Scale, Time, Evidence and the Politics of Urban Knowledge (Wang, Chai, Deng, Gerlofs, Poon, Falahat, Paiva) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

Comparability is not a property waiting inside urban cases; it is produced through decisions about scale, duration, field boundaries, evidential form and the terms under which difference is permitted to remain legible. A neighbourhood, a mobility trace, a physiological response or a transnational urban comparison becomes comparable only after an apparatus has defined what counts as the same kind of observation across changing circumstances. Wang et al. show that street-view imagery, social-media traces, positioning data, physiological signals and video are not interchangeable windows onto a single urban reality: each data type constructs a specific evidential object, with characteristic gains in scale, granularity or continuity and equally characteristic blind spots, biases and interpretive limits. Gerlofs and Poon make the same problem visible at neighbourhood scale, where cartographic, statistical, photographic, archival, historical, narrative and geospatial records cannot simply be aggregated without confronting commensurability, replication and territorial definition.

Embodied Urban Evidence: Walking, Visibility and Comparative Fieldwork (Amo Collective Berlin, Sax, Dastoum, Ladouce, Wolff et al.) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

Urban evidence begins before measurement, in the encounter between a moving body and a spatial condition. Walking is not merely a means of accessing the field; it is one of the mechanisms by which the field becomes perceptible. Surface, visibility, temperature, edge, density, sound, interruption and social presence are registered through a body that changes pace, direction, attention and posture as it moves. The city therefore does not present itself as a stable object waiting to be surveyed. It unfolds sequentially, through partial views, resistances, invitations and thresholds. Ladouce and Gillebert make this relation measurable at the scale of gaze and gait, showing that uneven surfaces systematically redirect visual attention and alter locomotion. Dastoum, Askarizad and Garau demonstrate that pedestrian life depends not simply on amenity or integration but on visual permeability, sightlines and the relation between a public space and its approaches.