Palmese, Carles Arribas and Rodríguez Antolín formulate listening as a mode of urban knowledge. Working in Puerta del Sol, Madrid, they combine soundwalks, improvised interview mapping, sound archives, performances, questionnaires, acoustic measurements and collective sound actions to examine how citizens perceive and produce the sonic character of a major public space. Their central contribution is methodological: quantitative measurement and situated listening are not competing epistemologies but complementary ways of approaching an environment whose meaning changes with time, activity and social context. Participants repeatedly exceed predefined sound categories, showing that perception generates descriptions unavailable to closed taxonomies. The authors consequently argue for adaptable, place-specific methodologies capable of integrating the present and the absent, the measurable and the experiential. The work bridges urbanism, music, environmental psychology, geography and participatory research. Its strongest implication is that urban observation is itself mobile and embodied: the city becomes intelligible through practices of attentive movement that record not only what occupies space but how space is collectively heard.
Fraisse, V., Tarlao, C. and Guastavino, C. (2024) ‘Shaping city soundscapes: In situ comparison of four sound installations in an urban public space’, Landscape and Urban Planning, 251, 105173. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2024.105173.
Fraisse, Tarlao and Guastavino move soundscape research from diagnosis to intervention. Four temporary sound installations were deployed across two summers in the same public space and evaluated through 825 questionnaires, allowing the authors to compare how distinct compositions altered calmness, pleasantness, perceived loudness, restorativeness and attention to existing sound sources. The central proposition is that sound can be designed as an urban resource rather than addressed only through noise mitigation. Each installation produced common improvements while also generating composition-specific effects: abstract sounds tended to become more noticeable, whereas nature sounds supported stronger restorative responses. Crucially, the installations redirected attention away from other non-dominant sources, revealing acoustic design as an operation on perceptual hierarchy. The study bridges sound art, landscape architecture and evidence-based urban design by treating artistic intervention as experimentally assessable. Its wider significance lies in demonstrating that aesthetic practices can function as low-cost, site-specific urban instruments whose effects are measurable without stripping them of compositional specificity.
Chrobak, G., Aslanoğlu, R., Lubańska, A., Kowalczyk, T., Tokarczyk-Dorociak, K., Szewrański, S. and Kazak, J.K. (2024) ‘Graph Enhanced Co-Occurrence: Deep dive into urban park soundscape’, Ecological Indicators, 165, 112172. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolind.2024.112172.
Chrobak et al. treat the soundscape of urban parks as a network rather than a list of acoustic events. Their methodological innovation is to use graph theory to map the co-occurrence and interconnectivity of natural and anthropogenic sounds observed through soundwalks in parks in Wrocław and Ankara. Centrality, connectivity and network position reveal how certain sounds—especially birds and water—operate as organising nodes within acoustic ecosystems and can mediate the perception of urban noise. This approach moves soundscape research beyond independent-source classification toward the study of relational acoustic organisation. The work’s iconic idea is that the experience of a park arises from an acoustic ecology whose elements acquire meaning through co-presence. Quantitative network analysis is therefore joined to qualitative sense-making. The wider intellectual bridge connects environmental acoustics to complexity science and landscape planning, demonstrating how graph methods can disclose sensory structure without reducing experience to decibel levels. Sound becomes a patterned urban system whose internal relations can inform spatial design.
Cao, J. and Kang, J. (2024) ‘Effect of human sound component on the sociability of urban public spaces—a case study in Sheffield, UK’, Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11, 1523. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03929-y.
