The Logic of the Lure

The gender studies and exploration of spaces associated with identities different from the hegemonic ones carried out by authors such as Bloomer or Beatriz Colomina (Sexuality and Space, 1992), created the ideal context for authors such as John Paul Ricco to take the minor as a path of study within the architecture and theory of space. Ricco is a professor in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, a graduate in art history and theorist, whose interdisciplinary research draws connections between art and architecture of the last century and contemporary ones. He appears as one of the first authors to establish connections and draw attention to issues related to space, geography and architecture within queer studies and HIV politics in the 1990s[1] Archived June 30, 2020 at the Wayback Machine. Influenced during his doctorate by authors such as Colomina and Bloomer,[14]​ he takes the concept of the minor of the latter and develops it with new nuances, dimensions and references in his first book The Logic of the Lure (2002). Still as a doctoral student, he wrote a first version of the text Jacking-off a Minor Architecture (1992), which was framed within a seminar focused on the “dedomestication” of architecture. In this writing, the author uses the concept of the minor to break binaries such as the public-private, and proposes the dark rooms "Dark Room (sexuality)") of the gay bars of the 90s as minor spaces: the collective articulation of these rooms, their “dedomestication” of sexuality and architecture, the politics of the deterritorialized bodies that occupy them, break with the categories and typologies established by hegemonic architecture, becoming minor spaces. In this first approach by the author to minor architectures, he defines them as intermediate zones, corridors that are never completely outside the major architecture, despite the fact that in his later development of the term he states them as the minor as the architectural Outside. In his 2002 book, The Logic of The Lure, the first chapter titled Minor establishes the theoretical bases of the minor architecture proposed by Ricco, reformulated with respect to those proposed 10 years earlier. Starting from a relational argument based on authors such as Foucault or Maurice Blanchot, he develops concepts such as the Outside, the Other "Other (philosophy)") or the virtual. Extrapolating this relational definition of the Self to architecture, its minor architectures appear: "Architecture aside/next to architecture is what I call minor architecture, architecture that is neither the interior of architecture nor the exterior, but architecture outside of architecture—the architectural Outside."[15]​.

Like Bloomer's development, post-structuralist ideas and materials are the basis and foundation of the minor, where Deleuze takes special relevance when Ricco assimilates the concept of minor with that of virtual, making minor architecture something imperceptible, unverifiable and indeterminate. If there is a difference with respect to Jennifer Bloomer, it is the very materialization of these minor spaces: while for the former the use of abject materials and the construction of objects that are visually external to the bases of the discipline are a manifestation of the minor character,[16]​ Ricco speaks of the imperceptibility of these spaces because they operate through the logic of spatial deterritorialization, this virtuality is what gives critical capacity to a minor architecture.

Towards a Minor Architecture

In 2012, architect and professor Jill Stoner published Towards a Minor Architecture, a book in which, by eliminating the four great myths of architecture (interior-exterior dichotomy, the autonomy of the object, the heroism of the architect and the culture-nature binomial), she advocates for an architectural practice that is born of collective resistance and desire. The book was published translated into Spanish in 2018 by fellow architect Lucía Jalón Oyarzun.

Stoner relies on the literature and thought of the century (Borges, Paul Klee, Walter Benjamin, Foucault, Agamben) with a discourse whose expressiveness and terminology correspond to those initiated by Bloomer three decades ago, but which serve as a point of support from which to propose a practice that deals with the ruins of the century. The spaces or constructions that he proposes as minor architectures are mostly literary spaces, spaces of seclusion, or both; What these minor architectures reveal is the intention of escape, the desire for resistance: they are the lines of flight proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, those that connect the current with the space of possibilities. The ultimate objective of Stoner's book is, in his own words, a more political practice of architecture, which leaves behind the political and economic powers that maintain relations of complicity with major architectures (those of the State and economic powers).[18]​ In the development of minor architectures as anonymous, Stoner's approach goes further than Bloomer, putting in check the need for the architect understood as an academic qualification. Minor architectures undo the architectural object as well as the subject of major architecture, the architect; Its authorship lies in the collective nature of the relationships that continually develop in space.

