Cuevas, E. (2003) ‘Imágenes familiares: del cine doméstico al diario cinematográfico’, in Art and Archives / Archivos de la Filmoteca, pp. 129–140.

Cuevas locates home movies at the unstable boundary between private memory, social ritual, historical evidence and artistic form. Domestic cinema is distinctive because filmmaker, subjects and initial audience often belong to the same familial or friendly milieu; filming is embedded in the life it records rather than organised as an external documentary operation. Its discontinuities, technical imperfections and lack of professional standardisation are therefore not merely deficiencies but traces of a specific social mode of image production. Cuevas also stresses the mnemonic selectivity of home movies: they preserve celebrations and cohesion while frequently omitting conflict, making later reuse capable of exposing both memory and repression. Through compilation films and especially Jonas Mekas’s film diaries, domestic recording becomes a public aesthetic form built from recurrent fragments of ordinary life. The essay bridges film studies, autobiography and archival theory by showing how material created without a research programme can later acquire historical and epistemic force through preservation, montage and renewed interpretation.

Arnold, E. (2021) ‘Photography, composition, and the ephemeral city’, Area, 53, pp. 659–670. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12725.

Arnold argues that photography can operate as an analytic practice rather than as an illustration appended to completed textual research. Working through graffiti and street art in Norwegian cities, she traces a shift from documentary capture toward five compositional operations—documentation, obstruction, abstraction, reflection and negation. The photographer does not simply take images but makes them, and this compositional activity registers changes in attention before they may be fully articulated in language. Photography becomes experiential, relational and embodied: framing, light, occlusion and absence become modes of inference. Crucially, Arnold notes that insight may emerge cumulatively across many photographs and that longitudinal return can reveal patterns unavailable to singular images. Her work bridges human geography, visual ethnography and artistic practice while refusing a simple opposition between scientific evidence and aesthetic construction. The photograph can simultaneously preserve a transient state, embody the researcher’s situated encounter and become a later comparative object through which urban change is reconstructed.

Value is never produced in a temporally neutral world.

Every economic, ecological, urban and informational operation changes the field in which subsequent operations become possible. Georgescu-Roegen gives this proposition its strongest physical form: transformation consumes gradients, degrades accessible low entropy and moves through time in a direction that no accounting convention can reverse. Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl extend the argument from physical process to social organisation. Societies maintain themselves through characteristic metabolisms, drawing energy and matter through institutions, technologies and ways of life, while colonising environments so that natural systems yield specific social functions. Value is therefore inseparable from throughput and from the infrastructures that direct it. What appears as an asset at one scale is a depletion, transformation, maintenance burden or delayed obligation at another. The question is not simply what something is worth, but what material and institutional history makes that worth possible, what future it commits, and where the consequences accumulate. Urban land renders this temporal asymmetry politically visible. A parcel can remain physically unchanged while its economic position changes dramatically through public infrastructure, rezoning, neighbouring investment, demographic concentration or expectations about future development. Halleux and colleagues call attention to the collective origin of much of this increase: the increment is frequently ‘unearned’ in the narrow sense that it does not arise from the owner’s own productive action. Noring shows how municipalities can organise development so that such collectively generated value becomes a renewable public capacity rather than a one-time windfall. Land ownership, development corporations, sequencing and patient finance become devices for retaining future option value inside a public strategy. The city is therefore not simply designed through form; it is designed through the institutional distribution of appreciation, risk, timing and reinvestment. Waiting is one of the principal mechanisms through which this distribution is organised. Loehr formalises the option value of postponement: when investment is irreversible and prices uncertain, delay can be privately rational, and when neighbouring owners also wait, strategic complementarity can raise the threshold for action still further. The city then contains not merely vacant land but temporal positions. Some parcels are held because their owners expect that infrastructures, planning decisions or adjacent investments will improve future returns; other territories absorb the social cost of that deferral through scarcity, disinvestment or blocked transformation. Delay is consequently productive and distributive. It stores options for some actors while externalising costs to others. Urban latency must therefore be read as a structure of value, not as an empty interval between legitimate states.

