The Civic Life of Infrastructural Legibility: Urban Data, Logistics, Knowledge Infrastructure and Cultural AI (Lefebvre, Söderström, Datta, Estlund, Mounier, Quek, UNESCO) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

Legibility has become one of the decisive political materials of the contemporary world: not the old legibility of maps, files and administrative grids alone, but a more pervasive condition in which cities, archives, platforms, bodies, cultural forms and logistical chains must be formatted before they can circulate, appear, be governed or be remembered. Lefebvre’s right to the city, as reread by Costes, remains the first pressure point because it refuses to treat urban space as a finished container; the city is a collective production, and the violence of generalized urbanization lies in the way this production is captured by capitalism, segregation and the disappearance of the traditional civic form into a planetary urban condition. Sanaan Bensi and Marullo extend that disappearance through logistics: neoliberalism does not simply occupy territory, it smooths it, translating ports, containers, warehouses, transport systems, labour rhythms and information flows into a rationalized architecture of exchange. Söderström and Datta’s urban data politics gives the same architecture its crisis interface, where dashboards, platforms, war rooms and civil-society tactics reveal that data does not merely describe the city but redistributes authority within it. Jiang and Sperandio place this redistribution inside smart governance, where technical systems can only become politically meaningful when they are held against institutional routines, civic agency, ethical frictions and situated urban differences. Quek et al. formulate the conundrum with particular clarity: city digital twins promise integration, yet technological proliferation often produces fragmented micro-solutions, interoperability failures and proprietary lock-ins; semantic approaches and knowledge graphs matter because they offer not only data transfer, but relation, context and cross-domain intelligibility. Estlund supplies the media-archaeological underside of this condition by showing that online access is structured through HTML, metadata, search engines, social media protocols and optimization manuals; visibility is not a natural reward of quality, but a negotiated position inside gatekeeping infrastructures. Mounier and Dumas Primbault then widen the frame: knowledge infrastructure is a fragile ecology of skills, conventions, software, materials, publics, governance bodies, standards, maintenance and repair, always torn between invisibility as technical support and visibility as public accountability. UNESCO’s report on artificial intelligence and culture adds the cultural threshold of the same problem: AI reorganizes rights, authorship, diversity, heritage, bias and cultural commons by altering the protocols through which culture is encoded, extracted, valued and redistributed. The political question running through these materials is therefore not only who owns the city, the data, the archive, the model or the platform, but who defines the grammar through which they become searchable, interoperable, trustworthy and durable. What once appeared as background support now acts as form; what once appeared as neutral circulation now produces social order; what once appeared as technical access now becomes a public field of conflict. Legibility is not transparency. It is an infrastructural operation, and it always asks who is being made visible, under what protocol, for whose use, and at what cost.

A digital twin is never only a technical replica. It is a political address system. It speaks to engineers, planners, software, sensors, administrations, interfaces, citizens, vehicles and models at once. DualAddress names this condition: the need for urban knowledge to communicate simultaneously with human subjects and machine systems without collapsing one into the other. This reader studies inclusive mobility, digital twins and urban belonging as one field because movement in the contemporary city is increasingly mediated by models, but belonging is still lived through bodies, memories, attachments and unequal access. The European debate on inclusive and sustainable urban mobility provides the first frame. Mobility can no longer be treated as a narrow transport-sector problem. It is ecological, social, digital, spatial and institutional. Electrification, autonomous vehicles, logistics systems, artificial intelligence and connectivity must be read alongside children, older people, disabled users, transport poverty, public participation and municipal capacity. The future of mobility is not simply a future of cleaner or smarter movement. It is a future of differentiated access.

Digital twin research brings this problem into technical focus. Li and colleagues’ concept of Digital Twin Federation is especially useful because it refuses the fantasy of one total urban model. Mobility systems are distributed across infrastructures, platforms, behaviours, sensors, institutions and temporal scales. Their twins must be federated rather than monolithic. The inclusion of human-in-the-loop architecture is crucial. It recognises that urban mobility cannot be governed by automated representation alone. Stakeholder judgment, behavioural uncertainty and public deliberation must remain inside the model. Nag and colleagues’ review of transport digital twins sharpens this through classification. Many systems described as digital twins are actually digital models or digital shadows. A model represents. A shadow receives data. A twin requires interaction, connection, service and feedback. HybridLegibility becomes relevant here because the urban twin must be legible to both technical systems and public actors. If a twin can be understood only by specialists, it risks becoming another opaque instrument of governance. If it is simplified only for public display, it may become symbolic theatre. The challenge is hybrid readability.