Cao and Kang investigate sound not as environmental nuisance but as a constituent of social possibility. Using Peace Gardens in Sheffield, they construct four 360-degree soundscape conditions that vary the prominence and type of human sound, then evaluate them through soundscape-quality measures and willingness for social interaction. Affordance Theory provides the conceptual mechanism: acoustic conditions are assessed according to both their suitability for social activity and their capacity to stimulate interaction. The key result complicates the assumption that quieter space is automatically more sociable. Foreground human sound can increase both suitability and stimulation, whereas other conditions distribute these qualities unevenly. Demographic and companion-group differences further show that acoustic preference is socially situated. The study bridges environmental acoustics, environmental psychology and public-space design by making sociability measurable as an auditory affordance. Its broader contribution is to recast urban sound as relational infrastructure: conversations, voices and eventfulness actively configure how public space invites encounter rather than merely forming a background to visual urbanism.
Mansour, E.A., Elazab, E.M. and Sheta, S.A. (2026) ‘Reviewing frameworks for identifying the memory of the city in historical urban landscape’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 41, pp. 691–715. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10901-025-10241-x.
Mansour, Elazab and Sheta address urban memory as an identifiable yet multidimensional component of historical urban landscapes. Their central proposition is that memory cannot be protected by cataloguing monuments alone because it emerges through relations between human experience and place. The review synthesises previous frameworks into two principal dimensions: the human, comprising psychological and social experience, and the place, comprising activities and physical characteristics. It then proposes a two-stage procedure combining desk-based analysis with in-field data collection and community engagement. This structure turns a diffuse cultural concept into an operational framework for regeneration. Temporal continuity, attachment, reminders, spatial organisation and social use become interdependent evidential layers. The paper bridges heritage conservation, environmental psychology and urban design by treating memory as a planning variable that is neither purely intangible nor reducible to fabric. Its wider significance lies in making regeneration accountable to what inhabitants remember, recognise and reproduce, thereby shifting heritage from object-centred preservation toward relational continuity.
Lister, P. (2024) ‘Creating a City for All of Us: The Possible Role of the Fediverse in Archiving Civic Urban Memory’, Digital Society, 3, 53. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44206-024-00137-8.
Lister relocates urban memory from proprietary social platforms into the institutional question of civic technological sovereignty. The paper proposes a citizen-generated urban memory archive hosted through the decentralised architecture of the Fediverse, with Mastodon serving as an indicative technical model. Its iconic idea is that collective digital memory should function as a civic public good: publicly owned, interoperable, citizen-curated and capable of surviving the closure or strategic decisions of private platforms. Methodologically, the paper combines literature on social memory, digital archives, learning cities and civic technology with a speculative infrastructural design. Questions of moderation, consent, anonymity and privacy are treated as constitutive archival decisions rather than peripheral governance problems. The wider contribution is to link memory studies to platform studies and public infrastructure. Urban remembrance becomes inseparable from protocols of ownership and persistence. The archive is therefore not simply a store of representations of the city; it is a civic institution whose technical architecture determines who may contribute, who governs continuity and under what conditions shared memory remains accessible.
Wilhite, H. and Shove, E. (1998) ‘Understanding Energy Consumption: Beyond Technology and Economics’, in Proceedings of the ACEEE 1998 Summer Study on Energy Efficiency in Buildings. Washington, DC: American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.
Wilhite and Shove dismantle the assumption that household energy demand can be adequately explained through technological efficiency, prices or individual environmental attitudes. Drawing on the interdisciplinary Geneva Group, they reconstruct energy consumption as an outcome of relations among households, manufacturers, retailers, policy organisations, media, infrastructures and cultural conventions. Their comparative discussion of Japanese and Norwegian lighting practices is emblematic: the meaning of a well-lit room is culturally organised and technically materialised, so one national pattern cannot simply represent the efficiency potential of another. The same logic applies to air conditioning, whose necessity is manufactured through building forms, comfort standards, clothing, work schedules and commercial systems. Methodologically, the paper progressively expands the unit of analysis from individual choice to socio-technical systems of demand. It bridges sociology of consumption, STS and energy policy by showing that technologies do not merely satisfy needs; they participate in producing the needs and normalities that later stabilise consumption.