The politics of capture begins where this asymmetry is made governable. Thompson and Hepburn show that contractual ingenuity can redirect value without resolving the structural problem of financialisation. Hattersley’s development arrangement constrained speculative land banking and channelled private returns into public facilities, yet the model still depended on volatile property appreciation and eventually surrendered long-term increments through the transfer of freehold ownership. Their case clarifies the difference between extracting enough value to finance a project and constructing institutions capable of retaining value across generations. Noring’s Danish cases push toward the second model: public or hybrid development corporations, municipal land positions and patient capital create a temporal infrastructure through which value can circulate repeatedly. Halleux’s European comparison similarly demonstrates that recurrent taxation, non-recurrent developer obligations, public acquisition and planning instruments do not merely collect money; they encode competing theories about who is entitled to future urban increments. This temporal-material understanding changes the status of infrastructure itself. Infrastructure is not simply what accelerates circulation. It also determines what can wait, what must be maintained, what remains legible and who retains control across periods of uncertainty. An archive, repository or identifier system faces the same structural problem in another register. Depositing an object does not secure its future if platforms disappear, formats decay, metadata detach or governance lapses. Persistence is produced through continuous institutional work: versioning, redundancy, maintenance, ownership, access policy and repair. The knowledge object, like urban land, occupies a temporal field in which present decisions determine who can use future value. A DOI, a public land reserve, a long leasehold and a maintenance protocol are radically different devices, yet each stabilises relations across time by constraining the conditions under which an asset can disappear, be appropriated or become inaccessible. Socioplastics gains a sharper infrastructural logic when value is understood as irreversible, collectively conditioned and temporally governed. A corpus is not merely accumulated content; it is a managed stock embedded in material, technical and institutional flows. Publication consumes attention and storage, creates citations and dependencies, modifies classifications and establishes future pathways of retrieval. The relevant question is therefore not maximum accumulation but the design of a metabolic and temporal regime in which objects can persist, be revised, circulate and remain publicly addressable without collapsing into platform dependence. The archive becomes analogous to a public land strategy: what matters is not only producing new objects but retaining the capacity to govern their future relations. Synthetic infrastructure names this capacity at the level of knowledge. It joins persistence, metadata, repositories, identifiers, maintenance and governance into a durable field where accumulated value remains operational rather than inert. The concept added here is a politics of irreversible value: an account of how material throughput, waiting, ownership, capture and maintenance determine which futures remain available to a system and to whom.

Khan, A.A., Amirkhani, M. and Martek, I. (2024) ‘Overcoming Deterrents to Modular Construction in Affordable Housing: A Systematic Review’, Sustainability, 16, 7611. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16177611.

Khan, Amirkhani and Martek examine modular construction as a possible response to the global shortage of affordable housing, but focus analytically on why adoption remains limited despite claimed efficiencies in time, cost and production. Their systematic review identifies 75 deterrents across environmental, social-cultural, technical, market, administrative, economic and regulatory categories. The study’s central conceptual contribution is interdependence: barriers do not act as isolated obstacles but form linked systems in which financing, regulation, industry structure and technical practice reinforce one another. Methodologically, the authors combine systematic literature review, Pareto analysis and total interpretive structural modelling to move from enumeration toward a hierarchy of relationships and actionable countermeasures. The paper bridges construction management, housing policy and industrialised building research. Its value for architectural theory lies in showing that reproducibility is not simply a technical property of modular systems; it is an institutional achievement dependent on coordinated markets, standards, financing, procurement cultures and policy environments.

Urban Difference, Place, Temporary Transformation and Socio-Technical Demand (Nijman, Robinson, Stevens, Zahnow, Wilhite, Shove) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

