Embodied exposure and the politics of urban measurability: situated evidence and its public consequences· LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

Urban vulnerability is not a property that can be assigned reliably to a mapped surface without asking how the measurement was made. Mobility, fear, thermal exposure and access to greenery or services vary with embodiment, time, infrastructure and the social capacity to move. Measurements generated by sensors, surveys, remote sensing and collective memories need not describe interchangeable realities. Their differences become analytically productive when they are preserved instead of averaged into a single indicator. In this instalment, the material includes Building dense or compact cities without jeopardizing biodiversity: Insights from bir; Sacred sites as refuges for native plant diversity in an urbanized tropical landscape; Global spatiotemporal analysis of interactions between urban heat islands and extreme; People drive or stop transitions: Lessons learned on co-creating Edible Cities. Read together, these distinct empirical and conceptual settings delimit the range of situations that a single urban vocabulary tends to compress. The critical comparison is not a claim of causal identity among the studies. It is a method of making their units of analysis and forms of proof visible together. Differences between field measurements, constructed scenarios, comparative datasets, qualitative accounts and prescriptive arguments must remain explicit. Where a study offers a mapping technique, the map is evidence of a specified operationalisation, not the territory itself. Where it offers a conceptual critique, that critique cannot be converted into an observed outcome without additional data. This separation is essential to any cross-disciplinary synthesis: the apparent coherence of a thematic field is weak if it depends on erasing the distinctions through which its sources produce knowledge.

For Socioplastics, the question is how an archive can store simultaneously a measured condition, a situated account and the gap between them. A spatial record should name the instrument, population, temporal window and scale of inference. It should make possible comparisons that are reversible when a category changes, and retain the circumstances under which residents can contest an apparently objective map. Additional cases in this selection concern Beta-diversity of urban vegetation shapes microbial heterogeneity and maintains healt; Explainable deep learning for understanding the influence of urban characteristics an; Urbanization increases the complexity of soil microbial interaction networks. Each should be indexed by its research question, method, geographic and temporal scope, unit of comparison and the kind of proposition it can support. In the present collection, the PDF is the primary evidential object: a title or abstract alone is insufficient to validate statistical inferences, the full context of a field intervention or a policy claim. These capsules therefore do not substitute for subsequent full-page interpretation, but they protect the completeness of the acquisition stage. Keeping publication identity separate from conceptual relevance also prevents a selective editorial argument from silently deleting original documents. The resulting Reader is a versioned, inspectable layer of Socioplastics, capable of being expanded with annotations of methods, limitations, empirical results, figures and counterarguments after a dedicated close reading of each source.

The Walk as an Unequal Instrument: Restoration, Exposure and Temporal Power (Bornioli, Korpela, Hartig, Kyttä, Dadvand, White, Kitchin) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

A neighbourhood is not encountered all at once. Its environmental qualities arrive through a sequence of turns, delays, openings, remembered corners, familiar shortcuts and interruptions whose effects cannot be inferred from the plan alone. A green surface recorded by a satellite may indicate vegetation without telling us whether the pedestrian sees it, can enter it, wants to remain there, or feels entitled to occupy it. A high score for walkability may describe connected streets without specifying whether the person crossing them is rested, apprehensive, hurried, physically constrained or searching for company. The tension is not between objective knowledge and subjective opinion, as though the researcher merely had to choose a side. It is between different operations for making a neighbourhood knowable, each capable of disclosing something that another necessarily omits. Dadvand and colleagues' school-based epidemiology demonstrates why spatial exposure must extend beyond the dwelling: the child's passage between home and school is itself a meaningful environmental interval, and cognitive development must be examined across time rather than extracted from one isolated observation. Yet an index of greenness, however finely resolved, cannot reveal the affective or biographical character of that passage. Bornioli, Parkhurst and Morgan begin from the other direction. Through photo-elicitation they give participants a means to identify places whose psychological significance arises during walking, including experiences that a standard spatial inventory would not have anticipated. The resulting evidence is richer in meaning but does not establish the same claims about population health. These are not rival methods waiting to be reconciled into a single superior score. They are instruments whose productive differences should be preserved. Hartig and colleagues complicate matters further by showing that environmental restoration has a trajectory: physiological response, attention and affect may change during and after an encounter, and their movements need not coincide. A walk is therefore neither a fixed dose nor a timeless experience. It has a before, a during and an after, and the need for restoration can be shaped by what happened before the first step. Korpela and colleagues locate this sequence inside a longer personal geography. A favourite place is not restorative simply because it possesses a prescribed set of natural features; its significance also depends on repeated use, remembered experience, stress, social relations and the individual's history of seeking relief. The same park may be a refuge, a compulsory passage, a site of labour, or an inaccessible promise. These differences cannot be read from the park's polygon. White and colleagues' large-scale analysis of time in nature makes a parallel distinction visible at another scale. Their association between weekly nature contact and health or wellbeing is important precisely because it shifts attention from proximity to actual time spent, but duration alone cannot tell us what that time contained. A person with abundant free time and another who must compress movement between obligations may report equal minutes while inhabiting radically different conditions of choice. The methodological problem is thus one of non-equivalence: mapped opportunity, actual passage, remembered attachment, measured response and accumulated contact all describe real dimensions of the urban environment, but none can legitimately substitute for all the others. The most consequential evidence may appear at their points of disagreement. A route classified as environmentally advantageous may produce fatigue or fear; a modest, heavily built street may sustain attachment and social reassurance; a short passage may provide a stronger sense of agency than a longer, greener alternative. Such contradictions are not noise to be removed by averaging. They are clues to how a place acquires capacity through relations among bodies, infrastructures, histories and practices. Kołodyńska, Rinne and Kyttä make this point spatially through the difference between necessary and optional activities in suburban Poland. Their participatory mapping discloses the geography of obligation and possibility: journeys made because daily life requires them do not occupy the same experiential category as journeys chosen for pleasure. The distinction also questions a common planning reflex. Connectivity is not automatically autonomy; access to a destination does not establish freedom over the journey; and a landscape capable of supporting optional activity does not guarantee that everyone can use it. The neighbourhood must therefore be understood as a differentiated field of potential actions whose value is realised, frustrated or transformed through situated movement. It is not simply an object awaiting measurement but a changing relation between what is materially offered, what is socially permitted, what is physically possible and what becomes meaningful to the person moving through it.

