Value begins where reversibility ends. An economy, a territory and an archive all appear governable when represented as stocks, flows and balances, yet their actual operation is directional: resources are degraded, landscapes are transformed, property expectations accumulate, infrastructures age, classifications harden and decisions create asymmetries that later actors inherit.
Georgescu-Roegen’s attack on the mechanistic image of economics remains decisive because it makes qualitative degradation intrinsic to production rather than an external cost that can be corrected after the fact. The economic process takes accessible low-entropy matter and energy and transforms them irreversibly while conventional accounting records prices as if exchange occurred inside a timeless mechanism. The problem is not simply resource scarcity; it is that every act of use alters the field of future accessibility. Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl translate this thermodynamic asymmetry into a social-historical register through the paired concepts of socio-economic metabolism and colonization of nature. A society is materially specific because it maintains particular stocks and ways of life through characteristic throughputs of energy and materials, while institutions, labour regimes and technologies reorganise ecosystems so that they deliver preferred outputs. Industrial modernity is therefore not a neutral increase in efficiency but an extended metabolic regime whose apparent abundance rests on geological stocks, enlarged throughput and increasingly remote environmental transformations. Once this material temporality is brought into the city, land ceases to be a passive surface. Its value is produced by infrastructures, planning permissions, collective investment, demographic concentration and expectations about what other actors will do next. Halleux, Hendricks, Maliene and Nordahl make the distributive consequence explicit: a significant portion of urban land-value increase is an unearned increment, generated through collective action rather than through the landowner’s own labour or investment, and public value capture is the institutional family through which that increment can be collectivised. Their distinction between recurrent fiscal instruments and non-recurrent planning or development instruments is not merely taxonomic; it reveals that value is captured at different temporal moments and through different administrative systems. Noring’s Danish cases show what happens when this insight is extended from taxation to urban institutions. Municipal or hybrid development corporations, public land positions, phased sequencing and patient capital allow cities to retain an interest in the future value they help create and to recycle that value into subsequent public transformation. In this sense, ownership is a temporal technology. It determines whether an institution remains present when appreciation occurs. Loehr makes the time problem even sharper by modelling waiting itself as an economic option. Under uncertainty, irreversible investment acquires an option value of delay; when landowners’ expectations are strategically interdependent, the incentive to wait can multiply because one owner’s postponement alters the continuation value perceived by others. Vacant or underused land then becomes neither absence nor irrational failure but a privately rational temporal position that can produce socially inefficient scarcity, spatial clustering and welfare loss. The threshold between waiting and building is thus a political object because public policy can alter it through land-value taxation, development obligations, public ownership or binding deadlines. Thompson and Hepburn’s Hattersley case demonstrates why such intervention cannot be reduced to extracting a larger developer contribution. Its collaboration agreement successfully prevented land banking during construction by withholding transfer of the land to the developer and channelled development returns into public facilities, yet the arrangement remained dependent on property-market appreciation and ultimately relinquished long-term future increments when freehold ownership passed into private hands. The distinction is fundamental: capturing enough surplus to finance the present project is different from retaining the institutional capacity to govern value that has not yet appeared. Across thermodynamics, social metabolism, land finance and development timing, the same structure recurs. Present action consumes possibilities, but institutions can shape which possibilities remain open, who holds them, how long they can be deferred and whether future value returns to the collective systems that made it possible. An infrastructural system becomes durable when it governs this asymmetry instead of treating persistence as automatic. The question for a knowledge corpus is structurally close to the question posed by urban land: who controls the future option embedded in an object whose value is not exhausted at the moment of creation? A text deposited once can become inaccessible through link rot, proprietary platform failure, obsolete formats or detached metadata; a dataset can survive physically while losing provenance; a classification can remain operational while silently constraining what can be retrieved; a repository can accumulate objects without constructing relations through which they