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.