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.
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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
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
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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.
Pohl, C. and Hirsch Hadorn, G. (2007) Principles for Designing Transdisciplinary Research. Munich: oekom verlag.
Pohl and Hirsch Hadorn establish one of the clearest early operational grammars for transdisciplinary research. Their decisive contribution is to define transdisciplinarity not as disciplinary mixture but as a recursive process structured around complexity reduction, contextualisation, open encounters and reflexivity. The method is explicitly designed to connect scientific inquiry with life-world problems, distinguishing systems knowledge, target knowledge and transformation knowledge while repeatedly reformulating research questions in relation to actors and contexts. Recursiveness is central: problem definition, analysis and implementation are not successive sealed stages but mutually correcting moments. The work therefore gives transdisciplinarity an architectural structure in which participation, integration and contextual embedding can be designed rather than left to goodwill. Its importance extends beyond sustainability research because it offers a general model for research fields in which epistemic plurality, societal relevance and methodological openness must coexist. It bridges science studies, systems thinking and participatory research by making reflexivity itself an operational principle.
Andrews, L.M., Munaretto, S., Mees, H.L.P. and Driessen, P.P.J. (2024) ‘Conceptualising boundary work activities to enhance credible, salient and legitimate knowledge in sustainability transdisciplinary research projects’, Environmental Science & Policy, 155, 103722. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2024.103722
Andrews and colleagues convert boundary work from a descriptive concept into an explicit operational grammar for transdisciplinary research. Their framework identifies twelve activities distributed across project phases and asks how each can strengthen credibility, salience and legitimacy in processes of knowledge co-creation. The important move is methodological: interdisciplinarity is insufficient if the interfaces between actors, expectations, languages and forms of evidence remain unmanaged. Boundary work names the labour of collective problem framing, mediation, synthesis, translation, relationship building and reflexive coordination through which heterogeneous knowledge can become usable without collapsing its differences. The paper thus relocates impact from the terminal dissemination of results to the continuous organisation of relations throughout research. It also makes visible an often hidden infrastructural layer: collaboration requires designed procedures, temporal allocation, facilitation and institutional support. The work bridges sustainability science, project governance and STS by giving conceptual precision to the intermediary operations through which scientific and societal actors construct shared yet contestable spaces of inquiry.
Albornoz, M. (2003) ‘El problema de re-pensar contextos’, Revista CTS, 1(1), pp. 225–230. Review of Nowotny, H., Scott, P. and Gibbons, M. (2001) Re-Thinking Science: Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Albornoz’s review is valuable less as a summary of Re-Thinking Science than as an early critical registration of the conceptual instability produced by Mode 2 knowledge. He identifies the radical claim that science and society co-evolve, with context no longer functioning as an external setting for research but as a constitutive condition of knowledge production itself. The review also isolates the ambiguity at the heart of this thesis: Mode 2 oscillates between empirical description, institutional prescription and a broader cognitive transformation. Albornoz therefore restores a political problem frequently softened by celebratory accounts of transdisciplinarity—what conception of society, power and scientific authority is silently installed when contextualisation becomes the dominant epistemic principle? His conceptual operation is diagnostic: he tests a new model of knowledge against the social ontology it presupposes. The text bridges sociology of science, science policy and political epistemology by showing that changing the organisation of research necessarily changes the implied relation between institutions, publics and legitimate knowledge.
Cash, D.W., Clark, W.C., Alcock, F., Dickson, N.M., Eckley, N., Guston, D.H., Jäger, J. and Mitchell, R.B. (2003) ‘Knowledge systems for sustainable development’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(14), pp. 8086–8091. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1231332100
Cash and colleagues shift the problem of scientific relevance from the quality of isolated findings to the architecture of relations through which knowledge becomes actionable. Their decisive proposition is that effective knowledge systems must simultaneously negotiate credibility, salience and legitimacy: scientific adequacy, practical relevance and procedural fairness are not supplementary virtues but coupled conditions of use. The methodological operation is therefore institutional rather than merely epistemological. Communication, translation and mediation become forms of boundary work that organise exchanges between expert communities, decision-makers and heterogeneous publics while retaining differences in norms, evidence and authority. The paper’s enduring contribution lies in treating knowledge-action interfaces as designed systems whose performance depends on how boundaries are managed rather than erased. This approach provides a crucial bridge between science and technology studies, sustainability governance and later transdisciplinary research, where the production of knowledge increasingly appears inseparable from the infrastructures, procedures and social relations through which claims acquire public consequence.