The image of the architect as the technical planner who has power over the territory and what happens in it has been maintained for a long time, and it is necessary to begin to focus on the minor.

Like Bloomer's proposal in the 90s, Stoner's text has provoked a new search for that minor character in the current context, where concepts such as Foucault's biopolitics or Agamben's bare life are still equally present. The result of this search generates proposals of a very similar nature to those raised 30 years ago: movements driven by protests from the groups that form the base within power structures[21]​[22]​ or situations of physical or political confinement.[23]​.

Other proposals that arise from an analysis of Jill Stoner's text and Oyarzun's translation and work argue about the potential of the entire theoretical and literary body of “Towards a Minor Architecture” to lay the foundations for a new practice of architectural intervention (rehabilitation, restoration)[24]​ or as a theoretical basis for a feminist architecture.[25]​.

Exception and rebel body

The translation of the book Towards a Minor Architecture into Spanish was carried out by the architect Lucía Jalón Oyarzun, also author of the prologue. Oyarzun's doctoral thesis, titled Exception and rebellious body: the political as a generator of a minor architecture,[26] tries to articulate a minor architecture very focused on the body and its power, concepts linked to the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. The development of this architecture subject to the other body, where the need for the rebellious body is so present, as a spatial concept rather than a constructive one, puts the author's developments in line with those of John Paul Ricco.

Minor architectures, defined and understood in plural by their own multiple configuration, often go unnoticed and are enriched by remaining open. Their potential lies, therefore, in the order of becoming, in their movements and the flows that they make possible, regardless of the final results in purely architectural matters, and in what refers to the technical.

Recognizing emergency points "Emergency (philosophy)") by expanding reality means understanding that the real is not only the immediate, measurable and representable form of official language. Configuring architectural spaces by recognizing the power of the virtual images that complete them allows us to enable those invisible, uncontrollable and deeply determining forces for their own composition. Faced with the hypercomplexity of the systems that configure the ways of contemporary living, non-reductionist responses are related to the possibility of the appearance of the emergent. The potentiality present in the minor within the architectural space manages to be determined by its capacity to enable the appearance of emerging "Process (philosophy)") processes, impossible to be understood absolutely in their varied interpretations. The ways of making minor architectures are presented as practices to renaturalize structures and different forms of life).

The value of these emerging processes lies in what the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard recognizes as a response to the extremely banal, immanent in a world saturated by capitalist modes of production and consumption. In other words, the emergent is presented in contrast to "the indifference of things to their own meaning, the indifference of the effects to their own cause."[28]​ In this sense, minor architectures are capable of enabling the appearance of the emergent and, at the same time, awareness "Consciousness (psychiatry)") about the potential of the emergent is fundamental for the enabling of architectural spaces of this type.

In the field of literature there are approaches that correspond to the ways in which minor architectures manage to be recognized as such. So much so, that the capacity to emerge exposed by John Paul Ricco in reference to “itinerant spaces” is related to the interstitial, intermittent, nomadic and improbably located spaces that Georges Didi-Huberman describes as a possibility of power to accommodate the unexpected glows that the survival of fireflies entails. In this sense, the minor architectural space makes it possible to emerge from a policy of reterritorialization organized on the basis of that which has not completely disappeared and, above all, on that which appears despite everything.[29]​

In a globalized world, spatialities and practices of resistance emerge that oppose the processes of homogenization and control established by the central powers. It is here where minor architectures are presented as a power to operate between spaces and architectures dominated by hegemony through lines of flight, abject materials, construction of objects external to the discipline and in their imperceptibility, typical of operating under its consequent logic of spatial deterritorialization.

The characteristics determined for minor architectural practices are manifested in the political space of contemporary cities as tactical responses to the current biopolitical device, which is amplified in urban configurations and in the production of lives separated from their forms, as lives vulnerable to the violence of sovereignty.[30]​.