Comparison becomes intellectually productive when difference is neither erased by a universal metric nor protected as an incomparable singularity. The urban field is especially resistant to both reductions because every city, neighbourhood, building and everyday practice is simultaneously situated and relational: particular in its material and cultural composition, yet connected to processes that recur elsewhere in altered form. Jan Nijman formulates comparative urbanism precisely in this intermediate register, between what can be said of all cities and what can be said only of one city at one moment. His insistence that similarity and difference must be studied together establishes comparison as a problem of epistemic calibration rather than case multiplication. The later theoretical imperative he identifies follows from this: comparison is unavoidable wherever urban research seeks knowledge that can travel, but its legitimacy depends on preventing one place from becoming the tacit norm against which others are measured. Jennifer Robinson radicalises this proposition by detaching theory production from a restricted geography of authorised cases. Comparative urbanism becomes a method for generating revisable concepts from anywhere, using located insight without pretending that location exhausts relevance. The important operation is not the selection of equivalent cases but the construction of relations capable of revealing unexpected analogies, divergences and causal configurations. This makes comparison generative rather than classificatory. A similar logic appears at smaller spatial scales in the work of Quentin Stevens, Dale Leorke, Kim Dovey, Fauster Awepuga and Merrick Morley on temporary urbanism. Their comparative study of pop-up parks in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth follows four interventions through different spatial, political and developmental contexts, showing that temporariness can operate as a strategic test rather than merely as a stop-gap condition. The temporary project becomes an epistemic device because it inserts a reversible proposition into the city and allows consequences to be observed before permanence is authorised. Mapping, interviews, planning documents and long-term trajectories reveal how comparison can join spatial form, institutional process, public response and temporal transformation without reducing them to a single indicator. Here the comparative object is not simply the park but the pathway by which temporary occupation acquires durability. Renee Zahnow shifts the same problem into neighbourhood attachment. Her distinction between place type and place function demonstrates that spatial categories do not carry stable social effects independently of use. Public places, local consumption places and socialisation places acquire different degrees of attachment depending on frequency, shared purpose, social experience and the meanings users attribute to them. A café, gym, place of worship or park therefore cannot be understood by typological identity alone; comparison must preserve the relational work through which function becomes lived significance. Justin Eng and Gavin McCormack extend this into the relation between place attachment, walkability and walking. Their analysis of Calgary neighbourhoods shows that built form and affective or functional attachment do not align through a simple linear rule. Street patterns, place identity, place dependence and different forms of walking interact unevenly, which means that an objectively more walkable environment does not automatically generate the same behavioural relation for all forms of attachment. The significance of comparison lies in detecting conditionality: the effect of one urban attribute depends upon the configuration in which it operates. Samar Thapa and Giovanni Pernigotto make this explicit at the climatic scale. Their comparison between naturally ventilated buildings in high-latitude Europe and the mountainous Himalayan context of Darjeeling demonstrates that similar temperate classifications do not produce identical comfort ranges. Clothing, indoor-outdoor thermal coupling, cultural adaptation and building practices modify what counts as acceptable comfort. The comparative act therefore destabilises the universal indoor standard and recovers comfort as an adaptive relation among climate, body, building and convention. Harold Wilhite and Elizabeth Shove had already exposed the epistemic stakes of this move in energy research. Their critique of technical and economic models of household energy consumption shows that practices such as lighting, cooling and heating cannot be derived from abstract efficiency potentials or individual preferences. Japanese and Norwegian lighting conventions differ because technologies, aesthetics, industries, expectations and routines have developed through distinct socio-technical histories. Air conditioning likewise becomes necessary only after buildings, standards, industries and cultural expectations have combined to manufacture a particular normality. Ana Horta, Wilhite, Luísa Schmidt and Françoise Bartiaux extend this argument by treating energy consumption as a bridge between nature and culture, locating demand within political decisions, conventions, infrastructures and social practice. Comparison thus becomes capable of detecting how apparently technical phenomena are culturally organised without collapsing culture into an explanatory residual. Across these scales, situated comparison is not a compromise between universalism and particularism but a method for producing stronger abstractions. It asks which differences matter, which similarities are consequential, which variables are artefacts of classification, and which relations remain stable enough to travel. The city becomes comparable when its specificity is retained long enough for relations to become visible. An operational field built through situated comparison must therefore organise knowledge so that mobility does not require decontextualisation. The problem is not merely how to store heterogeneous material but how to preserve the conditions that make heterogeneous material comparable: provenance, scale, temporal position, spatial relation, mode of observation, technical mediation and institutional context. This alters the architecture of a corpus. A conventional archive often stabilises objects by assigning them categories, while a comparative archive must also retain the possibility that categories themselves will be revised when new cases enter the field. Nijman’s intermediate register becomes infrastructural: metadata must be precise enough to distinguish cases without freezing them into isolated singularities, and general enough to permit relations across different places and moments. Robinson’s call for theory that can begin anywhere intensifies this requirement because a distributed field cannot maintain one canonical site as the epistemic centre from which all others derive meaning. Search, citation and indexing must allow peripheral, recent, minor or geographically distant materials to become concept-producing rather than merely illustrative. This is particularly relevant to an archive that moves across architecture, urbanism, energy, environmental psychology, artistic research and public infrastructure. Situated comparison provides a grammar for that movement. A temporary intervention can be compared with a permanent one through duration and institutional uptake rather than formal resemblance; a neighbourhood can be compared through patterns of attachment rather than typology alone; climates can be compared through adaptive comfort rather than identical temperature thresholds; energy cultures can be compared through conventions of service rather than kilowatt-hours alone. The comparative unit is therefore constructed in relation to the question. Stevens and colleagues show how reversible urban experiments become longitudinal evidence when their trajectories are followed beyond the event. This suggests an archival principle of temporal recursion: a trace should remain open to later states that alter its interpretation. A photograph of a pop-up park, for example, changes epistemic status if the temporary intervention later becomes permanent; the archive must be capable of connecting those states rather than treating them as separate objects. Zahnow’s work adds a functional principle. Spatial form should not be indexed only by physical type because use, shared purpose and recurrent social experience can reorganise the meaning of apparently similar settings. An archive of places therefore gains explanatory power when social function and lived attachment remain traceable alongside morphology. Eng and McCormack add a behavioural qualification: spatial configuration and affective connection interact, so evidence should preserve the distinction between measurable urban form and experiential relation instead of assuming that one transparently predicts the other. Thapa and Pernigotto make the same point climatically. A temperature value becomes meaningful only in relation to building type, latitude, altitude, ventilation, clothing and adaptive expectation. Comparative knowledge thus depends on contextual density, not on the elimination of context. Wilhite and Shove show what is lost when modelling abstracts practice from the socio-technical systems that fabricate demand. Their move from individual consumer to household, institution, manufacturer, media, infrastructure and policy is instructive for any transdisciplinary corpus: the meaningful unit is often a web of interdependence rather than a single actor or object. Horta and colleagues further demonstrate that the social organisation of energy cannot be treated as an optional cultural layer added after technical description; culture, technology and extraction are co-constitutive. For Socioplastics, this implies an archive whose comparative intelligence lies in maintaining multiple registers at once. A node can carry conceptual, spatial, temporal, bibliographic, visual and infrastructural relations without one of them becoming the sovereign key. Comparison then acts as a pressure test on categories. Repeated encounters with divergent cases reveal where a term is too broad, a scale too crude, a distinction too local or a presumed universal merely conventional. The field becomes self-revising because new material does not simply increase volume; it modifies the relations through which earlier material can be interpreted. This also changes what public legibility means. A searchable corpus is not legible merely because its items can be found. It becomes legible when users can understand why two items have been brought into relation, what differences have been preserved, what transformations made comparison possible, and where analogy ceases to hold. Such legibility resists both the encyclopaedic fantasy that everything can be reduced to one grid and the opposite fantasy that every case is incommensurable. It produces a disciplined openness in which abstractions remain revisable and situated evidence remains mobile. The resulting urban epistemology is neither localist nor universalist: it is relational, conditional and recursive, capable of moving from household energy practices to thermal environments, from neighbourhood attachment to metropolitan theory, and from temporary interventions to durable institutions without presuming that scale determines epistemic value. Socioplastics becomes stronger when comparison is treated as an infrastructural operation for making differences think together rather than an after-the-fact technique for arranging cases. Within Socioplastics, this condition condenses as ContextReadymade.

