The industrial afterlife of a territory is assembled through decisions that rarely become visible in the completed neighbourhood photograph. AGORA's 2025 annual report distinguishes phases at Belval and Metzeschmelz, recording property interfaces, planning instruments, environmental assessment, protected industrial heritage, infrastructural costs and future housing and mobility provision. Belval's extensive conversion is far advanced in some areas while its southern phase remains subject to programming and development; Metzeschmelz enters operational definition with water management, contamination and heritage constraints. The report is a developer's institutional account, not independent evidence that projected social, climatic or housing outcomes have been delivered. Its scientific value is different: it exposes the sequencing and dependencies of planned transformation, including what remains conditional upon infrastructure, ownership and authorisation. Any study of the neighbourhood as an available public realm should therefore include the often-invisible commitments that determine when a path opens, an industrial remnant is conserved or a collective facility becomes accessible.
domingo, 11 de octubre de 2026
Mulè Stagno, L. (2019) ‘Msida Bastion Garden of Rest Geothermal Project’, Vigilo, 51, p. 44. Din l-Art Ħelwa, Malta.
A heritage building can remain materially intact while its environmental conditions restrict possible use. In a short project account, Mulè Stagno describes a Horizon 2020 geothermal-retrofit initiative at the Msida Bastion Garden of Rest, where narrow boreholes and heat-pump technology were proposed to provide heating and cooling without large-scale disruption of a sensitive site. The text identifies the multinational GEO4CIVHIC research partnership and the local conservation and access constraints shaping a demonstration. It reports an intended installation and future monitoring, not independently verified performance figures or a completed impact evaluation. The document is applied project evidence rather than a peer-reviewed efficacy study. It introduces a useful reversal: technical adaptation can be an instrument for extending the life and accessibility of an existing place rather than a pretext for replacing it. Material restraint, energy performance, heritage obligations and the institution capable of maintaining the system belong within the same design decision.
Brankov, B. (2019) ‘Common areas in development of multi-family housing’, Arhitektura i urbanizam, 49, pp. 32–39. https://doi.org/10.5937/a-u0-22134.
The existence of shared architectural space does not ensure collective life. Brankov compares three twentieth-century experiments in multi-family housing: the Narkomfin building, the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille and Walden 7. Reading them through changing household structures and social aspirations, the article examines how communal programmes, internal streets, galleries and roof spaces sought to move selected functions beyond the private flat. It also registers gaps between design intentions and the spatial qualities that actually encourage meeting: a corridor called a street does not thereby acquire the generosity or programme of one. The analysis is comparative and architectural rather than an ethnography of current residents. Its distinctive operation is to treat the internal common area as a contested urban scale, neither simply domestic nor automatically public. For studies of neighbourhood experience, collective space must be described through access rules, everyday uses and maintenance as well as floor plans. The architecture of possibility can be ambitious and still remain underused.
Łukaszkiewicz, J., Długoński, A., Fortuna-Antoszkiewicz, B. and Fialová, J. (2024) ‘The ecological potential of poplars (Populus L.) for city tree planting and management: A preliminary study of central Poland (Warsaw) and Silesia (Chorzów)’, Land, 13(5), 593. https://doi.org/10.3390/land13050593.
A tree is often made legible to urban policy as present or absent, although the service it may provide is inseparable from biological duration and care. Łukaszkiewicz and colleagues synthesise evidence on poplars in Warsaw, Chorzów and wider urban contexts, discussing their fast growth, adaptability, ecological potential and the practical difficulties created by differing cultivar lifespans, root systems and maintenance requirements. Their contribution is a species-specific management argument, not an intervention trial proving that a particular tree produces a stable climatic benefit at every location. It complicates the static binary between planting and non-planting. Urban greening is a sequence of selection, establishment, maturity, replacement and occasionally failure, each phase generating different conditions of shade, risk and expense. For a longitudinal corpus, canopy is neither scenery nor a timeless infrastructure. Tree identity, age, health, management responsibility and anticipated succession matter when comparing the public possibilities that vegetation makes available through time.