The methodological consequence is to construct a research archive in which these differences remain retrievable rather than being flattened into a composite neighbourhood score. The route should function as an evidentiary sequence: an ordered set of observations, decisions, interruptions, transitions and interpretations, connected to environmental measurements without being absorbed by them. This requires more than adding a qualitative comment field to a geographic information system. It means deciding what the smallest comparable unit of evidence can be, what contextual information must accompany it, and which forms of uncertainty deserve to survive the act of classification. A route's coordinates may be stored as a spatial trace; its circumstances may include time, weather, traffic, social company, bodily effort, purpose and the participant's freedom to deviate. But a trace is not a complete account of experience, and a statement of feeling is not a complete account of exposure. Their relationship must be recorded as a relationship. Kahila-Tani's work on participatory GIS shows why this is simultaneously an epistemological and an institutional problem. Once a personal experience becomes a point or line on a planning map, it gains visibility, portability and apparent comparability. It can travel into a meeting, be grouped with other observations and appear as evidence in a decision. Yet the same conversion can detach the mark from the narrative that gave it significance. The map is not simply an innocent container for local knowledge. It is an interface that decides what becomes countable, which differences can be represented, and how much interpretation is left to the person who originally supplied the information. An accountable walking archive would therefore preserve provenance: who made an observation, under what conditions, with what degree of confidence, and how it was subsequently interpreted or aggregated. It would distinguish participant-chosen routes from researcher-designed comparison routes, and separate what was observed directly from what was inferred from external spatial datasets. It would also allow contradictions to be found again. When objective accessibility and experienced accessibility diverge, the system should not silently resolve the conflict in favour of the supposedly more rigorous layer. It should permit the disagreement to become a research question. Such a structure changes the status of metadata. Metadata is no longer administrative residue attached after fieldwork; it is the means by which situated evidence retains its conditions of production across places, observers and time. The choice of which categories to standardise and which to leave open is correspondingly political. Too little structure makes cross-city comparison weak; too much structure erases the very differences that walking research was designed to reveal. Kitchin's engagement with distant time sharpens this dilemma by insisting that urban conditions are not merely distributed across space but organised through temporal power. Waiting at a crossing, navigating an unfinished redevelopment, taking a detour around a construction site or encountering a place whose future has already been decided elsewhere are not trivial deviations from an ideal pedestrian itinerary. They are experiences of governance materialised as movement. The archive must therefore be capable of registering infrastructural and political time alongside individual duration. It must ask who controls the pace of change, who absorbs its friction, and whose remembered landscape is treated as disposable when a new plan becomes authoritative. This is particularly important when longitudinal comparison is attempted. Returning to a route does not reproduce the earlier walk; it establishes a new observation in relation to a previous configuration of place, body, expectation and institution. The temporal comparison must retain both continuity and difference, rather than projecting a false stability onto the same coordinates. Health evidence adds another responsibility. Associations between environmental exposure and wellbeing can inform planning, but they should not be used to turn individual reports into diagnoses or to infer clinical benefit from a single pleasant walk. Likewise, detailed GPS traces can expose home locations, routines and vulnerable patterns of movement. The possibility of producing precise data does not automatically confer a right to publish them. Spatial masking, selective access and careful separation of identifying traces from shareable analytical descriptions are part of the knowledge architecture, not external restrictions imposed upon it. The strongest public result may sometimes be an aggregate pattern whose individual paths remain deliberately opaque. A comparative instrument built on these principles would make available a more demanding form of urban evidence: one in which exposure, restoration, obligation, choice, attachment and governance can be examined together without being declared equivalent. It would make neighbourhood capacity legible as a profile of situated possibilities, not as a single promise of wellbeing. In Socioplastics, the resulting tension between trace, interpretation and public evidence condenses as Relational Agency.

The Cultivated and the Spontaneous: Ecological Novelty, Classification and Urban Experience (Teixeira, Fernandes, Ahern, Rudka) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

A plant can survive the city without being acknowledged as belonging to it. This asymmetry is not exhausted by the difference between biological presence and cultural preference: it runs through the very instruments that make urban nature actionable. The garden and the vacant lot, the curated arboretum and the roadside colony, the officially selected tree and the species that takes root without permission, all expose a friction between life as an ongoing process and the institutional forms through which life is named, ordered, maintained or eliminated. In the research of Catarina Patoilo Teixeira and collaborators, ecological novelty is not a romantic celebration of wilderness inside the metropolis. It identifies biological assemblages emerging under anthropogenic pressure, including climates and disturbances to which conventional planting prescriptions may be poorly fitted. Novelty therefore cannot be read off appearance alone. A spontaneous patch can provide ecological functions that its unplanned status renders culturally suspect; a formally planted scheme can bear an exemplary environmental label without delivering the ecological diversity that label suggests. This tension is particularly precise in the survey of Portuguese landscape professionals. By decomposing Novel Urban Ecosystems into the axes native/non-native and cultivated/spontaneous, Teixeira, Fernandes, Ryan and Ahern reveal that the act of classification has practical consequences for acceptance. The remarkable implication is not that experts can be persuaded to like plants, but that the conceptual frame through which an organism is presented participates in the judgement made about it. When the description changes, some evaluations shift. Yet the study does not eliminate the distinction between an expressed judgement and an experienced place: its questionnaire records professional responses, not lived encounters along routes, and the authors identify the restricted professional sample as a limitation. The distance is productive. It indicates a form of evidence still required between ecological inventory and social judgement: situated encounter, in which a person may move from heat into shade, from a visibly maintained path into spontaneous growth, from a refuge to an obstructed sightline, and register different forms of comfort or uncertainty without first classifying the vegetation botanically. The adaptive planting framework takes a second step by refusing to make the design of nature into a single moment of authorship. Climate assessment, trait-based species knowledge and iterative management form a sequence in which a site must remain capable of teaching its designers. The categories remove, monitor, keep and add appear practical, but they disclose an ethics of non-finality: ecological value can alter as environmental conditions change, and the grounds for intervention can be reconsidered. This is a discipline of provisional decisions, not an exemption from ecological risk. The accompanying plant-traits database clarifies how such decisions are made legible. Two hundred and eighty-seven species become a structured field of recorded capacities, tolerances, forms and potential hazards; the data's apparent stability conceals both the work of sampling and the inevitable selectivity of its variables. A crown can be described through density and dimensions, but its perceived hospitality is not reducible to those attributes. A flowering season may indicate potential resources for insects, but neither the actual activity of pollinators nor the aesthetic meaning of a meadow follows automatically from a spreadsheet entry. Fernandes and colleagues' study of seed mixtures sharpens this distinction between designation and performance: a market in ecological solutions depends on descriptors whose credibility must be checked against composition and explicit criteria. Only a minority of the mixtures examined meet the paper's selected pollinator-friendly criteria, a result that does not warrant universal claims about all mixes but does expose the fragility of self-declared environmental virtue. At the other end of the spectrum, the arboretum represents nature made deliberately legible: accession, arrangement, circulation and visitor services operate together, transforming living collections into an architectural and educational apparatus. Its spatial order does not merely accommodate botanical knowledge. It edits the sequence in which knowledge can be encountered. The cultivated and the spontaneous are thus not two opposing kinds of vegetation. They are two unstable political and epistemic positions within an urban system that decides how nature becomes evidence, experience and public legitimacy.