Anto Lloveras is an architect and urban researcher working across spatial practice, urban epistemology, archives, infrastructure and comparative forms through LAPIEZA LAB and Socioplastics.

Bibliography

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Horta, A., Wilhite, H., Schmidt, L. and Bartiaux, F. (2014) ‘Socio-Technical and Cultural Approaches to Energy Consumption: An Introduction’, Nature and Culture, 9(2), pp. 115–121. https://doi.org/10.3167/nc.2014.090201.

Nijman, J. (2007) ‘Introduction—Comparative Urbanism’, Urban Geography, 28(1), pp. 1–6.

Nijman, J. (2015) ‘The Theoretical Imperative of Comparative Urbanism: A Commentary on “Cities beyond Compare?” by Jamie Peck’, Regional Studies, 49(1), pp. 183–186. https://doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2014.986908.

Robinson, J. (2016) ‘Comparative Urbanism: New Geographies and Cultures of Theorizing the Urban’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 40(1), pp. 187–199. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2427.12273.

Stevens, Q., Leorke, D., Dovey, K., Awepuga, F. and Morley, M. (2024) ‘From “pop-up” to permanent: Temporary urbanism as an emerging mode of strategic open-space planning’, Cities, 154, 105376. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2024.105376.

Thapa, S. and Pernigotto, G. (2025) ‘Adaptive Thermal Comfort in the Different Buildings of Temperate Climates—Comparison Between High-Latitude Europe and Mountainous Himalayas in India’, Sustainability, 17(2), 404. https://doi.org/10.3390/su17020404.

