Maestre, C.A., Garza, S., Albornoz, Y., Mejia-Arango, S., Melgarejo, J.D. and Maestre, G.E. (2025) ‘Impacts of imageability of architecture on brain health: A systematic literature review’, Landscape and Urban Planning, 256, 105286. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2024.105286.

Maestre and colleagues reactivate Kevin Lynch’s imageability as a bridge between urban design and brain health, shifting a classic planning concept from legibility and memorability toward cognition, affect and social connectivity. Their systematic review screens 5,270 records and retains 56 peer-reviewed studies linking architectural imageability with wayfinding, visual recall, familiarity, biophilia, aesthetics, embodiment and psychological outcomes. The central proposition is that memorable, differentiated and cognitively graspable environments may support orientation, emotional engagement, physical activity and sense of place, although the neural mechanisms remain insufficiently established. The methodological contribution is equally important: the review exposes the conceptual elasticity of “imageability” and the lack of standardised, replicable measures capable of separating urban-design qualities from broader contextual effects. Rather than turning Lynch into a neuroscientific prescription, the paper makes imageability an empirical research programme. Its wider intellectual bridge joins urban morphology, spatial cognition and public health by treating legibility as a possible cognitive infrastructure whose effects must be tested rather than assumed.

Meng, D., Xu, L., Huang, J. and Tan, Y. (2024) ‘Healthy communities in the post-epidemic era: Residential satisfaction and housing choice’, Journal of Human Settlements in West China, 39(5), pp. 33–39. https://doi.org/10.13791/j.cnki.hsfwest.20240506.

Meng, Xu, Huang and Tan treat the 2022 Shanghai lockdown as an involuntary spatial experiment in which everyday life was compressed into housing and neighbourhood infrastructures. Their iconic move is to read residential satisfaction not as a generic preference score but as an indicator of spatial vulnerability exposed under crisis conditions. Using an online survey of Shanghai residents, the study connects health status, behavioural change, housing choice, relocation intention and community characteristics, then converts those observations into planning questions about resilience, facilities, services and appropriate community scale. The contribution is therefore less neuroscientific than environmental-behavioural: crisis intensifies the legibility of dependencies that routine urban life normally disperses. Methodologically, the paper demonstrates how exceptional conditions can reveal latent relations between spatial configuration, perceived adequacy and behavioural adaptation. Its wider bridge is to resilience planning and environmental psychology, where vulnerability is understood as a relational property of people, services, dwelling types and neighbourhood organisation rather than as a purely demographic condition.

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Tillmann, L.M. (2015) ‘Friendship as Method’, in In Solidarity: Friendship, Family, and Activism Beyond Gay and Straight. New York: Routledge, pp. 287–319.

Tillmann converts friendship from a background condition of fieldwork into an explicit qualitative method. Her central proposition is that friendship and fieldwork share relational operations: gaining entrée, negotiating roles, learning codes, participating, observing participation, managing intimacy and eventually confronting departure or loss. Friendship as method therefore requires research to proceed with the practices, pace, natural contexts and ethic of friendship rather than treating relational proximity as contamination. The theoretical contribution is interpretivist and critical: reality is understood as plural and interactionally constructed, while estrangement and neutrality are refused as automatic guarantees of rigour. Methodologically, the approach demands radical reflexivity because the researcher’s commitments, vulnerabilities and privileges become part of the field rather than external conditions. Its wider bridge is to feminist methodology, relational ethics and insider research. Friendship produces forms of access and mutual knowledge unavailable to short encounters, but precisely for that reason it raises the ethical stakes and makes accountability inseparable from relationship.

Portelli, A. (1991 [1979]) ‘What Makes Oral History Different’, in The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History. Albany: State University of New York Press.

Thomson, R. (2007) ‘The qualitative longitudinal case history: practical, methodological and ethical reflections’, Social Policy and Society, 6(4), pp. 571–582. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746407003909.