The difficulty for Socioplastics begins exactly where the conventional green map appears sufficient. A mapped polygon labelled park or an inventory point labelled tree can be correct in its own terms and still fail to explain what becomes possible for a particular walker at a particular hour. The botanical, administrative and experiential descriptions of the city do not occupy the same scale or temporal resolution. An ecological dataset may follow species and traits; a planning layer may locate designated land uses; a visitor may remember the cool edge of a wall, an inaccessible gate, flowering weeds beside a neglected pavement or the unexpected attraction of a less regulated landscape. None of these observations invalidates the others, but none should be allowed to stand in silently for them. This is the opening for an observational grammar in which living vegetation, spatial affordance, interpretation and movement are recorded as distinct yet potentially comparable layers. Teixeira's research offers both resources and warnings for such a grammar. The plant-traits database demonstrates the utility of clearly defined fields, source provenance and reusable classifications. Its sampling from ecologically novel sites demonstrates that selection is never innocent: a database is shaped from the start by a decision about which places will count. The arboretum study demonstrates how standardised georeferencing and vectorisation can make unlike landscapes comparable, while its institutional diversity reminds us that the common map does not dissolve local governance, histories or modes of access. The professional-attitudes survey warns against confusing familiarity with ecological categories and public acceptance; indeed, a visitor's relation to spontaneous vegetation may be articulated without any prior awareness of ecological novelty as a scientific idea. For fieldwork, the consequence is to avoid asking walkers to become amateur botanists. Expert ecological assessment can remain an independent layer, linked to but not substituted for statements about shade, visibility, scent, vegetation density, perceived care, fear, pleasure or fatigue. The record of a walk would then be a sequence of situated differences, not a global vote on whether greenery is desirable. The same tree may provide shade and obstruct a sightline; spontaneous vegetation may carry habitat value and still be read as neglect; a planted mix may be rich in signage but poor in sustained floral resources. These conditions should not be flattened into an automatic composite score. They can instead be described through documented relations and unresolved disagreements: the experience is specific, the ecological evidence independent, and the comparative claim limited to variables that can legitimately travel between settings. Seasonal repetition becomes essential because vegetative performance and human responses have different calendars. An arboretum's circulation network may remain recognisably stable while its canopy, flowering, access conditions and public uses change; a roadside meadow may be briefly spectacular before being cut, and a vacant site may move between refuge, habitat, enclosure and redevelopment without altering its position on the map. Field evidence therefore needs time-stamped observations, an explicit account of what was actually seen, a distinction between measured properties and attributed meanings, and a record of the conditions under which comparison was made. Metadata are not clerical additions here. They are the means by which a claim can remain answerable to the circumstances of its production. An archival photograph of an overgrown lot, a botanical inventory and an interview about its perceived safety may all be durable records; their productive relation depends on keeping their objects, periods and methods visibly distinct. The same principle applies to governance. A city's vegetation does not speak in a single register. Municipal maintenance, biodiversity conservation, residents' claims, professional design judgements and the legal treatment of invasive risk can authorise contradictory interventions in the same space. The question is not how to abolish conflict through a perfect ecological indicator, but how to preserve enough of its structure for decisions to remain revisable and publicly intelligible. An urban research instrument earns its authority by making the limits of its claims inspectable. Teixeira's constellation makes possible an account of landscape not as a decorative surface covering urban infrastructure, but as a changing infrastructure of living capacities whose meanings are co-produced by classification, administration, ecological processes and situated encounter. Within Socioplastics, this tension can be retained without inventing a new operator: it demands a comparative record in which the spontaneous is neither romanticised nor erased by the cultivated.

Harries, B., Chalmin-Pui, L. S., Gatersleben, B. et al. (2025) ‘Noticing nature: The role of environmental awareness in promoting well-being’, People and Nature, 7. https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.70113

Environmental presence is not equivalent to environmental attention. The paper investigates how noticing nature relates to well-being, shifting the analytical question from the distribution of green elements alone to the perceptual encounters through which they become meaningful. For walking-based research, the distinction matters because visual availability, attention and experienced benefit cannot be assumed to coincide. It joins environmental psychology to the everyday phenomenology of public space.

Scopelliti, M., Carrus, G. and Bonaiuto, M. (2019) ‘Is it really nature that restores people? A comparison with historical sites with high restorative potential’, Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 2742. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02742

The standard comparison between attractive nature and depleted urban fabric risks making the empirical superiority of nature a property of experimental contrast. Scopelliti, Carrus and Bonaiuto instead compare a natural setting and a built historical setting, both selected for high restorative potential, in a quasi-experimental study of 125 participants in Rome. Evaluations made in situ and in other settings allow the authors to inspect how direct presence alters perceptions and how different environmental properties contribute to restoration. Their operation changes the comparison's baseline: a historically meaningful built environment is no longer a neutral or damaged control, but another possible carrier of recovery. This reframes environmental restoration across social psychology, cultural heritage and urban design. The study reports distinct psychological routes by which the two types of place may support restoration; it does not imply that monuments everywhere substitute for everyday access to nature. Most importantly, it reveals that place categories organise experiments before participants encounter the places themselves. Any comparative instrument that assumes ‘natural’ and ‘urban’ are mutually exclusive experiential outcomes would erase exactly the historical and symbolic capacities this study brings into view.

LAPIEZA-LAB

Korpilo, S., Willberg, E., Müürisepp, K., Klein, R., Taylor, R., Torkko, J., Hasanzadeh, K. and Toivonen, T. (2025) ‘Restoring nature, enhancing active mobility: The role of street greenery in the EU’s 2024 restoration law’, Ambio, 54, pp. 1611–1620. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-025-02178-w

Korpilo and colleagues move the discussion from measuring exposure to deciding what public restoration policies should count. Against a planning imagination centred on bounded parks and static green-space inventories, the perspective argues that everyday movement through streets constitutes an important form of nature contact. It proposes attention to multiple exposure metrics, temporal change, subjective as well as objective assessments, and environmental injustice in the context of the EU Nature Restoration Law. Its epistemic operation is a change of policy object: not merely the amount of vegetation within a jurisdiction, but the distribution and experience of vegetation along ordinary trajectories. The argument joins environmental governance, transport planning, landscape ecology and public health. It is particularly useful for transfer because it connects local observational differences to a recognisable European policy framework without asserting that one universal greening prescription will fit every neighbourhood.

