Mitchell, A., Oberman, T., Aletta, F. and Kang, J. (n.d.) ‘Searching for a common understanding of “soundscape”: a critical look at the definitions and uses of the term’, OSF preprint, supplied manuscript.

A soundscape is not automatically a recording of sound, a distribution of decibels or an ecological inventory of acoustic events. Mitchell and colleagues investigate the instability of the term across urban, ecological, underwater and other domains, taking ISO 12913’s emphasis on an acoustic environment as perceived by people in context as a central point of reference. Their operation is conceptual and classificatory: they compare incompatible definitions and examine the consequences of treating the same word as though it designated the same research object. That distinction makes a hidden methodological decision explicit. A microphone registers pressure fluctuations; a survey records a person’s account of their acoustic experience; ecological monitoring may privilege an entirely different listener or organism. The three can occupy the same coordinates without being interchangeable. The preprint bridges acoustics, urban research, standardisation and epistemology. Its importance is less a promise of terminological consensus than the demonstration that comparability begins by declaring what each record claims to represent. As a supplied preprint, it should not be cited as a settled standard or as evidence of a tested intervention.

LAPIEZA-LAB

Mitchell, A., Oberman, T., Aletta, F., Erfanian, M., Kachlicka, M., Lionello, M. and Kang, J. (2020) ‘The Soundscape Indices (SSID) Protocol: A method for urban soundscape surveys—questionnaires with acoustical and contextual information’, Applied Sciences, 10(7), 2397. https://doi.org/10.3390/app10072397

 

The soundscape becomes a research object only by maintaining the difference between an acoustic signal and someone's situated response to it. The Soundscape Indices protocol couples audiovisual recording with in-situ questionnaires and contextual information, setting out complementary collection stages designed to enable datasets from different research groups to be meaningfully compared. It distinguishes descriptors of perceived soundscape quality from acoustic indicators and from derived indices, thereby resisting the collapse of listening into sound-pressure measurement. The operation is infrastructural as much as methodological: it specifies where recordings, observations, participant judgments and circumstances meet, and which transformations occur before a summary number appears. Acoustical engineering, environmental psychology and data standardisation become collaborators rather than interchangeable accounts of a street. Yet protocol portability introduces its own tension. Synchronising an evaluation with a recording makes the research record more accountable, while the prescribed prompts and spatial sampling decisions also delimit what will become audible as evidence. An index can carry a comparison only when the contextual and perceptual inputs from which it was constructed remain recoverable and contestable.

Lawrence, B., Beschi, S., Dehqan, F., Strugovshchikova, S., Khalil, I., Blioka-Sotiriou, M., Tribble, R., Frücht, A. and Gruehn, D. (2025) ‘Quiet routes to alleviate noise annoyance and promote active mobility’, Journal of Transport & Health, 44, 102142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jth.2025.102142.

A quiet area can be registered by a municipal noise plan while the journey to it remains unaddressed. In Dortmund, Lawrence and collaborators build a multi-factor cost surface and derive a network of quieter paths linking residents exposed to noise with designated quieter areas. Their contribution is a counterfactual infrastructural geography: alternative routes can be compared not merely by distance but by patterns of exposure and how a small proportion of network segments might support wider connectivity. The analysis does not document every resident choosing the proposed path, nor does a modelled reduction in acoustic exposure demonstrate restoration for a particular individual. Those are questions for subsequent observation. What it supplies is a spatial intervention hypothesis with explicit environmental criteria. Acoustic modelling, landscape planning and health-oriented transport research acquire a shared decision object: a route network whose benefits must be tested, not presumed. The method also exposes an institutional blind spot in managing environmental destinations without their approaches.

Korpilo, S., Hasanzadeh, K., Klein, R., Willberg, E., Taylor, R., Müürisepp, K., Olafsson, A.S. and Toivonen, T. (2025) ‘Green and blue spaces matter for active mobility: Results from mapping perceived environmental exposure in five European cities’, Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 113, 129088. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2025.129088.