Jansson, J., Nordlund, A. and Westin, K. (2017) ‘Examining drivers of sustainable consumption: The influence of norms and opinion leadership on electric vehicle adoption in Sweden’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 154, pp. 176–187. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2017.03.186.
A sustainable alternative does not circulate through the city as a self-explanatory technical advantage. Jansson, Nordlund and Westin compare respondents who adopted electric vehicles, alternative-fuel vehicles and neither, using a survey of 1,192 people to distinguish personal norms, perceived social norms, ecological attitudes and interpersonal influence. Personal norms and forms of opinion leadership and seeking remain relevant in their statistical models; the role of social norms is less straightforward when those variables are considered together. The study concerns adoption of particular vehicle technologies in Sweden, not whether residents will choose to walk through a green neighbourhood. Its methodological force lies in refusing to treat the presence of an option as evidence of its uptake. Alternatives travel through information, identification and social relations; attitudes and behaviour cannot be conflated, nor can the characteristics of adopters be generalised to all travellers. A comparative urban archive needs to register which possibilities are known, shared, trusted and actually practised.
Stefánsdóttir, H. (2015) ‘Offentlige rom for mennesker eller for biler? [Public spaces for people or cars?]’, Kart og Plan, 75(4), pp. 320–327.
An apparently possible journey may nevertheless announce that its traveller is unwelcome. Stefánsdóttir examines the symbolic and experiential character of public environments dominated by cars and asks how such settings shape the appeal of walking and cycling. The article is a design-theoretical argument informed by situated examples, not a controlled test showing that visual character causes a quantified modal shift. Its critical operation is to separate infrastructural provision from the atmospheres through which provision is encountered. A continuous cycle route or a technically walkable destination can still be embedded in an environment whose scale, surfaces, noise and spatial priorities communicate a preference for drivers. Transport choices are therefore not made inside a neutral network. For fieldwork, the article suggests recording the perceived hierarchy of modes, the aesthetic character of crossings and the experience of vulnerability without converting these observations into presumed population-level behaviour. A route's permissions can be felt as well as regulated.
Therán-Nieto, K.R., Pérez-Arévalo, R., Marín-Carranza, J. and Caballero-Calvo, A. (2025) ‘Variaciones del microclima local en zonas de tejido urbano abierto en clima tropical seco’, Revista AUS, 37, pp. 32–39. https://doi.org/10.4206/aus.2025.n37-05.
The space offered to a pedestrian is continually recomposed by orientation, canopy and air flow. Studying open urban fabrics in Barranquilla, Therán-Nieto and colleagues use two computer-simulation protocols to explore the effects of canyon geometry, building materials, tree cover, solar radiation and wind in a hot, dry tropical climate. Their simulations distinguish sharply among facades, ground planes, solstice dates and street orientations; favourable shade conditions can coexist with less favourable ventilation, and morphological parameters interact rather than operate as isolated variables. The operation is the controlled construction of alternative microclimatic situations, not the direct observation of a population's thermal comfort. Neither simulated radiation nor local wind speed can stand alone for a health effect. The study instead gives comparative walking research a demanding vocabulary of place: the same route requires timestamped orientation, surface and vegetation records before its climatic qualities can be interpreted or reproduced elsewhere.
Vitale, C.M., Price, E.J., Miller, G.W., David, A., Antignac, J.-P., Barouki, R. and Klánová, J. (2021) ‘Analytical strategies for chemical exposomics: Exploring limits and feasibility’, Exposome, 1, osab003. https://doi.org/10.1093/exposome/osab003.
