The Moving Observer: Walking, Sensory Atmospheres and Situated Urban Evidence (Byrne, Mason, Macpherson, Robinson, Gandy, Wesener, Üstün, Iturra) · LAPIEZA LAB · Anto Lloveras · Socioplastics · 2026

Urban knowledge changes when the observer moves. A street, park, route or neighbourhood does not present the same object to a stationary survey, a passing pedestrian, a cyclist, a participant walking beside a researcher, a camera moving without a predetermined destination, or a body attending to sound, light, smell, fatigue and memory. Movement is not simply a means of reaching the field; it is one of the conditions through which the field becomes knowable. Byrne’s distinction between structured and naturalistic observation makes this explicit at the level of research design: observation is an interpretive act whose validity depends on where, when and how attention is organised, not a transparent extraction of facts from space.

ENVIRONMENTAL EVIDENCE AS DISTRIBUTED SENSING: GABRYS, INFRASTRUCTURE AND LANDSCAPE · LAPIEZA LAB · ANTO LLOVERAS · SOCIOPLASTICS · 2026

An environment becomes knowable through the distribution of capacities to sense it. Jennifer Gabrys displaces environmental knowledge from a privileged observing subject toward arrangements in which devices, bodies, infrastructures, communities and landscapes participate in making conditions perceptible. Smart-city sensing reorganises governance: it programs feedback loops and assigns technical roles to urban actors, and measurement follows from that reorganisation.

 Citizen sensing generates data practices through which residents formulate environmental concerns, narrate exposure and contest the terms by which regulatory knowledge is recognised. The concept of "just good enough data" fixes this point: data acquire epistemic significance relative to the problems, publics and actions they enable. "Sensors Experiencing Environments" extends the argument. Sensing technologies participate in composing computational environments, and experience distributes across technical and more-than-human relations.