By introducing Recetas Urbanas (Urban Recipes), a practice developed by Spanish architect Santiago Cirugeda in 1996, this paper presents a dissident alternative to normative standards in architectural practice, which are currently governed by technical over-codification and bureaucratic homogenization in urban planning. Recetas Urbanas operates in the liminal space between the unregulated and the not explicitly banned, exemplifying disciplinary decoding in architecture and urbanism. Cirugeda’s practice aims to democratize city-making through norm hacking and reinterpretation, translate these alternatives into open, replicable protocols, and experiment with models for environmentally friendly, collaborative buildings. In doing so, it creates infrastructures for socialization that exist outside the prevalent market dynamics of extraction and production.