Thomson turns the longitudinal archive into an analytical object by showing how case histories are actively forged from repeated encounters rather than simply discovered within accumulated data. Her key distinction is between synchronic and diachronic analysis: the individual case must be read both across time and within the social and spatial contexts that structure each moment. Methodologically, case profiles condense interviews, memory books, focus groups and field notes into longitudinal accounts capable of tracking motifs, impasses, solutions and changing biographical fields. The resulting history remains tied to concrete events, juxtapositions and coincidences while allowing higher-order patterns to emerge through comparison among cases. Thomson’s theoretical contribution lies in making process central: the aim is not a before-and-after narrative but an account of how change is produced through timing, resources and resourcefulness. The wider bridge is to archival analysis and biography, where longitudinal intensity transforms an individual archive into a research environment without eliminating contingency or ethical complexity.

Holland, J., Thomson, R. and Henderson, S. (2006) Qualitative Longitudinal Research: A Discussion Paper. London: London South Bank University, Families & Social Capital ESRC Research Group Working Paper No. 21.

Holland, Thomson and Henderson establish qualitative longitudinal research as a framework for investigating change over time while retaining the contextual density of social experience. Their central proposition is that qualitative methods can access fluid, situation-specific understandings and perceptions that large-scale panel studies tend to flatten. Longitudinality therefore does not simply increase the quantity of qualitative material; it changes the explanatory object by allowing researchers to observe process, transition and the interaction between micro-social negotiation and broader socio-cultural change. Methodologically, the paper maps research traditions, units of analysis, scale, duration, ethics, archiving and secondary analysis, showing that long-term inquiry intensifies familiar qualitative problems rather than suspending them. Consent becomes a process rather than a one-off event, while archiving demands selective and context-sensitive infrastructures. The wider bridge is to research governance and knowledge infrastructure: the value of longitudinal inquiry depends upon how repeated encounters, technological supports, ethical obligations and archival practices are organised across time.

Neale, B. (2013) Journeys through Time: The Contours of Qualitative Longitudinal Research. Timescapes, University of Leeds.

Neale makes time an object of inquiry rather than the neutral medium through which research happens. Qualitative longitudinal research is defined as enquiry conducted through or in relation to time, capable of tracing change, continuity, endurance, transition and the lived processes through which individuals accommodate or shape transformation. Its theoretical contribution is to align social theories of temporality with empirically grounded life-course research, refusing the reduction of longitudinality to repeated data collection. Methodologically, the approach values rich, textured and context-sensitive materials generated through interviews, ethnography and narrative methods, precisely because such materials can disclose micro-processes invisible to aggregate longitudinal measures. The decisive operation is comparative return: revisiting lives, relationships or situations makes it possible to distinguish transient variation from consequential transformation. The wider bridge reaches social theory, life-course studies and process sociology. Time becomes analytically productive when recurrence reveals how agency, circumstance and social change become mutually entangled across duration.

966

 

Springgay, S. and Truman, S.E. (2018) ‘A walking-writing practice: Queering the trail’, in Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World: WalkingLab. London and New York: Routledge.

Springgay and Truman’s walking-writing practice refuses the separation of movement, thought and inscription. Walking is not preparation for writing, and writing does not begin when experience is converted into text; both operate as a single thinking-in-movement in which concepts form through rhythm, atmosphere, encounter and friction. The chapter’s distinctive operation is propositional rather than instructional. Queering, differentiation, surfacing, activation devices, with-ness, touch and contouring are offered as techniques of relation rather than repeatable procedures. Cameras, sound recorders, altered gaits, reading salons and material actions are valuable only when they alter the event instead of extracting representations from it. This makes the work methodologically rigorous precisely where it rejects formula. Its wider contribution joins feminist research-creation, affect theory, more-than-human geography and situated ethics: walking-writing becomes a practice of response-ability in which knowledge is generated through co-composition, and where collaboration, citation, land, bodies and nonhuman matter remain active participants in the production of thought.

 

Truman, S.E. and Springgay, S. (2016) ‘Propositions for walking research’, in Powell, K., Bernard, P. and Mackinlay, L. (eds.) International Handbook of Intercultural Arts Research. New York: Routledge, pp. 259–267.