Exposure is not a substance that instruments retrieve intact from the world. Vitale and colleagues examine the analytical conventions of chemical exposomics, especially high-resolution mass-spectrometric workflows, and compare alternative chromatographic and sampling strategies against sensitivity, coverage, reproducibility, throughput, expertise and cost. Their review shows that commonly adopted separations privilege particular chemical ranges while potentially informative alternatives remain underused. Its distinctive contribution is the treatment of analytical coverage as a designed and resource-dependent boundary, rather than the neutral limit of available science. Low-cost methodological alterations can improve detection, but combining workflows also creates requirements for calibration, processing and quality assurance. The article does not measure street-level urban exposure or establish effects on inhabitants. Its relevance to spatial research is epistemological: a neighbourhood sensor, laboratory assay and self-reported encounter are different instruments with distinct detectable worlds. An archive must retain methods and detection limits alongside any quantity that travels into comparative claims.
Koch, S., Khomenko, S., Cirach, M., Ubalde-Lopez, M., Baclet, S., Daher, C., Hidalgo, L., Löhmus, M., Rizzuto, D., Rumpler, R., Susilo, Y., Venkataraman, S., Wegener, S., Wellenius, G.A., Woodcock, J. and Nieuwenhuijsen, M. (2022) ‘Impacts of changes in environmental exposures and health behaviours due to the COVID-19 pandemic on cardiovascular and mental health: A comparison of Barcelona, Vienna, and Stockholm’, Environmental Pollution, 304, 119124. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envpol.2022.119124.
A healthier atmospheric reading does not guarantee a healthier urban day. Koch and colleagues analyse restrictions during the first pandemic surge across Barcelona, Vienna and Stockholm, combining changes in nitrogen dioxide, noise, physical activity and green-space visits with exposure–response relationships to estimate potential cardiovascular and mental-health outcomes. Their counterfactuals make an uncomfortable trade-off legible: cleaner and quieter environments coincided with substantial decreases in movement, and the modelled consequences of inactivity could exceed benefits attributable to reduced pollution. These are conditional estimates under specified scenarios, not observed diagnoses caused by confinement. The operation is nevertheless precise. Environmental quality and behavioural opportunity cannot be assumed to vary together, while the comparison of three differently governed cities shows why a common variable requires locally situated interpretation. This study makes the circumstances under which an apparently beneficial urban change becomes usable for health a question for research rather than an answer contained in one indicator.
Helbich, M., Browning, M.H.E.M., Voets, D. and Dadvand, P. (2025) 'Adherence to the 3+30+300 urban green space rule and mental health, physical activity, and overweight: A population-based study in the Netherlands', Environment International, 202, 109643. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envint.2025.109643.
A memorable planning rule acquires authority more quickly than the outcomes it is intended to secure. Using detailed urban-tree and green-space indicators linked to 2022 survey responses from 180,949 Dutch adults, Helbich and colleagues test the combined 3+30+300 rule against multiple health and behavioural measures through covariate-adjusted mixed-effects logistic regression. Only 16.4 per cent of respondents meet the composite rule. Adherence is associated with greater physical activity and lower likelihood of overweight, but not with the measured mental-health or other health outcomes. The negative findings are not a weakness to erase: they separate environmental provision from assumed psychological effects. Moreover, indicators assigned to residential addresses cannot account for all exposures accumulated in everyday movement. The work contributes a demanding principle of inference: preserve the distinction between a spatial planning threshold, the behaviour potentially associated with it and the health outcome actually observed. A neighbourhood archive should document those links without declaring them causal in advance.
Willberg, E., Fink, C., Klein, R., Heinonen, R. and Toivonen, T. (2024) 'Green or short: choose one – A comparison of walking accessibility and greenery in 43 European cities', Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 113, 102168. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compenvurbsys.2024.102168.
