Planning value is not captured when money changes hands; it is captured when an increase in economic possibility is converted into a durable public capacity. Development rights, infrastructure, landownership and municipal action can all increase the value of land, but the political question begins only after that increase becomes identifiable. What portion is private return, what portion can be redirected, through which mechanism, and into what form of collective benefit? Value conversion names this passage from uplift to outcome.

The distinction between land rent and land value capture reveals why the object is unstable. One tradition observes the whole field of urban land value and asks how rent should be taxed or distributed; another focuses on increments associated with planning decisions and infrastructure. Both depend on a theory of causation. Value cannot be captured fairly unless institutions can explain which part of an increase is socially produced, which is attributable to location or scarcity, and which emerges from private investment and risk. Yet conversion is never purely fiscal. Governmentality analysis shows that the calculations used to represent value are themselves instruments of governance. Residual valuations, land prices, infrastructure budgets and feasibility models translate heterogeneous qualities into commensurable figures. These technologies make action possible, but they also exclude what cannot be easily priced. Social, ecological and aesthetic values enter redevelopment only when institutions construct channels through which they can survive financial calculation. Public land development offers one such channel. Municipal ownership can connect land allocation to developer obligations, sustainability criteria, collaboration and learning. It can transform the land transaction into a platform for defining desired public outcomes. The Swedish cases demonstrate that this capacity reaches beyond infrastructure provision, while also exposing a conceptual problem: not every public benefit can be traced to a discrete increment of captured value. Public value is wider than value capture. Place quality makes this tension explicit. The comparative evidence from Scotland, the Netherlands and Germany shows that planning systems and land-policy strategies affect whether uplift can be channelled into public realm and placemaking. Active land policy can internalise quality costs earlier and reduce uncertainty, but no instrument guarantees durability. The decisive analytical question becomes not simply what is captured, but what the captured value becomes and whether that outcome persists. For Socioplastics, value conversion makes finance, regulation, land, design and maintenance readable within one infrastructural chain. A corpus can follow the movement from development right to valuation, from valuation to obligation, from obligation to spatial outcome, and from outcome to long-term maintenance or erosion. This is stronger than treating value as a monetary category because it makes conversion itself observable. Value conversion adds to Socioplastics a political economy of transformation: a method for tracing how institutional decisions turn abstract uplift into concrete public conditions, and where that transformation succeeds, leaks or disappears.

Planning time is not the interval between a proposal and a decision. It is an organised distribution of opportunities to know, revise, contest, wait and commit. Calendar duration matters, but it does not explain the process. Two plans can occupy the same number of months while producing entirely different institutional sequences: one may allow decisive knowledge to enter early, another may accumulate unresolved dependencies until revision becomes costly. Organized time names the architecture through which planning transforms uncertainty into commitment.

The distinction between time and temporality is therefore fundamental. Clock time measures duration; temporality describes the ordering, tempo and timing of events. A meeting held before a design hardens is not equivalent to the same meeting held after land, finance and political commitments are fixed. Sequence alters causal capacity. The planning process is path-dependent because every decision changes what remains revisable, and because the cost of change increases as actors accumulate sunk commitments. This makes delay a political rather than purely administrative category. Some intervals add no information and merely reproduce fragmentation; others allow environmental knowledge, negotiation or public scrutiny to enter. Productive and pathological delay cannot be identified by duration alone. They must be distinguished by what an interval changes: whether it resolves uncertainty, broadens legitimacy, preserves reversibility or simply transfers cost to another actor. The temporal politics of planning also concerns unequal capacities to wait. Institutions, developers, residents and consultants do not experience delay symmetrically. One actor may absorb months as portfolio risk while another experiences the same period as existential uncertainty. Acceleration can therefore redistribute power as effectively as regulation. Compressing consultation, advancing a decision or postponing infrastructure does not merely alter the schedule; it reallocates opportunity and exposure. For Socioplastics, organized time enables planning documents to be read as event structures rather than as static artefacts. A corpus can register when a requirement appeared, which actor introduced it, what uncertainty it resolved and what later decisions it made possible or impossible. Such a sequence turns the archive into a temporal instrument: not a repository of completed objects but a record of how alternatives close, reopen and acquire institutional weight. Organized time adds to Socioplastics a temporal grammar of causality. It makes duration secondary to sequence, and transforms planning history from a line of dates into an operational map of when knowledge, authority and irreversibility enter the field.