Truman and Springgay recast walking from an embodied technique into a propositional mode of research. Their central move is Whiteheadian: a proposition occupies the interval between actuality and potentiality and therefore does not prescribe an outcome but generates conditions in which novelty can emerge. Walking becomes research when it exceeds transit, observation or data collection and begins to reorganise the relations among bodies, space, sensation and thought. The chapter operationalises this through defamiliarisation, sensory mixing, enabling constraints and the Artist Placement Group’s open brief, where context becomes part of the work and not-knowing becomes an active condition. Its conceptual force lies in replacing the researcher who moves through a stable environment with an event in which bodies and environments are mutually constituted. This provides a precise bridge to new materialism, relational ontology, psychogeography and experimental pedagogy: walking is not a neutral carrier of inquiry but a device that changes the field through which knowledge becomes possible.

Pool, S. (2022) Residency-as-Method: A Process-Based Approach to Developing Artistic Ways of Knowing Within Sites of Informal Learning. PhD thesis. Manchester Metropolitan University, Education and Social Research Institute.

Steven Pool’s thesis advances a deceptively simple proposition: residency is not merely a condition surrounding research but can itself become a method. By defining residency as practice operating within a site, Pool shifts attention from the production of a discrete outcome to the relations generated among practitioner, place, community and ongoing inquiry. His theoretical contribution lies in treating research-creation as a thinking-making-doing continuum rather than a sequence in which practice is subsequently translated into academic explanation. Assemblage and nomadic thought support this move, but the thesis remains committed to the contingencies of situated work, contradiction and partial knowledge. Methodologically, Pool works across multiple sites and follows how concepts emerge through encounters rather than imposing a stable protocol in advance. The wider significance is substantial for artistic research and informal learning: a residency becomes a temporal-spatial apparatus in which agency, knowledge and practice are co-produced through sustained presence rather than delivered as predetermined results.

Hand, C.L., Rudman, D.L., Huot, S., Gilliland, J.A. and Pack, R.L. (2018) ‘Toward understanding person–place transactions in neighborhoods: A qualitative-participatory geospatial approach’, The Gerontologist, 58(1), pp. 89–100. https://doi.org/10.1093/geront/gnx064.

Hand and colleagues develop a participatory geospatial method for studying person–place relations as transactions rather than one-directional environmental effects. Their key contribution is to combine situated qualitative inquiry with geospatial techniques so that meanings attached to streets, routes, services and neighbourhood features can be registered alongside their locations. The method is particularly useful where conventional interviews fail to verbalise the practical, affective or habitual dimensions of place. Rather than treating neighbourhoods as bounded exposure zones, the approach understands them through lived interactions, movement and interpretation. Its conceptual operation is therefore relational: environments shape possibilities, but participants also select, reinterpret and transform the significance of environmental features through everyday practice. The bridge to urban research is substantial because it joins participatory methods, qualitative GIS and environmental gerontology without reducing experience to coordinates. It offers a model for spatial evidence in which geolocation increases specificity while participant interpretation retains epistemic authority.

Peluso, N.L. (1995) ‘Whose woods are these? Counter-mapping forest territories in Kalimantan, Indonesia’, Antipode, 27(4), pp. 383–406.

Peluso defines counter-mapping as the appropriation of cartographic technologies by groups whose territorial claims have been suppressed or erased by official maps. The iconic operation is political inversion: sketch maps, GPS coordinates and planning maps are mobilised to translate customary resource relations into forms legible to states, NGOs and international institutions. Yet the article refuses an uncomplicated narrative of empowerment. Mapping may contest state authority, reinsert settlements into resource representations and challenge spatial homogenisation, but it can also freeze flexible customary practices, harden boundaries and generate new gatekeepers around technical knowledge. The map is therefore both instrument and transformation of the claim it represents. Peluso’s wider theoretical contribution lies in treating representation as territorial action rather than neutral depiction. Counter-mapping connects critical cartography, political ecology and legal pluralism, while anticipating participatory GIS debates: spatial technologies redistribute visibility and authority, but their emancipatory force depends on who controls categories, scale, access, revision and the right to redraw.

Warren, S. (2017) ‘Pluralising the walking interview: Researching (im)mobilities with Muslim women’, Social & Cultural Geography, 18(6), pp. 786–807. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1228113.

