Socioplastics 11998 Not Everything Connected Is Interdependent
Urban complexity is often invoked when explanation becomes difficult, then used to justify an indefinitely expanding list of variables. ComplexityWeave makes a narrower demand: identify relations whose alteration changes the behaviour of other relations. The weave is not a diagram with the most arrows. It is a pattern of dependencies through which disturbance travels unevenly. Removing a decorative connection leaves the explanation intact; removing a consequential one changes what the inquiry can account for. Ash Amin’s work on the coexistence of strangers gives urban sociality a political and material thickness beyond neighbourhood cohesion. Steve Hinchliffe’s geography of nature complicates simplified separations between social order and ecological process. Their perspectives offer different scales and explanatory traditions. In relation, they resist the assumption that complexity is only a technical property awaiting computational capture. It is also a question about which interdependencies institutions recognise, which relations they measure and how those choices affect public decisions. Consider a flood-prone street. Drainage may be modelled separately from residents’ rent burdens, insurance exclusions and the capacity of neighbours to provide temporary care. Yet an intervention that reduces flooding while raising housing costs may change who remains exposed during the next event. This is a constructed analytical example, not a report about a particular street. The inquiry would distinguish hydraulic causation, economic displacement and social support, then identify points where change in one relation affects another. ComplexityWeave does not claim that a single diagram can measure every relationship. It names a discipline of selective connection: preserve heterogeneous mechanisms, specify consequential crossings and show what evidence supports them. A project becomes more intelligible when it explains why particular relations belong in its account and how they influence one another. The marker helps evaluate claims of integration by asking what the integration actually connects. Its value lies in tracing dependencies that change an explanation, rather than treating the presence of many components as proof that a system has been understood.
REFERENCES
Amin, A. (2012) Land of Strangers. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hinchliffe, S. (2007) Geographies of Nature: Societies, Environments, Ecologies. London: SAGE.
CITE AS
Lloveras, A. (2026) Socioplastics, LAPIEZA-LAB, Madrid.
https://antolloveras.blogspot.com/p/socioplastics-project-index.html