Minor architectures can be presented as the practices of before, during and after in the configuration of architectural space. Just as chronophotography is the photography of movement, that is to say that its significance is in change, minor architectures are based on their continuous process of resignification of the “architectural work”, in its immanent dynamics and mutations, determined and allowed at the same time by their own effects that will always have something unfinished, incomplete and imperfect.

The architectural space as a resignified body, in the reterritorialization that allows the expansion of the limits of the real, depends on the ability to dialogue with the “memory of the place” or the anima locus[31]​ to which Juan José Lahuerta refers). Intruder" addressing alternative positions on issues of immunity, by taking into consideration his own body as the resignified element. In the same sense that this French philosopher deconstructs his thought to make imperceptible the limits of intruders and strangers, ghosts and guests, based on the disappearance of the duality of absences and presences in his own body,[33] minor architectural practices advocate a conscious resignification of the limits of the real that enable more diverse and inclusive.

Minor urban planning

Ida Sandström, in her doctoral thesis Toward a minor Urbanism: Thinking Community without Unity in Recent Makings of Public Space,[34] starts from the question of how to plan and design for the community in various urban situations, conceiving public space as a vehicle to foster openness towards differences, both in practice and in theory. In this work, he analyzes two public space projects: Superkilen in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Jubileumsparken in Gothenburg, Sweden, which together with theoretical conceptualizations referring to the minor and public space, aims to find answers or strategies on how to think and intervene in a community open to difference or diversities. Each place has its own quality and set of factors that identify it.

To develop the notion of a minor urbanism, it takes foundations from the work of Deleuze and Guattari on a minor literature, such as deterritorialization, politicization and collective enunciation, transferring these characteristics to the field of urbanism and citizen participation, with an emphasis on how transformative criticism can originate within planning institutions. In his work he highlights the importance of the participation of all the actors involved in a space or community because they are the ones who inhabit and know the potential of the place more than anyone else.

Carlos Moreno "Carlos Moreno (scientist)"), architect and urban planner, scientific director of the ETI chair, Entrepreneurial Spirit, Territory and Innovation at the Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne University, proposes a new development of cities, which is based on them allowing such movement of their inhabitants that in a quarter of an hour they can meet all their needs without the need for further travel. The aim is to change the paradigm of the modern city, and "it is about recreating a quality of life on a human scale in cities, leaving the anonymity of big cities, escaping from an always hurried life. Obtaining a quality of social life."[35]​.

By developing this approach to what could be defined as minor urbanism, we see how these processes are characterized by the urban reterritorialization of cities, based on concepts such as geographical proximity, family proximity, multicenters, proximity services, etc. By creating this quarter-hour urban planning, the aim is to create integrated cities based on their main actor: the citizen.[35]​.

This is how by organizing cities under proximity criteria, it is possible to undo the power that normally operates in modern cities, which has been concentrated in their "multicenters", such as shopping centers, forcing citizens in one way or another to have to carry out large displacement processes in order to access these services. Through the development of 15-minute cities, it is possible to create spaces of exceptions, in which the stereotypes of cities that create their multicenters under force and oppression are broken.[35]​.

This term was used for the first time in the Dictionary of Applied and Professional Geography, in which a type of urbanism began to be defined that takes as priority the relationship between time and space (space-time), in which the processes of decentralization and deregulation are evoked. Starting with Torsten Hägerstrand and his "geography of time", when he realized the variable nature of time and how it is used by people throughout the day, but especially in the unequal way in which individuals and communities use the same territory; underlining the importance of distance-time in the understanding of territories and societies. His three-dimensional graphics are recognized, still used today as a basis for understanding the relationship between short times and space.

In this same framework, the Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand was a pioneer in the study of the geography of time. A key part of his work was the development of methods for visualizing world lines. He typically used three-dimensional diagrams, with a 2D plane showing position on the ground and time of the vertical axis. He called these visualizations space-time aquariums.