 

Environmental exposure becomes a comparative problem when participants indicate places that are pleasant or unpleasant along daily journeys rather than rating an entire neighbourhood. Across Copenhagen, Helsinki, London, Munich and Las Palmas, 4,964 respondents identified 8,048 mapped places. Participatory GIS connects these accounts to vegetation, water, season, day and night, and spatially varying associations. The result cannot be flattened into the claim that more greenery always generates a better journey: associations differ across contexts, conspicuously in the subtropical city of Las Palmas, while participant selection and geolocated recollection have their own limits. The decisive operation is spatially anchored appraisal with explicit temporal context. By joining environmental geography, mobility research and perception studies, the authors reveal how a common protocol may compare locations without presuming identical ecological thresholds or meanings. The resulting point dataset is neither a continuous record of all travel nor a sensor's objective measure of pleasure. Its evidential value depends on preserving that distinction.

Liu, T., Newman, W.E. and Browning, M.H.E.M. (2024) ‘Daily green exposure, mobility, and health: A scoping review’, Sustainability, 16(8), 3412. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16083412.

 

Exposure becomes conceptually imprecise when residence, movement and encounter are treated as interchangeable. Reviewing twenty studies, Liu and colleagues propose daily greenness exposure as a frame for comparing ways in which greenery is measured in relation to mobility and health. Their typology distinguishes ecological momentary, effect-oriented and spatiotemporal assessments, while recognising moderation, mediation, independence and undifferentiated associations in the observed relationships. This is not a new universal dose; it is a classification of the operations by which environmental contact becomes measurable. A satellite-derived residential greenness score and a momentary report during a journey may refer to the same person without referring to the same event. Their temporalities, spatial boundaries and inferential claims differ. By joining mobility studies, environmental measurement, landscape research and public health, the article provides a useful vocabulary for preventing a substitution that frequently passes unnoticed: the replacement of a moving subject’s situated exposures with static attributes of a location. Its most durable lesson concerns methodological provenance, not the positive value of greenery in the abstract.

LAPIEZA-LAB

Van Cauwenberg, J., Van Holle, V., Simons, D., Deridder, R., Clarys, P., Goubert, L., Nasar, J., Salmon, J., De Bourdeaudhuij, I. and Deforche, B. (2012) ‘Environmental factors influencing older adults’ walking for transportation: a study using walk-along interviews’, International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 9, 85. https://doi.org/10.1186/1479-5868-9-85

An ordinary journey to a nearby destination becomes an instrument for identifying environmental conditions that cannot be adequately reconstructed from an interview conducted elsewhere. Fifty-seven older adults in Flemish urban or semi-urban settings were accompanied along journeys to destinations within a fifteen-minute walk of home. Rather than beginning with a predefined walkability index, the analysis derives categories from reported encounters: facilities, surfaces, crossings, traffic, legibility, benches, social contact, familiarity, weather, crime-related safety and sensory qualities. The interview mobilises participants' practical expertise by allowing the setting to prompt observation and speech together. Its significance is not that every category discovered is unprecedented, but that physical form and the experienced conditions of using it become inseparable evidence. The limitation is equally important: a purposive convenience sample and qualitative coding cannot establish population prevalence or causal effects. Architecture, gerontology, mobility studies and qualitative health research converge around an epistemic proposition: spatial affordances become observable through situated use, while the return journey itself matters as much as the destination.

Teixeira, C.P., Fernandes, C.O., Ahern, J. and Farinha-Marques, P. (2022) ‘Plant traits database for climate change adaptation and mitigation in Northwest Portugal’, Data in Brief, 42, 108193. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2022.108193

This dataset materialises the classificatory infrastructure required by the adaptive framework. Drawing on 19 sites selected for higher ecological novelty from an earlier assessment of 85 green spaces in Porto, it organises 287 plant species across more than 50 traits or variables. Origin and invasive risk coexist with tolerance of drought, heat, pollution and flooding, as well as habit, crown density, flowering season, ornamental properties, shading functions and potential hazards. The database is therefore neither a neutral botanical inventory nor a universal measure of urban value. Its columns make certain relations between vegetation and climate legible while leaving other relations, including attachment, fear, everyday use and public interpretation, outside their direct scope. The methodological contribution is a reproducible interface between field sampling, ecological knowledge and design decision. Because the associated data are made available through Mendeley Data, the case also addresses the relationship between scientific publication and reusable research infrastructure. It supplies the botanical side of a comparison that an experiential urban instrument would need to extend, rather than duplicate.

