Running Water and Porous stones

Relational Thinking in Urban Ethnography through Creative Practice

Abstract

This visual essay explores the public launderettes of Quito’s historical centre as threshold spaces—sites of daily negotiation between infrastructure, care, and community. Often overlooked in architectural and urban studies dominated by heritage discourse, the launderettes are reapproached here through relational thinking and creative ethnography. The author engages with these sites not merely as utilitarian or heritage spaces, but as living, sensorial territories shaped through affect, memory, and embodied labour. Drawing from non-representational theory and visual anthropology, the essay uses photography and sound to explore multisensory and affective dimensions of place-making. The creative process foregrounds the relational aspects of design, whereby bodies, materials, and elements (like water and soap) compose a shared space of rhythm, movement, and coexistence. In this situated ethnography, space is not pre-given but continuously produced through gestures, repetition, and sensory traces—offering a compelling challenge to static or object-oriented architectural epistemologies. By attending to texture, temperature, sound, and rhythm, the work foregrounds the more-than-human qualities of spatial production, echoing the everyday cosmologies embedded in acts of care, maintenance, and reciprocity. In doing so, it invites reflection on how peripheral or liminal urban practices can generate alternative design imaginaries rooted in lived experience, relational agency, and affective materiality.