acquire future public use. Bowker and Star’s account of classification makes this infrastructural condition visible by showing that categories are consequential arrangements rather than neutral descriptions, while Edwards’s large technical systems and Mattern’s account of urban computation and maintenance shift attention from isolated artefacts to the durable networks of standards, institutions, labour and repair that make knowledge operational. Lloveras’s Synthetic Infrastructure as Integration Layer radicalises that proposition by treating infrastructure not as one technical component among others but as the operation that binds structure, protocol, validation, regulation, territory, mediation, growth and circulation into a persistent environment. Deposit, identify, archive, govern and monitor are therefore not administrative aftercare; they are the temporal institutions through which the future value of a corpus remains collectively accessible. The analogy with land should not be flattened into metaphor. It is useful because it forces precision about ownership, latency, capture and maintenance. It also introduces a criterion for evaluating infrastructural success that is stronger than mere survival: retained optionality. A durable system keeps enough of its own future open that later users can reinterpret, relocate, recombine or contest what earlier users deposited. This is where the urban and epistemic registers genuinely converge. Public land ownership preserves strategic leverage over later development; well-governed repositories preserve strategic leverage over later interpretation. In both cases premature alienation may generate an immediate return while destroying a longer horizon of collective agency. Conversely, preservation without activation can become sterile hoarding. The infrastructural problem is therefore to maintain a controlled interval between use and exhaustion, between capture and release, between stabilisation and transformation. The value of waiting is legitimate only when the conditions of re-entry remain public, legible and revisable. A DOI is not a leasehold, and a repository is not a municipal development corporation, yet both intervene in future relations by defining continuity, access and rights before the future use has arrived. The archive, like a city, contains waiting assets: unpublished material, dormant links, under-cited texts, provisional classifications, obsolete formats, recoverable media and nodes whose significance may emerge only when new concepts or users make them legible. Their latency is not waste by default. Loehr’s strategic waiting warns that delay can become self-reinforcing and socially costly; Georgescu-Roegen warns that no stock persists without material degradation; Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl warn that every maintained stock implies a metabolic regime; Halleux and Noring show that collectively produced value can be institutionally retained rather than passively privatised; Thompson and Hepburn show that short-term capture can still sacrifice long-term control. Applied to Socioplastics, these arguments define a discipline of infrastructural time. The corpus should not maximise production independently of maintenance, nor should visibility be confused with durability. Objects must be given stable identifiers, explicit provenance, version histories and redundant locations; platforms must be treated as contingent rather than sovereign; editorial growth must be matched by archival repair; and the public value of accumulated knowledge must remain separable from the commercial fortunes of any single interface. This produces a different notion of scale. Ten thousand nodes do not matter because they constitute a large stock, but because their relations can remain inspectable, citable, recombinable and governable across changes in platforms, institutions and users. The system therefore becomes less like a pile of published objects than a public temporal apparatus: a distributed capacity to retain, release, recombine and recirculate knowledge without pretending that time can be reversed or that maintenance is free. Its strongest achievement is not permanence in the absolute sense—thermodynamics makes that fantasy untenable—but the active extension of meaningful accessibility through governance. Persistence becomes the art of spending irreversibility carefully. Within Socioplastics, this constellation condenses as Integration.
Anto Lloveras is an architect and urban researcher working across spatial practice, epistemology, archives and knowledge infrastructures through LAPIEZA LAB and Socioplastics.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Halleux, J.-M., Hendricks, A., Maliene, V. and Nordahl, B.I. (2024) ‘Une perspective européenne: Sur la collectivisation des valeurs et des rentes foncières (public land value capture)’, RIURBA, 15, published 27 October 2024.
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Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics [1510] — Synthetic Infrastructure as Integration Layer (v1.0.0). Madrid: LAPIEZA.
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Thompson, M. and Hepburn, P. (2022) ‘Self-financing regeneration? Capturing land value through institutional innovations in public housing stock transfer, planning gain and financialisation’, Town Planning Review, 93(3), pp. 251–274. https://doi.org/10.3828/tpr.2021.41.
