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Ontopolitics of Openness: Care for Possibility Against Urban Immunization

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10 November 2026

Posted:

11 November 2026

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Abstract
This article develops care for possibility as an ontopolitical alternative to urbanism organized around immunological enclosure. Rather than treating care as the redistribution of existing functions, our argument reframes it as the protection of spatial openness, i.e., the lived condition through which emergent forms of life become perceptible. Drawing on current literature, we show how planning rationalities foreclose futurity by enforcing legibility and spatial finality and reframe care as the safeguarding of spatial indeterminacy to argue that the urban condition ought to depend on protecting the not‑yet rather than optimizing and exhausting the already‑given. To ground this intervention, the article examines Morocco as a spatial and cultural laboratory where colonial enclosure, sovereign hybridity, and rural-urban hydrological infrastructures reveal the limits of immunological urbanism. Across Rabat, Tangier, and Beni Mellal, our analysis demonstrates how interspaces sustain incompleteness despite pressures toward closure. These cases show that openness is a political and cultural resource, emerging through contradictions within postcolonial territorial authority. We conclude by redefining the planner as a mediator of thresholds, responsible for sustaining relational vulnerability and spatial indeterminacy as infrastructures of futurity.
Keywords: 
care for possibility
;  
urban immunization
;  
ontopolitics
Subject: 
Social Sciences  -   Urban Studies and Planning

Care in the City

Contemporary urbanism is increasingly legitimized as a project of technical salvation, one that seeks to secure urban life by eliminating ambiguity and vulnerability. Jean-Philippe Pierron describes this as sécurisé space, a form of urbanism driven by an “obsession with control” that treats architecture as a machine à guérir—a device for neutralizing contingency through surveillance and technical intervention (Pierron, 2023, p. 58). Regular surveillance becomes spatial condition, turning urban space into a field of regulated conduct due to the possibility of being seen (Šupa, 2015; Reeve, 2019; Koskela, 2000; Lysova, 2025). The security this achieves is strictly technical, confined to spatial and social control, while leaving the lived and existential dimensions of urban life sterile. This condition reduces urban reality to a “mechanical assembly of elements” and forecloses the possibility of encounter, surprise, and play (Boscarato, 2022, p. 1019). Urban development then is the narrative of immunological enclosures (Sloterdijk, 1998; Sutherland, 2019; Zhang, 2026), which from an economic perspective reveals how technocratic planning homogenizes urban environments under the neoliberal logic of consumption and accumulation (Lefebvre, 1991; Brenner & Theodore, 2005; Baffoe, 2023; Kumar, 2025).
Contemporary debates on urban care increasingly challenge this logic by redirecting attention to the spatial and institutional conditions of everyday reproduction, especially amid the visible fractures in neoliberal narratives of success (Brenner & Theodore, 2005; Wiesel, Steele, & Houston, 2020; Davies, 2024; Igual Capdevila, 2026). Care is not a private act but is a spatially distributed practice shaped by infrastructures, institutions, and planning decisions (Alam & Houston, 2020, 2023). Work on care-oriented urban governance contends that vulnerability can be understood as a collective urban condition, shaped and recognized through institutional and spatial practices (Williams, 2017). These interventions are crucial, yet they remain largely oriented toward supporting already existing forms of life. They focus on redistributing burdens and improving service provision but pay far less attention to how the city might protect what is not yet stabilized as a recognized need or function.
We argue that care must also be directed toward possibility in relation to urban space. Pierron’s notion of sécurisant space describes an architectural and urban condition that supports rather than suppresses vulnerability, keeping space en formation and open to the not-yet (Pierron, 2023). This is given an ontological depth through Bloch’s ontology of the not-yet, in which hope is understood as an active commitment to what is only partially determined and a refusal to confine reality to finished scenarios, positioning urban care within a utopian praxis that resists closure and treats the city as a site of ongoing becoming (Adorno and Bloch, 1964; Bloch, 1986; Ganjavie, 2015; Jaster, 2022; Shahar, 2024). Care for possibility is therefore a refusal of premature closure and a protection of spatial openness against the immunological pressures of property, which do not merely regulate land but determine which futures are permitted to appear by filtering out unexchangeable forms of difference (Tveter, 2009). From this, we pose the question: How can care for the city be theorized and practiced not as the management of existing functions, but as the protection of spatial openness and the urban future?
We address this by presenting care for possibility as an ontopolitical response to urbanism driven by control and enclosure. This paper reframes care as the safeguarding of spatial indeterminacy, arguing that the urban condition ought to depend on protecting the not-yet rather than optimizing and exhausting the already-given. We analyze specific spatial conflicts in postcolonial Morocco – colonial enclosure in Rabat, sovereign hybridity in Tangier, and rural-urban hydrological system in Beni Mellal – to demonstrate how forms of incompleteness persist in interspaces despite intense pressures toward legibility and standardization. These cases reveal that the de-immunized city requires a redefinition of the planner’s role from simply an enforcer of regulation to a mediator of thresholds who is responsible for safeguarding the conditions under which the not-yet can emerge.