Warren exposes the hidden universal subject embedded in much walking-method literature. Against accounts that assume walking to be inherently pleasurable, liberatory or democratising, she shows how faith, ethnicity, gender, legal insecurity, caring responsibilities and social visibility alter both mobility and the conditions under which research can occur. The methodological contribution is therefore a pluralisation of the walking interview itself: participants may walk independently, with companions, in friendship groups, with children or partners, while classroom mapping can substitute for street-based mobility when walking is inappropriate. The failure of participant-led routing automatically to redistribute power is one of the article’s most important findings; research authority, generational hierarchy and cultural expectations continue to operate inside allegedly emancipatory formats. Warren converts methodological discomfort into evidence. The wider bridge is to feminist and postcolonial epistemology, where every method contains an implicit body, social norm and geography of access. Immobility, refusal and withdrawal become legitimate forms of spatial knowledge.

Oosterlynck, S. and Beeckmans, L. (2021) ‘De sociale bijziendheid van de 15 minutenstad [The Social Myopia of the 15-Minute City]’, Ruimte & Maatschappij, 13(2), pp. 63–74.

Oosterlynck and Beeckmans expose the distributive blind spot within the apparently universal promise of the 15-minute city. Proximity, walkability, local services and reduced car dependence may be desirable, but the model tacitly assumes the housing security, employment flexibility and consumer autonomy of the Western urban middle class. The authors’ decisive operation is to shift analysis from the quality of the residential environment to the political economy of inhabitation: who can afford to live in well-served neighbourhoods, who performs the non-telework labour that sustains proximity, and who lacks the “exit” option of moving elsewhere. The result is a critique of spatial optimisation detached from housing and income policy. Urban justice cannot be inferred from geometric accessibility alone because identical distances are lived through unequal resources, labour conditions and housing positions. The essay therefore connects proximity planning to broader debates on gentrification, class and distributive justice, insisting that a socially just neighbourhood model must organise access to housing and livelihoods as seriously as access to amenities.

Beeckmans, L., Gola, A., Singh, A. and Heynen, H. (eds.) (2022) Making Home(s) in Displacement: Critical Reflections on a Spatial Practice. Leuven: Leuven University Press. https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461664082.

Making Home(s) in Displacement dislodges “home” from the image of a stable domestic object and treats homemaking as a spatial practice performed under shifting political, material and temporal conditions. Organised through camp, shelter, city and house, the volume uses these sites as conceptual lenses rather than fixed typologies, allowing their borders to blur across diverse geopolitical cases. Its theoretical contribution lies in making everyday spatial agency central to architectural knowledge: appropriation, repair, decoration, self-building, adaptation, hosting and informal organisation become modes through which displaced subjects materially negotiate belonging, security and political presence. Methodologically, the book combines architecture, urbanism, anthropology, geography, philosophy, gender studies and decolonial thought, arguing that displacement exceeds the epistemic capacity of any autonomous discipline. This interdisciplinary and micro-historical orientation also contests canonical architectural historiography by restoring ordinary gestures, minor material transformations and migrant spatial knowledge to the production of urban history. Home emerges not as a recovered origin but as an unstable, continuously made relation. 

Nagi, T., Beeckmans, L. and d’Auria, V. (2024) ‘Mapping Brussels’ Displaced Housing Ecosystem: Palais des Droits’ Post-Eviction Geographies and “Weird Alliances”’, Urban Planning, 9, Article 8614. https://doi.org/10.17645/up.8614.

Nagi, Beeckmans and d’Auria reconceptualise displacement as an urban condition produced at the intersection of border regimes, housing scarcity and differentiated access to the city. Their iconic contribution is the “displaced housing ecosystem”: a relational field in which migrants and non-migrants circulate through homelessness, squats, hospitality spaces, asylum accommodation, hosting arrangements and precarious rental situations. Mapping is therefore not classificatory description but a method for following trajectories, temporary stabilisations and alliances across formal and informal governance. The article’s “weird alliances” foreground improvised coalitions between displaced people, activists, property owners, civil society, municipalities and other state or non-state actors, showing housing as an infrastructural and political practice rather than a bounded commodity. Its wider theoretical importance lies in de-exceptionalising refugee urbanism: displacement becomes legible as a shared, though unevenly distributed, effect of bordering and neoliberal housing systems, while inhabitation itself becomes a form of situated governance from below.

