Session #142

– Round Table / Discussion –

The session will reflect on the role of participatory architecture in creating spaces of environmental care, by engaging with more-than-human perspectives within the process of co-design. Informed by findings from my practice-based PhD, the discussion will explore the opportunities and challenges of using multispecies thinking, as a largely theoretical approach, during the making and doing of architecture. The session will be structured as a discussion, inviting contributions which explore the more-than-human perspectives within architecture design and research, as a group conversation, considering what feels familiar, what can support existing approaches to research and what disrupts current practice.

This framing has been informed by a live case study, the Play Lanes, a participatory design project I facilitated with the Child Friendly Cities department in Cardiff Council. Improvements to the lanes at the back of residents’ houses in Cardiff were collectively imagined and made through the patient and slow process of co-design. Residents were asked to look with care at the existing moss within their lanes, focusing on a situated environmental understanding of place to appreciate the interconnected ecology of the plants, animals and people who formed part of the project. We explored how moss, filtering the air as it breathes, is a form of interspecies care, which framed the current environment of the lanes and their imagined future improvements.

The discussion will question how this mode of working, thinking with the more than human, can be translated to other contexts or operate at different scales, exploring the opportunities and challenges of implementing this method within research, participatory design or urban policy.

Within this discussion we will consider: is noticing enough? It invites contributions which reflect on how these patient small-scale acts of care sit within narratives of social and environmental justice.