Immunological Closure

Contemporary literature on urban care has significantly reshaped how planning is understood. Rather than a technical coordination of territory, planning is increasingly seen as a practice of co-producing the conditions of dependency and reproduction. Alam and Houston demonstrate that care depends on infrastructural linkages between housing, transport, and public space; cities thus become active agents in distributing uneven burdens and shaping the possibilities of giving and even receiving care. The discourse on care-full cities similarly frames care as a principle of urban justice, arguing that planning must recognize and redistribute reproductive burdens through institutional coordination (Williams, 2017; Williams & Rodela, 2025). These contributions are foundational in that they shift care from a moral discourse to a spatial and institutional one. Yet a common limitation is discernible in this position: care is largely conceptualized as support for life in its already recognized forms, i.e., as redistribution, service provision, and infrastructural maintenance. There is less attention paid to how the city might care for what is not yet stabilized as a need. This gap raises a question of the role of the city’s physical matter in care for possibility.
To address this question, it is first necessary to understand how contemporary urbanism closes space and, in doing so, how care itself becomes colonized by an immunological logic. Pierron’s distinction between sécurisé and sécurisant space reveals how modern planning is driven by an “obsession with control,” reducing architecture to a machine à guérir that seeks to neutralize contingency through norms, surveillance, and technical mastery. Far from being limited to questions of design, this logic finds expression in broader regimes of governance. James C. Scott’s critique of state legibility demonstrates how modern administrations render complex social realities visible by translating them into simplified and governable forms, while critiques of property, such as those raised by Olympia Tatver, reveal how ownership functions not merely as a legal arrangement but as an epistemological filter that determines which forms of relation, use, and difference are allowed to appear (Scott, 1998; Tatver, 2013). Taken together, these approaches show that contemporary urbanism increasingly operates through a political technology of closure, and, as such, a territorial rationality forms the very ontological ground to society’s immunological conditions.
This very condition is aligned with the broader diagnosis of modernity developed by Peter Sloterdijk. For Sloterdijk, human existence is inseparable from the construction of spheres, understood as protective environments that do not merely encompass lived experience but actively constitute the spatial conditions through which life becomes possible (Sloterdijk, 1998). This diagnosis can be extended through Sloterdijk’s account of modernity as an immunological interior. He holds that the world is always perceived from and as an inside, i.e., within the bounds of immunized life (Ernste, 2018; Ferreira de Barros, Pavanini, and Lemmens, 2023). Immunology is employed here not as a biological concept but as a reorientation of the accustomed dichotomy between subject and object to inside and outside the sphere. In a spatial sense, this is employed through the very social institutions that make urban immunology possible and likewise through architecture that allows not simply organization but likewise aesthetics to preserves itself against perceived threats (Rennesland, 2025).
Sloterdijk’s account therefore reveals that the tendency toward closure in contemporary urbanism is not merely technical or administrative but ontological. The city becomes organized around an immunological principle rooted in the assumption that life flourishes through protection from uncertainty, exposure, and contingency. Under such conditions, planning is increasingly reduced to the anticipation and management of risk, making it unsurprising that contemporary visions of the secure city are characterized by surveillance infrastructures and securitized public spaces. While these interventions are often justified in the name of safety, comfort, or social stability, the same immunological mechanisms that seek to protect urban life frequently constrain its capacity for transformation. Seen