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.

Zahnow, R. (2024) ‘Place type or place function: What matters for place attachment?’, American Journal of Community Psychology, 73, pp. 446–460. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajcp.12722.

Li, N., He, N., Li, M. and Xu, L. (2025) ‘From neural decoding to design intervention: A systematic review of human emotional responses to architectural spaces through neuroimaging techniques’, Wellbeing, Space and Society, 9, 100305. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wss.2025.100305.

Li, He, Li and Xu ask the question on which neuroarchitecture ultimately stands or falls: whether neural measurements can become architecturally actionable without being reduced to decorative scientific evidence. Their PRISMA review of seventeen neuroimaging studies maps the field’s methodological convergence around EEG, frequently coupled with VR, and extracts reported relations among proportion, curvature, openness, relaxation–arousal balance and aesthetic valuation. The authors move further by discussing candidate design thresholds, multimodal assessment and computational optimisation, thereby explicitly translating from neural decoding toward intervention. Yet the review is strongest where it identifies its own field’s fragility: only a small fraction of studies operate in real environments, protocols remain heterogeneous, cultural and individual differences are undersampled, and single-variable experiments poorly represent complex architectural situations. Its methodological contribution is therefore double: it catalogues measurable spatial–neural relations while delimiting their evidential scope. The wider bridge is evidence-based design, understood not as universal prescription but as a translation problem between controlled experiment, situated experience and architectural decision.

Digital knowledge is always larger and smaller than the object through which it becomes visible. A screen, map, sensor, repository entry or augmented walk condenses systems whose operative scale extends from bodily perception to institutional platforms, energy infrastructures and planetary material flows. Scalar knowledge therefore concerns the movement between levels rather than the supremacy of one level over another.

Datawalking provides the clearest methodological model. By placing bodies inside computational environments, van Es and de Lange make infrastructures observable through situated encounters. Antunes expands the same operation into artistic practice, where movement can connect sensory perception to locative media and public-space politics. The body does not replace the network; it becomes the point from which the network can be read. Paraverse demonstrates how this scalar problem reorganises curating. Digital mediation does not simply reproduce the museum online. It alters access, ownership, display, value and the very ontology of the collected object. An exhibition can now be distributed across physical architecture, virtual environments, software protocols and market infrastructures. The curatorial object therefore has multiple simultaneous locations. The ecological dimension makes scalar thinking unavoidable. Ohls shows that virtual environments depend on material systems whose energy, hardware and infrastructural costs remain spatially displaced. Digital culture becomes legible only when interface and infrastructure are analysed together. Situated Systems adds another layer by treating technical workshops as epistemic environments in which tools and institutional structures actively condition research. Socioplastics can operationalise scalar mediation by requiring every digital object to retain links between its visible form and the infrastructures that support its circulation. A node should be readable as text, metadata, file, interface, repository object and relational position without assuming that any one of these scales is sufficient. The result is an architecture in which knowledge can move across scales without losing provenance. The corpus becomes not a flat archive but a distributed system of objects whose meanings change as they move between material, institutional, urban and planetary registers. Within Socioplastics, this condenses as ScalarArchitecture.

Ohls, H. (2025) ‘Virtual Worlds and Digital Ecology in the Exhibitionary Internet Complex: Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s Berl-Berl and Boreal Dreams’, in Mersmann, B. and Ohls, H. (eds.) Paraverse: Digital Transformation in Curating, Exhibiting, and Collecting. OnCurating, 63.

Ohls examines digital ecological artworks within what he calls the exhibitionary internet complex, where immersive simulation, AI, screens, networks and environmental representation are inseparable. The key contribution is to connect virtual exhibition practice with the material and ecological costs of digital infrastructures. His analysis resists the tendency to treat virtuality as immaterial, foregrounding energy use, technological dependency and protocol as constitutive aspects of digital culture. Methodologically, he reads specific works as interfaces between ecological imagination and infrastructural reality, paying attention to their ongoing and generative character. The wider bridge is to environmental media theory: digital ecology names both the representation of environments and the ecology of the technologies through which such environments are produced and circulated. Scale becomes crucial because local visual experience depends on distributed computational systems that extend far beyond the exhibition site.

Brin, S., Wasserman, S. and Voss, G. (2016) Situated Knowledges, Gray Area, Issue 4.

