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.

Moore, J.W. (2022) ‘How to Read Capitalism in the Web of Life: Towards a World-Historical Materialism in the Web of Life’, Journal of World-Systems Research, 28(1), pp. 153–168. https://doi.org/10.5195/JWSR.2022.1127.

Moore defends the world-ecology perspective as a historical method for understanding capitalism through the web of life rather than as a social system acting upon an external nature. His central proposition is relational and dialectical: human social relations acquire their specific forms through metabolic relations with extra-human natures, while those relations simultaneously transform the environments in which they develop. The article insists that this is not simply an abstract theory of interconnectedness. World-ecology must be reconstructed through concrete historical turning points, commodity frontiers, labour regimes and transformations in the organisation of nature. Methodologically, Moore privileges world-historical explanation over conceptual dualisms such as society/nature or humanity/environment. His intervention also clarifies the differences between world-ecology, metabolic-rift approaches and competing Marxist ecological theories. The work bridges historical materialism, environmental history and world-systems analysis, providing a conceptual apparatus for tracing how capital accumulation, unpaid work, energy and ecological change co-produce one another over the longue durée.

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.

Zahnow separates the physical category of a neighbourhood place from the function that users attribute to it, showing that place attachment is generated less by typology alone than by recurrent social experience. Using data from 892 respondents, the study compares public places, large consumption spaces, local consumption places and socialisation settings while testing how personalised functions modify attachment. The strongest conceptual finding is that places associated with socialising and shared purpose produce greater attachment, and that local cafés or stores become especially significant when experienced as social rather than merely consumptive environments. Methodologically, regression models distinguish direct, mediating and moderating relationships between place type, function and attachment. The theoretical contribution is to shift place attachment from a static property of location to a relational effect of use, meaning and frequency. The paper bridges community psychology, environmental psychology and social-infrastructure research by demonstrating that everyday neighbourhood settings become anchors of belonging through what people repeatedly do there together.

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.

Nijman’s response to Jamie Peck argues that comparative urbanism is theoretically necessary because contemporary urbanisation is increasingly interrelated, not merely because cities display striking variety. Comparison therefore belongs to the systemic condition of planetary urbanisation rather than to an optional search for exceptional cases. The paper’s key contribution is a dialectic between conceptual definition and openness to emergent formations: researchers need workable definitions of the urban and theoretically grounded case selection, while remaining prepared to revise those definitions when unfamiliar urban processes disrupt them. Nijman also insists that comparison requires movement between induction and deduction and a much broader empirical geography than the Anglo-American field has historically admitted. Methodologically, the commentary combines epistemological argument with a political-economic orientation to city–state relations and uneven urbanisation. It bridges classical comparative inquiry with postcolonial and planetary urban debates, offering a compact defence of comparison as the means by which urban theory can remain both generalisable and responsive to geographical difference.

The decisive concept emerging from contemporary neuroarchitecture and environmental neuroscience is ecological validity: the degree to which an experimental relation survives the passage from controlled stimulus to inhabited world.