through Sloterdijk’s framework, the contemporary city emerges as an immunological achievement, yet one that is far from politically neutral. The question is not whether cities should provide protection, but rather what forms of protection they produce and at what cost. Urbanism organized primarily around security tends to treat vulnerability as a deficiency to be corrected rather than a constitutive condition of human coexistence. At its extreme, the immunized city seeks to insulate itself from uncertainty so thoroughly that the possibilities of unexpected encounters, collective experimentation, and emergent forms of life are diminished; care itself becomes reduced to the management of risks rather than the cultivation of possibilities. Immunological urbanism therefore appears not simply as a mode of governance but as a worldview that equates flourishing with enclosure, stability with predictability, and protection with the elimination of vulnerability.
The question that we aspire to address is not whether cities should provide protection, but whether this form of protection can be reimagined without sacrificing the indeterminacy through which new forms of life may emerge. While Sloterdijk’s total spatial conception may be identified as an ontological grounding to closed urban forms, his work also suggests otherwise. Human beings do not exist outside spheres but continuously inhabit and construct protective worlds at multiple scales; the critical distinction lies in whether these worlds preserve openness to emergent possibilities or increasingly harden into immunological regimes of closure (Sloterdijk, 1999). The critical issue is whether protective environments remain open to alteration and encounter. This distinction returns the current narrative to Pierron’s contrast between sécurisé and sécurisant space. While a sécurisé environment seeks to eliminate vulnerability through insulation, a sécurisant environment supports vulnerability without abolishing it. The latter does not deny the need for spatial support but refuses to equate support with enclosure. It preserves the possibility that new relationships and practices may emerge within the very spaces it shelters. The task, therefore, is not to abandon immunity altogether, but to imagine forms of urban life whose protective envelopes remain porous to difference.
The focus should then turn to what kinds of spaces can sustain openness without collapsing into enclosure. Against the immunological logic of closure, Pierron foregrounds espaces interstitiels—interspaces that are not empty residues of planning but conditions of encounter and relational aesthetics (Pierron, 2023, p. 64). Boscarato complements this perspective through the concept of fonction contenante, which understands architecture as a multisensory envelope capable of stabilizing vulnerability without binding it, thereby keeping the inhabitant’s temporality open to future possibilities (Boscarato, 2022, p. 1226). Tveter’s defense of “unique differences” extends this argument by suggesting that disorientation and discord do not threaten spatial order but deepen spatial perception through the generation of new relational possibilities (Tveter, 2009, p. 547). Together, these thinkers represent contradictions within the abstract blanket of space. Yet, crucially, they present the very essence of difference present therein. Unlike abstract space, which homogenizes social life according to the demands of legibility and administration, differential space preserves heterogeneity, considering conflict and multiplicity as generative conditions of urban existence (Lefebvre, 1991). Read alongside the three thinkers, differential space, as theorized by Lefebvre, emerges as the spatial form of relational vulnerability. It is a descriptive category, a plane of interspaces and disorienting differences that coexist without being absorbed into a single order. Differential space is therefore inseparable from an onto-political view of openness. Against the tendency to render the city fully legible, it insists that urban life retains spaces of experimentation, encounter, and uncertainty. Such spaces remain vital precisely because they resist premature closure and allow alternative urban futures to take shape. In turn, protecting differential space becomes an ontopolitical task—a way of safeguarding the conditions under which futurity can take shape.