Mark Shepard, artist, architect and associate professor at the Studio of Architecture and Media at the University of Buffalo, in his article Notes on Minor Urbanism,[36] written for the 2012 Venice Biennale, explains his approach in a single channel of two videos: on the left Russian Climbing, an example of the new contemporary mobility of parkour; On the right, The Catalogue, produced by video artist Chris Oakley, a simulation from the perspective of a surveillance system in an undefined shopping center in northern England.[37]​.

Parkour helps develop spatial awareness of specific possibilities of urban structures. From the Flâneur of Walter Benjamin, to the dériviste of the situationists, the traceurs interpret the city not so much as a reflective representation, but as its transductional enactment: they demonstrate its socio-spatial relations. In this context, parkour becomes urban hacking, a way of appropriating architecture and its accessories for purposes that the original design did not sanction or anticipate.

At The Catalogue, shoppers are tagged, tracked and monitored as they go through their routines. All data collected will be redirected in favor of consumer logistics. Even food consumption at a sushi bar is used to report a health forecast: imagine this data sold to health insurance companies.

Combining these two ideas, the practice of minor urbanism involves transferring the practice of parkour to the space of The Catalogue. Like minor literature, minor urbanism involves speaking in a major language from a minor position. Unlike mainstream mainstream architecture and urban planning approaches, minor urbanism examines local and shared network approaches to formulate our own city experience and our choices in living it. The new technology applied to everyday urban life offers a set of geolocated data, through systems designed and programmed to remember, relate and anticipate our movements, transactions and desires. Minor urbanism is a conceptual vehicle to understand the complex assemblages of actors, practices and situations created by the ubicomp") of the real world.

In the role of this new urban actor, the traceur, Shepard questions how he could develop spatial awareness, in a hybrid environment of a material/immaterial city of induced information, the resources available in these virtual infrastructures and their intertwinements with everyday life. Parkour becomes a conceptual vehicle, potentially capable, in retrospect, of recirculating, reconfiguring and redirecting flows of people, goods and data.[38]​.

The Logic of the Lure

The gender studies and exploration of spaces associated with identities different from the hegemonic ones carried out by authors such as Bloomer or Beatriz Colomina (Sexuality and Space, 1992), created the ideal context for authors such as John Paul Ricco to take the minor as a path of study within the architecture and theory of space. Ricco is a professor in the Department of Visual Studies at the University of Toronto, a graduate in art history and theorist, whose interdisciplinary research draws connections between art and architecture of the last century and contemporary ones. He appears as one of the first authors to establish connections and draw attention to issues related to space, geography and architecture within queer studies and HIV politics in the 1990s[1] Archived June 30, 2020 at the Wayback Machine. Influenced during his doctorate by authors such as Colomina and Bloomer,[14]​ he takes the concept of the minor of the latter and develops it with new nuances, dimensions and references in his first book The Logic of the Lure (2002). Still as a doctoral student, he wrote a first version of the text Jacking-off a Minor Architecture (1992), which was framed within a seminar focused on the “dedomestication” of architecture. In this writing, the author uses the concept of the minor to break binaries such as the public-private, and proposes the dark rooms "Dark Room (sexuality)") of the gay bars of the 90s as minor spaces: the collective articulation of these rooms, their “dedomestication” of sexuality and architecture, the politics of the deterritorialized bodies that occupy them, break with the categories and typologies established by hegemonic architecture, becoming minor spaces. In this first approach by the author to minor architectures, he defines them as intermediate zones, corridors that are never completely outside the major architecture, despite the fact that in his later development of the term he states them as the minor as the architectural Outside. In his 2002 book, The Logic of The Lure, the first chapter titled Minor establishes the theoretical bases of the minor architecture proposed by Ricco, reformulated with respect to those proposed 10 years earlier. Starting from a relational argument based on authors such as Foucault or Maurice Blanchot, he develops concepts such as the Outside, the Other "Other (philosophy)") or the virtual. Extrapolating this relational definition of the Self to architecture, its minor architectures appear: "Architecture aside/next to architecture is what I call minor architecture, architecture that is neither the interior of architecture nor the exterior, but architecture outside of architecture—the architectural Outside."[15]​.