Architecture makes this problem unusually acute because space is never encountered as an isolated variable. Curvature arrives with material, scale, light, programme, memory and cultural expectation; a window is simultaneously an aperture, a luminance condition, a view, an orientation device and a social threshold; a neighbourhood is at once infrastructure, routine, attachment, risk, access and collective history. The strongest recent work therefore moves away from the fantasy that architecture can be translated directly into neural prescriptions and toward an evidential ecology in which each measurement has a defined scope. Valentine’s work on physiological stress establishes the need to operationalise architectural form rigorously, then extends the temporal horizon through allostasis: environmental effects may accumulate through repeated exposure rather than appearing as instantaneous preference. Li and Xu’s review of neuroimaging converts spatial–emotional relations into candidate design parameters but simultaneously demonstrates why such thresholds remain provisional when EEG–VR paradigms dominate and real-world validation is scarce. Wei and colleagues sharpen the critique at the level of experimental construction itself: a photograph of a curvilinear interior is not curvature, because photographic composition, typology, aesthetic capital and imagined use contaminate the nominal variable. Their progression from images to objects to full-scale experience reframes design as an epistemic technology for producing controlled difference while progressively restoring embodiment. Grasso-Cladera and colleagues move furthest toward naturalistic neuroscience by treating everyday indoor environments as laboratories and coupling mobile physiological sensing with situated action. The important shift is from measuring a brain exposed to architecture toward measuring a brain–body system acting within architecture. Urban-scale studies complicate the field further. Xu and Meng’s third places show that restorative urban effects cannot be reduced to naturalness: socially active environments generate distinct pathways of pleasure, affiliation and wellbeing. Maestre’s recovery of imageability similarly extends neural questions toward orientation, memorability, physical activity and sense of place, while warning that a Lynchian urban concept cannot become a biomarker without standardised operationalisation. García-Mira’s psychological de-territorialisation provides the strongest scalar correction to reductive neuroarchitecture. Environmental transformation acts through employment, identity, memory, financial threat, participation and place attachment; the relevant “response” may be life satisfaction or the decision to leave a region rather than a fluctuation in EEG. Meng and Xu’s lockdown study reaches the same conclusion through crisis: when ordinary mobility collapses, housing, services and neighbourhood form reveal themselves as behavioural infrastructures whose adequacy is inseparable from resilience. Across these scales, evidence becomes architecturally meaningful only when the conditions of its production remain attached to it. Ecological validity is therefore not merely a demand for more realistic experiments. It is an epistemic principle governing the translation between representation and occupation, laboratory and city, short exposure and longitudinal life, individual physiology and social territory. A mature environmental neuroscience would not search for universal forms that mechanically produce wellness. It would construct comparable situations, preserve contextual variables, combine neural, physiological, behavioural and qualitative evidence, and state precisely the range within which a finding can travel. The design implication is substantial: architecture ceases to be a container subsequently evaluated by science and becomes a controlled yet situated medium through which relations among bodies, environments and meanings can be experimentally composed. For Socioplastics, this offers a particularly productive bridge. Spatial knowledge does not reside in the building or the nervous system alone; it emerges through repeated, instrumented and socially embedded encounters whose traces can move across disciplinary regimes only if their context, scale and transformation remain legible. Ecological validity thus becomes the condition under which spatial evidence can become transferable knowledge without being emptied of the world that made it evidential.

Grasso-Cladera, A., Arenas-Perez, M., Wegertseder-Martinez, P., Vilina, E., Mattoli-Sanchez, J. and Parada, F.J. (2025) ‘Neuroscientific insights into the built environment: A systematic review of empirical research on indoor environmental quality, physiological dynamics, and psychological well-being in real-life contexts’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 22(6), 824. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph22060824.

Grasso-Cladera and colleagues relocate environmental neuroscience from the controlled image or virtual room toward the unstable conditions of everyday occupancy. Their systematic review examines real-life studies of indoor environmental quality—especially thermal comfort, air quality, lighting and related variables—using physiological measures including heart activity, skin temperature and brain dynamics. Thermal comfort emerges as the most frequently investigated factor, but the deeper contribution is methodological: the authors advocate Mobile Brain/Body Imaging and situated experimental designs capable of recording coupled brain–body–environment dynamics while people act naturally. They explicitly frame the “real world” as laboratory, accepting reduced experimental control in exchange for greater ecological validity and behavioural relevance. The paper also emphasises multimodal sensing, coherent theoretical frameworks and interdisciplinary teams because no single biomarker can adequately represent well-being. Its wider bridge is ecological psychology and situated cognition, replacing stimulus–response simplification with a dynamic account of agents whose cognitive and physiological states arise through continuous interaction with materially variable environments.

Wei, N., Chuquichambi, E.G., Damiano, C., Bruce, K. and Walther, D.B. (2026) ‘A design-integrated framework for neuroarchitectural research’, Frontiers in Psychology, 17, 1666480. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2026.1666480.

Wei and colleagues make a methodological intervention of unusual importance: architectural design itself becomes part of experimental construction rather than a passive source of stimulus images. Using curvature as a test case, they expose how conventional neuroaesthetic studies often confuse geometry with photographic style, design quality, cultural association and symbolic reconstruction. Their alternative is a three-phase framework moving from image-based evaluation to object-based interaction and finally full-scale immersive experience, with each phase generated through explicit architectural logic. The conceptual shift is from representation to embodied engagement. Perception and response are treated as coupled processes in which affordance, movement, affect and spatial meaning emerge through encounter, not through detached visual judgement alone. The framework therefore aims to increase ecological validity progressively while retaining experimental comparability. Its wider bridge is to research-through-design and embodied cognition: architectural making becomes an epistemic instrument capable of producing controlled variation without stripping space of the material, scalar and action-oriented properties that make it architecture.

Valentine, C. (2024) ‘The impact of architectural form on physiological stress: A systematic review’, Frontiers in Computer Science, 5, 1237531. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomp.2023.1237531.