LAPIEZA-LAB

Farris, S., Zhang, L., Dempsey, N., McEwan, K., Hoyle, H. and Cameron, R. (2026) ‘The Elephant in the Room – Does actual or perceived biodiversity elicit restorative responses in a virtual park?’, Cities & Health, 10(4), pp. 1310–1325. https://doi.org/10.1080/23748834.2024.2383825

The experiment by Farris and colleagues destabilises the apparently self-evident relationship between ecological richness and psychological restoration. More than 1,600 participants in the United Kingdom and China encountered virtual versions of a park with manipulated macro-biodiversity and reported mood and perceived species variety. Mood improved across park variants, while perceived biodiversity, rather than simply the experimental level of actual biodiversity, was associated with greater improvement. This does not establish that ecological diversity is unimportant; it reveals that noticing and interpreting environmental qualities is a distinct pathway in the production of experience. The controlled virtual setting is a strength for isolating a perceptual question and a limitation for generalising to everyday movement. The article bridges experimental psychology, landscape design and biodiversity research. For a field instrument it cautions against collapsing ecological inventory, perceived richness and momentary wellbeing into one proxy. These are linked but non-identical evidential layers.

LAPIEZA-LAB

  

Macintyre, V.G., Cotterill, S., Anderson, J., Phillipson, C., Benton, J.S. and French, D.P. (2019) ‘“I would never come here because I’ve got my own garden”: older adults’ perceptions of small urban green spaces’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 16(11), 1994. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph16111994.

 

The Old Moat study is a precise demonstration that entry into a public-looking place may be socially inhibited without a locked gate. Fifteen older people in Greater Manchester explored small green spaces through walk-along interviews and photo elicitation. Some spaces were perceived as belonging to other people or as poorly maintained, and larger parks remained more attractive destinations. The sample was small and specific, but the research produced a category that an inventory of green cover cannot generate: perceived entitlement to use. A patch of green can be territorially present, publicly designated and functionally unavailable to someone who reads its social signals as exclusion. Combining photographs with situated speech exposes how meanings attach to particular sites rather than to an abstract provision category. Health psychology, urban sociology and planning thereby become connected through a question of implicit ownership. A route can approach a place without the walker regarding it as theirs to enter.

LAPIEZA-LAB

Pastore, M.C., Parenti, C.I.M. and Patetta, C. (2025) ‘Measuring accessibility of green spaces for the health and wellbeing of inhabitants of the Milan metropolitan area’, Land, 14(1), 97. https://doi.org/10.3390/land14010097.

A metropolitan green-space inventory becomes a different object when the question moves from area to reachable entrance. Pastore and colleagues integrate formal and informal green spaces with satellite and thematic spatial data, then investigate pedestrian accessibility at a 300-metre threshold. Their finding that only 37 per cent of the Milan metropolitan residential surface lies within the defined five-minute walking catchment is a statement about a carefully specified spatial relation, not a measurement of actual visits, ease of passage or experienced restoration. The paper’s contribution is to make the denominator and access criterion visible, while expanding the territory of the count beyond officially designated parks. An informal green area can exist without institutional recognition; a mapped green polygon can be nearby without offering the kind of entrance or route that everyday access requires. Urban ecology, GIS and distributive planning are therefore brought together through a deliberately operational definition of opportunity. The resulting map is powerful because it specifies one condition of possible encounter, and rigorous because it does not, by itself, certify that encounter.

LAPIEZA-LAB

Farris, S., Dempsey, N., McEwan, K., Hoyle, H. and Cameron, R. (2024) ‘Does increasing biodiversity in an urban woodland setting promote positive emotional responses in humans? A stress recovery experiment using 360-degree videos of an urban woodland’, PLOS ONE, 19(2), e0297179. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0297179.

The experiment distinguishes ecological variation from the perception of ecological variation. After a mild stress induction, 372 participants watched panoramic recordings of the same urban woodland manipulated to present four degrees of species richness. Negative affect decreased across the conditions without significant differences between biodiversity levels; positive affect, however, was greater among participants who perceived the scene as more biodiverse. Attention to flowers and trees appeared in comments associated with more positive responses. This is neither proof that biodiversity is irrelevant nor proof that subjective appreciation overrides ecology. The controlled visual exposure establishes a narrower but crucial asymmetry: materially varied scenes and noticed differences do not map onto one another automatically. The use of mediated, stationary observation also prevents unqualified transfer to mobile encounters in an actual woodland. Precisely in that separation lies the paper’s conceptual value. Environmental design, experimental psychology and visual media meet at the point where a landscape’s measurable properties cease to predict the full range of its experiential consequences.

LAPIEZA-LAB

Fernandes, C., Medeiros, A., Teixeira, C., Porto, M., Xavier, M., Ferreira, S. and Afonso, A. (2025) ‘Seed mixes in landscape design and management: An untapped conservation tool for pollinators in cities’, Land, 14(7), 1477. https://doi.org/10.3390/land14071477

The label ‘pollinator-friendly’ is submitted to scrutiny rather than accepted as an ecological fact. A systematic screening of 229 commercial seed mixes in Portugal examines taxonomy, origin, life-cycle traits, flowering duration and potential pollinator resources. Only 21 meet the authors' three-step criteria, which privilege native species, extended flowering and visual diversity. The finding exposes a mismatch between product description and demonstrable ecological provision; it does not prove that the remaining products fail under every possible field condition, nor does it measure pollinator response after planting. The epistemic move is from a marketed claim to a transparent classification with inspectable thresholds. Here the ecology of urban design intersects with procurement, public communication and the infrastructures through which purported environmental benefits are made believable. For an urban field instrument, this is a warning against treating the presence of a nominally green intervention as equivalent to effective habitat or socially experienced improvement. A planted verge must be observed as material composition, seasonal resource and designed claim.

LAPIEZA-LAB

 

Teixeira, C.P., Fernandes, C.O., Ryan, R. and Ahern, J. (2022) ‘Attitudes and preferences towards plants in urban green spaces: Implications for the design and management of Novel Urban Ecosystems’, Journal of Environmental Management, 314, 115103. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvman.2022.115103

Ecological novelty becomes a public problem before it becomes a planting prescription. This study transforms the abstract category of Novel Urban Ecosystems into two socially intelligible distinctions: native/non-native and cultivated/spontaneous. An online questionnaire, pre-tested with eight experts and completed by 203 Portuguese landscape professionals, examines the acceptability of their combinations. Native and cultivated plants enjoy stronger acceptance than non-native and spontaneous ones; notably, a short explanation of ecological novelty raises ratings for some initially less accepted categories. Classification here is not a passive descriptive step: it conditions what the respondent is prepared to recognise and endorse. The experiment makes a methodological difficulty visible as well. These are professional judgements elicited through a questionnaire, not residents' situated responses during movement through actual landscapes. What changes under an altered description is not necessarily what changes under embodied encounter. The paper joins landscape architecture, environmental perception, classification and the sociology of expertise, opening a gap between ecological function, professional legitimacy and lived experience.