Like Bloomer's development, post-structuralist ideas and materials are the basis and foundation of the minor, where Deleuze takes special relevance when Ricco assimilates the concept of minor with that of virtual, making minor architecture something imperceptible, unverifiable and indeterminate. If there is a difference with respect to Jennifer Bloomer, it is the very materialization of these minor spaces: while for the former the use of abject materials and the construction of objects that are visually external to the bases of the discipline are a manifestation of the minor character,[16]​ Ricco speaks of the imperceptibility of these spaces because they operate through the logic of spatial deterritorialization, this virtuality is what gives critical capacity to a minor architecture.

Towards a Minor Architecture

In 2012, architect and professor Jill Stoner published Towards a Minor Architecture, a book in which, by eliminating the four great myths of architecture (interior-exterior dichotomy, the autonomy of the object, the heroism of the architect and the culture-nature binomial), she advocates for an architectural practice that is born of collective resistance and desire. The book was published translated into Spanish in 2018 by fellow architect Lucía Jalón Oyarzun.

Stoner relies on the literature and thought of the century (Borges, Paul Klee, Walter Benjamin, Foucault, Agamben) with a discourse whose expressiveness and terminology correspond to those initiated by Bloomer three decades ago, but which serve as a point of support from which to propose a practice that deals with the ruins of the century. The spaces or constructions that he proposes as minor architectures are mostly literary spaces, spaces of seclusion, or both; What these minor architectures reveal is the intention of escape, the desire for resistance: they are the lines of flight proposed by Deleuze and Guattari, those that connect the current with the space of possibilities. The ultimate objective of Stoner's book is, in his own words, a more political practice of architecture, which leaves behind the political and economic powers that maintain relations of complicity with major architectures (those of the State and economic powers).[18]​ In the development of minor architectures as anonymous, Stoner's approach goes further than Bloomer, putting in check the need for the architect understood as an academic qualification. Minor architectures undo the architectural object as well as the subject of major architecture, the architect; Its authorship lies in the collective nature of the relationships that continually develop in space.

The image of the architect as the technical planner who has power over the territory and what happens in it has been maintained for a long time, and it is necessary to begin to focus on the minor.

Like Bloomer's proposal in the 90s, Stoner's text has provoked a new search for that minor character in the current context, where concepts such as Foucault's biopolitics or Agamben's bare life are still equally present. The result of this search generates proposals of a very similar nature to those raised 30 years ago: movements driven by protests from the groups that form the base within power structures[21]​[22]​ or situations of physical or political confinement.[23]​.

Other proposals that arise from an analysis of Jill Stoner's text and Oyarzun's translation and work argue about the potential of the entire theoretical and literary body of “Towards a Minor Architecture” to lay the foundations for a new practice of architectural intervention (rehabilitation, restoration)[24]​ or as a theoretical basis for a feminist architecture.[25]​.

Exception and rebel body

The translation of the book Towards a Minor Architecture into Spanish was carried out by the architect Lucía Jalón Oyarzun, also author of the prologue. Oyarzun's doctoral thesis, titled Exception and rebellious body: the political as a generator of a minor architecture,[26] tries to articulate a minor architecture very focused on the body and its power, concepts linked to the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza. The development of this architecture subject to the other body, where the need for the rebellious body is so present, as a spatial concept rather than a constructive one, puts the author's developments in line with those of John Paul Ricco.

Minor architectures, defined and understood in plural by their own multiple configuration, often go unnoticed and are enriched by remaining open. Their potential lies, therefore, in the order of becoming, in their movements and the flows that they make possible, regardless of the final results in purely architectural matters, and in what refers to the technical.