The Energetic Legibility of Urban Life: Infrastructure, Flow and Relational Knowledge (Cottrell, Daggett, Lefebvre, Valverde, Farías, Connolly, Graham, Marvin, Wiig, Donati) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026
Energy becomes politically consequential when it ceases to appear as an abstract quantity and is understood as a relation among bodies, technologies, territories, institutions and forms of knowledge. Fred Cottrell’s Energy and Society established this proposition with unusual clarity: the amount and form of available energy condition what a society can do, yet energy never acts outside the social matrix of converters, values and organisational choices through which it is captured and spent. His notion of surplus energy is therefore not merely thermodynamic but evaluative, because what counts as surplus depends upon the social operations through which energetic gains and losses are recognised. Cara New Daggett radicalises this historical insight by showing that “energy” itself is not an innocent natural category waiting to be discovered. The modern energetic imagination emerges through nineteenth-century thermodynamics, fossil fuels, industrial labour, racialised empire and a political theology of productive work. Energy becomes a way of measuring bodies, disciplining labour and projecting a world in which matter appears valuable insofar as it can be converted into work. The epistemology of energy is thus inseparable from an apparatus of valuation. Henri Lefebvre relocates this problem in space. His production of space does not describe an inert container occupied by economic processes; it identifies space itself as a product and productive force, traversed by flows of energy, raw materials, labour, capital and information. Urban space becomes a nodal condensation of these movements, a place where infrastructures make distant territories operationally present. What looks like a bounded city is consequently sustained by relations extending far beyond its apparent edge. This is the point at which energetic history becomes urban epistemology: to know the city is to know the relations, converters, conduits, scales and asymmetries through which its continuity is materially accomplished. Farías gives this proposition a methodological form through actor-network theory. The city can no longer be treated as a singular, stable object whose internal characteristics await description; it is multiple and decentred, circulating through heterogeneous networks of humans, technologies, documents, institutions and non-humans.
Antunes, R.F. (2026) ‘Expanded Walking: interdisciplinary artistic practices in technologically mediated public space’, Artnodes, 39. https://doi.org/10.7238/artnodes.v0i39.980000013657.
Antunes conceptualises Expanded Walking as an interdisciplinary artistic form that integrates movement, narrative, sound and locative or augmented-reality technologies to generate embodied knowledge in public space. The work’s theoretical contribution lies in linking post-medium practice, phenomenology and infrastructural mediation while refusing to treat walking as belonging to a single artistic genre. Methodologically, Antunes analyses a curated dataset of more than one hundred walking-based artworks, identifying a spectrum from solitary action to communal participation and from analogue encounter to technologically augmented experience. The wider bridge is to media archaeology and urban theory: public space appears as a layered environment shaped by historical traces, sensory intensities and sociotechnical infrastructures. Expanded Walking therefore offers a model for scalar research in which bodily movement can connect immediate perception with larger technological and political systems.
van Es, K. and de Lange, M. (2020) ‘Data with its boots on the ground: Datawalking as research method’, European Journal of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1177/0267323120922087.
Van Es and de Lange formulate datawalking as a method for reconnecting abstract data infrastructures with the material, spatial and embodied conditions of everyday life. Their iconic idea is that data must be encountered “with its boots on the ground”: sensors, platforms and computational systems become intelligible when researchers walk through the environments in which datafication operates. The theoretical contribution is to challenge the invisibility and decontextualisation of data by treating it as situated and constitutive of urban experience. Methodologically, purposive walking directs attention toward the infrastructural traces of deep mediatization. The wider bridge is to urban studies and infrastructure studies, where apparently immaterial systems are understood through their spatial manifestations, maintenance regimes and social consequences. Datawalking thus becomes a scalar operation capable of moving between interface, street, network and institutional system.
Springgay, S. and Truman, S.E. (2019) ‘Research-Creation Walking Methodologies and an Unsettling of Time’, International Review of Qualitative Research, 12(1), pp. 85–93. https://doi.org/10.1525/irqr.2019.12.1.85.