SOCIOPLASTICS AT 11K — URBAN ECOLOGY · CLIMATE · MAINTENANCE · CHANNEL: HolaVerdeUrbano · AUTHOR: Anto Lloveras · INSTITUTION: LAPIEZA-LAB · LOCATION: Madrid, Spain · YEAR: 2026 · FIELD: Urban Ecology / Climate / Maintenance

Environmental and territorial questions have recurred throughout Lloveras's work: research on green-city parameters with UNESCO in Colima, Ruralismos in the Sierra Norte, landscape and open-air museum proposals in Norway, and later projects concerned with restoration, climate and everyday urban conditions. These strands place ecological observation inside a broader spatial and cultural practice. Urban ecology is often represented through exceptional objects: major parks, restored rivers, new green corridors or spectacular climate projects. A long corpus reveals another ecology, one made of maintenance, shade, soil, heat, repair, ordinary vegetation, species presence and the uneven capacity of places to remain habitable. Across eleven thousand nodes, these conditions repeatedly return as spatial and political evidence. Their recurrence matters because environmental quality is not produced once. It is maintained, neglected, repaired and redistributed over time. A tree is not only planted; it is watered, pruned, protected or allowed to fail. A shaded route exists differently at noon and in winter. Soil can be treated as surface, infrastructure or living system. These temporal differences are difficult to see in a single project but become legible across an extended archive. Socioplastics connects those observations to questions of knowledge. Who records maintenance? Which environmental conditions become indicators? What disappears when ecological processes are translated into categories? The corpus does not separate the physical city from the systems used to describe and govern it. Environmental questions become more substantial when a green space is treated not simply as an image but as lived, maintained and unevenly accessible infrastructure. Saberes Urbanos (2026) proposes a small-territory procedure for assembling local observation with maps, photographs and explicit uncertainty. The systematic review Agroturismo y ganadería extensiva (2026) extends the concern to rural socioecological settings, while also identifying the limits of available evidence about livestock systems and long-term territorial effects. The two works do not describe a completed common field experiment; they show how care, access, landscape experience and governance can become questions precise enough to investigate. HolaVerdeUrbano therefore reads 11K as an ecological archive of persistence. The index below keeps the large structure visible while the individual nodes continue to register the small acts through which urban environments survive, deteriorate and change. FULL PROJECT INDEX

https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html

Bowker, G.C. and Star, S.L. (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Bowker and Star relocate classification from the margins of information work to the centre of social organisation. Categories, standards and classificatory schemes operate as information infrastructure: they coordinate action precisely because they often disappear into ordinary use. The methodological operation is infrastructural inversion, making visible the decisions, exclusions and ethical consequences sedimented inside apparently technical ordering systems. Classification does not simply sort an already-given world; it helps constitute what can be counted, compared, administered and recognised. This insight bridges science and technology studies, sociology, information studies and institutional analysis. It matters to a critical lexicon because every node, preferred label, author pairing and cross-reference is simultaneously an aid to navigation and a decision about visibility. A concept scheme can therefore never be defended only by consistency. Its categories must remain open to provenance: who named them, what alternatives were suppressed, what communities recognise them and what kinds of inference the resulting structure encourages. Bowker and Star turn metadata from background description into an accountable social act.

Son, T.H., Weedon, Z., Yigitcanlar, T., Sanchez, T., Corchado, J.M. and Mehmood, R. (2023) ‘Algorithmic urban planning for smart and sustainable development: Systematic review of the literature’, Sustainable Cities and Society, 94, 104562.

Son and colleagues map the emerging domain of AI in urban planning through a PRISMA-based systematic review. Their strongest contribution lies less in celebrating computational capacity than in exposing the breadth of functions to which algorithmic systems are being attached: land-use analysis, zoning and permitting, mobility, environmental planning, pattern recognition, prediction and decision support. The methodological operation is field construction. By classifying applications, techniques and planning tasks, the review makes algorithmic planning visible as an expanding epistemic infrastructure rather than a collection of isolated experiments. It also identifies a recurrent theory–practice gap and stresses that big data, institutional collaboration and convergence between human and artificial intelligence are conditions of meaningful adoption. The paper bridges AI, smart-city research and planning practice. Within the nexus developed here, its significance is diagnostic: algorithms can enlarge the searchable space of alternatives while simultaneously embedding new assumptions about relevance, classification and optimisation. The question is therefore not whether AI can plan, but which possibilities become addressable when planning problems are reformatted for algorithmic inspection.

Vrebos, H., Hermans, K. and Hannes, K. (2025) ‘Walking Praxis as Community-Based Research: A Deep Map of Affective Flows in a Neighborhood Development Process’, Urban Planning, 10, Article 9637. doi:10.17645/up.9637.

Vrebos, Hermans and Hannes make walking an epistemic device for accessing the relational production of belonging in neighbourhoods under transformation. Go-along interviews expose memories, emotions, sensory cues and spatial negotiations that static participation procedures routinely miss. Their theoretical framework is explicitly new materialist: place is treated as an assemblage in which human and other-than-human agents affect one another, while belonging emerges through mutable relations rather than fixed territorial attachment. Methodologically, walking generates situated narratives in motion and the resulting material is synthesised through a deep map of affective flows. The analysis identifies four capacities—place, people, municipality and money—that shape neighbourhood change, shifting attention from discrete opinions to distributed forces. The paper bridges participatory planning, sensory ethnography, affect theory and spatial design. Its strongest contribution is methodological: movement through space becomes a mode of knowledge production capable of registering multiple belongings, latent conflicts and material agencies that conventional consultation compresses into static representations.

Are, C. and Briggs, P. (2026) ‘Collapsing occupational identities on social media: new approaches to digital identity management’, Creator and Influencer Studies, 1, 4. doi:10.1007/s44538-026-00004-x.

Are and Briggs move beyond the familiar diagnosis of “context collapse” by examining people who deliberately merge otherwise incompatible occupational selves online. They call this strategic process context collusion. Through five case studies and an autoethnographic conversation, the paper shows how platformisation, creator economies and labour precarity alter the management of professional identity. Public self-presentation is no longer simply about keeping audiences separate; some users collapse both context and content in order to reduce secrecy, expand opportunities, connect different forms of work and achieve greater coherence across fragmented careers. Methodologically, the study privileges situated accounts of identity labour rather than assuming that boundary maintenance is always desirable. The resulting tension is infrastructural: platforms reward visibility and self-branding while workplaces often retain older expectations of reputational separation. The paper bridges occupational psychology with platform studies and labour theory. Identity management appears as work performed under conditions set jointly by institutional norms, algorithmic visibility and precarious economies.

Adichie, C.N. (2009) ‘The Danger of a Single Story’, TEDGlobal, Oxford [transcript].