Urban vulnerability is not a property that can be assigned reliably to a mapped surface without asking how the measurement was made. Mobility, fear, thermal exposure and access to greenery or services vary with embodiment, time, infrastructure and the social capacity to move. Measurements generated by sensors, surveys, remote sensing and collective memories need not describe interchangeable realities. Their differences become analytically productive when they are preserved instead of averaged into a single indicator. In this instalment, the material includes Comparative assessment of women’s safety and mobility research methods in informal ne; Spatial mismatch between heat exposure and cooling accessibility in the Middle Yangtz; Right to the digital Twin City? citizen participation and limits-by-design in Rotterd; Pathways to spatial equity: lessons from global patterns of urban infrastructure dive. Read together, these distinct empirical and conceptual settings delimit the range of situations that a single urban vocabulary tends to compress. The critical comparison is not a claim of causal identity among the studies. It is a method of making their units of analysis and forms of proof visible together. Differences between field measurements, constructed scenarios, comparative datasets, qualitative accounts and prescriptive arguments must remain explicit. Where a study offers a mapping technique, the map is evidence of a specified operationalisation, not the territory itself. Where it offers a conceptual critique, that critique cannot be converted into an observed outcome without additional data. This separation is essential to any cross-disciplinary synthesis: the apparent coherence of a thematic field is weak if it depends on erasing the distinctions through which its sources produce knowledge.

For Socioplastics, the question is how an archive can store simultaneously a measured condition, a situated account and the gap between them. A spatial record should name the instrument, population, temporal window and scale of inference. It should make possible comparisons that are reversible when a category changes, and retain the circumstances under which residents can contest an apparently objective map. Additional cases in this selection concern Blind spots and actionable insights for urban governance of the climate–biodiversity–; Nature-based policy as a pathway to urban sustainability transitions; From civic voices to greener cities: informal governance and city-level agri‑sustaina. Each should be indexed by its research question, method, geographic and temporal scope, unit of comparison and the kind of proposition it can support. In the present collection, the PDF is the primary evidential object: a title or abstract alone is insufficient to validate statistical inferences, the full context of a field intervention or a policy claim. These capsules therefore do not substitute for subsequent full-page interpretation, but they protect the completeness of the acquisition stage. Keeping publication identity separate from conceptual relevance also prevents a selective editorial argument from silently deleting original documents. The resulting Reader is a versioned, inspectable layer of Socioplastics, capable of being expanded with annotations of methods, limitations, empirical results, figures and counterarguments after a dedicated close reading of each source.

The Non-Equivalent City: Sound, Walking and Contextual Exposure (Ruotolo, Aletta, García-Martín, Grecchi, Oberman, Schaupp, Liu) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

A city does not possess one environmental description whose refinement will eventually make all the others unnecessary. It has physical variations that can be registered, permitted routes whose accessibility can be modelled, sounds whose energy can be estimated, and situated encounters whose significance emerges under conditions no instrument can fully preserve. The difference is ontological before it is statistical. A noise level is an acoustic measurement; a soundscape, in the perceptual usage scrutinised by Mitchell, Oberman, Aletta and Kang, depends on a perceiver and a context; a reported feeling of restoration is a further psychological object whose temporal duration and explanatory conditions must be specified separately. Confusing these objects allows measured exposure to stand in for lived distress, or an enjoyable experience to certify a condition as healthy, even when the two records have not actually tested one another. The appeal of environmental indices rests partly on their capacity to condense a dispersed city into decision-ready comparisons.