Urban form is never produced by a single rule, yet it is never free from rules. What planning governs most effectively is not the final shape of the city but the field within which shape can emerge. A limit on height, a minimum open-space ratio, a floor-area ceiling or a street-width requirement does not contain an architectural solution. Each creates a boundary condition. The built environment appears through the intersection of these conditions with property, finance, design practice, infrastructure and precedent. The relevant object is therefore neither regulation nor form in isolation, but feasible form: the changing set of spatial configurations that remain possible as rules accumulate and interact.

This shift displaces deterministic accounts of planning. Moroni’s distinction between teleocratic and nomocratic regulation clarifies why a rule cannot be read simply as a command toward a desired image. General rules can structure action without specifying an end-state, while discretionary planning can seek outcomes through case-specific steering. Both nevertheless alter the range of spatial possibilities. Regulation acts morphologically when it changes that range: when one option becomes impossible, another more advantageous, or a previously indifferent relation between footprint, height and access becomes decisive. Spacematrix gives feasible form a measurable topology. Density ceases to be a scalar and becomes a multidimensional configuration in which built intensity, coverage and network structure interact. Under the same nominal density, radically different fabrics remain available. This is more than a technical refinement. It means that regulation operates in a space of alternatives rather than along a single quantitative axis. A planning parameter does not merely add or subtract capacity; it reshapes the geometry of the solution field. The Nanjing evidence demonstrates that such effects can be observed historically. Plot indicators, building-density controls and block regulations leave traces in subdivision, massing and street-block structure, yet those traces remain mediated by developer response and broader urban transformation. Feasible form is therefore probabilistic rather than deterministic. Its analytical value lies precisely in the capacity to distinguish strong constraints from weak influence, and direct morphological effects from those routed through other institutional or economic mechanisms. For Socioplastics, feasible form offers an operational way to connect institutional language with spatial evidence. Regulations, plans, diagrams, massing studies and built outcomes can be archived as successive states of one constrained field. The archive no longer records only what was built; it can register what became possible, what was excluded and which combinations of rules produced each narrowing. This makes the regulatory environment observable as a material and epistemic infrastructure. Feasible form adds to Socioplastics a grammar of constrained possibility: a way of treating rules not as static texts but as active delimiters of spatial variation, and morphology not as a finished object but as the visible residue of successive institutional selections.

Pooley, C.G., Jones, T., Jones, H., Spencer, B. and Chatterjee, K. (2018) ‘Family formation and everyday travel in Britain since c.1850’, The History of the Family, 23(2), pp. 290–306. https://doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2017.1417146.

Pooley and colleagues place everyday mobility inside a long historical frame, showing that family formation changes travel practices differently according to available technologies, social norms, risk perceptions and gendered responsibilities. Their evidence combines travel life histories with historical diaries, allowing routine movement to be analysed across more than a century without reducing mobility to spectacular journeys. The article’s key contribution is the insistence that ordinary travel is historically variable: walking, cycling, public transport and car dependence are shaped not only by infrastructure but by changing expectations about care, safety, time and appropriate behaviour. Methodologically, qualitative life histories recover decisions and constraints that aggregate travel statistics cannot explain, while the authors explicitly acknowledge the limits of retrospective testimony. The wider bridge is to mobilities history: everyday routes become social evidence, revealing how family, technology and cultural norms reorganise spatial practice over generations.

Albrecht, J., Holz-Rau, C. and Scheiner, J. (2017) ‘Life-course data reconstruction using complementary information taken from linked lives’, Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 104, pp. 308–318. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2017.03.016.