Adichie turns narrative asymmetry into a theory of identity and power. The “single story” does not operate simply by disseminating false information; it reduces complex persons and places to one repeatedly available account until that account becomes the dominant condition of recognition. Her autobiographical examples show that representation works through repetition, unequal access to narration and the authority to decide which stories become general knowledge. Methodologically, the talk uses situated narrative rather than abstract typology, allowing the argument to demonstrate its own claim: multiplicity is restored by adding standpoints, histories and contradictions that a dominant account has excluded. The bridge to social psychology is direct because categorisation and stereotype are shown as narrative processes, while the bridge to postcolonial theory lies in the unequal distribution of representational power. Identity emerges as vulnerable to narrative compression but not reducible to it. Counter-storytelling becomes an epistemic and political practice through which categories can be reopened rather than merely replaced by new fixed images.

Vázquez Sixto, F. and Muñoz Justicia, J. (2003) ‘La memoria social como construcción colectiva. Compartiendo y engendrando significados y acciones’, in Vázquez Sixto, F. (ed.) Psicología del comportamiento colectivo. Barcelona: Editorial UOC.

Vázquez and Muñoz displace memory from the model of individual storage toward an account of remembering as social action. Their key proposition is that the past is not simply retained and retrieved; it is reconstructed through language, interaction, artefacts, institutions and present concerns. The distinction between “social” and “collective” memory becomes analytically productive because it forces the question of how a collectivity can remember without being reduced to an aggregate of individual brains. Methodologically, the chapter moves from conventional psychological treatments of memory toward constructionist and discursive approaches, emphasising shared meanings and the practical consequences of versions of the past. Remembering and forgetting are therefore not neutral cognitive operations but ways of organising responsibility, continuity and possible action. The chapter bridges social psychology with historiography, memory studies and public culture. Its strongest implication is that identity depends on temporal infrastructures: groups and persons become intelligible by sustaining narratives of continuity whose form is negotiated in the present.

Lorenzo Montero, E. (2022) Beneficios psicológicos del contacto con la naturaleza: restauración y emociones trascendentes. Doctoral thesis. Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.

Lorenzo’s thesis links everyday restoration and more intense transcendent experience across three correlational studies. The first examines small urban squares and shows that vegetation, preference, social interaction and time spent are associated with perceived restoration. The second compares remembered restorative and transcendent experiences, identifying person–environment compatibility as a shared dimension while locating exceptionality as distinctive to transcendence. The third moves into a protected natural area, comparing walking itineraries characterised by homogeneous or contrasting landscape elements; contrasting views generate greater awe, absorption predicts awe, and awe is associated with improved affective wellbeing. The thesis therefore moves from urban micro-nature to memory and then to embodied routes, progressively thickening exposure as an environmental relation. Its methodological limitation—explicitly acknowledged—is that all three studies are correlational. Its future agenda is correspondingly temporal and relational: longer-term wellbeing, community scales, collective restoration and interdisciplinary indicators capable of linking psychological experience to ecosystem and health frameworks.

Gómez Mendoza, J. and Mata Olmo, R. (2006) ‘Paisajes forestales españoles y sostenibilidad. Tópicos y realidades’, Áreas. Revista Internacional de Ciencias Sociales, 25, pp. 13–29.

Gómez Mendoza and Mata treat landscape as territory in transformation and use that position to challenge simplified narratives of sustainability and ‘return to nature’. Their iconic move is to read apparently naturalising forest processes against the simultaneous territorial pressures of urbanisation, tourism and intensive agricultural production. The paper turns geographical landscape analysis into a method for detecting contradictions between visible change, management discourse and the deeper spatial organisation of land. Field observation, historical interpretation and attention to morphology are joined to a scalar argument: boundaries, flows, settlement patterns, property structures, resilience and irreversibility become legible differently according to the scale at which they are observed. The work also reiterates geography’s capacity to interpret, decipher, describe and narrate natural, agrarian, industrial, urban and periurban landscapes within a single territorial frame. Its bridge to sustainability studies is critical rather than celebratory: sustainability must be evaluated through the actual trajectories and spatial consequences of management, not through the vocabulary that accompanies it.

Gómez Mendoza, J. (2004) ‘La mirada de la geografía. Paisajes en transformación: el caso de los paisajes forestales’.

Gómez Mendoza defines the geographical gaze as a disciplined capacity to move between observation, synthesis, scale and historical transformation. Landscape is not reduced to image or aesthetic object: it is a quality of territory whose intelligibility depends on knowing how natural and cultural relations have been assembled through time. The essay gives particular force to fieldwork and direct observation, recovering Manuel de Terán’s maxim of a geography of ‘andar y ver’ while linking it to Humboldtian visual thinking and narrative ordering. Its most consequential claim concerns scale: changing scale is not equivalent to enlarging or reducing the same object, because different phenomena become visible, significant or unintelligible at different spatial levels. Medium scales acquire special importance as territorial and landscape observatories. The wider bridge is to epistemology: geographical knowledge is produced through calibrated acts of seeing, moving, narrating and rescaling, each of which transforms what can legitimately count as the object under study.

Brandtner, A. and Wegmann, E. (2023) ‘The fear in desire: linking desire thinking and fear of missing out in the social media context’, BMC Psychology, 11, 176. doi:10.1186/s40359-023-01216-0.

 

Brandtner and Wegmann situate FoMO within the cognitive-affective dynamics of desire rather than treating it as inherently pathological. Drawing on the Elaborated Intrusion Theory of Desire, they test how desire thinking, FoMO and craving interact in problematic social networking-site use among 193 participants. Their most important conceptual result is negative in a productive sense: neither desire thinking nor FoMO becomes dysfunctional by definition; problematicity emerges through their interaction with craving and patterns of use. This reframes FoMO as a contingent process rather than a fixed deficit. Methodologically, the study uses serial mediation to specify the sequence through which verbally elaborated desire can contribute to FoMO and, under certain conditions, problematic use. The work bridges cognitive psychology, behavioural addiction research and media studies by locating platform use within loops of anticipation, imagined participation and recurrent checking. It thereby complicates moralising accounts of digital behaviour and provides a mechanism-sensitive model of how affective anticipation becomes technologically organised.

Servidio, R., Soraci, P., Griffiths, M.D., Boca, S. and Demetrovics, Z. (2024) ‘Fear of missing out and problematic social media use: A serial mediation model of social comparison and self-esteem’, Addictive Behaviors Reports, 19, 100536. doi:10.1016/j.abrep.2024.100536.