Conditional Urban Capacity: Walking, Restoration and the Unequal Map (Korpela, Kyttä, Bornioli, Dadvand, Kahila-Tani) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

An environment does not become a resource simply by existing within reach. Its capacity to support attention, movement, attachment or recovery is made in the encounter between an urban arrangement and a changing person, then rendered legible through instruments that never quite measure the same thing. A green surface observed from a satellite, a pedestrian route calculated from a network, a favourite place nominated in an interview and a neighbourhood evaluated through psychometric scales are not competing descriptions of one stable object. They are distinct operations through which a place becomes evidence. The difficulty is that urban policy often treats these operations as if they could be translated into a common inventory without residue. Korpela and Hartig locate restoration within the regulation of emotion and self-experience: coherence and compatibility, not simply fascination or withdrawal, organise the value of favourite places. 

White, M.P. et al. (2019) ‘Spending at least 120 minutes a week in nature is associated with good health and wellbeing’, Scientific Reports, 9, article 7730. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-44097-3.

Environmental contact has duration, and duration is not captured by the mere presence of a park near a home. White and colleagues analyse survey evidence from 19,806 respondents in England, examining reported nature contact during the preceding week in relation to self-reported health and wellbeing while accounting for several individual and neighbourhood characteristics. The widely discussed two-hour association is a descriptive threshold in an observational analysis, not a universal prescription or a demonstrated causal minimum. This distinction is central. The paper turns exposure into an accumulated temporal quantity and raises questions about the relation between visit frequency, duration and the social conditions that permit contact. It also illustrates the limits of large-scale comparability: total minutes cannot identify whether contact was freely chosen, interrupted, accessible, stressful, socially meaningful or restorative. For urban field research, the value of the study lies less in adopting 120 minutes as a target than in refusing to conflate environmental availability with experienced time. A route has duration, but a duration does not yet describe a route.

Winkler, M.S., Furu, P., Viliani, F., Cave, B., Divall, M., Ramesh, G., Harris-Roxas, B. and Knoblauch, A.M. (2020) ‘Current global health impact assessment practice’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 17(9), 2988. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph17092988

 

The capacity to assess an environmental intervention's health implications is itself unequally institutionalised. Winkler and colleagues survey 122 health-impact-assessment practitioners across 29 countries to characterise working practices, drivers, barriers, training and reliance on guidance. The survey does not estimate the health consequences of an urban project. Instead, it examines the practical infrastructure through which prospective consequences become recognisable and actionable in planning and policy. Its central operation is to turn assessment procedures and their institutional distribution into empirical objects. Differences in policy frameworks, expertise and resources affect what can be asked, compared and acted upon; methodological standardisation without capacity building cannot remove those disparities. Its evidence is descriptive and reliant on a self-selecting professional sample, so global representativeness cannot be assumed. The paper connects public health, environmental governance, institutional sociology and methodological standard-setting. For comparative urban research it distinguishes a claim about experienced wellbeing from an authorised health-impact assessment and makes visible the conditions under which the latter could responsibly inform decisions.

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ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE  >

                        

METKA KRASOVEC 

BRIGITTE BRAND 

RUDI BENETIK 

STANISLAV HABJAN 

ANTO LLOVERAS

SEBASTIJAN VOJVODA 

ZUZANA KALINAKOVA 

COLONIA DI RIVIERA 

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Korpela, K.M., Ylén, M., Tyrväinen, L. and Silvennoinen, H. (2008) ‘Determinants of restorative experiences in everyday favorite places’, Health & Place, 14(4), pp. 636–652. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2007.10.008.

The restorative environment is not a universal type of place but a relation between a setting, a person's history and the pressures of everyday life. Drawing on a questionnaire sample of 1,089 respondents in Helsinki and Tampere, Korpela and colleagues distinguish immediate patterns of visiting from biographical nature orientation, current stressors and social circumstances. This is a decisive methodological move: the unit of explanation expands beyond the landscape to include the conditions under which a landscape is sought, inhabited and remembered. Their differentiation among extensively managed natural areas, built green spaces, watersides, activity settings and urban locations prevents a simple natural-versus-built opposition from doing all the analytical work. The proposal of ‘favorite place prescriptions’ is provocative precisely because it turns an individual geography of preference into a possible health resource. Yet prescription risks standardising what the evidence identifies as personally variable. For comparative urban research, the paper requires attention to repeated use, self-selection and the temporal biography of attachment, not only to environmental inventories or single-visit wellbeing scores.

