A place becomes administratively available before it becomes epistemically settled. The apparatuses through which land is registered, assessed, zoned, prioritised or described generate legitimate but partial propositions about what it is and what ought to happen there. A neighbourhood may score well on provision, access or environmental amenity while a resident’s actual routes repeatedly fail; an abandoned parcel may register as unused while performing ecological, cultural or informal social work; an intervention may count as temporary because it can be assembled quickly while its legal, financial and material consequences prove remarkably permanent. These are not three versions of a general complaint against quantification. They are three different failures of relation: between a measure and the situation to which it is applied, between an inventory category and the activities it excludes, and between an intervention’s declared duration and its full temporal obligations. The New European Bauhaus self-assessment method already responds to part of this difficulty by keeping Sustainability, Beauty and Inclusiveness analytically distinct, aligning indicators with project types and spatial scales, and explicitly declining to produce a universal combined score (European Commission, JRC, 2024).
That refusal matters. It acknowledges that public value is plural and that numerical commensuration can conceal rather than resolve incompatibility. But differentiation among indicators is not the same as verification of their situated consequences. An attractive public space can remain inaccessible through a particular sequence of crossings, weather exposure and care obligations; a well-connected service can be effectively unavailable to someone for whom the apparently shortest route imposes an unacceptable burden. The epistemic problem is therefore not whether measured and experienced environments should be reconciled into one truthful picture. It is what kind of claim an instrument is entitled to make, at which scale, for which person, under which conditions, and what evidence would oblige that claim to change. HoodKnows approaches this problem through the difference between spatial opportunity and realised movement: a deliberately sampled route may expose an environmental repertoire, while everyday itineraries disclose the constraints under which opportunities become usable, avoided or irrelevant. These are not interchangeable observations, and neither proves a health outcome by itself. Their comparison would become scientifically consequential only if it provided explanatory information beyond conventional environmental and accessibility indicators, under specified conditions and with independent checks on measurement, population variation and time. The same caution governs vacant land. TIMBRE had already produced multicriteria brownfield prioritisation, participatory site assessment, information systems and remediation-oriented guidance with concrete European applications (European Commission, CORDIS, 2014). Consequently, a new atlas of vacant sites, an expanded checklist or an interface displaying stakeholder preferences would reproduce important work already done. What remains unresolved is narrower and harder: the designation of a place as empty can itself determine which evidence is solicited, which values count as present and which possible futures are excluded before decision-making formally begins. Ecological succession may enter as dereliction until a field survey recodes it as habitat; informal occupation may appear as a problem of access until current users demonstrate a durable social infrastructure; an apparently feasible reuse may fail when contamination or legal responsibility enters the picture. Payá Pérez and Peláez Sánchez (2017) show why such constraints cannot be handled as metaphors: soil histories, remediation systems and jurisdictional arrangements materially determine what interventions can be attempted and at what public cost. The source of disagreement is not necessarily error by one discipline. An environmental, architectural, economic or experiential account may be sound within its own boundaries while still being insufficient for the claim that the place is healthy, vacant, accessible, recoverable or available. A serious comparative design must register which disagreements are consequences of different instruments and which are consequences of different worlds. A thermal measurement and a resident’s report may refer to different hours, physiological needs or places; a survey of current occupation and a cadastral record may be answering different questions; a green-space calculation can be accurate while its implied walking connection is not. Reconciliation without temporal and spatial alignment would manufacture consensus. Conversely, declaring every conflict incommensurable would make the research incapable of correcting anything. The practical task is to define shared minimum units of observation and then permit locally justified departures with documented consequences. In such a system, a mismatch is not automatically an innovation: measurement error, recruitment bias, missing exposure data and ambiguous wording are alternative explanations that must be excluded or retained. It follows that the record of a discrepancy needs the same care as the record of agreement. One must know whether the statement was anticipated, which competing explanation was tested, which population it concerns, and whether repetition weakens or strengthens it. A European instrument becomes useful at the moment when its conditions of validity can be examined across materially different locations without forcing their histories into one normalised type. The critical issue is the movement between these domains. A useful research instrument must not simply arrange them side by side; it must specify the conditions under which evidence generated in one domain can restrict, reopen or invalidate a proposition made in another. The term conditional spatial value names this situation: value is neither an intrinsic property waiting to be extracted from a site nor a purely subjective attribution, but a proposition sustained or weakened by relationships among measurements, lived uses, material states, rights and possible futures. Its conditions have to be documented rather than rhetorically gathered beneath the convenient