Servidio and colleagues model Fear of Missing Out as part of a relational mechanism connecting social comparison, self-esteem and problematic social media use. Using a cross-sectional survey of 256 Italian university students, the study tests a serial mediation model in which FoMO is associated with intensified comparison, diminished self-esteem and increased problematic use. Its value lies less in treating FoMO as a self-explanatory diagnosis than in decomposing the phenomenon into interacting psychosocial processes. Methodologically, mediation analysis renders the proposed pathway explicit and testable while also making visible the limits of causal claims from cross-sectional data. The work bridges social psychology of comparison with contemporary platform studies by showing how networked environments can become behavioural settings in which social evaluation is recurrently intensified. It also provides a useful empirical counterpoint to constructionist accounts: even when psychological variables are operationalised quantitatively, their relations remain organised by a social ecology of visibility, comparison and mediated participation rather than by isolated individual traits.

Hoemann, K., Lee, Y., Dussault, È., Devylder, S., Ungar, L.H., Geeraerts, D. and Mesquita, B. (2025) ‘The construction of emotional meaning in language’, Communications Psychology, 3, 99. doi:10.1038/s44271-025-00255-0.

Hoemann and colleagues recast emotion as situated meaning-making and ask how language can reveal the architecture of that process without reducing it to explicit emotion labels. Their conceptual innovation is to organise emotional meaning around three linguistic dimensions: attention, construal and appraisal. What becomes salient, from which conceptual vantage point events are viewed, and how circumstances are evaluated together provide a higher-dimensional account of emotion than categorical naming alone. The methodological contribution lies in joining discursive psychology with socio-, cognitive and computational linguistics, treating naturally occurring language as a rich trace of situated psychological organisation. Language is not merely a report about emotion; it participates in producing the interpretive relation between person and circumstance. This framework bridges qualitative concerns with scalable computational analysis, opening a route between close reading and large corpora without assuming that quantification must strip away context. The paper therefore advances a dynamic, relational model of emotional meaning capable of moving between discourse, culture and data-intensive research.

Mesquita, B., De Leersnyder, J. and Boiger, M. (2016) ‘The cultural psychology of emotion’, in Barrett, L.F., Lewis, M. and Haviland-Jones, J.M. (eds.) Handbook of Emotions. 4th edn. New York: Guilford Press, pp. 393–411.

Mesquita, De Leersnyder and Boiger replace the image of culture as an external modifier of universal emotions with a processual account in which emotions are made through recurrent social relations and culturally patterned situations. Their central contribution is the concept of emotional fit: affective experience can align more or less closely with culturally prevalent patterns, and that alignment changes through participation, migration and social contact. The chapter draws on cross-cultural comparisons, diary studies, survey data and acculturation research, but its methodological argument is more radical than simple comparison. Context should not be controlled away as noise because context partly constitutes the phenomenon. Emotional episodes are therefore relational accomplishments embedded in moral orders, interactional expectations and culturally valued forms of action. This position bridges cultural psychology with ecological and situated approaches to cognition. It also challenges decontextualised experimental designs by proposing that emotional processes should be studied where they are socially produced: in practices, relationships and environments rather than as isolated responses.

Lutz, C. (1986) ‘Emotion, Thought, and Estrangement: Emotion as a Cultural Category’, Cultural Anthropology, 1(3), pp. 287–309.

Lutz’s essay dismantles the apparently self-evident Western category of emotion by treating it as an ethnographic object. Rather than assuming emotions to be universal biological substances subsequently coloured by culture, she asks how the Euro-American opposition between emotion and thought, nature and culture, body and reason has itself been historically constructed. The iconic idea is that “emotion” is a master cultural category whose conceptual architecture organises both ordinary life and scientific explanation. Her methodological operation is reflexive anthropology: the analyst turns the ethnographic gaze back onto the categories through which Western psychology and social science claim to describe affective life. This move exposes how notions of naturalness, interiority and irrationality are culturally specific rather than neutral. The essay bridges anthropology of emotion with feminist epistemology, history of concepts and science studies because it demonstrates that analytical vocabularies carry moral and political assumptions. Emotion becomes not an object beneath culture but one of culture’s techniques for organising persons, bodies and social difference.

Gil-Juárez, A. and Vitores González, A. (2009) Comunicación y discurso. Barcelona: Editorial UOC.

Gil-Juárez and Vitores reject the conduit metaphor of communication: language is not a neutral channel through which already formed meanings travel from one mind to another. Communication is instead constitutive, a social process through which objects, identities and versions of reality are produced, negotiated and made durable. Their central theoretical contribution is the insistence on the productive and performative character of linguistic practice. Discourse is approached as a historically situated ensemble of meanings, metaphors, categories and narratives capable of making some versions of the world appear obvious while marginalising others. The methodological operation is therefore to examine variation, rhetorical function and interpretative repertoires rather than to treat speech as transparent evidence of underlying mental states. This connects social psychology to ethnomethodology, post-structuralism and the linguistic turn, while preserving attention to everyday interaction. The work is particularly strong in showing that meaning is neither purely individual nor merely textual: it is socially available, pragmatically mobilised and consequential in action.

Pallí Monguilod, C., Martínez Martínez, L.M., Calsamiglia Madurga, A. and Cubells Serra, J. (2019) Actitudes y discurso. Barcelona: Fundació Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Actitudes y discurso reconstructs the attitude concept from an apparently internal psychological property into a historically variable and socially consequential practice of evaluation. The text’s key move is to shift attention from what people supposedly “have in their heads” to what evaluations accomplish in situated language. Discursive approaches treat attitudes as positions enacted through talk, rather than as stable predispositions awaiting measurement. This theoretical reorientation also foregrounds ideology, power and institutional effects: discourse is analysed not only for what it represents but for what it authorises, normalises or excludes. Methodologically, the text links conceptual history to discourse analysis, showing how competing definitions of attitude imply different models of the person, knowledge and social reality. Its wider significance lies in connecting social psychology with critical discourse studies and governmentality: evaluative language becomes a mechanism through which subjects and social objects are stabilised. The work therefore makes discursivity operational without reducing discourse to rhetoric alone.

Feliu i Samuel-Lajeunesse, J. (2022) Breve introducción a la psicología social y sus corrientes. Barcelona: Fundació Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Feliu’s compact introduction is built around a decisive epistemic proposition: social psychology is not one unified gaze but a field organised by incompatible ways of constituting its object. By distinguishing psychological social psychology, sociological social psychology and constructionist social psychology, the text turns “perspective” into an analytical instrument rather than a taxonomic label. Its theoretical contribution lies in showing that questions, evidence and explanations are inseparable from the conceptual frame that makes them possible. Methodologically, the text performs controlled perspectival switching: the same phenomenon can be reformulated through individual cognition, interactional structures or historically situated practices. This operation dislodges the assumption that social phenomena pre-exist their explanatory apparatus intact. The work therefore bridges introductory social psychology with epistemology and sociology of knowledge, because it makes visible how disciplines produce different realities by asking different questions. Its most useful proposition is that comparison between perspectives is itself a form of critical inquiry.