Care for Possibility and the Ontology of Openness

The critique of immunological closure and the defense of differential space point toward a broader political problem. If contemporary planning increasingly seeks to stabilize urban life by reducing uncertainty, what would it mean to care for those aspects of the city that remain unresolved, uncoordinated, and still in the process of becoming? The concept of care for possibility is developed here as a response to this question, shifting attention from the management of existing forms of life toward the protection of futures that have not yet fully appeared. It is at this point, we argue, that Ernst Bloch’s ontology of the not-yet becomes indispensable in further expanding Lefebvre’s differential space.
Bloch provides the epistemological foundation for this intervention through his critique of static thinking. He rejects forms of thought that “close off as something finished what has become its lot” (Bloch, 1986, p. 6), arguing instead that thinking must involve “venturing beyond” the given without suppressing what already exists (Bloch, 1986, p. 4). The new is never created out of nothing but emerges through processes already at work within reality itself. For Bloch, reality is not a completed state but an ongoing mediation between an unfinished past and a possible future. This insight has important implications for urbanism, directly challenges immunological urbanism. The immune city assumes that all possibilities have already been formed. It suffocates openness by treating space as finished. Planning becomes a technology of closure rather than a medium of futurity.
Central to this vision is Bloch is the not-yet. The future is not an abstract horizon lying beyond the present but an active dimension of reality already latent within it. Bloch (1986, p. 127) therefore speaks of the world as possessing a “front,” a zone where unrealized tendencies and possibilities begin to take shape. Read spatially, the city itself becomes part of this “front of the world.” Urban forms are not merely arrangements of buildings and infrastructures but sites where emergent ways of living, relating, and, vitally, dwelling become perceptible. What requires protection, therefore, are not only existing forms of life but also those possibilities that have not yet stabilized into recognized needs. This is why his claim that possibility is “everything that is only partially conditioned” (Bloch, 1986, p. 196) is so significant. If possibility remains open because it is incompletely determined, then urban space must likewise remain partially unconditioned—never fully exhausted by program, property, or regimes of legibility. Gaps, conflicts, and empty lots are not defects but engines of movement. Lack is not nothingness but the driving force of development. Care for possibility should not be understood as an escape into a utopian fantasy but as a way of engaging existing urban conditions while remaining attentive to what they have not yet become. In this sense, this view of Bloch converges with Pierron’s insistence that the city remain en formation: an unfinished terrain whose interstitial spaces preserve opportunities for encounter and experimentation.
Hope becomes crucial at this point. For Bloch, it is not passive expectation or religious ideal but an active orientation toward what remains unfinished in reality. It is a force that “makes us broad instead of confining [us]” (Bloch, 1986, p. 3). Care for possibility emerges from this orientation. It is not a sentimental commitment to openness for its own sake, but an ontopolitical practice concerned with preserving the conditions through which alternative futures may emerge. Rather than optimizing existing functions, it asks how urban arrangements can avoid foreclosing forms of life that remain unnamed and unrealized. Care therefore shifts from the management of already established realities to the protection of the not-yet. The city is no longer understood as a completed artifact enclosed within an immunized order, but as a relational configuration in constant translation, whose future remains irreducible to the horizons of the present.
Bloch’s ontology of the not-yet further expands Lefebvre’s notion of differential space by introducing a temporal dimension. While Lefebvre’s treatment of differential space often remained tied to the horizon of a post-capitalist society brought about through social revolution, he nevertheless conceived it as a space of transformed everyday life characterized by openness, multiplicity, and the emergence of new possibilities (Lefebvre, 1991). The temporal aspect in his vision is often identified within a utopian post-capitalist horizon, as a teleological development beyond capitalist abstract space but even within the fractures of late capitalism itself wherever land and property are temporarily abandoned by market interests and state regulation, creating openings for unforeseen uses, encounters, and forms of collective life (Leary-Owhin, 2016). Yet Bloch invites a deeper reading of this openness with a differed temporal motif. Both thinkers share a sense of how the future is implicit in the present, yet Bloch (1986) maintains that “real possibility surrounds the open dialectical tendencies and latencies to the very last.” Read through the lens of the not-yet, differential space becomes a terrain of becoming, where urban life remains open to futures that have not yet fully appeared because space has not been entirely stabilized, coordinated, or rendered legible. The openness Lefebvre attributes to lived space thus acquires an explicitly futural character in Bloch’s thought. What differential space preserves is not only heterogeneity but the capacity of the city to become otherwise. It keeps alive those dimensions of urban life that remain unfinished, unresolved, and still in formation, making the city not simply a field of difference but a horizon of possibility.
