The city, the periurban fringe, the region, the forest landscape and the heritage territory do not persist unchanged while an observer simply zooms in or out; each becomes a different epistemic object when scale, temporal depth, mode of evidence and territorial relation change. This proposition runs through Josefina Gómez Mendoza’s work with remarkable consistency. In ‘Un mundo de regiones’, the refusal of rigid and exclusive regional classification leads to a geography of variable geometry: regions can alter boundary, size and relational structure while remaining analytically rigorous because their coherence derives from a geographical problem rather than from an inherited container. Narrative and language enter here as methods rather than decorations. Regions are not only delimited; they are named, represented, argued for, inhabited and politically mobilised.
This does not dissolve material geography into discourse. On the contrary, it makes the task harder: territorial form, institutional structure, economic relation and cultural representation must be read together. The same operation appears in ‘La mirada de la geografía’, where landscape is presented as a quality of all territory and geographical practice is defined through observation, synthesis and the persistent question of scale. Gómez Mendoza’s retrieval of Manuel de Terán’s ‘andar y ver’ places movement at the centre of this epistemology. Direct observation is not the naïve presence of the researcher before an already legible world. The geographical gaze moves through a field, selects relations, orders them and tests whether inherited categories survive contact with spatial difference. Humboldtian visual thinking becomes a useful precedent precisely because seeing is joined to narrative and continual rewriting. The statement that changing scale is more than enlarging or reducing an image is decisive: phenomena appear, disappear or become incomprehensible according to the scalar field in which they are observed. Medium scales matter because they frequently allow natural process, settlement, property, infrastructure, cultural representation and political intervention to coexist within one intelligible frame. Gómez Mendoza and Rafael Mata make this especially clear in their work on forest landscapes, where apparent ecological recovery cannot be understood apart from urbanising, touristic and productive pressures that operate through different territorial scales. Landscape is therefore not scenery but a spatial synthesis under pressure, composed of boundaries, flows, dominant elements, routes, property patterns, resilience and irreversible transformations. The early work on periurban agriculture already contains the same logic. The urban edge is neither city nor countryside in a simple binary sense; proximity to metropolitan demand changes productive systems, land expectations, recreational functions, environmental values and the temporality of agricultural survival. The object is constituted by the relations crossing it. ‘Cultura ambiental tradicional y arbolados de Madrid’ extends this relationality into material maintenance: trees are biological entities, climatic devices, civic spaces, administrative responsibilities and historical records simultaneously. Archival memoranda, species inventories, irrigation histories and cartographic sequences reveal that urban nature persists only through repeated infrastructures of knowledge and care. In ‘Del patrimonio paisaje a los paisajes patrimonio’, historicity becomes explicit. Landscape can become heritage because its present singularity is the sedimentation of political ordering, vernacular practices, institutional recognition and natural–human interaction. The value of landscape is not timeless; it is produced through historical processes that select what becomes visible and transmissible. Even the history of geography itself is subject to this operation. Gómez Mendoza’s reconstruction of Republican women educators and geographers demonstrates that disciplinary knowledge has its own variable geometry: political repression, gender and institutional authority determine whose work occupies the centre and whose disappears from the map of intellectual inheritance. Across these very different objects, the same geographical discipline recurs. Scale does not merely locate a phenomenon; it makes a set of relations thinkable. Field observation does not merely collect evidence; it confronts abstraction with situated complexity. Historical reconstruction does not provide background; it explains why the present spatial form can exist. Narrative does not merely communicate the result; it becomes one of the means by which heterogeneous territorial relations are held together without being falsely homogenised. The geographical gaze is therefore a relational apparatus whose strength lies in knowing that every act of seeing has a scale, every territory has a history and every apparently stable category contains a process of construction. This architecture is unusually productive for Socioplastics because it supplies a geographical grammar for a corpus already organised through movement between situations, media, archives and fields. A Socioplastics object need not possess one privileged spatial identity. It can be followed through variable geometries: an embodied encounter can become a room, street, neighbourhood, metropolitan condition, regional relation or transnational network depending on the question being asked, while each shift must