label of complexity. Once spatial value is treated as conditional, archives, maps and decisions must register not only what has been observed but how the permissible interpretation changes. Haasnoot and colleagues (2013) provide a crucial temporal precedent: Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways do not rely on one forecast, but assemble alternative sequences, monitoring signposts and conditions at which an existing action no longer satisfies its objectives. The method is already sophisticated enough that flexibility, triggers and future options cannot credibly be introduced as independent inventions. The Waiting City would have to make a more particular intervention into that tradition by relocating adaptive decision-making to the site-in-governance, where a parcel’s physical extent intersects with ownership, users, ecological processes, permission, investment, liability and exit. Waiting would then cease to be a vacancy between projects. It would become a governed interval with unevenly distributed costs, benefits, rights and opportunities for learning. The right to latency cannot mean an unlimited entitlement to leave a place inactive, particularly where delay intensifies housing shortages, toxic exposure, exclusion or deterioration. Nor can it mean the unilateral right of an owner, designer or municipality to hold collective needs in suspension. It can instead name an investigable question about authority: who is able to define the relevant horizon, demand evidence of present value, contest irreversible commitment and insist that the burdens of non-action be made visible? This does not override statutory property rights or safety obligations; it locates the knowledge and agency excluded when those obligations are mistakenly taken as a complete description of the site. The seven proposed families of action—leave, protect, maintain minimally, use temporarily, establish productive functions, introduce mobile systems or commit permanently—would then function as rival propositions subject to common constraints, not as a hierarchy in which activation is always superior. The departure from conventional multicriteria assessment would need to be demonstrated, not asserted: if existing procedures select the same defensible action and anticipate the same risks, a new grammar has generated nomenclature rather than knowledge. If a legal-ecological veto, a documented current use, a changed horizon or the complete costs of dismantling and restoration alter the result, the difference becomes an auditable finding. Reversibility in particular must be evaluated across the entire chain of permission, maintenance, notice, liability, removal, destination and repair: the ability to unbolt a structure is not the ability to undo its effects. Here the possible relation to HoodKnows becomes precise without collapsing their subjects. HoodKnows tests an environmental claim against situated experience; The Waiting City tests a spatial decision against previously uncounted conditions of value and authority. The first asks whether the capacity represented in a map persists through bodily movement and lived routine. The second asks whether a future represented in a plan survives material, ecological, legal and collective scrutiny. Both need disciplined comparisons with pre-existing methods, and both need evidence that is allowed to fail. A traceable interpretation record and a traceable decision record would be useful only insofar as they preserve the original claim, evidence sources, dissenting counter-evidence, alterations of scale or variable, counterfactual alternatives, responsible parties and final unresolved conditions. Their value is not that they accumulate information. It is that the archive can reproduce the route by which an assertion became less general, less certain, more adequate or no longer defensible. Metadata must therefore carry provenance and rights, not simply date and location; mapping must distinguish analytical boundaries from people’s actual fields of movement; interfaces must reveal where a decision is conditional while protecting sensitive routes, ownership information and individual testimony; transfer between European sites must preserve the conditions under which a rule operates rather than imply that a result is universal because its vocabulary is portable. These principles describe a research ecology in which independence among disciplines is respected but their claims are not immune to revision. They also provide a practical distinction between the two Horizon instruments and the larger Socioplastics inquiry: the projects would test specific procedures within funded territorial research, while the wider inquiry asks how distributed evidence remains open to contestation without dissolving into incompatible personal accounts. The common achievement would be a form of public knowledge that records not only what was decided or measured but who could compel a revision and what happened as a result. Within Socioplastics, this tension condenses as Relational Agency.
Anto Lloveras works across architecture, urbanism and transdisciplinary research. Through LAPIEZA-LAB, he develops comparative field methods, spatial records and public knowledge infrastructures concerned with how environments are observed, classified, experienced and governed.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
European Commission, CORDIS (2014) TIMBRE: An integrated framework of methods, technologies, tools and policies for improvement of brownfield regeneration in Europe. Final report summary, grant agreement 265364. Brussels: European Commission.
European Commission, Joint Research Centre (2024) A practical guide to the New European Bauhaus self-assessment method and tool. Edited by K. Gkatzogias, E. Romano and P. Negro. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. doi:10.2760/9581060.
Haasnoot, M., Kwakkel, J.H., Walker, W.E. and ter Maat, J. (2013) ‘Dynamic adaptive policy pathways: A method for crafting robust decisions for a deeply uncertain world’, Global Environmental Change, 23(2), pp. 485–498. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2012.12.006.
Payá Pérez, A. and Peláez Sánchez, S. (eds.) (2017) European achievements in soil remediation and brownfield redevelopment. EUR 27814 EN, JRC102681. Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union. doi:10.2760/818120.