TEMPORARY STRUCTURES BEYOND THE EVENT — Architecture · Event Studies · Archive

 Temporary structures can acquire durations far longer than their physical presence when images, memories, reuse and later conceptualisation keep their spatial and social operations available for re-entry. A Symposium Can Be a Temporary Territory provides the first material test through Symposium Correns June 2019, where observation, conversation, critique and collective making transform a time-limited gathering into a situated learning environment whose knowledge persists beyond the event itself · SOCIOPLASTICS-2709 · WalkableWisdom · https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2019/06/symposium-correns-june-2019.html. A Biennial Is Also an Urban Machine provides the second through the Lagos Biennial intervention at Tafawa Balewa Square, where a textile pavilion occupies a former colonial racecourse turned civic arena and connects curatorial openness, postcolonial memory and circular economies; the temporary structure therefore enters a territorial history that exceeds the duration of the exhibition · SOCIOPLASTICS-2765 · ResilienceMisreading · https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2025/10/iv-lagos-art-and-architecture-biennial.html. These works gain density across the field through Moving Image 011 · SOCIOPLASTICS-8290 · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI8QZ7fI7po; the Tomoto Tomoto archive of March 2020 · SOCIOPLASTICS-4668 · https://tomototomoto.blogspot.com/2020/03; Kinetic Dispersion — Urban Intervention · SOCIOPLASTICS-111 · https://freshmuseum.blogspot.com/2026/01/111-mesh-tail-kinetic-architecture-of.html; LAPIEZA Label 707 · SOCIOPLASTICS-7441 · https://lapiezalapieza.blogspot.com/search/label/707; Socioplastics Pentagon as a Theory of Knowledge Infrastructure · SOCIOPLASTICS-3380 · https://socioplastics.blogspot.com/2026/05/lloveras-2026-socioplastics-pentagon.html; LAPIEZA-LAB Label 040 · SOCIOPLASTICS-4704 · https://lapiezalapieza.blogspot.com/search/label/04; Eutrochium purpureum · SOCIOPLASTICS-6423 · https://holaverdeurbano.blogspot.com/2026/07/eutrochium-purpureum-eupatorio-purpura.html; and Copos 396 · SOCIOPLASTICS-6751 · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sEqMG0SDfcg. Across these returns, Symposium Correns and the Lagos Biennial pavilion provide the primary evidence: one persists through situated knowledge and collective memory, while the other persists through images, urban history and later interpretation. Their physical temporariness therefore does not limit their duration as field structures.

BLOCK MEMORY / MUNICIPAL SHARD

Scalar Governance identifies a territorial operation through which urban systems distribute opportunity, burden and effective access. The material layer acts as a constraint that redistributes action, memory, access and maintenance. The class and LateralGovernance supply the operative grammar; A District Can Become a Long Take — Film · Urban Memory · Political Geography contributes a historical practice that resists abstraction. Methods And Systems Of Scalar Relations and Scalar Architecture Relations reopen the 10K archive from two distant positions. A botanical return through Index Hortensis https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/07/index-hortensis.html and Urban Taxidermy Street Action · SOCIOPLASTICS-5865 · https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/06/urban-taxidermy-from-street-action-to.html introduces living time, species, care and decay. The DOI fixes one persistent scholarly object, while the video tests the relation under duration, framing and movement. The comparison remains accountable through Bray, D. (2005) Social Space and Governance in Urban China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. and Jiang, H. (2021) Smart Urban Governance. PhD thesis. Utrecht University. MATERIAL / SCALE / TIME / SENSE / ECOLOGY — steel · building · latency · sound · oxidation. The new proposition is the residue of the crossing: what remains analytically legible after the same mechanism passes through radically different media, scales, temporalities and forms of evidence. CLASS 0423 · LateralGovernance · WORK II-006 · https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2018/11/los-martiresbogota-film-50-min11-2018no.html · SOCIOPLASTICS-2220 · https://socioplastics.blogspot.com/2026/04/socioplastics-2220-methods-and.html · SOCIOPLASTICS-2197 · https://socioplastics.blogspot.com/2026/04/socioplastics-2197-scalar-architecture.html · https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31563646 · VIDEO · SOCIOPLASTICS-8326 · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoadEGGEhPY

965

FACADE CLIMATE / SOCIAL FILTER

Temporary Populations and Permanent Planning identifies a territorial operation through which urban systems distribute opportunity, burden and effective access. The material layer acts as a constraint that redistributes action, memory, access and maintenance. The class and TransienceBlueprint supply the operative grammar; Relational Aesthetics Can Become Socioplastic — Art · Social Practice · Systems contributes a historical practice that resists abstraction. Friction As Method Urban Climate and Ciudad Lista Urban Planning Does Not Simply Organise reopen the 10K archive from two distant positions. A botanical return through Index Hortensis https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/06/index-hortensis.html and Urban Taxidermy Street Action · SOCIOPLASTICS-5865 · https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/06/urban-taxidermy-from-street-action-to.html introduces living time, species, care and decay. The DOI fixes one persistent scholarly object, while the video tests the relation under duration, framing and movement. The comparison remains accountable through Bray, D. (2005) Social Space and Governance in Urban China. Stanford: Stanford University Press. and Cook, B.R. and Skaer, M. (2020) 'Situating Urban Climate Policy in Procedural Fairness'. Environmental Research Letters, 15(12), p. 124006. MATERIAL / SCALE / TIME / SENSE / ECOLOGY — soil · threshold · seasonal change · pressure · infiltration. The new proposition is the residue of the crossing: what remains analytically legible after the same mechanism passes through radically different media, scales, temporalities and forms of evidence. CLASS 0447 · TransienceBlueprint · WORK II-045 · https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2019/02/estetica-relacional-y-socioplastica.html · SOCIOPLASTICS-6999 · https://artnations.blogspot.com/2026/07/friction-as-method-urban-climate.html · SOCIOPLASTICS-6445 · https://ciudadlista.blogspot.com/2026/06/urban-planning-does-not-simply-organise.html · https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19162080 · VIDEO · SOCIOPLASTICS-8327 · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3bM2VeQcUg

964 CÁDIZ 08 2026

COAST EDGE / MOBILE BORDER

An affordance is a relation between environmental possibility and the capacities of a particular body or actor. The material layer acts as a constraint that redistributes action, memory, access and maintenance. The class and AffordanceInvitation supply the operative grammar; Reuse Can Travel Between Cities — Circularity · Urbanism · Collective Practice contributes a historical practice that resists abstraction. Relation Between Ideas And Will and The Shortest Path Between Two Ideas Is reopen the 10K archive from two distant positions. A botanical return through Index Hortensis https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/06/index-hortensis_01120481.html and Trees Grow On Edge Of Road Without · SOCIOPLASTICS-1275 · https://youtubebreakfast.blogspot.com/2026/03/trees-grow-on-edge-of-road-without.html introduces living time, species, care and decay. The DOI fixes one persistent scholarly object, while the video tests the relation under duration, framing and movement. The comparison remains accountable through Jirón, P. (2010) 'Mobile Borders: Urban Mobility and Social Segregation in Santiago'. In: Urry, J. and Sheller, M. (eds.) Mobile Technologies of the City. London: Routledge. and Whyte, K.P. (2018) 'Settler Colonialism, Ecology, and Environmental Injustice'. Environment and Society, 9(1), pp. 125–144. MATERIAL / SCALE / TIME / SENSE / ECOLOGY — dust · territory · regrowth · smell · regeneration. The new proposition is the residue of the crossing: what remains analytically legible after the same mechanism passes through radically different media, scales, temporalities and forms of evidence. CLASS 0528 · AffordanceInvitation · WORK II-047 · https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2018/07/rus-miami-with-basurama.html · SOCIOPLASTICS-4054 · https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/05/the-relation-between-ideas-and-will.html · SOCIOPLASTICS-1282 · https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/03/the-shortest-path-between-two-ideas-is.html · https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31940472.v1 · VIDEO · SOCIOPLASTICS-7941 · https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DbiYj5XOdQ

Schwab, M. (2013) ‘Introduction’, in Schwab, M. (ed.) Experimental Systems: Future Knowledge in Artistic Research. Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 5–14.