Bornioli, A., Parkhurst, G. and Morgan, P. (2018) ‘The psychological wellbeing benefits of place engagement during walking in urban environments: a qualitative photo-elicitation study’, Health & Place, 53, pp. 228–236. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2018.08.018.

Walking is not merely an exercise performed against an environmental background; it is a situated relation through which the environment becomes perceptible, meaningful and potentially beneficial. Bornioli, Parkhurst and Morgan make this distinction experimentally consequential at the level of research design by using qualitative photo-elicitation to bring the participant's own encounters with urban places into the production of evidence. The photograph does not simply illustrate an interview already conducted: it helps establish which moments of the walk deserve description, and whose categories of experience count. Their approach complicates the assumption that beneficial walking can be predicted adequately from a route's objectively measured properties. The psychological significance of a street may emerge through memory, attention, social recognition or the pleasures of engagement rather than through greenery alone. The paper bridges health geography, environmental psychology and mobile qualitative research. Its particular value is to make place engagement an observable research problem without reducing it to either a map coordinate or a generic statement of satisfaction. Its qualitative design does not, however, establish population-level causal effects.

Aldred, R., Goodman, A. and Woodcock, J. (2024) ‘Impacts of active travel interventions on travel behaviour and health: Results from a five-year longitudinal travel survey in Outer London’, Journal of Transport & Health, 35, 101771.

 

Aldred, Goodman and Woodcock use longitudinal evidence from Outer London to evaluate active-travel infrastructure and changes in walking and cycling behaviour. The study’s controlled comparisons distinguish residents exposed to different levels of intervention, including low-traffic neighbourhoods, and connect observed mobility changes to prospective health benefits. Its epistemic operation is temporal: rather than inferring transformation from a single snapshot or a desirable design image, it examines how behaviour evolves across successive waves of measurement. Transport epidemiology, public health, infrastructure evaluation and urban policy are brought into a common evidentiary frame. This matters because lived accounts can illuminate mechanisms without, on their own, establishing the duration or distribution of population-level effects. Conversely, longitudinal averages can register change while obscuring the frictions and exclusions through which it occurs. A credible comparative account requires both scales, while refusing to treat either as the final authority over the other.

Khreis, H., Williams, H., Abdollahpour, S.S., van den Bosch, M., Mudu, P., Tainio, M., Poom, A., Sohrabi, S. and Hankey, S. (2024) ‘The nexus of transportation, the built environment, air pollution and health’, Cities & Health. https://doi.org/10.1080/23748834.2024.2376389

Khreis and colleagues refuse to treat transport, environmental exposure and health as separate policy silos. Their multidisciplinary review traces how built and natural environments condition travel, how travel changes pollution exposure and physical activity, and how these pathways combine in health outcomes. The paper's distinctive operation is the construction of an upstream-to-downstream causal field in which mobility is simultaneously a behavioural choice, an exposure mechanism and an outcome of infrastructure. It bridges epidemiology, transport research, urban planning and environmental health without claiming that a single indicator captures their interactions. This makes it an essential counterweight to purely experiential accounts of walking. A route can feel restorative while carrying measurable exposure burdens, and a seemingly efficient intervention can redistribute risks unevenly. For neighbourhood comparison, the paper calls for explicit boundaries between immediate self-reported wellbeing, exposure measures and longer-term health claims. Those boundaries protect the validity of a modest field protocol while allowing it to connect to more demanding epidemiological research.

Turcu, C. (2025) ‘Urban greenspace, climate adaptation and health co-benefits: Municipal policy and practice in London’, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 22(3), 409. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph22030409.

