For two decades, SOCIOPLASTICS built the apparatus to read this system—the Decalogue, PlasticScale, the 100 audited works, the 2200 nodes of LAPIEZA, the 186 series, the 700 MUSE protocols. All of it was preparation. All of it was training. Now the apparatus turns toward the city itself. The 700-series marks this turn. It is not an expansion of the art system into urbanism. It is not a application of aesthetic categories to territorial questions. It is something more radical: the discovery that territory was always the subject. The bags, the tags, the lemons, the leaves—they were never only art. They were probes into urban metabolism. They were sensors detecting pressure gradients that the disciplines had no name for. The 700-series simply names what the work was always doing. Three forces structure the hypothesis. Three indices recalibrate PlasticScale for territorial reading.
The city operates as a hydraulic pump. It sucks value from the social stratum not through theft but through gradient. Rent is not price. Price is what things cost. Rent is what the city extracts simply by existing, by concentrating possibility, by making some locations more accessible than others. The gradient is invisible until you measure the flow it produces: people displaced, communities dissolved, histories erased, futures foreclosed. The bags read this gradient. The Yellow Bag in Provence registered the pressure of tourism on rural territory. The Blue Bag in Lagos registered the pressure of global waste economies on postcolonial urbanism. The Green Briefcase in Mexico registered the pressure of art world validation on local practice. They did not measure in euros or dollars. They measured in displacement—of attention, of materials, of bodies, of meaning. 701 formalises this reading. Extractive pressure becomes a variable in the territorial equation. It cannot be eliminated, only redirected. The question is not how to stop the pump but how to ensure that what it pumps nourishes rather than drains. Every territory has a biophysical capacity. It can absorb so many bodies, so much waste, so much energy, so much attention. Beyond that limit, the system enters decompensation. Not collapse—collapse is dramatic, visible, narratable. Decompensation is slower, more structural. It is the gradual erosion of the conditions that made the territory viable in the first place. The leaves read this limit. Mudas in Mexico registered the temporal boundary of organic matter—a leaf that oxidises, that decays, that returns to soil. The Kingdom Series registered the boundary of ecological attention—a small geometric removal in moss that the weather reclaims within weeks. They did not measure in parts per million or biodiversity indices. They measured in duration—how long a territory can sustain a form before the form dissolves.
Metabolic limit becomes the second variable. It cannot be expanded indefinitely, only respected. The question is not how to push the limit but how to live within it without impoverishing life. The city is built from its own past. Warehouses, infrastructure, street traces, property lines—these are not nostalgia. They are sediment. They are the accumulated mass of decisions made, materials assembled, energies expended. This sediment stabilises the system. It absorbs shocks. It channels flows. It resists change. The tag reads this inertia. The Small Orange Tag marks without marking, draws attention to surfaces without altering them. It registers the presence of what already exists without pretending to transform it. The Spanish Bar reads this inertia differently—a fading ritual, a living archive, a social form that persists because it is embedded in community practice, not because anyone preserves it.
Material inertia becomes the third variable. It cannot be ignored, only worked with. The question is not how to overcome the past but how to make it productive in the present. The three forces interact. Extractive pressure increases metabolic load. Metabolic load exhausts material inertia. Material inertia resists extractive pressure. The city is the dynamic equilibrium among them. When equilibrium breaks, the city breaks. Not always dramatically. Sometimes just a little more exhaustion, a little less capacity, a little more extraction, a little less memory. Until one day the territory is no longer habitable in the way it was.
The 700-series proposes that equilibrium can be engineered. Not imposed from above but calibrated from within. PlasticScale provides the calibration. The same indices that measure works—Weight, Circulatory Reach, Temporal Durability—can measure territorial forces. Weight becomes institutional and material inertia. Circulatory Reach becomes extractive pressure gradient. Temporal Durability becomes metabolic limit. The formula remains: IE = (C × T) / W. Only now it reads territories, not works. This is the territorial turn. It is not a departure from the system but its fulfillment. The bags, the tags, the lemons, the leaves—they were never only art. They were the system learning to read territory before territory had a name. Now the name exists. 700-MUSE. Urban Territorial Metabolism. The apparatus turns outward. ARTNATIONS remains on the horizon. 10,000 names, three of them heavy—LAPIEZA, SOCIOPLASTICS, ANTOLLOVERAS. But the horizon is not the immediate task. The immediate task is inscription: taking the apparatus into the city, reading pressure where pressure operates, measuring limits where limits bind, working with inertia where inertia resists. The 700-series is not theory. It is operation.
The series will unfold. Each module an analytical instrument. Each instrument calibrated by PlasticScale. Each calibration tested against the 100 audited works. The bags will guide. The tag will mark. The leaves will measure duration. The breakfast will distribute attention. The lemons will register decay. Everything the system learned in two decades of self-audit will now be applied to the territory that always contained it. The hypothesis is simple and severe. Territory is not ground. It is pressure, flow, inertia. The city is not form. It is equilibrium under stress. SOCIOPLASTICS is not art. It is the instrument that reads this equilibrium and acts within it. The turn is taken.
Reference
Lloveras, A. (2026) '700-MUSE-URBAN-TERRITORIAL-METABOLISM', SOCIOPLASTICS: Sovereign systems for unstable times [Blog]. Available at: https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/2026/02/700-muse-urban-territorial-metabolism.html (Accessed: 24 February 2026).