Schwab develops artistic research through the epistemology of experimental systems, treating knowledge as something generated inside materially organised situations rather than applied to them from outside. His pivotal concept is the epistemic thing: an initially indeterminate object whose significance emerges at the contact zone between graphematic space—material traces, operations and inscriptions—and representational space, where those traces acquire conceptual articulation. The methodological consequence is substantial. Research is not reduced to a single experiment or to the verification of a prior hypothesis; it depends on a system capable of sustaining iteration, contingency, attention and the appearance of questions whose answers are not yet known. Schwab retains the specificity of artistic practice while refusing a simple opposition between art and science, proposing instead a proximity-in-difference grounded in experimental labour. The bridge extends directly into history of science, practice theory and media epistemology, where instruments, traces and representational formats become active conditions for what can become knowable.

Schneider, T. and Till, J. (2009) ‘Beyond Discourse: Notes on Spatial Agency’, Agency in Architecture: Reframing Criticality in Theory and Practice, Spring 2009, pp. 97–111.

Schneider and Till recast architectural agency as the capacity to “act otherwise” within conditions that are neither fully chosen nor fully controllable. Their decisive move is to displace the architect from heroic authorship toward a distributed field of co-production in which expertise remains consequential but no longer monopolises authority. Spatial agency therefore names a temporal and political continuity between intention, material mediation, occupation and subsequent transformation. Methodologically, the essay joins critical theory to situated episodes of practice: critique matters only insofar as it can enter practical consciousness, negotiation, intuition and collective action. Power is correspondingly reformulated as the capacity to enable others to take control of their environment rather than as unilateral command. The argument makes a precise bridge from architectural theory to the sociology of agency and the politics of participation, while also anticipating relational accounts in which buildings, institutions, users and professionals form interdependent chains of responsibility rather than separable domains.

Palmer, H., Polk, M. and Raviola, E. (2024) ‘The situatedness of dilemmas in boundary spaces: uncovering paradoxical conditions for increasing effectiveness through transdisciplinary research approaches’, Global Social Challenges Journal, Early View. https://doi.org/10.1332/27523349Y2024D000000027

Palmer, Polk and Raviola give spatial precision to the organisational problem of transdisciplinarity through the concept of boundary spaces. These are intentionally staged settings in which heterogeneous actors meet to formulate and manage wicked problems, yet their in-between status generates dilemmas that cannot always be solved from within the collaboration itself. Their analytic framework distinguishes contextual, relational, process and transformation-related dilemmas and identifies three recurring tensions: mismatch, commoning and collaboration paradoxes. The critical insight is that paradox is situated in time and space; it cannot be reduced to a generic failure of cooperation. Boundary spaces therefore become diagnostic environments where institutional rigidity, uneven representation, divergent expectations and conflicting temporalities become visible. Methodologically, the paper combines planning studies, organisation theory and iterative transdisciplinary research. Its wider contribution lies in showing that the spatial production of collaboration is inseparable from governance. A boundary space is not merely where actors meet, but where differences are staged, mediated and made politically consequential.

Harris, F., Lyon, F., Sioen, G.B. and Ebi, K.L. (2024) ‘Working with the tensions of transdisciplinary research: a review and agenda for the future of knowledge co-production in the Anthropocene’, Global Sustainability, 7, e13, pp. 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1017/sus.2024.11

Harris and colleagues relocate transdisciplinarity from a rhetoric of integration to a field of persistent institutional and interpersonal tensions. Their review draws on institutional logics to show that collaborative research is shaped by competing values: academic publication, societal impact, professional practice, commercial objectives, policy expectations and public legitimacy do not automatically align. The methodological significance lies in refusing the assumption that successful transdisciplinarity eliminates conflict. Instead, the ability to recognise, negotiate and work through tensions becomes a core competence. Soft skills, relationship-building, facilitation and long-term collaborative capacity are treated as structural elements of research rather than supplementary qualities. The paper’s iconic move is therefore to interpret friction as constitutive rather than accidental. This produces a bridge between sustainability science and organisational theory: transdisciplinary projects become arenas in which different institutional logics are temporarily assembled, negotiated and sometimes transformed. The field advances when these tensions are made explicit enough to become objects of collective work.