Valentine isolates a deceptively simple question—whether architectural form can produce measurable physiological stress—and uses it to expose both the promise and immaturity of neuroarchitectural experimentation. Following PRISMA-P guidelines, the review examines studies using clinical biomarkers, wearable sensing and simulated environments to test architectural configurations, identifying curvature, enclosure and proportion as the principal formal categories associated with stress responses. The paper’s contribution is not the declaration of preferred shapes but the insistence that architectural variables require operational definitions precise enough to be compared across experiments. Existing evidence is constrained by small research volume, inconsistent definitions, heterogeneous contexts, predominantly unisensory paradigms and short exposure durations. The review therefore converts form from an aesthetic category into a measurable but unstable experimental variable. Its wider bridge is to environmental physiology: architecture can be studied as an external stressor, but meaningful translation requires standardised descriptions of both spatial conditions and bodily response, allowing evidence to travel without losing the circumstances that produced it.

Wang, Y., Yan, S., Xu, L., Yan, Y., Ma, D. and Han, S. (2026) ‘Virtual Reality for human-centred evaluation of underground environments: A focused review’, Buildings, 16(15), 3016. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings16153016.

Wang and colleagues use underground space as a demanding test case for human-centred environmental evaluation because reduced daylight, weakened exterior reference and restricted sensory information intensify problems of orientation, comfort and perceived safety. Reviewing twenty-eight VR studies, they organise environmental variables through a perception–cognition–emotion framework and map how spatial clarity, scale, signage, lighting, biophilic intervention and wayfinding influence reported experience. The paper’s methodological strength lies in treating VR as a pre-construction experimental medium rather than as a surrogate reality: design alternatives can be manipulated systematically while perceptual, cognitive, behavioural and physiological responses are compared. At the same time, the review identifies the limitations of visually dominated, short-duration and single-factor experiments and calls for multisensory, multifactor and repeated-exposure protocols. Its wider bridge is to performance-based design, where virtual environments become reversible prototypes for testing spatial consequences before construction while remaining accountable to eventual validation in embodied, real-world conditions.

Attaianese, E., Barilà, M. and Perillo, M. (2025) ‘Exploring neuroscientific approaches to architecture: Design strategies of the built environment for improving human performance’, Buildings, 15(19), 3524. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings15193524.

Attaianese, Barilà and Perillo critically survey neuroarchitecture as an emerging interdisciplinary field rather than treating it as an already consolidated design science. Their review reconstructs a genealogy from person–environment theories and Lewin’s B = ƒ(P,E) through environmental psychology, embodied architectural experience and contemporary neuroscientific measurement. It then inventories design variables associated with cognitive, emotional and physiological performance, including lighting, spatial configuration, materials, natural elements and technological conditions. Crucially, the authors refuse to convert these associations into mandatory prescriptions: the available criteria remain heterogeneous, frequently vague, culturally contingent and poorly supported by in-situ evidence. This restraint is the paper’s principal methodological contribution. Neuroarchitecture is framed as a formative evidence base whose translation into design requires stronger comparability, larger and more diverse samples, context-sensitive experimentation and interdisciplinary interpretation. Its wider bridge is to evidence-based architecture, but with a necessary epistemic qualification: design guidance becomes legitimate only when the conditions under which evidence was produced remain visible.

Valentine, C., Mitcheltree, H., Sjövall, I.A.K. and Khalil, M.H. (2025) ‘Architecturally mediated allostasis and neurosustainability: A proposed theoretical framework for the impact of the built environment on neurocognitive health’, Brain Sciences, 15(2), 201. https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci15020201.

Valentine and colleagues introduce one of the field’s strongest recent theoretical propositions: architecture may participate in allostatic regulation. Instead of treating stress as an instantaneous reaction to an isolated visual stimulus, they model repeated exposure to environmental stressors as a potential contributor to cumulative allostatic load mediated through the HPA and SAM axes. The framework connects chronic physiological strain with neuroplastic processes involving the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex and amygdala, and names “neurosustainability” as the long-term maintenance of neurocognitive health in relation to environmental conditions. Its conceptual operation is temporal: architectural effects matter not only because a room alters an immediate preference or arousal score, but because recurrent environmental demands may accumulate across everyday life. The paper is explicitly hypothesis-generating and calls for rigorous empirical validation rather than claiming settled causal mechanisms. Its wider bridge is to public health, where architecture becomes an exposure regime whose consequences must be studied longitudinally, alongside noise, pollution, crowding and other chronic environmental stressors.