The Situated Systems panel documents an experimental research model developed around Autodesk Pier 9 in which critical inquiry is deliberately constructed across art, design, architecture and technology. Its iconic idea is hybrid research: one question should be examined from multiple disciplinary positions while remaining materially tied to a site and its fabrication infrastructure. The contribution lies in insisting that technical environments require public discourse and theoretical reflection if their cultural implications are to become legible. Methodologically, the project joins site-based research, workshop infrastructure, public conversation and interdisciplinary collaboration. The wider bridge is to STS and laboratory studies, because the workshop is treated as both a productive facility and an epistemic environment whose tools, institutional language and social organisation shape what knowledge can be produced. Situated Systems therefore models how technical infrastructures can be studied from within without collapsing critical distance.

Voss, G. with Prelinger, R. and Prelinger, M. (n.d.) ‘Prelinger Library’, Situated Knowledges, Issue 3.

The Prelinger Library proposes an archive that behaves less like a repository than a workshop. Rick and Megan Prelinger describe a collection assembled from books, periodicals and ephemera in order to contextualise film and technological histories that become unintelligible when objects are detached from the conditions of their production and reception. Their decisive methodological principle is empirical: allow material to disturb the thesis rather than constructing a thesis and then searching for confirmation. Physical browsing becomes a form of spatial research akin to hiking or road-tripping, because discovery depends on adjacency, scale, touch and unexpected encounter. The library consequently resists a purely query-based epistemology in which researchers can retrieve only what they already know how to name. Its wider contribution connects archival theory, media archaeology and open knowledge: physical and digital objects perform different epistemic jobs, and a living archive must preserve the possibility of finding relations that no catalogue, search field or predetermined research question could have anticipated.

Raqs Media Collective (2025) ‘Blurry Borders and Messy Realities: Reflections on the Infrastructural in the Curatorial’, OnCurating, 59, pp. 15–21.

Raqs Media Collective formulates curating as infrastructural mobilisation rather than the arrangement of objects. Water, toxicity, care, public gestures, digital circulation and urban life are treated as already mediated by systems that distribute access, exposure, memory and possibility. The curatorial task is therefore to sense and work with those systems without pretending that they are clean or neutral. Their examples—from Yokohama to Five Million Incidents and 51 Personae—show duration, multiplication and peer relations as curatorial materials. A small gesture can become a network; an event can migrate between physical and digital space; an exhibition can become a perennial urban practice. The key conceptual contribution is “open infrastructure”: openness must be written into the architecture of a system if modification and repurposing are to remain possible. This bridges curatorial theory with software culture, urban studies and institutional critique. Curation becomes a durational technology for moving protagonists, objects and intangible relations through porous fields.

Villa Arson (2022) Practice-based PhD in Arts: Call for Applications 2022. Nice: Villa Arson / Université Côte d’Azur.

Villa Arson’s practice-based doctoral framework provides a concise institutional theory of artistic research. It defines the artistic project as a matrix for research structured through both analytical reflection and the production of works, refusing a hierarchy in which theory validates practice after the fact. The programme expects candidates to organise research through projects, situate it within an interdisciplinary environment, develop specific methodological tools and produce knowledge capable of transfer beyond the originating discipline. Its most consequential operation is the hybrid dissertation: works coexist with text, portfolio, logbook, sources and records of interactions with artistic and scientific practices. Publication, teaching, public restitution and participation in the institution’s research ecology are treated as constitutive parts of inquiry rather than dissemination added at the end. The document therefore bridges artistic research, pedagogy, curatorial practice and institutional knowledge production. It makes explicit that research can remain materially heterogeneous while still requiring argument, method, continuity and public legibility.

Haley, D. (2021) ‘A Walk on the Wild Side: Steps towards an ecological arts pedagogy’, International Journal of Education Through Art, 17(1), pp. 135–152. doi:10.1386/eta_00054_1.

David Haley develops walking as an ecological arts pedagogy through a fourteen-year programme of more than twenty walking performances across nine cities in five countries. Its iconic idea is that urban walking can become a form of question-based learning capable of revealing ecological interdependence that remains invisible to conventional disciplinary observation. The project emerged from noticing an apparently minor urban event—a tree growing high on a Victorian building—and allowing curiosity to expand into a sustained programme of inquiry. Haley’s theoretical contribution is therefore ecological and pedagogical at once: the walk produces a temporary learning system in which participants encounter urban life as a field of relations rather than as a backdrop. Methodologically, he combines performance, dialogue, community participation, observation and open-ended questioning without resolving them into a single scientific protocol. The bridge to transdisciplinary research is exact: ecological knowledge is generated through attention, conversation and situated movement, making pedagogy an urban practice of collective perception and future-making.