Albrecht, Holz-Rau and Scheiner address a central weakness of retrospective research: parts of early life are inaccessible to the person whose biography is being reconstructed. Their solution is to treat linked lives as an evidential resource, using parents’ and grandparents’ accounts to reconstruct residential biographies and then testing those reconstructions against respondents’ own reports. The method reframes memory as distributed rather than sovereign. A childhood trajectory can be partially recovered because family members shared residences, decisions and temporal episodes even when the child did not consciously register them. The study also shows that reconstruction quality varies by relationship and variable, so supplementary testimony cannot simply be treated as factual replacement. Its wider contribution is methodological and epistemic: longitudinal biography becomes a multi-source reconstruction problem, linking mobility research to relational sociology, intergenerational transmission and evidential triangulation across partially overlapping lives.

Schoenduwe, R., Mueller, M.G., Peters, A. and Lanzendorf, M. (2015) ‘Analysing mobility biographies with the life course calendar: a retrospective survey methodology for longitudinal data collection’, Journal of Transport Geography, 42, pp. 98–109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2014.12.001.

Schoenduwe and colleagues turn mobility biography into a practical retrospective instrument through the life course calendar, a year-by-question grid that aligns spatial context, transport decisions and biographical events. Tested with 646 respondents, the method retrieves relocations, workplace changes and car acquisitions more reliably than fine-grained travel behaviour, demonstrating both the promise and the limits of retrospective longitudinal data. Its conceptual strength lies in using temporal adjacency as evidence: changes in residence, employment, household structure and mobility can be read together rather than as unrelated variables. The authors remain cautious about causal ordering when several events occur within the same year, an important warning against false precision. Methodologically, the calendar offers a disciplined middle ground between expensive panel studies and free-form memory. It connects transport research to event-history methods by making the life course simultaneously narratable, comparable and structurally analysable.

Scheiner, J. (2007) ‘Mobility biographies: elements of a biographical theory of travel demand’, Erdkunde, 61(2), pp. 161–173.

Scheiner relocates travel behaviour from the instant of choice to the temporal architecture of a life. Mobility biography names the development of travel practices in relation to residential, household and employment biographies, where routines stabilise behaviour while relocations, work changes and other key events may interrupt established patterns. The conceptual gain lies in replacing cross-sectional explanation with process: mobility is neither an isolated preference nor a direct response to environment, but a path-dependent formation in which earlier arrangements constrain and enable later ones. Methodologically, the paper also clarifies the limits of retrospective reconstruction: exact distances and frequencies are fragile, whereas residences, workplaces, transport availability and major transitions are more recoverable. Its wider importance lies in joining transport geography to life-course research, making temporal sequence itself an explanatory dimension of spatial practice.

PSICOLOGÍA AMBIENTAL HOY

http://psicologiaambientalhoy.blogspot.com

 

Mehl, K., Reschke-Hernandez, A.E., Hanson, J., Linhardt, L., Frame, J., Dew, M., Kickbusch, E., Johnson, C., Bai, E. and Belfi, A.M. (2025) ‘Music-evoked autobiographical memories are associated with negative affect in younger and older adults’, Experimental Aging Research, 51(1), pp. 1–18. doi:10.1080/0361073X.2024.2302785.

Mehl and colleagues challenge the assumption that autobiographically meaningful music is primarily a vehicle of positive emotion. Thirty younger and thirty older adults listened to self-selected music in two conditions: memory-evoking music and familiar music that did not evoke autobiographical memories. Affect was measured before listening and at three subsequent time points. Positive affect increased after both kinds of music, but negative affect increased only after memory-evoking music, indicating that autobiographical musical cues are especially capable of producing mixed emotional states. The experiment’s critical operation is the use of familiar non-memory-evoking music as a control, allowing autobiographical content to be distinguished from familiarity itself. The paper therefore supplies an empirical mechanism for understanding why personally significant music cannot be equated with pleasurable or desirable listening. Its wider importance lies at the intersection of affect, ageing, memory and music-based intervention: a cue’s mnemonic potency can carry emotional costs as well as benefits, making autobiographical salience an ambivalent rather than uniformly rewarding property.

