Urban legibility is never innocent. A city can become readable to its inhabitants, but it can also become readable to landlords, platforms, police systems, speculative finance, welfare algorithms and administrative extraction. SyntheticLegibility names this double condition: the production of readability through technical, spatial and symbolic systems that may either support civic orientation or intensify exclusion. This reader studies the threshold where legibility becomes expulsion, where digital objects participate in urban sorting, and where the city’s visibility must be politically questioned.

Kevin Lynch’s The Image of the City remains foundational because it gives urban form a vocabulary of paths, edges, districts, nodes and landmarks. Legibility, in Lynch, supports orientation, memory and environmental confidence. The readable city helps inhabitants locate themselves within a meaningful spatial structure. Yet contemporary urbanism complicates this promise. The legible city is not always democratic. When systems of power read neighbourhoods, bodies and behaviours, legibility may become a mechanism of capture. SyntheticLegibility therefore extends Lynch into a critical digital condition: who reads, through which device, for what purpose, and with what consequences?

Operational Decagon

The scalar reconfiguration of the Operational Decagon formalises Socioplastics as an architectural and epistemic infrastructure through which independent transdisciplinary research can expand without dissolving into informational noise. Once a corpus exceeds thousands of nodes and millions of words outside conventional university validation, its central vulnerability is not disappearance, but semantic dilution: the absorption of precise terms into generic academic, commercial, or algorithmic language. Socioplastics counters this risk by aligning ten CamelTag operators as a load-bearing matrix. SoftOntology establishes stable conceptual cores with porous edges; EpistemicLatency grants time for density to form before exposure; SemanticHardening protects terms against drift; TopolexicalSovereignty secures the field’s lexical territory; and ScalarArchitecture organises relations between nodes, packs, books, tomes, repositories, and index windows. This formal armature is materialised through MeshEngine, which distributes and mirrors deposits across open-access infrastructures, and through StratigraphicField, where earlier layers remain active foundations rather than obsolete records. SyntheticLegibility then optimises titles, metadata, identifiers, and recurrent formulations for human navigation and machine retrieval, while GravitationalCorpus names the accumulated mass through which scale increases the probability of reading, citation, and recombination. Finally, CitationalCommitment introduces the ethical-documentary layer: each node must remain dated, attributable, deposited, and publicly accountable. The Decagon therefore shifts open science from vulnerable dissemination toward structured permanence. It does not guarantee automatic recognition by future foundation models; rather, it builds the technical and lexical conditions under which accurate retrieval becomes increasingly plausible. Ultimately, Socioplastics demonstrates that theoretical writing can operate as architectural assembly: open yet coherent, distributed yet anchored, textual yet infrastructural. Benjamin, W.; Lloveras, A.; Luhmann, N.; Maturana, H.; Simondon, G. Anto Lloveras / Socioplastics / LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid / ORCID: 0009-0009-9820-3319.