Abbas, S., Okdeh, N., Roufayel, R., Kovacic, H., Sabatier, J.-M., Fajloun, Z. and Abi Khattar, Z. (2024) ‘Neuroarchitecture: How the perception of our surroundings impacts the brain’, Biology, 13(4), 220. https://doi.org/10.3390/biology13040220.

Abbas and colleagues provide a broad physiological map of neuroarchitecture, assembling research on architectural perception, emotion, navigation, learning and healing around structures including the anterior cingulate cortex and parahippocampal place area. The paper’s iconic idea is that architectural experience is not a superficial aesthetic reception but a distributed cognitive event involving orientation, memory, affect, empathy and sensorimotor interpretation. As a narrative review, it synthesises findings concerning light, colour, spatial layout, cognitive maps, place cells and wayfinding, extending them toward educational environments, ageing and therapeutic design. Its value lies primarily in conceptual accessibility and interdisciplinary connection rather than in establishing causal design rules: heterogeneous evidence from neuroscience, architecture and environmental psychology is brought into one explanatory landscape. The methodological operation is synthetic, translating specialised neural mechanisms into spatial questions without a single experimental protocol. Its wider bridge is to embodied cognition, where architectural perception becomes inseparable from movement, anticipation and situated action, and where the built environment participates continuously in the organisation of cognitive experience.

Evans, J. and Jones, P. (2011) ‘The walking interview: Methodology, mobility and place’, Applied Geography, 31(2), pp. 849–858. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apgeog.2010.09.005.

Evans and Jones give the walking interview a precise geospatial and comparative methodology. Their pilot study combines mobile interviewing with qualitative GIS to examine the relation between what participants say and where they say it, while directly comparing walking and sedentary interviews. The important contribution is methodological measurability without reducing the qualitative richness of place narratives: walked interviews generate more spatially specific accounts because environmental features actively shape discussion. The paper therefore moves mobile methods beyond an intuitive claim that walking produces “better” data and demonstrates how spatially located narratives can be analysed systematically. Its critical edge is equally important, since the authors warn that technocentric analysis can privilege locational information over humanistic meaning. Qualitative GIS is valuable precisely when it preserves the interpretive density of situated speech. The wider bridge is to mixed-method urbanism, where narrative, movement and spatial data can inhabit the same evidential architecture without one becoming a proxy for the others.

Anderson, J. (2004) ‘Talking whilst walking: A geographical archaeology of knowledge’, Area, 36(3), pp. 254–261. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0004-0894.2004.00222.x.

Anderson radicalises qualitative interviewing by making geographical context constitutive of knowledge production. “Talking whilst walking” is not merely an interview conducted outdoors; it is a method in which place acts as an active trigger for recollection, association and interpretation. The central operation is the production of “conversations in place”, where researcher and participant move through landscapes that prompt memories and render tacit spatial knowledge speakable. Anderson’s notion of a collaborative collage of knowledge challenges the fiction that testimony can be detached from the material conditions in which it is elicited. The method also reconfigures interviewer–interviewee relations by allowing route, encounter and environmental interruption to participate in the research situation. Its broader theoretical importance lies in joining human geography to embodied epistemology: knowledge is not simply located in subjects and later projected onto space, but co-produced by bodies, movement, material surroundings and conversation. Place becomes an epistemic agent rather than a passive container.

Carpiano, R.M. (2009) ‘Come take a walk with me: The “go-along” interview as a novel method for studying the implications of place for health and well-being’, Health & Place, 15(1), pp. 263–272. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2008.05.003.

Carpiano turns the go-along into a systematic qualitative method for investigating how people interpret, navigate and inhabit local environments. Its iconic proposition is simple but epistemically consequential: the researcher accompanies participants through familiar settings so that place becomes an active component of the interview rather than a topic recalled elsewhere. Walk-alongs, ride-alongs and mixed forms allow perception, practice, memory and social interaction to be observed in situ. Carpiano positions the method between phenomenology, interactionism, ethnomethodology and relational sociology, while stressing its complementarity with field observation, sit-down interviews, photography, GIS, network analysis and focus groups. The method therefore refuses the opposition between qualitative depth and spatial precision. Its strongest operation is to convert vague “context” into an action space composed of routes, encounters, resources, obstacles and remembered meanings. The wider intellectual bridge is to situated knowledge: environmental effects become intelligible only through the practices by which subjects encounter and interpret them.