Loui, P. and Wessel, D. (2008) ‘Learning and liking an artificial musical system: Effects of set size and repeated exposure’, Musicae Scientiae, 12(2), pp. 207–230.

Loui and Wessel demonstrate that learning a musical grammar and developing a preference for its exemplars are dissociable consequences of exposure. Participants encountered melodies generated from a finite-state grammar in the unfamiliar Bohlen–Pierce system. In Experiment 1, fifteen melodies repeated twenty-seven times each produced recognition and generalisation to new grammatical melodies without differentiated preference. In Experiment 2, ten melodies repeated forty times each generated stronger recognition and greater liking for familiar items but unsuccessful grammatical generalisation. The iconic result is therefore distributional: exposure to a broader set supports abstraction of structural regularities, whereas denser repetition of fewer items favours item-specific recognition and preference. Their experimental operation replaces “amount of exposure” with the architecture of exposure—set size, repetition density and variability. The work bridges statistical learning and aesthetics by showing that becoming able to inhabit an unfamiliar musical system and becoming attached to particular objects within it are related but independent processes, undermining any universal repetition-to-liking threshold.

Hennessy, S., Janata, P., Ginsberg, T., Kaplan, J. and Habibi, A. (2025) ‘Music-Evoked Nostalgia Activates Default Mode and Reward Networks Across the Lifespan’, Human Brain Mapping, 46, e70181. doi:10.1002/hbm.70181.

Hennessy and colleagues experimentally separate nostalgia from familiarity, a distinction often blurred in research on personally meaningful music. Fifty-seven younger and older adults listened during fMRI to three individually constructed categories: personalised nostalgic music, familiar non-nostalgic music and unfamiliar non-nostalgic music, with stimuli matched for musical features through a machine-learning-based procedure. Nostalgic music produced stronger activity than both control conditions across default-mode, salience, reward, medial-temporal and supplementary-motor regions, together with increased connectivity between self-referential and affect-related areas. Older adults showed stronger BOLD responses in nostalgia-related regions, while the predictors of neural response differed by age. The study’s key conceptual operation is to demonstrate that nostalgia cannot be reduced to recognition or familiarity; it constitutes a self-relevant affective-memory configuration. By combining personalised stimulus construction with acoustic matching, the paper bridges autobiographical memory, affective neuroscience and lifespan research, offering a rigorous model for isolating biographical charge from mere musical familiarity.

Hanson, J., Frame, J., Bai, E., Mehl, K., Jakubowski, K. and Belfi, A.M. (2025) ‘Popular music and movies as autobiographical memory cues’, Memory & Cognition, 54, pp. 515–531. doi:10.3758/s13421-025-01765-2.

Hanson and colleagues compare popular music and movies as culturally distributed autobiographical cues while simultaneously constructing a normed stimulus resource. In a sample of 248 participants, music excerpts or movie clips were rated for familiarity, autobiographical salience, emotional valence and arousal. Both media contained stimuli capable of cueing memories across a wide age range, but music produced a significantly more pronounced reminiscence bump, indicating a particularly strong relation between music encountered during formative life periods and later autobiographical retrieval. The study’s methodological contribution is to move beyond idiosyncratic self-selected stimuli toward normed popular-media cues while preserving age-related variation. Its conceptual force lies in separating familiarity from autobiographical salience: culturally recognisable objects do not automatically possess equivalent mnemonic power. The comparison with cinema places music within a wider ecology of mediated memory and suggests that different cultural forms organise temporal attachment differently, opening a bridge between cognitive memory research, media studies and the cultural construction of life-course memory.

Ford, J.H., Rubin, D.C. and Giovanello, K.S. (2016) ‘The effects of song familiarity and age on phenomenological characteristics and neural recruitment during autobiographical memory retrieval’, Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, 26(3), pp. 199–210. doi:10.1037/pmu0000152.