This view of urbanism, which we attempt to capture through the ontopolitics of openness in care for possibility, remains incomplete unless it is accompanied by a critique of property and planning sovereignty. Without this political dimension, openness risks becoming a purely aesthetic ideal rather than a condition of urban transformation. Property functions not merely as a legal arrangement but as a regime of exclusion that determines which forms of life, use, and relation may legitimately appear within the city. As Tveter argues, ownership is fundamentally a claim to exclusive control, while authority operates through the enforcement of that claim (Tveter, 2009, p. 410). Under such conditions, planning often serves as an instrument of closure, translating urban complexity into standardized typologies compatible with governance and exchange. The city becomes increasingly legible, but at the cost of narrowing the horizon of what can emerge within it.
What is lost through these processes of closure is not simply diversity but the city’s capacity to remain open to the not-yet. The problem is not that urban space contains fewer differences, but that the range of futures capable of emerging within it becomes increasingly restricted. In this sense, difference is politically significant because it exceeds existing systems of value, exchange, and classification (Tveter, 2009). Forms of life that cannot be easily assimilated into dominant economic or administrative categories preserve the city’s capacity to become otherwise. Far from being an aesthetic surplus, heterogeneity functions as a condition of urban freedom. This also reshapes how disorientation is understood. Encounters with ambiguity, conflict, and disruption are not symptoms of disorder but moments through which new forms of spatial awareness and social relation can emerge. The city remains vital not because it eliminates uncertainty, but because it sustains the possibility of encountering what is different from itself.
The challenge, however, is not merely to defend openness but to understand how it can be sustained. If immunological urbanism treats uncertainty as a threat to be neutralized, care for possibility begins from the premise that vulnerability and openness are constitutive features of urban life. The question therefore shifts from how to eliminate contingency to how to inhabit it. Spatial environments need not be organized around the imperative of complete stabilization. They can instead provide forms of support that allow uncertainty, experimentation, and difference to persist without being immediately absorbed into regimes of regulation or exchange. What requires protection is not a fixed order but the conditions under which urban life continues to exceed its existing forms. Seen in this light, support and openness are not opposites. The common assumption that protection necessarily entails enclosure reproduces the very logic of immunological urbanism. Yet spaces can stabilize vulnerability without foreclosing possibility, enabling inhabitants to maintain an open relationship to their own temporality and future possibilities (Boscarato, 2022, pp. 1126, 1363). They can shelter without insulating, coordinate without homogenizing, and support without fixing. Such spaces preserve the unfinished character of urban life by allowing differences, encounters, and possibilities to remain in circulation. The task of care is therefore not to resolve uncertainty but to sustain the conditions through which new relations, practices, and futures can emerge. Care for possibility ultimately names this commitment: the cultivation of forms of support that keep the city open to what it has not yet become.
This reorientation has direct implications for the role of the planner. The planner can no longer be understood as an agent responsible for fixing space into a definitive arrangement. Instead, planning becomes a practice of maintaining an open structure of possibilities. Interstitial spaces, incomplete forms, and differential uses cease to be treated as deficiencies awaiting correction and instead become conditions of urban vitality. The task of planning is therefore not to manage difference but to protect the circumstances under which difference can continue to generate new forms of life. The planner must shift from an enforcing regulator to a mediator of thresholds, maintaining the space of possibilities rather than closing it. In this sense, the de-immunized city preserves incompleteness not as a failure of order but as one of the conditions of its future.

