“Ruins, imagination, and technodiversity: experimentations for spatial justice”
By Fernanda Eiras Rubio
Communication presented at Crossroads in Cultural Studies 2026
“Decolonizing Cultural Studies: Leisure, Bodies, Performances, Territories
and Universities” at UFMG, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Urban voids are spaces in cities that have been underutilized for extended periods and may contain ruins. In such cases, the occupation, intervention, ressignification, and/or preservation of the site require careful consideration that can create challenges to the heritage.
Ruins are structures undergoing deterioration, generally caused by time, abandonment, or incidents. These spaces are discussed in the fields of social sciences and arts, with concerns about their historical and cultural value. Like other urban voids, ruins provoke estrangement and utopian desires, as well as challenging urban planning, bridging the gap between past and present, representing the space of the possible. When ruins present access barriers for the community, imagination intensifies in the exercise of creating possibilities for transforming the degraded space.
Technodiversity, in this sense, can provide mobilization tools for promoting spatial justice in this territory ruined for ideological, political, and/or economic reasons. Imagination, with its creative, instituting, and transcendental capacity; technodiversity, with its cosmotechnical and contextual plurality, possesses the potential to achieve spatial justice through action strategies and challenges in the face of the urban crisis, thus influencing policies.
To exemplify these horizons of mobilization, we present some experimentations carried out by Escola Comunitária in the Aclimação region of São Paulo, specifically concerning an urban void with a ruin and extensive green area on its land, nicknamed “Queijinho”, belonging to a state school in the neighborhood and abandoned by the São Paulo state government for over 30 years. Among the activities, we highlight the workshop “Designing possibilities with the community for an underutilized area” with the Municipal Heritage Journey; the production of the documentary “Queijinho — Local memory or institutional stalemate”; the creation of the poetic video “Ask the space”; and the imagetic experimentation with generative artificial intelligence “Imagine Action”.
Abstracts at the congress: https://repositorio.ufmg.br/items/003dedb0-82b0-4f95-816b-2747a040d0a8
Communication presentation: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/412309133_Ruinas_imaginacao_e_tecnodiversidade_experimentacoes_para_a_justica_espacial
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Community School Linktree: https://linktr.ee/escolacomunitaria
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