Ford, Rubin and Giovanello examine familiarity not as a terminal state of recognition but as a variable shaping the quality of autobiographical retrieval. In an event-related fMRI study, younger and older participants retrieved memories in response to age-specific popular musical clips and rated song familiarity, temporal specificity and emotional valence. Greater familiarity was associated across participants with increased dorsomedial prefrontal activity, more temporally specific memories and greater positivity. Age modified the pattern: familiarity was more closely associated with enhanced memory detail in younger adults and with affective positivity in older adults. The study’s theoretical contribution is to connect subjective familiarity with the phenomenology and neural organisation of autobiographical remembering. Its methodological strength lies in combining cue ratings, memory characteristics and neuroimaging rather than treating retrieval as a binary outcome. The wider bridge joins music cognition to lifespan memory research, showing that the autobiographical effectiveness of a cue depends simultaneously on personal relevance and the changing architecture of remembering across age.

Castro, M., L’héritier, F., Plailly, J., Saive, A.-L., Corneyllie, A., Tillmann, B. and Perrin, F. (2020) ‘Personal familiarity of music and its cerebral effect on subsequent speech processing’, Scientific Reports, 10, 14854. doi:10.1038/s41598-020-71855-5.

Castro and colleagues make a decisive distinction between general familiarity and personal familiarity. A popular song may be culturally recognisable, whereas personally familiar music is grounded in direct experience and can be attached to people, places, objects and specific spatiotemporal-emotional contexts. Using fMRI with composers, the study compares participants’ own compositions, favourite music by others and unfamiliar music, followed by personally familiar and unfamiliar names. Music carrying autobiographical content recruits a fronto-parietal network including dorsolateral prefrontal, supramarginal/angular and precuneus regions; favourite music engages reward and emotion networks, while self-composed music more strongly recruits self-referential and visuomotor processes. The methodological operation is unusually precise because familiarity, autobiographical relevance and self-reference are experimentally differentiated rather than merged. The study bridges neuroscience and autobiographical-memory theory by demonstrating that apparently equivalent states of “knowing” music can have different cerebral architectures depending on how the musical object entered the listener’s life.

Belfi, A.M., Bai, E., Stroud, A., Twohy, R. and Beadle, J.N. (2022) ‘Investigating the role of involuntary retrieval in music-evoked autobiographical memories’, Consciousness and Cognition, 100, 103305. doi:10.1016/j.concog.2022.103305.

Belfi and colleagues test whether the unusual episodic richness of music-evoked autobiographical memories can be explained simply by their tendency to arise involuntarily. By comparing memories elicited by musical and face cues while distinguishing voluntary from involuntary retrieval, the study separates cue type from retrieval intentionality. Music-evoked memories remained more episodically rich and contained more perceptual detail than face-evoked memories even when involuntary memories were compared directly across cue types. Involuntary retrieval itself increased internal detail, but it did not eliminate the music effect. The conceptual result is important because spontaneity and musical specificity cannot be collapsed into a single mechanism. Music appears to contribute something beyond effortless access, plausibly through its temporal, perceptual, emotional and contextual organisation. Methodologically, the paper exemplifies controlled decomposition of a seemingly unitary phenomenon into independent dimensions. It bridges music cognition with episodic-memory research by showing that retrieval mode and sensory cue jointly shape the phenomenology of autobiographical remembering.

Belfi, A.M. and Jakubowski, K. (2021) ‘Music and Autobiographical Memory’, Music & Science, 4. doi:10.1177/20592043211047123.