 

Elwood, S. (2006) ‘Critical issues in participatory GIS: Deconstructions, reconstructions, and new research directions’, Transactions in GIS, 10(5), pp. 693–708. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9671.2006.01023.x.

Elwood reconstructs participatory GIS as both a response to the political critique of GIS and a new field of epistemological difficulty. Participatory GIS attempts to redistribute access to spatial technologies, diversify the forms of knowledge that can enter digital maps and embed geospatial tools within more inclusive research and decision-making processes. Yet Elwood refuses to equate participation with emancipation. Lower technological costs do not erase inequalities of expertise, infrastructure or institutional power; multimedia and web-based GIS can expand representation while simultaneously reproducing new digital divides. Her most important conceptual operation is the distinction between using GIS with qualitative methods and treating GIS itself as a qualitative method, opening cartographic representation to inductive, interpretive and feminist epistemologies. Maps become communicative and political texts rather than neutral analytical outputs. The wider bridge is to critical cartography and STS: spatial technologies mediate knowledge, access and authority, and their democratization must therefore remain reflexive about the infrastructures and power relations they reconstruct.

Middleton, J. (2010) ‘Sense and the city: Exploring the embodied geographies of urban walking’, Social & Cultural Geography, 11(6), pp. 575–596. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2010.497913.

Middleton displaces urban walking from the policy language of sustainable transport and from abstract celebrations of pedestrian life toward the embodied, material and technological complexity of everyday movement. Walking is treated as a socio-technical assemblage rather than a homogeneous behaviour: bodily senses, habits, street materials, technologies, temporal routines and spatial conventions combine differently across ordinary journeys. Methodologically, the article draws on in-depth interviews and walking photo diaries with participants in Islington and Hackney, producing an empirical account of how people actually negotiate city streets. Its strongest contribution is to show that pedestrian experience cannot be reduced to distance, accessibility or mode choice because urban movement is continuously mediated by sensation, materiality and practical convention. This creates a precise bridge between urban policy and social theory: evidence about walking must preserve the lived heterogeneity that infrastructural metrics tend to flatten. The pedestrian becomes an situated sensing body rather than an abstract unit of mobility.

Kusenbach, M. (2003) ‘Street phenomenology: The go-along as ethnographic research tool’, Ethnography, 4(3), pp. 455–485. https://doi.org/10.1177/146613810343007.

Kusenbach gives the go-along its foundational ethnographic formulation by joining interviewing to movement through the settings in which everyday life actually unfolds. The method’s iconic proposition is that lived experience becomes more accessible when participants encounter the environments, objects, routes and social situations through which their meanings are ordinarily produced. Rather than asking subjects to reconstruct place retrospectively from a detached interview setting, the researcher accompanies them in situ, allowing perception, memory, biography and spatial practice to emerge through environmental prompts. Kusenbach identifies five especially productive domains: environmental perception, spatial practices, biographies, social architecture and social realms. This makes the go-along more than a mobile interview; it becomes a phenomenological extension of ethnography capable of accessing reflexive and tacit dimensions of experience. Its broader theoretical contribution lies in reconnecting qualitative research with the spatial constitution of social life, treating place as an active component of knowledge rather than a neutral container.

Leonelli, S. and Trappes, R. (2026) ‘The Nature of Research Environments: Editorial Introduction’, European Journal for Philosophy of Science, 16, article 45. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13194-026-00755-8.

Leonelli and Trappes propose the research environment as a systematic object for philosophy of science. Scientific inquiry is situated within intertwined conceptual, material and social conditions: skills, background knowledge, instruments, samples, institutional structures, norms, collaboration, administrative arrangements and physical settings all participate in shaping what can be known. The theoretical contribution is to move beyond accounts of scientific change centred principally on concepts, theories or disciplines and to examine the environments within which research practices become possible. Their conceptual operation draws cautiously on ecological and organism–environment thinking while refusing a simplistic biological metaphor for social science. This opens research environments to analysis as distributed structures of agency, division of labour, situated knowledge and material constraint. The wider bridge is to social epistemology, feminist epistemology and infrastructure studies: disciplines cease to be sufficient explanatory containers once the concrete environments of knowledge production are recognised as active determinants of scientific content and change.