Zhang, S. and Zhang, G. (2025) ‘The impact of platform affordance on the representation of iconic architecture: a case study of Markthal across visual social media’, Archnet-IJAR: International Journal of Architectural Research. https://doi.org/10.1108/ARCH-05-2024-0198
Zhang and Zhang demonstrate that architectural representation changes systematically with platform affordance. Using Markthal in Rotterdam across TikTok, Instagram and Google Maps, they combine qualitative coding with computational analysis of text, images and video to show that each platform privileges a different spatial register. TikTok intensifies lived space through dynamic activity and personal experience; Instagram curates perceived space through visual selection; Google Maps foregrounds conceived and perceived space through ratings, reviews and practical feedback. The crucial theoretical move is to treat the platform not as a passive channel but as an intermediary whose technical features participate in producing the architectural object that becomes publicly legible. Methodologically, the study bridges media affordance theory with Lefebvrian spatial categories and multimodal data analysis. Its wider significance lies in urban media studies: architecture increasingly circulates through algorithmic environments that feed back into reputation, visitation, design decisions and public perception. The building’s mediated life becomes part of its operative spatial condition.
Iacovou, P. and Artopoulos, G. (2024) ‘The architecture exhibition as a stage of mediated narratives’, Digital Creativity, 35(2), pp. 156–170. https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2024.2304811
Iacovou and Artopoulos define the architecture exhibition as a performative medium that can reorganise the meanings contained in an architectural archive. Drawings, models and photographs are not treated as neutral documents of buildings but as partial representations capable of producing multiple histories when recombined through curatorial and digital operations. The key contribution is the concept of the exhibition as a discursive site of knowledge production: by “making public” a private archive, mediation changes what the archive can do socially and spatially. Methodologically, the paper combines curatorial practice, multimedia reconstruction and urban engagement, showing how archival research can generate new relations between historical material, host city and contemporary audiences. Its wider bridge lies between architectural history, digital humanities and exhibition studies. The exhibition does not simply communicate prior research; it becomes a research apparatus in its own right. This makes mediation consequential: the format through which architecture is made visible changes the narratives, publics and spatial questions that become possible.
García-García, T. (2023) ‘The Master, Sigurd Lewerentz (1885–1975). Experiences and artistic findings in the Sanctuary of St. Petri Church in Klippan (2020)’, Arquitecturas del Sur, 41(63), pp. 104–121.
García-García approaches St. Petri through an unusual archival object: a fragile folded-paper construction kept by Lewerentz during the building process. Rather than treating the object as marginal ephemera, the essay reads it as a condensed spatial proposition connecting origami, brick lamellae, structural balance, air, sound and bodily perception. Its theoretical contribution lies in demonstrating how a minor representational artefact can reveal architectural logic not fully available in conventional plans or photographs. The method combines archival discovery, model-making and close spatial interpretation, allowing apparently immaterial qualities—air movement, suspension, darkness, resonance—to become analytically legible. This produces a bridge between architectural history, material culture and artistic research: the archive is no longer only a repository of evidence but a site where latent operations can be reconstructed experimentally. Lewerentz’s paper object matters because it changes the scale at which the building can be understood, exposing a continuity between speculative gesture, constructional intelligence and atmosphere without reducing one to illustration of the others.
Seelow, A.M. (2024) ‘From “Beauty and Festivity” to “Accept the Reality”: the Comprehensive Modern Vision of the Stockholm Exhibition 1930 and Acceptera’, in Fleming, P. and Mill, P. (eds.) Essays from the 2nd International Symposium on the Architecture of Erik Gunnar Asplund. Zürich: ETH Zürich, pp. 20–39.
Seelow reads the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930 and the manifesto Acceptera as two coordinated media within a broader project of social modernisation. Architecture, exhibition, publication, industrial production and public argument operate together rather than as separate cultural outputs. The iconic idea is therefore not functionalism as a stylistic category but modernism as a distributed apparatus capable of translating a programme of social reform across buildings, interiors, commodities and text. Methodologically, the essay reconstructs the transfer of continental modernist ideas into a specifically Nordic field while showing how they were reformulated through Swedish institutional, economic and cultural conditions. This avoids treating Nordic modernism as either isolated regional essence or passive import. Its wider theoretical bridge is to studies of mediation and public culture: an architectural idea acquires force when it can circulate through multiple formats while retaining enough coherence to organise collective expectations. Acceptera becomes important not as commentary on architecture, but as one of the mechanisms through which architecture entered public reality.
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