An accessible destination and an environmentally favourable journey are not the same urban good. Across 43 European cities, Willberg and colleagues construct school journeys as a standardised travel demand, derive walking accessibility and associate potential routes with monthly green-cover data. Inequalities are treated both between and within cities, with indices including Gini, Kolm–Pollak equally distributed equivalent and Moran's I. The central result is a recurring negative relationship between proximity and greenery: shorter access may expose a traveller to less vegetation. This is a strong correction to neighbourhood assessment by destination counts or green-space proximity alone. Yet the routes are modelled potentials, not observed diaries of journeys actually taken. The article therefore opens, rather than closes, a question about situated movement: which paths people choose, how routes change with season or care obligations, and whether their actual encounters reproduce the modelled trade-off. It supplies a rigorous comparative scaffold while making a case for locally recorded trajectories.
Ornelas, A.J.A., Cordeiro, A.M.R. and Lameiras, J.M. (2026) ‘Green spaces: Urban heat island mitigation and building climate resilience in Coimbra’, Atmosphere, 17(3), 284. https://doi.org/10.3390/atmos17030284.
Ornelas and colleagues make temporal sampling indispensable to spatial diagnosis. Their multi-site observations of near-surface air temperature in Coimbra distinguish recurrent intra-urban thermal hotspots from cooler green and blue settings, tracking contrasts across different parts of the day and different urban conditions. Santana and the Seminary surroundings emerge as prominent heat-exposed locations; the Botanical Garden and Mermaid Garden operate as local cooling refuges. The research instrument is not a single climatic map but a sequence of situated measurements, interpreted against urbanisation intensity, surface cover and site context. This matters because an apparently homogeneous neighbourhood may change thermal character within hours. It would be incorrect to infer individual thermal comfort, health outcomes or the causal effectiveness of a proposed design intervention directly from those temperature contrasts. The paper nevertheless establishes a powerful empirical requirement: exposure must be observed at the scale and frequency at which urban conditions actually diverge. The city has no single temperature, and an observation made once should not silently become a permanent attribute of place.
Sfîcă, L., Crețu, C.-Ș., Ichim, P., Hrițac, R. and Breabăn, I.-G. (2023) 'Surface urban heat island of Iași city (Romania) and its differences from in situ screen-level air temperature measurements', Sustainable Cities and Society, 94, 104568. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scs.2023.104568.
The thermal city is not a single temperature field. Sfîcă and colleagues align MODIS land-surface temperature with screen-level air observations in Iași, making disagreement between two legitimate measurements the object of investigation rather than an error to suppress. Their analysis relates the geometry and intensity of the surface urban heat island to season, atmospheric circulation and impervious land cover. In spring and summer daylight conditions, surface and two-metre air temperatures can diverge by approximately 5–7°C; nighttime relationships differ. The study therefore interrupts a common slide from thermal imagery to claims about human exposure. Satellite surfaces, measured air and felt heat occupy different observational layers, each with its own spatial and temporal assumptions. The transferable operation is paired measurement: keep data streams distinct, register where they converge or diverge, and preserve the circumstances of observation. For walking-based comparative fieldwork, the mismatch is a research finding in its own right, especially across heterogeneous urban materials, slopes, shade structures and seasons.
De Ridder, K., Lauwaet, D. and Maiheu, B. (2015) 'UrbClim – a fast urban boundary layer climate model'. VITO, Mol, Belgium. Research manuscript.
UrbClim turns the urban atmosphere into an object that can be compared at a scale wider than the individual street but finer than conventional regional climate modelling. Its operation is selective simplification: an urban land-surface scheme, with representations of imperviousness, albedo, heat storage, roughness and anthropogenic heat, is coupled to a three-dimensional atmospheric boundary-layer model. Validation against observations from Toulouse, Ghent, Antwerp and Bilbao shows that this reduced architecture can reproduce important urban–rural climatic contrasts while running far faster than more elaborate mesoscale models. Its achievement is not an exhaustive reproduction of street-level experience; it is to make long integrations across urban domains computationally practicable. That distinction matters. Model resolution is an epistemic bargain, not a measure of observational completeness. A distributed European study could use such modelling to describe comparable background conditions, but must not mistake a grid-cell prediction for the microclimate a pedestrian encounters under a particular tree, beside a wall, or at a particular hour.
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