Leonelli, S. and Tempini, N. (2021) ‘Where Health and Environment Meet: The Use of Invariant Parameters in Big Data Analysis’, Synthese, 198(Suppl 10), pp. S2485–S2504. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1844-2.

Leonelli and Tempini examine how radically heterogeneous health, climate, environmental and biomedical datasets can be linked without pretending that their original contexts are equivalent. Their iconic operation is the strategic invariant: a parameter such as geolocation is temporarily held stable so that otherwise incomparable data can be searched, linked and interpreted together. The theoretical contribution is a situated account of invariance in which comparability is deliberately constructed and its limitations remain visible. Rather than treating localisation as an external universal coordinate, the paper insists on its idiographic character and on documenting the transformations required for reuse. Methodologically, the argument reconstructs big-data practices at the intersection of epidemiology and environmental research, showing how metadata, scale, time and purpose condition inference. The wider bridge is exceptionally relevant to spatial research: built and natural environments can enter health analysis only through carefully governed translations between epistemic cultures, making scale itself an evidential problem rather than a neutral container.

Castillo, C., Panadero, J., Alvarez-Palau, E.J. and Juan, A.A. (2024) ‘Towards greener city logistics: an application of agile routing algorithms to optimize the distribution of micro-hubs in Barcelona’, European Transport Research Review, 16, 44. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12544-024-00669-7.

Castillo and colleagues treat last-mile logistics as a combined problem of location, routing and urban policy. Their Barcelona model identifies potential micro-hubs across 1,057 existing facilities—including stations, markets, public buildings, pickup points and parking areas—and couples these locations with cargo bikes and electric vans. The methodological core is a location-routing problem solved through agile heuristic and machine-learning procedures capable of producing adaptive plans across multiple operational objectives. The theoretical contribution lies in refusing to separate spatial infrastructure from circulation: the value of a hub depends on the routes and modes it makes possible, while routing efficiency depends on the distribution of intermediary nodes. The wider bridge connects operations research to urban design and public administration. Micro-hubs alter value chains, land-use relations and regulatory requirements, making logistics a spatial governance problem in which algorithmic optimisation, underused urban assets and sustainability policy become mutually dependent.

Paradelo, R., Herbón, C. and Barral, M.T. (2025) ‘Physical properties of the urban soils of Santiago de Compostela (Spain)’, Journal of Soils and Sediments, 25, pp. 462–471. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11368-024-03833-7.

Paradelo, Herbón and Barral make urban soil visible as functional infrastructure. Studying sixty-four soils across different parent materials and land uses in Santiago de Compostela, they measure bulk density, porosity, water-holding capacity, aggregate stability, permeability, penetration resistance and erosion risk. Their key contribution is to show that “urban soil” is not a uniform degraded category: properties are heterogeneous and strongly conditioned by management. Compaction is widespread, yet urban agriculture can retain higher permeability and lower compaction than grasslands or forests, while coarse fragments may sustain preferential infiltration despite local degradation. Methodologically, field and laboratory measurements connect microscopic physical structure to city-scale water-cycle performance. The wider bridge reaches urban ecology and landscape architecture: soil sealing, organic matter, desire lines and maintenance practices become design variables. Ground is therefore not a passive substrate beneath urban form but a dynamic medium regulating infiltration, erosion, vegetation and hydrological resilience.

Leopold, L.B. (1968) Hydrology for Urban Land Planning: A Guidebook on the Hydrologic Effects of Urban Land Use. Geological Survey Circular 554. Washington, DC: U.S. Geological Survey.

Leopold makes urbanisation legible as a hydrological transformation rather than merely a change in land cover. The guidebook’s iconic operation is to connect planning decisions with altered runoff, flood frequency, local storage, sediment production and water quality. Urban land use becomes consequential because surfaces, drainage systems and development patterns reorganise the timing and magnitude of water movement through a watershed. Methodologically, Leopold translates hydrological variables into a planning framework, showing how available data and relatively direct analytical techniques can anticipate consequences before development hardens them into infrastructure. The theoretical contribution is relational: water does not respect administrative parcels, and the effect of one intervention propagates across a larger catchment system. The wider bridge reaches landscape ecology, environmental planning and infrastructure studies, where the city must be read through flows that exceed visible built form and where design becomes partly the management of temporal relations among rainfall, storage, runoff and downstream exposure.