Recognizing emergency points "Emergency (philosophy)") by expanding reality means understanding that the real is not only the immediate, measurable and representable form of official language. Configuring architectural spaces by recognizing the power of the virtual images that complete them allows us to enable those invisible, uncontrollable and deeply determining forces for their own composition. Faced with the hypercomplexity of the systems that configure the ways of contemporary living, non-reductionist responses are related to the possibility of the appearance of the emergent. The potentiality present in the minor within the architectural space manages to be determined by its capacity to enable the appearance of emerging "Process (philosophy)") processes, impossible to be understood absolutely in their varied interpretations. The ways of making minor architectures are presented as practices to renaturalize structures and different forms of life).

The value of these emerging processes lies in what the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard recognizes as a response to the extremely banal, immanent in a world saturated by capitalist modes of production and consumption. In other words, the emergent is presented in contrast to "the indifference of things to their own meaning, the indifference of the effects to their own cause."[28]​ In this sense, minor architectures are capable of enabling the appearance of the emergent and, at the same time, awareness "Consciousness (psychiatry)") about the potential of the emergent is fundamental for the enabling of architectural spaces of this type.

In the field of literature there are approaches that correspond to the ways in which minor architectures manage to be recognized as such. So much so, that the capacity to emerge exposed by John Paul Ricco in reference to “itinerant spaces” is related to the interstitial, intermittent, nomadic and improbably located spaces that Georges Didi-Huberman describes as a possibility of power to accommodate the unexpected glows that the survival of fireflies entails. In this sense, the minor architectural space makes it possible to emerge from a policy of reterritorialization organized on the basis of that which has not completely disappeared and, above all, on that which appears despite everything.[29]​

In a globalized world, spatialities and practices of resistance emerge that oppose the processes of homogenization and control established by the central powers. It is here where minor architectures are presented as a power to operate between spaces and architectures dominated by hegemony through lines of flight, abject materials, construction of objects external to the discipline and in their imperceptibility, typical of operating under its consequent logic of spatial deterritorialization.

The characteristics determined for minor architectural practices are manifested in the political space of contemporary cities as tactical responses to the current biopolitical device, which is amplified in urban configurations and in the production of lives separated from their forms, as lives vulnerable to the violence of sovereignty.[30]​.

Minor architectures can be presented as the practices of before, during and after in the configuration of architectural space. Just as chronophotography is the photography of movement, that is to say that its significance is in change, minor architectures are based on their continuous process of resignification of the “architectural work”, in its immanent dynamics and mutations, determined and allowed at the same time by their own effects that will always have something unfinished, incomplete and imperfect.

The architectural space as a resignified body, in the reterritorialization that allows the expansion of the limits of the real, depends on the ability to dialogue with the “memory of the place” or the anima locus[31]​ to which Juan José Lahuerta refers). Intruder" addressing alternative positions on issues of immunity, by taking into consideration his own body as the resignified element. In the same sense that this French philosopher deconstructs his thought to make imperceptible the limits of intruders and strangers, ghosts and guests, based on the disappearance of the duality of absences and presences in his own body,[33] minor architectural practices advocate a conscious resignification of the limits of the real that enable more diverse and inclusive.

Minor urban planning

Ida Sandström, in her doctoral thesis Toward a minor Urbanism: Thinking Community without Unity in Recent Makings of Public Space,[34] starts from the question of how to plan and design for the community in various urban situations, conceiving public space as a vehicle to foster openness towards differences, both in practice and in theory. In this work, he analyzes two public space projects: Superkilen in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Jubileumsparken in Gothenburg, Sweden, which together with theoretical conceptualizations referring to the minor and public space, aims to find answers or strategies on how to think and intervene in a community open to difference or diversities. Each place has its own quality and set of factors that identify it.

To develop the notion of a minor urbanism, it takes foundations from the work of Deleuze and Guattari on a minor literature, such as deterritorialization, politicization and collective enunciation, transferring these characteristics to the field of urbanism and citizen participation, with an emphasis on how transformative criticism can originate within planning institutions. In his work he highlights the importance of the participation of all the actors involved in a space or community because they are the ones who inhabit and know the potential of the place more than anyone else.

