A city is a temporary organisation of movements. Energy crosses buildings, water passes through infrastructures, waste changes jurisdiction and material status, memories attach themselves to streets, voices reorganise public space, and sensory events become evidence through bodies that move across them. Situated urban flow names this condition in a way that avoids the weakness of purely metaphorical organicism. Flow is material enough to be measured, social enough to be contested, perceptual enough to be experienced and mnemonic enough to persist after its original event. The city acquires form by slowing, channelling, accelerating, storing and transforming heterogeneous currents. Urban knowledge therefore depends on the ability to identify not only what exists in a place but what passes through it, what remains, what disappears and what becomes perceptible only at a particular scale.

Urban metabolism provides the clearest systemic grammar for this proposition. Material-flow analysis, life-cycle assessment, thermodynamic scaling and circular models make resource circulation legible as an organised urban condition. Yet metabolic knowledge becomes most productive when scale is treated as an epistemic variable rather than as a neutral container. Citywide totals can reveal aggregate dependencies while concealing neighbourhood inequalities; street-level mapping can disclose the distribution of heat, waste, vegetation and infrastructural access that macro indicators smooth away. Digital-twin research radicalises the same problem by asking how static flow accounts might become dynamic spatial representations interoperable with the tools of urban transformation. Representation is therefore not secondary to metabolism. The diagram, map, model and interface determine which relations can be seen together and which interventions can subsequently be imagined.

Memory introduces duration into flow. The city retains previous movements without preserving them intact. Collective memory resides partly in buildings and landmarks, but equally in recurring practices, events, attachments, stories and forms of participation. Regeneration becomes destructive when it treats material preservation as sufficient while interrupting the social operations through which a place remains recognisable. Conversely, postdigital and civic-memory research shows that retention increasingly depends on media infrastructures whose ownership, protocols and curatorial rules condition what survives. Memory circulates through platforms, archives, sensors, community practices and public institutions; it is simultaneously environmental and technical. A city remembers when heterogeneous traces can be reactivated, related and transmitted. Urban memory is thus not the opposite of flow but one of its temporal forms: persistence produced through repeated transformations. The sensuous city establishes perception as another infrastructure of circulation. Soundwalks, 360-degree acoustic experiments, graph analysis and temporary sound installations reveal that urban sound is not residual noise around a visually defined space. Voices, traffic, birds, water, construction and composed sound enter into changing relations that structure attention, sociability and restoration. Soundscape research is especially important because it exposes the limits of fixed classifications. A fountain can destabilise the category of “natural” sound; a human voice may increase social stimulation rather than simply raise acoustic intensity; an artistic installation can redirect attention without altering the physical plan. Sensory knowledge therefore emerges through situated encounters where context modifies the meaning of a measurable signal. The city is not simply sensed after it has been built. Sensation participates in its continual production. Situated urban flow joins these registers without collapsing their differences. Energy is not memory, and memory is not sound, yet all three demonstrate that urban evidence is relational, scalar and temporally unstable. A flow becomes analytically significant when its trajectory, transformation and effects can be traced; a memory becomes operative when it can be reactivated; a sound becomes urban knowledge when its contextual relations are recorded rather than isolated. Socioplastics can operationalise this common structure because its distributed archive already treats heterogeneous objects as positions within an expanding field rather than as specimens within a closed taxonomy. Metabolic diagrams, field observations, sound archives, civic memories, spatial mappings and theoretical texts can coexist as differently scaled traces of urban transformation, provided that their provenance and relations remain visible. The consequence is an epistemology of the city based on passage rather than possession. Knowledge does not arise from capturing the whole city in a single model, archive or sensory description. It emerges by following transformations across scales and media while retaining enough context to understand what each transformation permits or suppresses. Situated urban flow adds to Socioplastics a precise way of connecting ecological, archival, sensory and infrastructural evidence: not through thematic similarity, but through the operations by which urban realities circulate, accumulate, become perceptible and change state. The city becomes legible as a field of conversions—material into spatial, event into memory, vibration into social atmosphere, observation into evidence—and Socioplastics gains a framework for recording those conversions without pretending that any one representation exhausts the urban field.