Belfi and Jakubowski define music-evoked autobiographical memory as a distinct interdisciplinary problem connecting memory, emotion, identity and ageing. Their editorial synthesis establishes that music can evoke vivid, emotionally intense and personally meaningful memories across experimental and everyday contexts, healthy and clinical populations, and quantitative, qualitative and theoretical methodologies. Rather than treating musical memory as simple recognition, they foreground the autobiographical event: a cue retrieves episodes embedded in a life history. The text maps four major axes—youth, ageing and reminiscence bumps; special populations; identity, relationships and emotions; and musical qualities—while positioning music against other sensory cues. Its conceptual operation is therefore field-forming: it shifts inquiry from whether music triggers memory to what kinds of memories emerge, for whom, under which conditions and with what phenomenological qualities. The broader bridge is toward autobiographical-memory research in which sensory media become active retrieval infrastructures connecting perception, self-continuity and temporally distributed experience.

Anglada-Tort, M., Masters, N., Steffens, J., North, A. and Müllensiefen, D. (2023) ‘The Behavioural Economics of Music: Systematic review and future directions’, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 76(5), pp. 1177–1194. doi:10.1177/17470218221113761.

Anglada-Tort and colleagues recast musical behaviour as decision-making rather than preference considered in isolation. Using a PRISMA-guided systematic review, they move from 338 identified records to 32 included studies and organise the field into four behavioural-economic domains: heuristics and biases, social decision-making, behavioural time preferences and dual-process theory. The theoretical contribution is to show that musical choices are structured by cognitive shortcuts, social information, temporal valuation and shifts between intuitive and deliberative processing. Music listening, performance and consumption consequently appear as situated decisions rather than transparent expressions of taste. Particularly useful is the demonstration that familiarity and expertise can alter the balance between automatic and controlled judgement. The proposed Behavioural Economics of Music programme opens a bridge between music cognition and behavioural economics, providing a framework for studying how platforms, recommendations, repeated exposure, social signals and temporal routines participate in the construction of musical value.

Ordinary social life depends on environments that make encounter possible without requiring encounter to be formally organised. The crucial condition is neither spectacle nor institutional grandeur but repeatable accessibility: places that can be entered, understood, used and revisited with limited negotiation. A tavern, café, library, market or pavement becomes socially consequential when its material arrangement and habitual use lower the threshold for presence among others. Social capacity is therefore spatial before it is programmatic. It emerges through doors that remain open, counters that support brief occupation, tables that tolerate duration, familiar routines, affordable transactions, recognisable temporal rhythms and a degree of behavioural looseness. Such spaces do not simply host social relations after those relations have been formed elsewhere. They participate in producing them by stabilising situations in which proximity, repetition and recognition can accumulate.

This capacity is epistemically difficult because it often appears trivial while it is functioning. Infrastructure, as Latham and Layton insist, is frequently transparent in use and becomes visible through interruption, closure or unequal access. Uría’s historical tavern reveals the same structure from another direction: its social importance was obscured by moral categories that framed drinking, gaming and informal gathering as disorder. The ordinary setting becomes legible only when analysis separates what authorities said the space represented from what people repeatedly did there. This is a methodological lesson of wider scope. Informal public life is easily missed when research privileges formal organisations, declared functions or exceptional events. Repetition, weak ties and unplanned coexistence require attention to practices whose significance lies precisely in their routine character.

Latham, A. and Layton, J. (2022) ‘Social infrastructure: why it matters and how urban geographers might study it’, Urban Geography, 43(5), pp. 659–668. https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2021.2003609.

Latham and Layton refine social infrastructure by distinguishing several meanings that had begun to travel under the same term: people as infrastructure, the social relations surrounding hard infrastructures, infrastructures of social care, and the public or quasi-public places that support social connection. The paper’s iconic move is conceptual disaggregation. Rather than treating social infrastructure as an intuitively positive label for any socially useful place, it asks what kind of infrastructural work is actually being described. Its theoretical contribution lies in returning infrastructure to capacity: infrastructures facilitate, support, service and sustain activity, but they do so through different material, institutional and political arrangements. Methodologically, the text urges urban researchers to specify the infrastructural object, its users, its relations of access and its mode of support instead of relying on broad metaphor. This creates a bridge to critical urban geography, where infrastructure is simultaneously material provision, unevenly distributed capacity and political form. The concept becomes strongest when its empirical register is made explicit.