Spinoza’s concept of conatus refers to the basic striving of every thing to persevere in its own existence. In the context of urbanism, this means that cities, neighbourhoods, buildings, and communities are constantly acting to maintain and affirm their way of being. Urban tensions such as rent pressure, thermal inertia, or civic friction can be understood as expressions of this striving when different forces encounter one another, either supporting or weakening each other’s power to persist. Kevin Lynch’s cognitive maps, introduced in The Image of the City (1960), focused on how people mentally perceive and navigate urban space. He identified five key elements — paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks — and showed how these help form a clear, legible image of the city. Lynch’s work was about improving the physical environment so that it becomes easier for people to understand and move through it. His diagrams were descriptive reconstructions based on human perception and experience. Socioplastics takes a deeper and more relational approach. It combines Spinoza’s idea of conatus with a transdisciplinary matrix to reveal the invisible forces shaping urban life. Instead of mapping how the city appears to people, Socioplastics creates minimal, clear conceptual diagrams that show how spatial categories — such as rent as a displacement machine or thermal inertia — operate as active forces. These simple, logos-like diagrams make complex urban tensions and their interactions visible, turning abstract relations into readable and actionable knowledg

The core idea is that the ten conceptual diagrams should not function as isolated illustrations. Instead, each diagram must be designed with enough internal complexity and detail so that, when viewed from a distance, it remains immediately recognizable and iconic, while still containing rich relational information. When these diagrams are brought together, they should be able to connect, interact, and influence one another. Some diagrams will torque (twist or distort) others, some will flatten or compress them, and others will expand or amplify them. Through these interactions, the complete set of diagrams generates a larger, living morphology — a visible structure that reveals the overall health, tensions, and vital dynamics of a city or a specific neighbourhood. In other words, each diagram operates both autonomously and relationally. Individually, every schema must be clear, minimal, and strong enough to stand on its own as a conceptual instrument (a logos-like figure). However, when placed in relation with the others, they begin to affect each other dynamically — just as urban forces do in reality. Rent pressure may compress thermal inertia, civic friction may torque flow patterns, scalar misalignment may flatten metabolic regimes, and energy transition may expand or reconfigure several other tensions at once. This relational behavior is intentional. The goal is not merely to display ten separate urban categories, but to construct a diagnostic visual system. When all ten diagrams are considered together, their interactions, conflicts, and synergies should produce an emergent morphology that makes the “sanity” or overall health of the urban territory readable. The resulting image becomes a kind of diagnostic map: it shows where the urban body is under stress, where forces are balanced, where they are collapsing, or where new possibilities of expansion and transformation are emerging. The diagrams must therefore be conceived as modular yet sensitive — simple and canonical enough to be instantly understood, yet rich and complex enough in their internal structure to allow meaningful deformation, compression, expansion, or torsion when they come into contact with one another. In this way, the set of ten diagrams moves beyond representation and becomes an active epistemic tool: a visual apparatus capable of revealing the hidden relational mechanics and the vital state of the city through the dynamic interplay of its spatial tensions.