Springgay and Truman challenge chronological time by using walking as a research-creation practice that opens history to speculation, counter-cartography and anarchiving. Their central theoretical contribution is to expose how normative temporal organisation reinforces colonial and neoliberal narratives of progress. Walking can interrupt these temporal regimes because it combines duration, bodily movement, place and repetition in ways that allow alternative temporal relations to emerge. Methodologically, their collaborative events are not simply fieldwork techniques but time-making practices: the walk generates conditions in which past, present and future are rearranged through situated encounter. The wider bridge is to performance studies and decolonial theory, where temporality itself is recognised as a political infrastructure. Long duration therefore becomes critical not because it extends a project quantitatively but because it changes what kinds of relations can become perceptible.
MacDowell (2019) Annual Report 2019. Peterborough, NH: MacDowell.
MacDowell’s institutional model treats protected time as a primary artistic resource. Its annual report describes a residency structure in which artists across architecture, film, literature, theatre, music, visual art and interdisciplinary practice receive studio space, accommodation and meals in order to focus on work for periods ranging from two weeks to two months. The key conceptual contribution is implicit rather than theoretical: production is enabled by withdrawing selected pressures of ordinary life without prescribing a common thematic framework. Methodologically, MacDowell creates an environment of temporal concentration, disciplinary plurality and low administrative friction. The wider bridge is to theories of creative labour and attention, because the residency demonstrates that continuity is not merely a psychological preference but an infrastructural condition produced through space, time, care and institutional support. Protected duration becomes a research apparatus capable of revealing connections that fragmented project schedules often suppress.
O’Neill, P. (2014) ‘Co-productive Exhibition-Making and Three Principal Categories of Organisation: the Background, the Middle-ground and the Foreground’, OnCurating, 22, pp. 34–40.
O’Neill’s model rethinks exhibition-making as a co-productive organisation of relations rather than a linear act of curatorial authorship. By distinguishing background, middle-ground and foreground, he renders visible the layered social and temporal structure through which exhibitions are made, negotiated and received. The key contribution lies in shifting attention away from isolated objects and toward the organisational ecology that conditions how meanings emerge. Methodologically, the model offers a practical grammar for distributing agency: background names enabling conditions and institutional infrastructures, middle-ground names negotiation and mediation, and foreground names what becomes publicly legible. This has a precise bridge to contemporary organisational theory and institutional critique, because the exhibition is treated not as a neutral representational frame but as a site in which authority, visibility and participation are continuously arranged. Curating becomes an infrastructural practice that must calibrate direction without exhausting emergence.
UNIDEE – University of Ideas (2015) UNIDEE – University of Ideas, Statement 2015. Biella: Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto.
UNIDEE defines education as an interdisciplinary, socially embedded process of knowledge-sharing, exchange and cross-pollination rather than as the transmission of a fixed curriculum. Its distinctive move is to cast artistic and educational practice as a catalyst for responsible social transformation while preserving room for error, divergence and the production of unforeseen directions. The statement is especially strong on temporality: the programme must operate as a long-term endeavour whose effects accrue through repeated encounters with civil society and through the re-localisation of processes once participants return to their own contexts. Methodologically, this converts the residency or module from a bounded event into a recursive pedagogical infrastructure. The wider theoretical bridge is to institutional and curatorial theory: institutions become frameworks for generating conditions of emergence rather than containers for predetermined content, making duration, participation and situated return central criteria of practice.
Mersmann, B. and Ohls, H. (eds.) (2025) Paraverse: Digital Transformation in Curating, Exhibiting, and Collecting, OnCurating, 63.