record what has changed rather than pretending that the same object simply survives at another resolution. Such a principle clarifies the methodological ambition of comparative urban research. Comparability cannot be assumed between cities, scales or evidential forms; it must be produced through explicit transformations. A photograph, route, map, video sequence, field note, historical document and dataset may refer to the same territory, yet each establishes a different visibility. Gómez Mendoza’s geographical gaze suggests that the analytical task is not to collapse these differences but to organise them, preserving the relation between the evidence and the scale at which its claim is valid. The periurban case is exemplary: a parcel can be simultaneously productive land, metropolitan reserve, speculative asset, ecological interface and cultural landscape. No single evidential register exhausts it. A longitudinal archive can likewise reveal that the categories applied to the same place change through time, sometimes because the place changes and sometimes because the institutional or disciplinary gaze changes. This is where variable geometry becomes more than a metaphor. It can function as an indexing principle: every observation can carry spatial scale, temporal position, evidential medium, field condition and transformation history. Comparison then becomes a traceable operation among observations rather than a declaration that two cases belong to the same class. The geographic tradition also introduces a useful resistance to technological abstraction. More data or greater resolution do not necessarily yield better knowledge if the scale of the phenomenon has been misunderstood. A high-resolution trace can be epistemically weaker than a regional narrative when the process under study only becomes legible through longer duration, broader territorial relation or historical reconstruction. Conversely, the situated detail of a walk can expose what an aggregate map suppresses. The point is not to privilege one scale but to know when a transition between scales changes the question. This has direct consequences for open research infrastructures. Provenance should record not only where a datum came from but the geographical operation that made it meaningful: whether it was observed while moving, extracted from an archive, mapped retrospectively, aggregated statistically, delimited administratively or reconstructed narratively. Territorial categories should remain revisable when field evidence contradicts them. The archive should allow multiple scales to coexist without forcing them into a single spatial ontology. Historical layers should remain accessible enough to show how a present classification acquired authority. And international comparison should admit non-equivalence when concepts fail to travel. Gómez Mendoza’s insistence on flexible but rigorous regionalisation offers a particularly strong alternative to the false choice between universal standardisation and incomparable local singularity. A field can be delimited provisionally, tested, resized and related to another field while retaining the reasons for each operation. That principle also changes the politics of knowledge. If regions are partly produced through language, if heritage is historically designated, and if disciplines themselves make some figures visible while silencing others, then every research infrastructure participates in distributing epistemic visibility. Socioplastics can make this distribution inspectable by keeping the transformations of naming, classification, scale and representation attached to the objects they organise. What emerges is not an archive aspiring to a final map, but an infrastructure capable of holding successive maps whose differences matter. The most precise bridge between Gómez Mendoza’s geography and the present research field is therefore not landscape as a thematic subject but geography as a method for regulating transitions: between near and far, field and representation, present and archive, visible form and historical process, local singularity and comparative structure. Within Socioplastics, this movement condenses as DiscourseRefraction.
Anto Lloveras is an architect and urban researcher working across spatial practice, comparative fieldwork, epistemology, media archives and open research infrastructures through LAPIEZA LAB and Socioplastics.
Bibliography
Gómez Mendoza, J. (1987) ‘La agricultura periurbana: su estudio, sus cambios, sus políticas’, Agricultura y Sociedad, 42, pp. 109–146.
Gómez Mendoza, J. (1995) ‘Cultura ambiental tradicional y arbolados de Madrid’, Anales de Geografía de la Universidad Complutense, 15, pp. 361–373.
Gómez Mendoza, J. (2001) ‘Un mundo de regiones: geografía regional de geometría variable’, Boletín de la Asociación de Geógrafos Españoles, 32, pp. 15–33.
Gómez Mendoza, J. (2004) ‘La mirada de la geografía. Paisajes en transformación: el caso de los paisajes forestales’.
Gómez Mendoza, J. and Mata Olmo, R. (2006) ‘Paisajes forestales españoles y sostenibilidad. Tópicos y realidades’, Áreas. Revista Internacional de Ciencias Sociales, 25, pp. 13–29.
Gómez-Mendoza, J. (2013) ‘Del patrimonio paisaje a los paisajes patrimonio’, Documents d’Anàlisi Geogràfica, 59(1), pp. 5–20.
Gómez Mendoza, J. (2023) ‘Educadoras y profesoras de geografía de la II República y durante la represión franquista: Gloria Giner de los Ríos, Leonor Serrano y las hermanas Comas Ros’, Cuadernos Geográficos, 62(2), pp. 6–27.