Falzon, D. and Conrad, E. (2024) ‘Designing primary school grounds for Nature-based learning: A review of the evidence’, Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education, 27, pp. 437–468. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42322-023-00142-4

Falzon and Conrad examine nature-based learning through the material specificity of the environments in which it occurs. Their review is especially valuable because it refuses to treat “nature” as a generic positive variable: the central question is how particular spatial characteristics enable or constrain learning, wellbeing and nature connectedness. The conceptual operation is relational. Drawing on ecological psychology and affordance theory, learning emerges from transactions between people and environments rather than from exposure to scenery alone. This makes design pedagogically consequential: access, complexity, multisensoriality, vegetation, spatial limitation and the possibilities for action offered by a site become part of the learning apparatus. The review also highlights significant evidential gaps, especially in dense urban contexts and across diverse cultural and geographical settings. Its bridge to environmental psychology is precise: educational outcomes depend on person–environment relations that are simultaneously functional, affective and spatial. Nature-based learning therefore becomes a question of how environments invite attention, action, attachment and interpretation.

Falzon, D. and Conrad, E. (2024) ‘Designing primary school grounds for Nature-based learning: A review of the evidence’, Journal of Outdoor and Environmental Education, 27, pp. 437–468. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42322-023-00142-4

Falzon and Conrad examine nature-based learning through the material specificity of the environments in which it occurs. Their review is especially valuable because it refuses to treat “nature” as a generic positive variable: the central question is how particular spatial characteristics enable or constrain learning, wellbeing and nature connectedness. The conceptual operation is relational. Drawing on ecological psychology and affordance theory, learning emerges from transactions between people and environments rather than from exposure to scenery alone. This makes design pedagogically consequential: access, complexity, multisensoriality, vegetation, spatial limitation and the possibilities for action offered by a site become part of the learning apparatus. The review also highlights significant evidential gaps, especially in dense urban contexts and across diverse cultural and geographical settings. Its bridge to environmental psychology is precise: educational outcomes depend on person–environment relations that are simultaneously functional, affective and spatial. Nature-based learning therefore becomes a question of how environments invite attention, action, attachment and interpretation.

Taghizadeh Kerman, N., Banihashem, S.K., Karami, M., Er, E., van Ginkel, S. and Noroozi, O. (2024) ‘Online peer feedback in higher education: A synthesis of the literature’, Education and Information Technologies, 29, pp. 763–813. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-023-12273-8

Taghizadeh Kerman and colleagues treat feedback as a structured learning process rather than a correction appended to completed work. Their systematic synthesis shows that online feedback operates through an interaction among learner characteristics, learning environments, activity design and desired outcomes. Its important methodological contribution is to make feedback architecture explicit: who responds, through which platform, according to what criteria, at what moment and with what opportunity for revision all condition the educational effect. Online environments add flexibility and scalability, but the review resists technological determinism by identifying trust, feedback literacy, disciplinary knowledge and task complexity as decisive variables. Feedback can support writing, professional judgement, argumentation, self-regulation and communication, yet poorly designed exchanges can remain superficial or unusable. The work therefore bridges assessment theory and digital learning by showing that response is itself a pedagogical medium. Learning intensifies when a participant’s specific production becomes the object of attention, comparison and revision rather than disappearing into standardized completion metrics.

Jelewska, A. (2024) ‘Postdigital Collective Memory: Media Practices Against Total Design’, Postdigital Science and Education, 6, pp. 259–278. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00421-9.

Jelewska proposes postdigital collective memory as a form of remembrance co-produced by humans, nonhumans, environments and technological media. The article develops this idea through field practices and design workshops at Lake Rusałka in Poznań, a landscape whose wartime history had been materially transformed and publicly suppressed. Its central device, the Sensitive Data Lake, is not conceived as a neutral database but as an experimental environment in which archives, sensors, ecological processes, narratives and artificial intelligence can generate friction around the past. Critical Media Design supplies the methodological operation: remembrance is produced through situated making rather than deposited after the fact into a stable archive. The paper thereby challenges “total design”, understood as the attempt to render environments fully ordered, legible and controllable. Memory instead becomes plural, spectral and transitional. The wider bridge joins posthumanism, media archaeology, transition design and critical infrastructure studies, establishing digital memory as an environmental relation whose politics depends on how heterogeneous agencies are allowed to enter the record.

HaghighatBin, M., Saghafi Moghaddam, S. and Nijhuis, S. (2024) ‘Collective Memory, Urban Regeneration and Conservation of Historical Sites – ChaharBagh Street, Isfahan City, Iran’, Journal of Urban Culture Research, 28, pp. 143–158.

HaghighatBin, Saghafi Moghaddam and Nijhuis approach regeneration through the continuity of collective memory, arguing that historic urban space cannot be conserved through physical preservation alone. ChaharBagh Street in Isfahan serves as a landscape in which material structure, social practice and remembered meaning have been repeatedly transformed. The paper’s iconic operation is to place conservation and rehabilitation in the same temporal system: regeneration must restore capacities for memory to be reproduced rather than freezing an urban scene as heritage image. Landscape becomes the mediating structure between people and place, capable of carrying historical continuity while accommodating contemporary use. Methodologically, the case study reads spatial transformation against social and cultural change, making historical urban morphology legible as an active mnemonic field. The work bridges landscape architecture, heritage studies and urban regeneration by shifting attention from objects to relations. Its strongest theoretical implication is that collective memory survives through renewed spatial participation, not through the isolated preservation of monuments or stylistic fragments.

Chavoshi, N., Ilbeigi, M., Karimi, M., Asgharzadeh, A. and Behrouzifard, E. (2024) ‘Investigating the relation between emotional and cultural mapping by considering collective memory in Urban design from perspective of citizens (case study: Tehran, Iran)’, City, Territory and Architecture, 11, 14. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40410-024-00234-8.

Chavoshi et al. treat collective memory as a spatially distributed relation between emotion, culture and urban experience rather than as a repository of historic facts. Their central contribution is to bring emotional mapping and cultural mapping into the same empirical frame. Through a questionnaire-based case study in Tehran, the authors identify how place identity, antiquity, satisfaction, events, accessibility, cultural meaning and particular emotions contribute to memorable urban spaces. Emotional mapping emerges as especially consequential, while demographic variables shape the relative weight assigned to cultural and affective factors. The method converts subjective attachment into a structured urban-design dataset without reducing memory to physical heritage alone. Memory is produced through repeated encounters between urban form and lived interpretation. The study therefore bridges environmental psychology, participatory mapping and urban design, offering a way to examine how affective intensities become attached to locations and persist collectively. Its wider value lies in making emotion an evidential dimension of spatial knowledge rather than treating it as an anecdotal supplement to morphological analysis.