Morocco as a Laboratory of Urban Futurity

The preceding discussion has argued that care for possibility depends upon preserving those spaces that remain open to the not-yet. The question that follows is how such openness becomes visible within actually existing urban environments. Morocco provides a particularly illuminating site for this inquiry. Rather than serving as a mere empirical illustration of a pre-established theory, we identify how Moroccan urban space exposes with unusual clarity the tensions between closure and openness, stabilization and emergence. Colonial planning, neoliberal redevelopment, and everyday practices of appropriation coexist within a highly stratified urban landscape, producing a hyper-visible urban laboratory (Wagner and Minca, 2014). It is precisely within these overlapping spatial regimes that the limits of property, legibility, and planning sovereignty become most apparent. In this sense, Morocco does not simply confirm the theoretical framework developed above; it radicalizes it by revealing how the not-yet persists within the interstices of urban life despite repeated attempts to stabilize, regulate, and contain it, making visible those unfinished futures that immunological urbanism continually seeks to foreclose.
Methodologically, the analysis combines a critical reading of urban strategies with an examination of the spatial practices through which urban life exceeds them. The first dimension focuses on the discursive and institutional production of urban space, including large-scale redevelopment projects such as the Bouregreg Valley initiative in Rabat. The second consists of a spatial analysis of interstitial environments grounded in visual documentation, including field photographs and video recordings, through which often overlooked forms of urban life become perceptible. Attention is directed not only toward official plans and infrastructures but also toward the residual, improvised, and unfinished spaces that surround them. This dual approach makes it possible to identify both the mechanisms through which urban space is rendered legible, securitized, and fixed, and the practices through which it remains open, incomplete, and receptive to alternative futures.

Rabat

Rabat is crucial for our argument: colonial urbanism here does not merely create a historical layer, but a still-operating spatial regime. The city does not function here as a unified organism, but as a field of closures and passages. A direct correlation presents itself here: the effort to cleanly separate functions produces only new borders and conflicts. This is fundamental for the concept of care for possibility: it shows that the problem is the permanent tendency of the city to be organized as a legible and hierarchical order. Wagner and Minca describe Rabat as a “Moroccan urban laboratory”(Wagner & Minca, 2014), which allows understanding the city as a laboratory of forms of statehood. The ville nouvelle was a space in which difference was intentionally disciplined and subjected to the logic of administrative legibility.
This logic, however, never remains complete. The current morphology of Rabat shows that the layers of the city enter into relationships that undermine the idea of a stably closed composition. From our approach, it follows that possibility does not arise outside of power, but precisely in the cracks of its operations. This moment is evident even in newer redevelopments, for example, in the Bouregreg area, where Rabat is being rewritten as a space of state image and managed modernity. This is not a simple persistence of heritage, but its updating in new regimes of symbolic power. Exactly here, care for possibility gains analytical precision: it does not designate the protection of authenticity, but the defense of openness against pressures for fixation and monumental closure.
In Rabat, the sécurisé space reaches the form of an ultimate immune panopticon. Linear corridors of power like Avenue Mohammed V or the hypermodern, state-guarded plaza in front of the Grand Theatre by Zaha Hadid represent architectures of total control. They are defined by surveillance and strict property, removing ambiguity. However, is it really true that there is no room for life in this panoptic machine? In interstitial spaces, we find the exact opposite: the sécurisant space. A concrete example is subcultural appropriations: when youth and skaters physically occupy the sterile surfaces in front of the theater, or when street art in Arabizi appears on market walls, a de-immunization of space occurs. These are exactly Pierron’s “interstitial spaces” in which room is made for contingency and an “aesthetics of encounter” arises (Pierron, p. 64). Boundary zones also belong here, where trams physically punch through historical walls of red clay (Bab Rouah or Bab El Had). These places do not limit risk, but provide support so that inhabitants can “inaugurate space through their own choreographies” (Pierron, p. 65).

Tangier

Tangier does not function as a second case to Rabat, but as a counterpoint. It is a city of hybrid jurisdictions and overlapping regimes. Its urbanity is organized through the layering of codes, which makes the city a space of permanent translation. Tangier complicates a simple opposition: while in Rabat we analyze legible borders, in Tangier we observe the ambivalent openness of power operating through overlaps. From the perspective of Bloch’s “not-yet,” the future does not emerge here as a pure promise, but as a conflicting convergence of limitations. Care for possibility here must mean the ability to distinguish between openness that expands common life and openness that translates power into less visible forms.
Tangier shifts this analysis to the level of the ideology of fluidity and speed. While the concrete promenades near the station for the Al Boraq high-speed train (near Avenue d’Espagne) function as sterile transit non-places (the essence of sécurisé), a real possibility is tangible in the zones of self-construction on the peripheries. In places such as steep slopes surrounded by unplastered houses (for example, the districts of Zouitina or El Mers) with protruding steel rebars, architecture manifests as an open process. These steel rebars pointing to the sky are not a sign of failure, but a literal material manifestation of Bloch’s “not-yet”: a materialized anticipation of future growth that rejects the “static delusion” of a final shape directly in the field. Together with the circular urbanism of the Casabarata market, where the street does not serve transit but recycling, these zones show that care for possibility does not always look like an aesthetically clean project. It is the ability to absorb disorientation, which, according to Tveter, paradoxically “enhances our perceptions” (Tveter, p. 547).

