City boids: Diagramming molecular urbanism

‘City Boids–Tactical Spatialisations’, is a documentation of urban practices produced within the framework of a research programme, ‘Caracas-Case and the culture of the informal city’. Its goal was to shed light onto the informal self-built construction processes that shape the Latin-American capital of Venezuela in which four out of its six million inhabitants live. The project documented here is an example of how practices observed from below and above may be synthesised into one representation through the formats of diagrams, and how diagrams can register underlying principles of action rather than realised shape, form, and appearance. Compared to a grand or single project, there is intelligence and beauty while acting in a resource-tight and already built-out context. The ‘City Boid’ diagram is a plea for the small and the many, acting together, within the system of the other.