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 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.
MANUEL MAQUEDA - TOURVES 2012
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
