Affecdent spaces: grassroot’s networks, codes and artifacts for urban innovation

The dissertation presents AFFECT and DISSIDENCE as architectural parameters through which to transform the built environment of contemporary western cities, particularly, in regards of their public-private spatial duality. As a result of this combination, Affecdent Spaces encompasses processes, actions and narratives with three characteristics: to be interconnected within a self-managed network with independent power, encoded by specific languages and protocols, and technified in that they build their own artifacts and tools. Since the socio-cultural inflection of 1968, affecdent spaces allow the incorporation of collective subjectivities in urban transformation, enabling rebel bodies to reinvent the “normal” through collective action and critical performance. By transforming daily life, occupying spaces of power and implosioning gender barriers, they question post-capitalist system and redefine the complexity of the urban. The dissertation sets three scenarios from the late ‘60s in Global North to explore the spatial features of political performance in Paris, social production in Manhattan and cultural fight of the LGBTQ revolution and civil rights in San Francisco. A graphic and historic archive, or traceography is generated to explore the emancipatory, transforming, and innovative effects of affecdent spaces, and finally their effects on a fluid and virtual western contemporaneity.