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.
This makes restoration historical. The person who returns to a familiar location does not encounter the same environment as the stranger who crosses it, even when their coordinates coincide. Bonaiuto, Fornara and Bonnes show another dimension of the problem by decomposing neighbourhood quality into spatial, human, functional and contextual evaluations. Their indexes produce an accountable grammar for comparison, but that grammar does not abolish the unevenness it describes. A district may be accessible yet socially alienating, green yet poorly maintained, rich in facilities yet difficult to inhabit at a particular pace. What counts as environmental quality is distributed across incompatible registers. The Helsinki softGIS research by Kyttä and colleagues makes the incompatibility geographical. Residents' mapped appreciations complicate the claim that density necessarily diminishes environmental value: greenery matters, but so do the social possibilities of built-up places. A map that can hold both claims is more useful than one that simply declares a winner. Bornioli, Parkhurst and Morgan move the evidential encounter into the walk itself. Their participants' photographs are not neutral captures of an already defined therapeutic landscape; they are selections that permit an event to be revisited and interpreted. The ordinary city, including its non-natural elements, becomes a possible source of psychological benefit through personal connection and attention. Yet the photograph does not carry the full encounter, just as a route trace cannot carry the decision to pause, the unease of a crossing or the memory attached to a façade. In Dadvand and colleagues' longitudinal school study, by contrast, the evidence is organised around repeated cognitive outcomes and measured vegetation exposure across home, school and commuting environments. The association between greener surroundings and cognitive development, partly accounted for by air-pollution differences, cannot be inferred from an attractive walk or a favourable neighbourhood appraisal. It demands a different temporal scale and an explicit account of potential pathways. These forms of evidence should not be collapsed into an undifferentiated narrative of healthy cities. They show that environmental benefit is neither a purely subjective impression nor an intrinsic material property. It is an exposure, an opportunity, a judgement and sometimes a process of recovery, with each term requiring its own method of construction. Marquet, Hipp and Miralles-Guasch add the decisive complication of ageing: a street network may remain geometrically identical while the practical mobility it affords changes markedly with bodily capacities. The difference between proximity and usability is therefore not a measurement error to be corrected once. It is a constitutive feature of urban life. Von Lindern, Lymeus and Hartig sharpen the point by treating restoration as renewal following depletion, shaped by available resources and constraints. A restorative setting cannot be specified independently of the condition from which restoration is needed. The resulting concept is conditional urban capacity: the uneven, time-dependent possibility that a spatial arrangement will become useful to a particular person for a particular activity, relation or form of renewal. Its contradiction is that the more precisely we attempt to map it as a universal attribute, the more easily we erase the situated conditions that make it real.
Conditional urban capacity changes what a comparative spatial corpus should preserve. The fundamental record is not simply the neighbourhood, the park, the route or the respondent; it is an encounter whose meaning depends on the relations among these elements and the method that produced its trace. A resident's marked favourite place, a sequence of photographed thresholds, a network measure of walkability and a vegetation index may refer to overlapping geography while belonging to different evidential orders. To store them under a single heading such as environmental quality would make the archive easier to search and harder to understand. Socioplastics can instead approach the urban record as a layered system of addressable differences: where a claim was made, at what spatial and temporal resolution, by which procedure, in relation to which population, and with what limits on inference. Kyttä's softGIS and Kahila-Tani's account of participatory planning show that the interface is part of this production. A point placed on a digital map acquires institutional legibility, but its transformation into planning evidence depends on classifications, participation conditions and the possibility of returning interpretations to the people and places from which they emerged. The map is therefore not the destination of knowledge; it is a translation device whose omissions must remain inspectable. An urban archive attentive to this process would distinguish measured provision from perceived quality, actual use from potential access, short-term restoration from longer-term health association, and a person's present range of movement from the range a network model assigns them. Such distinctions are not obstacles to comparison. They are what make comparison intellectually responsible. A walk recorded as a polyline should remain linked, where consent permits, to pauses, detours, environmental conditions, elicited descriptions and the participant's reasons for choosing or avoiding places. An image should retain its relation to the walking sequence and the later account it helped produce; without that relation it risks becoming decorative confirmation of a pre-existing category. An environmental exposure layer should retain its measurement scale, reference period and uncertainty rather than masquerading as a direct measure of felt experience. Dadvand's school-based exposures and Marquet's ten-year comparison demonstrate why temporal alignment matters: a year of cognitive change, a decade of transport behaviour and a moment of self-regulation are not interchangeable units. The archive's task is to enable carefully bounded encounters among such findings, not to convert them into universal prescriptions. The political stakes appear where a spatial representation becomes an allocation rule. If an area has ample mapped greenery but residents cannot use it safely or comfortably, a provision-based indicator may conceal an inequity. If an older resident can no longer reach familiar social places, an unchanged accessibility score can conceal a loss of independence. If a dense street is dismissed as environmentally deficient despite its social value, the classificatory system can erase an existing form of support. Equally, reported attachment should not become a reason to overlook pollution, exclusion or missing services. No one evidential register has a monopoly on urban truth. Governance therefore requires not just public participation in data collection but the ability to question how a classification was assembled, which absences it leaves and what claims it is authorised to support. The comparative value of a corpus lies in preserving these differences across neighbourhoods without treating each local account as incommensurable. Categories can travel if their construction is documented; walking protocols can be shared if the meaning of a route remains open to contextual interpretation; mapped layers can be compared if the archive does not pretend that a satellite observation, a photograph and a self-report are equivalent measurements. This is also an argument about public legibility. Evidence should be accessible enough to contest, yet some locations and accounts must remain partially opaque where precise disclosure could identify people or expose vulnerable routines. Spatial precision is not automatically an ethical good. The record should therefore support different levels of resolution, distinguish publicly shareable descriptions from protected field material and maintain a traceable relation between them. Such an infrastructure would not turn lived experience into a definitive score for the healthy city. It would make visible how opportunities for movement, attachment and recovery are constructed, withdrawn and unevenly distributed, while allowing the conditions of those claims to be revisited. Within Socioplastics, this tension condenses as Relational Agency.