Beni Mellal

Beni Mellal then tests the argument outside the metropolises: the city appears here not only as a space of mobility, but as a flow-through hydrological organism. Physical traces of sécurisé urbanism, striving for absolute sanitation and the hiding of support networks, encounter their limits here. New forms of a digital panopticon appear in the city: a perfect materialization is the massive pole with a surveillance camera that rises dystopically directly above the commodified Instagram sign “I ❤️ BENI MELLAL” at the entrance roundabout on the Western part of the city. Power actors thereby transform formally open space into a zone of permanent immune surveillance. Despite this, the impermeable infrastructure of the center is constantly breached by a surface network of traditional irrigation canals (seguias). An infrastructural palimpsest arises here, in which modern engineering had to make a concession to the flow of water. Spontaneous micro-ecologies disrupting the opposition between “natural” and “built” emerge around these hydrological scars: these flows, together with streets that become an agricultural canvas full of crops, function as unintended interspaces (sécurisant). They resist blanket control and demonstrate a form of care where organic life forces its presence despite efforts at immune closure. This form of control constantly shatters in the informal use of the ground floor: streets lose their transport function and become an extension of the field. This agrarian metabolism completely erases the boundaries between formal architecture and practice. Beni Mellal reminds us that care for possibility manifests in the aesthetics of incompleteness even at the level of socioeconomic reproduction.
Taken together, these cases demonstrate that urban life is never fully captured by the rationalities that seek to organize it. Across distinct spatial regimes, processes of closure are continually confronted by residual spaces, informal appropriations, and emergent relations that preserve the city’s openness to the not-yet. What they reveal is not simply a diversity of urban forms, but the persistence of unfinished futures within the present. Care for possibility names the political and spatial commitment to protecting this incompleteness against the forces that seek to render the city fully legible, governed, and complete.

Toward a De-Immunized City (Discussion)

Rabat, Tangier, and Beni Mellal demonstrate that urban life continually exceeds the rationalities that seek to organize it. They reveal the limits of urbanism organized around legibility. Colonial planning, hybrid sovereignties, and infrastructural regulation all attempt to stabilize space, yet each city simultaneously generates interstitial conditions through which new relations and futures emerge. These spaces are not exceptional anomalies but recurring features of urban life. Informal appropriations, unfinished developments, residual infrastructures, and everyday improvisations reveal more than the practical limits of planning, suggesting that incompleteness is not a failure of urbanization but one of its constitutive conditions. They expose a deeper mismatch between the assumptions of immunological urbanism and the ontological character of urban life itself. Immunological urbanism fails because it assumes that uncertainty is a deficit to be eliminated rather than a constitutive feature of urban existence. In seeking to stabilize the city through closure, it mistakes incompleteness for dysfunction and openness for risk. Yet it is precisely within these spaces of incomplete determination that the not-yet becomes perceptible. The city remains alive because it continually generates possibilities that exceed the categories through which power attempts to organize it.
What remains largely unaddressed in contemporary debates on care is how cities might care for those possibilities that have not yet acquired institutional recognition. Care is typically directed toward existing needs, established identities, and already visible forms of vulnerability. The not-yet introduces a different horizon. It shifts attention toward latent possibilities that remain present within urban space but have not yet crystallized into recognized claims, functions, or modes of life. From this perspective, the question is no longer simply how the city supports what already exists, but how it preserves openness to what has not yet fully appeared.
The Moroccan cases illuminate this dimension of care. In Rabat, possibility survives within the fissures of monumental and colonial order; in Tangier, it appears through unfinished architectures and overlapping sovereignties; in Beni Mellal, it emerges through the hydrological and agrarian practices that exceed official spatial rationalities. These spaces are significant not because they represent alternative urban futures in themselves, but because they preserve the conditions under which such futures may become imaginable. Their value lies precisely in their incomplete determination. They remain partially open to relations, uses, and meanings that have not yet been absorbed into dominant systems of property, governance, or exchange.
Care for possibility therefore differs fundamentally from forms of care oriented toward maintenance, optimization, or resilience. Its concern is not primarily the administration of existing arrangements but the preservation of urban openness itself. What requires protection is not a particular outcome, identity, or spatial form, but the capacity of the city to remain unfinished. In this sense, care becomes a commitment to safeguarding the not-yet as an urban condition: protecting those spaces where alternative futures remain capable of emerging, even when they cannot yet be fully specified or recognized.
The de-immunized city should not be understood as a city without institutions, protections, or forms of order. Rather, it designates a city that accepts incompleteness as one of the conditions of its vitality. Against the immunological aspiration to stabilize urban life through regulation, it acknowledges that the city remains fundamentally unfinished. The significance of openness lies not in openness itself but in its capacity to sustain the not-yet—those unrealized possibilities, relations, and forms of life that cannot yet be fully recognized within existing spatial orders. The task of planning is therefore not to finalize the city but to preserve its capacity for transformation. The de-immunized city becomes a political and spatial commitment to the future, safeguarding those conditions through which urban life may continually become otherwise.