Moudon, A.V. (1997) ‘Urban morphology as an emerging interdisciplinary field’, Urban Morphology, 1, pp. 3–10.

Moudon establishes urban morphology as an interdisciplinary study of the city through form, resolution and time. Her decisive move is to treat buildings, plots, streets and open spaces not as inert components but as interdependent organisms whose uses, substitutions and transformations register social and economic forces. The article brings the Conzenian, Muratorian and Versailles traditions into a common field, showing how geography, architecture and planning can share a morphological grammar without collapsing their disciplinary differences. Methodologically, it works through nested scales—from parcel/building to street/block, city and region—and through historical transformation rather than static description. The notion of urban morphogenesis is therefore more precise than morphology alone: form becomes a record of continuous becoming. Moudon also anticipates the extension of classical morphological analysis through parcel-based GIS, thereby linking painstaking historical reconstruction to metropolitan-scale computation. The wider bridge is to an epistemology of urban form in which material configuration is both evidence and historical process.

Cerbara, L., Germani, D. and Santurro, M. (2026) ‘Ethical Implications in Building Longitudinal Data Infrastructures’, in Taddei, L. and Paolucci, M. (eds.) Longitudinal Data Infrastructures in Europe: Tools for Open Science in Social Science Research. Cham: Springer Nature, pp. 57–67. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-07005-0_4

Cerbara, Germani and Santurro treat ethics as an infrastructural property rather than an external regulatory checkpoint. Their analysis of European longitudinal studies shows that openness, reuse and long-term data accumulation produce persistent tensions around privacy, consent, re-identification and public trust. The key conceptual move is embedded ethics: ethical reflection should enter study design, consent procedures, communication, data-sharing strategies and technical development from the beginning rather than being applied after the system has already been constituted. Longitudinality intensifies this requirement because repeated observations create forms of informational persistence whose future combinations cannot be completely anticipated. The chapter therefore understands trust as something technically and institutionally produced through safeguards, transparent communication and accountable governance. Its bridge to infrastructure studies is precise: technical robustness and legal compliance are insufficient unless systems remain socially responsive to those whose data sustain them. Ethics becomes an architecture of continued permission, defining the conditions under which durable knowledge infrastructures can remain open without converting accessibility into extraction.

Taddei, L. and Paolucci, M. (2026) ‘Introduction’, in Taddei, L. and Paolucci, M. (eds.) Longitudinal Data Infrastructures in Europe: Tools for Open Science in Social Science Research. Cham: Springer Nature, pp. vii–x. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-07005-0

Taddei and Paolucci define social science infrastructure as a hybrid object: simultaneously technical system, organisational framework and social contract. This formulation displaces infrastructure from the background of research into the domain of active epistemic and political construction. Longitudinal data systems require continuous negotiation with privacy law, statistical institutions, changing ethical standards, funding regimes and communities whose trust sustains participation over time. Their distinctive methodological contribution is temporal: infrastructure is distinguished from the episodic research project by maintenance, stewardship and durability. The introduction also makes an explicitly political claim. European research infrastructures are mechanisms of interoperability, cohesion and shared capacity and, in a context of technological dependence, can become instruments of democratic sovereignty. The text bridges infrastructure studies, European research policy and social science methodology by making visible the care work and institutional imagination that allow knowledge systems to persist. Durability is therefore not passive storage but an organised capacity to remain legitimate, adaptable and publicly accountable through change.

Greif, H. (2017) ‘What is the extension of the extended mind?’, *Synthese*, 194, pp. 4311–4336. doi:10.1007/s11229-015-0799-9.

Greif sharpens the Extended Mind hypothesis by asking what kind of coupling can make an environmental entity constitutive of cognition rather than merely causally helpful. He adds historical depth to active externalism through an aetiological functionalism informed by niche construction, developmental systems theory and ecological psychology. The resulting account places natural environmental relations before familiar linguistic or technological extensions: external cognition is grounded in evolved forms of organism–environment integration from which artefactual couplings can later develop. The conceptual operation is to distinguish kinds of environmental participation instead of treating every useful external resource as part of the mind. This gives extended cognition a biological genealogy and prevents extension from becoming an indiscriminate metaphor. Greif bridges philosophy of mind and evolutionary theory by making function, history and environmental construction jointly relevant to cognitive constitution. His work is especially important for any account in which objects and places are not containers of thought but active components whose significance depends on patterned, historically established coupling.