Paraverse treats digital transformation not as a supplementary channel for museums and exhibitions but as a restructuring of mediation, display, collection and value. Its key contribution is to identify a “digital mediation complex” in which analogue objects, virtual environments, online exhibitions, blockchain systems and image ecologies interact across institutional and technical layers. Methodologically, the issue combines theoretical, empirical and curatorial perspectives, allowing the digital to be read simultaneously as medium, infrastructure and market ecology. The wider bridge is to media theory and STS: curating becomes inseparable from protocols, interfaces, ownership regimes, platforms and computational visibility. The significance of the volume lies in showing that digital exhibitionary conditions do not simply extend physical institutions; they reorganise the scales at which objects circulate, acquire meaning and become governable.
Inhabitation is not occupancy but a situated capacity to hold a place within intersecting systems of space, rights, labour, material resources and social recognition. A dwelling can be geographically close to services and still remain precarious; a shelter can be institutionally authorised and yet prohibit the gestures through which domestic life is made; a squat can lack formal legitimacy while generating dense infrastructures of care and political agency.
The decisive urban question is therefore not simply where people are located, but what forms of action, permanence, appropriation and relation become possible from that location. Situated inhabitation names this composite condition. It refuses to isolate spatial form from the institutional, economic and affective arrangements that make space usable, inhabitable and intelligible. This position changes the ontology of home. Home ceases to be a stable object opposed to displacement and becomes an ongoing spatial achievement. Camp, shelter, city and house describe different morphologies, but none guarantees dwelling in itself. Their meaning is produced through repeated practices: modifying a room, cooking, hosting, gardening, building, moving, remembering, negotiating rules, establishing alliances or attaching symbolic value to material fragments. The built environment consequently acquires significance through use and transformation rather than professional authorship alone. Spatial knowledge is distributed among inhabitants, institutions, designers, activists and infrastructures. Displacement makes this distributed authorship unusually visible because the conditions of possession and permanence are unstable, but the principle reaches far beyond migration: all inhabitation is relational, while precarity reveals the relations that secure inhabitation for some and suspend it for others. The political consequence is a displacement of analysis from abstract spatial equality toward differentiated urban capacity. The 15-minute city provides a clear example. Equal metric proximity does not produce equal access when housing costs, employment regimes, income, care obligations and mobility constraints remain unequal. A neighbourhood rich in services can intensify exclusion when its spatial qualities are capitalised into land and rent values. Conversely, populations whose labour sustains proximity for others may experience longer journeys, overcrowded housing or limited residential choice. Spatial justice therefore requires reading distance together with tenure, affordability, work and the possibility of remaining. Urban form is never socially innocent: accessibility is filtered through the material and institutional conditions that distribute the right to inhabit. The displaced housing ecosystem extends this argument from inequality to infrastructure. Housing is produced not only through buildings and official programmes but through mutable constellations of rules, vacancies, occupations, charitable resources, interpersonal agreements, municipal decisions, activist capacities and improvised forms of hospitality. Following post-eviction trajectories reveals governance as a spatial assemblage rather than a single sovereign apparatus. Formal and informal cease to function as adequate opposites because both can be temporary, unstable and dependent on negotiation. What matters is how alliances temporarily stabilise inhabitation, how people circulate among different geographies, and how knowledge of surviving, adapting and making home travels between them. The city appears as an ecology of partial supports whose political value lies in the capacities they enable and the exclusions they reproduce. This situated logic also clarifies why observation and representation are epistemic operations rather than neutral documentation. Ecologías del Campo proposes an analogous movement between the urban environment and the knowledge environment: place, evidence, representation and public return are treated as connected conditions of inquiry. Its comparison of peripheral microspaces insists that shade, vegetation, accessibility, morphology, use and experience cannot be collapsed into a single metric, just as displaced housing cannot be reduced to legal status or dwelling type. Heterogeneous evidence must retain its difference while becoming relationally comparable. The broader methodological implication is decisive: urban knowledge becomes stronger when it preserves context, provenance and positionality instead of abstracting them away. A map, photograph, trajectory, observation or testimony gains analytical power through the relations it makes legible. Socioplastics can operationalise situated inhabitation as a grammar for connecting spatial form, infrastructural conditions, distributed agency and the circulation of evidence. The corpus then functions not as an archive of detached objects but as a field in which heterogeneous traces remain linked to the conditions that produced them: who acted, where, under what constraint, through which medium, and with what capacity to alter the situation. Such a system can register not only stable entities but temporary alliances, contested categories, non-transferable findings and forms of knowledge generated from below. Situated inhabitation adds to Socioplastics a precise urban-epistemic proposition: every spatial claim is also a claim about the relations that permit a body, practice or piece of knowledge to remain operative in place.
