minimanual of ethnographic misuses
We begin in the margins
MINIMA stands next to other urban manuals— William Bunge’s radical cartographies, Michel de Certeau’s walkers, Haraway’s companions, infrastructural feminists, and bored kids on the corner. We don’t compete; we annotate, remix, and downgrade everything to pocket size.
Attention is our first hack
Look where the city prefers you not to look: drains, stains, queues, cables, patches, leftover tape. Follow one smell, one bench, one crack in the pavement. Hacking starts by re-routing attention from spectacle to maintenance.
Methods must fit in your hand
If a method doesn’t fit on a card, a sticker, or a tiny diagram, it’s too big for MINIMA. Each issue offers small exercises: walk scripts, overlay prompts, specimen labels, and micro-maps. They are meant to be stolen, repeated, and misused.
The city is an interface, not a fact
Treat turnstiles, bus stops, ATMs, Wi-Fi zones, trash islands, and planters as buttons, sliders, and hidden menus. Ask: what does this device show, what does it hide, and who maintains it? Then intervene—by walking wrong, waiting wrong, or annotating its surface.
We misuse design tools
Diagrams, maps, labels, and scales are not here to clarify but to complicate. Draw partial maps. Label strange specimens. Layer overlays that don’t quite align. Every graphic is a question, not an answer.
We side with maintenance and the minor
Our hacks pay attention to cleaners, repairers, vendors, delivery riders, informal recyclers, plants in cracks, pigeons, and stray cables. We tune methods to make their worlds visible—without capturing or romanticizing them.
DIY is a method, not a style
Photocopy, tape, cut, fold, scan, reprint. MINIMA lives in the small hacks: changing the scale of a map, re-routing an arrow, hijacking a legend, scribbling over an “official” diagram. Every copy is already a new version.
Partiality and glitch are features
Incomplete walks, broken maps, failed taxonomies, bad photos, mishearings—MINIMA treats these not as errors but as openings. The glitch is where another city briefly appears.
Hacks must be teachable
Each issue is a tiny kit for collective use: a minimanual to try out with friends, students, neighbors, strangers. If you can’t explain the hack in a few lines while standing on a sidewalk, rewrite it.
Everything is open to forking
MINIMA publishes protocols, not commandments. Rip, adapt, translate, redraw, ignore steps, invent new ones. Credit generously. Feed your variations back into the urban commons.
Run alternative cities in parallel
To hack the urban with ethnography is to run experimental versions of the city alongside the official one—on paper, on walls, in bodies. MINIMA is one such version: small, reproducible, and always in beta.
Use, misuse, repeat.