural thought in Buenos Aires by examining the role concrete imaginations played in the configuration of contrasting modernist political agendas.
 

There are four key themes that guide Leandra's research interests:

•     Politics of construction: materiality, social movements and local politics
•     Material imaginations: the role of construction in the crafting of urban futures in Latin America
•     Material histories: modern architecture, concrete and the invention of urban natures
•     New materialisms: assemblages, articulation and the moment of construction as theoretical fields 

New materialisms, material politics, urban social movements, material articulations and assemblages

Rapidly expanding metropolises, transformed by an intricate combination of complex infrastructural networks and the fragile proliferation of spontaneous structures of association, multiply across the Global South. For an ever-increasing urban population, cities appear as both an accelerated landscape, where visions of progress and development are dreamt and experienced and as a terrain for improvisation and adaptation, where the daily struggles to secure a form of urban presence and circulation are performed.

In this context, where urbanity and city life become salient and constitutive features of the social, understanding the tools, means and practices that articulate and sustain the socio-infrastructural networks that make the city, is paramount. For this reason, the studio proposes examining the role of materials and construction in the consolidation of urban forms of association and solidarities. It seeks to explore the richness and innovative quality of techno-popular knowledges involved in constructing and transforming urban spaces.

 
The aim of the studio is to develop practical solutions for the assembling of more egalitarian socio-material relations in cities of the global south. It will function as a node that will connect academic expertise and student participation with the work of social movements and public agencies involved in the development of new forms of territorialisation and the dissemination of novel constructive mechanisms.The studio is linked with the social movement GIROS, active in the city of Rosario, in the peripheral settlement of Nuevo Alberdi.

Funded by the Investing in Success grant, University of Mancheste. The opening workshop flyer is available here.