The administrative city does not see a single green space. It encounters distinct indicators, departmental responsibilities and evaluation conventions, each able to make some benefits visible while leaving others unregistered. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with London boroughs, Turcu examines what municipalities measure, why those measures enter local frameworks, and how green-space interventions connect climate adaptation with health. The study finds fragmented practices and weak integration between climate, greenspace and health objectives. This is more than an implementation gap after science has produced its results: the apparatus of governance determines which relationships can be demonstrated and compared in the first place. Shade, flood management, air quality and lived wellbeing may coexist geographically without sharing accountable units, timescales or reporting obligations. Turcu joins planning policy, climate research and public health through an institutional diagnosis of evidence production. Her paper gives an essential counterweight to participant-centred methods: residents’ observations become politically consequential only when public organisations can receive, interpret and test them without converting their complexity into an unexamined composite score.

Aghabozorgi, K., van der Jagt, A., Bell, S. and Smith, H. (2024) ‘How university blue and green space affect students’ mental health: A scoping review’, Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, 97, 128394. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ufug.2024.128394.

The apparently simple unit of a campus landscape becomes unstable once it must account for mental health. This scoping review brings 54 eligible studies into a shared frame but makes their incompatibilities unusually visible: the studies describe different landscape features, exposures, populations, instruments and outcomes. More than 96 per cent report a positive association of some kind, yet that convergence is not a common measure of landscape efficacy. Its analytical achievement is therefore partly negative. By treating variation in study design as evidence about the field itself, Aghabozorgi and colleagues separate the existence of a promising association from the capacity to explain precisely what the landscape does. The relatively thin evidence concerning blue-space characteristics and design qualities matters because these are exactly the features that planning drawings and site inventories make most easily legible. The review bridges landscape architecture, environmental psychology and public health while revealing the distance between visually identifiable provision and demonstrable experiential mechanisms. A green campus is an institutional asset, an ecological configuration and a lived itinerary; none of these descriptions can simply stand in for the others.

Michel, S., Banwell, N. and Senn, N. (2024) ‘Mobility infrastructures and health: Scoping review of studies in Europe’, Public Health Reviews, 45, 1606862. https://doi.org/10.3389/phrs.2024.1606862.

A pavement is simultaneously a material arrangement, a behavioural possibility and a public-health intervention, but the three descriptions require different evidence. Michel and colleagues review 146 European articles and reports concerning mobility infrastructure, active travel, health and co-benefits. Connections between pavement networks, destinations and walking are recurrent, as are associations between active transport and certain health outcomes. Yet a literature organised around transport can privilege movements that have a destination and can overlook the circumstances that make a route desirable, negotiable or refused. The review’s useful operation is cross-scalar: it carries knowledge from street configuration through reported mobility to health and collective costs without reducing each level to the preceding one. Its policy relevance also requires restraint. A favourable modelled effect is not the same as the experience of a newly built path, and associations drawn from heterogeneous interventions are not guarantees for a particular neighbourhood. Transport planning, primary care and health assessment intersect here around infrastructure as a proposal whose consequences must still be observed.

Larrington-Spencer, H., Verlinghieri, E., Lawlor, E. and Aldred, R. (2025) ‘Troubling go-alongs through the lens of care’, Qualitative Research, 25(3), pp. 690–710. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687941241277747

The celebrated intimacy of mobile interviewing becomes more complicated when the researcher is recognised as a vulnerable body rather than an invisible recording device. Drawing on four vignettes from 118 go-along interviews in and around London's Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, the authors consider encounters shaped by reciprocity, solidarity, exhaustion and abuse. Care is neither simply a duty bestowed by investigators on participants nor a guarantee secured by consent forms; it is negotiated relationally, under unequal conditions. Researcher precarity and stigma are part of the production of spatial evidence, not external biography. In two cases, virtual go-alongs were also used, underscoring how access requires flexible yet non-equivalent modes of participation. The article contests an easy claim that walking methods automatically democratise the interview. Its operation is reflexive: it turns the conditions of observation back into objects of analysis. Mobility studies, feminist ethics and methodological criticism thereby reveal the limits of any urban evidence protocol that counts routes while leaving exposure, fatigue and asymmetric risk unrecorded.