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Het traceren, articuleren en verweven van multispecies kennis van de Brusselse gecontesteerde stadsnatuur: een rubberen laarzen ontwerpantropologie

Year: 2024
Type: dissertation
Abstract: In Brussels, various semi-natural spaces, also known as 'friches urbaines', are the focus of renegotiation over the rights of nature in the city. The Josaphat Friche, Schaarbeek-Vorming, Marais Wiels, and Meylemeersch are just a few of the many places where action groups challenge regional planning processes. The action groups formulate two important critiques. Firstly, that regional planning does not sufficiently take into account local dynamics. Secondly, the detrimental impact of these processes on the destruction of non-human habitats in the city. In summary, it could be stated that these planning processes pay too little attention to the life of sites. However, it is not the first time that these critiques have been voiced and that activist groups have aimed to renegotiate a so-called 'more-than-human' right to the city. At places such as the Kauwberg, the Jette-Ganshoren Marsh, 't Moeraske, and the Vogelzangbeek, there is a longer history of citizen activism in semi-natural spaces. In these places, citizen activism has contributed to the creation of new equilibriums and collaborations, not only between action groups and authorities, but also between the city and nature. Similarly, within the theoretical discourse on urban planning and design, there is a continuing concern about the destructive impact of the disciplines on living systems. Too anthropocentric views on urban planning are put into question, and the city is also seen, partly inspired by discussions within the environmental humanities and urban ecology, as a crucial environment within which complex relationships between humans and nature can be restored through the urban project. These theoretic strands assume a very different position of the designer, who is no longer seen as the inventor or creator of new worlds, but rather as someone who uses his creative thinking to help restoring disrupted worlds. This suggests a more cautious approach of the designer to the living urban fabric, unraveling the coherence and coexistence of more-than-human cohabitation, examining how new connections and relationships can be made starting from these built-up knowledges. However, both in theory as well as in practice, contact with, and knowledge about, the coherence of living matter and life in the city has largely been lost. Building empirical knowledge about this more-than-human coexistence is therefore a major challenge for the urban designer. Paying attention to the diverse forms of life that contribute to the urban environment requires new ways of sensing the world around us, suggesting new forms of ethnographic and ethological research. In this doctoral dissertation, I focus on collaborations with activist actors, who have extensive knowledge about more-than-human coexistence in the city, to build and hybridize ethnographic and ethological knowledge about the city which can feed planning processes. Characteristic of these key figures is their ability to link situated knowledge about the relationship between nature and city to localized locations to urban planning discussions, a knowledge that few urban actors possess. In these collaborations, I focus on the following research questions: "In what way can an evolving involvement with action groups on contested sites of urban nature reconceptualize the constellations of actors, mobilized artifacts, and the organization of processes in urban planning and design? How do these involvements contribute to a theoretical reflection on the 'Multispecies City'?" For this, as a designer and researcher, I put on my proverbial rubber boots, and organize a design ethnography in collaboration with key figures from activist groups, according to three degrees of involvement. These different involvements allow both an investigative as well as a design-oriented trajectory to be completed, in which I engaged in both critical as generative dialogues. This evolving involvement allows for a better understanding of the present and at the same time makes possible a projection towards the future. The gathered insights are translated into a manuscript consisting of three parts. The first part, 'tracing multispecies knowledges', follows from a first involvement aimed at observing and describing the forms of knowledge of these key actors, and examining where this knowledge production serves more-than-human interests in urban planning and design. As a researcher, I move towards the constellations of actors ('moving in'). The second degree of involvement, 'articulating multispecies knowledges', aimed to examine how a more-than-human perspective can be articulated in dialogue with these key figures in urban planning processes. As a researcher, I take on a more active engagement here, moving along with the constellations of actors ('moving along'). The third degree of involvement, 'weaving multispecies knowledges', aims to investigate the development of an interaction between a more-than-human approach and more conventional urban planning processes. It is a more experimental approach, which partially distances itself from the action groups ('moving out'), and in which I as a researcher, take a design attitude by exploring how identified multispecies knowledges can be integrated and woven into the design process. These three involvements allow a set of skills and theoretical insights to be developed in a progressive manner, starting from the field. These help in building new associations between more-than-human theory and empirical material on how the contemporary dynamics on contested sites of urban nature can lead to new constellations of actors, knowledge artifacts, and planning processes in the production of the 'Multispecies City'. In addition, it also aims to collect empirical material with which multispecies planning and design experiments can be continued in the Brussels context, as well as beyond.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6982192401
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