Cities persist by routing flows through heterogeneous media. Water crosses watersheds, air and roots move through soil pores, parcels pass through hubs and streets, and instructions circulate through digital systems that coordinate workers. These flows are not secondary to urban form; they constitute the operational city. A surface, a soil profile, a micro-hub or an algorithm matters because it changes where movement can occur, at what speed, with what resistance and under whose control.
The material ground of metabolic routing is permeability. Leopold shows that urbanisation alters hydrological timing by replacing absorptive and distributed conditions with surfaces and systems that accelerate runoff. Paradelo and colleagues make the same problem visible inside the soil itself: compaction, sealing, organic matter and preferential channels reorganise the capacity of ground to admit and transmit water. Permeability is therefore designed, whether intentionally or not. Logistics introduces another form of routing in which urban space is converted into a network of intermediary positions. Castillo’s micro-hubs demonstrate that location and movement cannot be planned independently. A strategically placed node changes the efficiency of an entire distribution system. The city becomes topological: what matters is not only distance but the arrangement of transfer points, transport modes and permissions through which goods can change state and direction. Algorithmic management reveals that routing also acts upon people. A delivery itinerary, a warehouse instruction or a healthcare scheduling system can reduce uncertainty for an organisation while narrowing discretion for workers. Digital coordination redistributes agency along the chain. Efficiency therefore cannot be assessed only through travel distance or throughput; it must include the authority embedded in the route and the capacity of situated actors to modify it. Socioplastics can use metabolic routing to understand how a large corpus becomes traversable. Bibliographic clusters, readers, DOI anchors, indexes and cross-links function as intermediary nodes that shorten conceptual distances and make transitions among fields possible. The quality of the system depends not only on accumulation but on permeability: whether users can move between scales, disciplines and media without losing provenance or becoming trapped in one classificatory route. Metabolic routing adds a material and organisational criterion to Socioplastics. Flows require channels, but channels always shape what they carry. Excessive sealing creates runoff; excessive algorithmic prescription reduces autonomy; poorly located hubs increase friction; weak indexing leaves knowledge stranded. A productive field maintains structured permeability—enough resistance to preserve distinctions and enough connectivity to permit movement. The concept adds an urban metabolism of knowledge in which routing, maintenance and agency become inseparable.
Rani, U., Pesole, A. and González Vázquez, I. (2024) Algorithmic Management Practices in Regular Workplaces: Case Studies in Logistics and Healthcare. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. https://doi.org/10.2760/712475.
Rani, Pesole and González Vázquez demonstrate that algorithmic management has migrated from platform work into ordinary workplaces. Their comparative case studies across logistics and healthcare in Italy, France, India and South Africa examine technologies used for task allocation, route optimisation, monitoring, forecasting, scheduling and performance assessment. The report’s iconic insight is that automation reorganises labour even when a system is not explicitly designed as a management tool. Methodologically, workplace case studies reveal large differences in adoption according to infrastructure, labour costs, institutional constraints and sectoral practice. The theoretical contribution concerns distributed control: algorithms may operate as suggestions in one setting and near-binding instructions in another, while tacit knowledge and human overrides remain crucial. The wider bridge reaches labour process theory, STS and organisational governance, showing that efficiency, surveillance, autonomy and industrial relations are co-produced by the same digital infrastructures rather than separable consequences.
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