Conclusion

This article presented care as an ontopolitical alternative to the prevailing paradigm of immunological urbanism. We have shown that contemporary planning rationalities, driven by an obsession with control and security, reduce urban space to a “healing machine” (machine à guérir), thereby systematically closing off spatial indeterminacy and homogenizing urban life. While the existing discourse on urban care has focused primarily on the redistribution of burdens and the support of already existing, established ways of life, our analysis argues that truly formative care must include the protection of spatial openness. Drawing on Bloch’s ontology of the “not-yet” and Pierron’s concept of “sécurisant” (supportive) space, we have redefined care as the protection of incompleteness - that is, the defense of the city as a horizon that remains open to future becoming.
In this regard, Morocco has served as a key urban laboratory where the limits of immunological urbanism become hypervisible. Through our examination of spatial conflicts in Rabat, Tangier, and Beni Mellal, we have demonstrated that, despite intense pressures toward legibility, commodification, and ubiquitous surveillance, a viable difference persists in the interstitial zones. Subcultural appropriation in Rabat, the permanent spatial transition expressed through exposed architecture in Tangier, and the subversive agrarian-hydrological metabolism defying the digital panopticon in Beni Mellal demonstrate that openness is not merely an aesthetic ideal but an active political and cultural resource. These case studies confirm that forms of life that resist assimilation into dominant administrative categories are essential for maintaining a city’s capacity to evolve and transform.
Rejecting immunological enclosure therefore requires a fundamental epistemological and practical shift in the very concept of urban planning. The planner can no longer act as a sovereign agent who fixes space into definitive arrangements and eliminates vulnerability; rather, the planner must become a mediator of thresholds. Their task is to create forms of support that stabilize vulnerability without completely sealing it off, thereby preserving space for encounters, disorientation, and a new relational aesthetic. Ultimately, a de-immunized city is not built on the destruction of order, but on a conscious political commitment to maintain spatial indeterminacy as an essential infrastructure of the future.

Author Contributions

Vladan Klement, Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing Anton Heinrich Rennesland Conceptualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

Funding

The work of V.K. was supported by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic (MEYS) through the Jan Amos Komenský Operational Programme (OP JAK), project “Urbanity: inequality, adaptation and public space in cities in historical perspective” [CZ.02 .01.01/00/23_025/0008735], co-funded by the European Union. The other author declares that no specific funding was obtained for this study. The author acknowledges the use of artificial intelligence (AI) language models solely for stylistic suggestions and grammar verification of the English text. All academic arguments, conceptual frameworks, historical interpretations, and structural designs of the manuscript were exclusively conceived and written by the authors.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

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