An environment becomes knowable through the distribution of capacities to sense it. Jennifer Gabrys displaces environmental knowledge from a privileged observing subject toward arrangements in which devices, bodies, infrastructures, communities and landscapes participate in making conditions perceptible. Smart-city sensing reorganises governance: it programs feedback loops and assigns technical roles to urban actors, and measurement follows from that reorganisation.
Citizen sensing generates data practices through which residents formulate environmental concerns, narrate exposure and contest the terms by which regulatory knowledge is recognised. The concept of "just good enough data" fixes this point: data acquire epistemic significance relative to the problems, publics and actions they enable. "Sensors Experiencing Environments" extends the argument. Sensing technologies participate in composing computational environments, and experience distributes across technical and more-than-human relations.
Brown and Gabrys's work on community-led landscape regeneration carries the same structure into territory. Ecological restoration depends on who controls land, how communities are constituted, which forms of knowledge enter decisions, and whether institutions persist long enough to maintain intervention. Across urban sensing and landscape regeneration, environment operates as a field of capacities whose political organisation determines what can be detected, connected, valued and sustained. A spatial research infrastructure built on this premise records the architecture through which environmental states become evidence. Maps require provenance. Sensor traces require thresholds and situated purposes. Walking observations require bodies and routes. Community claims require institutional positions. Landscape interventions require ownership and maintenance structures. Socioplastics treats environmental evidence as a distributed operative field in which heterogeneous objects remain distinct yet relationally available. This premise governs neighbourhood and metropolitan research directly. A heat reading, a perceived-restoration score, an image sequence, a route barrier and a resident narrative retain their specific evidential capacities only when they remain uncollapsed into a single index. Their strength rests in coordinated difference: each form confirms, contests or reframes the others while retaining its own conditions of production. At metropolitan scale, the same principle blocks forced equivalence; methods travel with their validity conditions, and local contexts modify the common instrument. At the scale of open knowledge, distributed sensing becomes an archival principle: the public corpus preserves the relations among measurement, experience, governance and action, alongside the results themselves. The field registers environmental change without erasing the political and material arrangements through which change is sensed. Within Socioplastics, this distributed capacity condenses as EvidenceAmbiguity.
Anto Lloveras is an architect and urban researcher working across spatial practice, epistemology, comparative urbanism, archives and public knowledge infrastructures through LAPIEZA LAB and Socioplastics.
Brown, D. and Gabrys, J. (2026) 'Community-led Landscape Regeneration: A Review of and Framework for Engagement in Restoration Initiatives', Ambio, 55, pp. 227–244.
Gabrys, J. (2014) 'Programming Environments: Environmentality and Citizen Sensing in the Smart City', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 32(1), pp. 30–48.
Gabrys, J. (2016) Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Gabrys, J. (2019) 'Sensors Experiencing Environments, Environments Becoming Computational', Dialogues in Human Geography, 9(1), pp. 121–124.
Gabrys, J., Pritchard, H. and Barratt, B. (2016) 'Just Good Enough Data: Figuring Data Citizenships through Air Pollution Sensing and Data Stories', Big Data & Society, 3(2), pp. 1–14.
Gabrys, J. and Pritchard, H. (2018) 'Just Good Enough Data and Environmental Sensing: Moving Beyond Regulatory Benchmarks toward Citizen Action', International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, 13, pp. 4–14.
Pritchard, H. and Gabrys, J. (2016) 'From Citizen Sensing to Collective Monitoring: Working through the Perceptive and Affective Problematics of Environmental Pollution', GeoHumanities, 2(2), pp. 354–371.