Carlos Moreno "Carlos Moreno (scientist)"), architect and urban planner, scientific director of the ETI chair, Entrepreneurial Spirit, Territory and Innovation at the Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne University, proposes a new development of cities, which is based on them allowing such movement of their inhabitants that in a quarter of an hour they can meet all their needs without the need for further travel. The aim is to change the paradigm of the modern city, and "it is about recreating a quality of life on a human scale in cities, leaving the anonymity of big cities, escaping from an always hurried life. Obtaining a quality of social life."[35]​.

By developing this approach to what could be defined as minor urbanism, we see how these processes are characterized by the urban reterritorialization of cities, based on concepts such as geographical proximity, family proximity, multicenters, proximity services, etc. By creating this quarter-hour urban planning, the aim is to create integrated cities based on their main actor: the citizen.[35]​.

This is how by organizing cities under proximity criteria, it is possible to undo the power that normally operates in modern cities, which has been concentrated in their "multicenters", such as shopping centers, forcing citizens in one way or another to have to carry out large displacement processes in order to access these services. Through the development of 15-minute cities, it is possible to create spaces of exceptions, in which the stereotypes of cities that create their multicenters under force and oppression are broken.[35]​.

This term was used for the first time in the Dictionary of Applied and Professional Geography, in which a type of urbanism began to be defined that takes as priority the relationship between time and space (space-time), in which the processes of decentralization and deregulation are evoked. Starting with Torsten Hägerstrand and his "geography of time", when he realized the variable nature of time and how it is used by people throughout the day, but especially in the unequal way in which individuals and communities use the same territory; underlining the importance of distance-time in the understanding of territories and societies. His three-dimensional graphics are recognized, still used today as a basis for understanding the relationship between short times and space.

In this same framework, the Swedish geographer Torsten Hägerstrand was a pioneer in the study of the geography of time. A key part of his work was the development of methods for visualizing world lines. He typically used three-dimensional diagrams, with a 2D plane showing position on the ground and time of the vertical axis. He called these visualizations space-time aquariums.

Mark Shepard, artist, architect and associate professor at the Studio of Architecture and Media at the University of Buffalo, in his article Notes on Minor Urbanism,[36] written for the 2012 Venice Biennale, explains his approach in a single channel of two videos: on the left Russian Climbing, an example of the new contemporary mobility of parkour; On the right, The Catalogue, produced by video artist Chris Oakley, a simulation from the perspective of a surveillance system in an undefined shopping center in northern England.[37]​.

Parkour helps develop spatial awareness of specific possibilities of urban structures. From the Flâneur of Walter Benjamin, to the dériviste of the situationists, the traceurs interpret the city not so much as a reflective representation, but as its transductional enactment: they demonstrate its socio-spatial relations. In this context, parkour becomes urban hacking, a way of appropriating architecture and its accessories for purposes that the original design did not sanction or anticipate.

At The Catalogue, shoppers are tagged, tracked and monitored as they go through their routines. All data collected will be redirected in favor of consumer logistics. Even food consumption at a sushi bar is used to report a health forecast: imagine this data sold to health insurance companies.

Combining these two ideas, the practice of minor urbanism involves transferring the practice of parkour to the space of The Catalogue. Like minor literature, minor urbanism involves speaking in a major language from a minor position. Unlike mainstream mainstream architecture and urban planning approaches, minor urbanism examines local and shared network approaches to formulate our own city experience and our choices in living it. The new technology applied to everyday urban life offers a set of geolocated data, through systems designed and programmed to remember, relate and anticipate our movements, transactions and desires. Minor urbanism is a conceptual vehicle to understand the complex assemblages of actors, practices and situations created by the ubicomp") of the real world.

In the role of this new urban actor, the traceur, Shepard questions how he could develop spatial awareness, in a hybrid environment of a material/immaterial city of induced information, the resources available in these virtual infrastructures and their intertwinements with everyday life. Parkour becomes a conceptual vehicle, potentially capable, in retrospect, of recirculating, reconfiguring and redirecting flows of people, goods and data.[38]​.