Imagining Multispecies Urban Transformations
By Melissa Ingaruca
Melissa Ingaruca works in a transdisciplinary space of foresight. She connects different approaches to futures studies, multispecies thinking and design to tackle challenges of imagination for radical urban transformations. She is also a fellow at the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners (NGFP). Melissa will be joining us as a speaker at this year’s Summer Retreat in Strategic Foresight.
Today’s modern cities have expanded at the expense of our climate and biodiversity. Cities are responsible for 75 percent of global CO2 emissions and urban expansion has driven habitat loss for many species. The future of the biosphere depends on our ability to imagine radically different cities.
However, our collective imagination faces many challenges which urge us to push the boundaries of the futures field: A path dependency on the worldviews that are the root of our global ecological crisis, a linear imagination that prevents us from accounting for nonlinear change and a sensorial disconnection from the futures we imagine. To address these challenges, I am developing a methodological framework I call “Future tinkering for multispecies cities” to trigger critical, nonlinear, and embodied imagination for urban transformations.
Future Tinkering for Multispecies Cities: addressing urban light systems
Tinkering is all about hacking our futures. I believe that to envision multispecies cities, we need to hack our anthropocentric worldviews, our human-centric senses and our exploitative material engagements with nature that underpin current urban design practices. So I bring design methods- borrowed from biodesign and interactive design- to hack people’s experiences before they go into the visioning process and also offer them as tools for people to create tangible experiences of their designed futures.
In the context of my fellowship at the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners network, I am applying this framework to rethinking the future of urban light in Berlin through a multispecies thinking lens.
We, humans have colonised the nights with artificial light to fuel our modern urban lifestyles. But we are paying a price: light-polluted skies, disrupted circadian cycles for humans and other species, human health and ecologies disrupted, and increasing CO2 emissions from electricity generated to power urban lighting. Nocturnal urban lighting in Berlin and cities across the world is entangled in dualistic, hierarchical and anthropocentric paradigms of urban design. So I wonder, can multispecies thinking heal this brokenness in our worldviews and seed radically emphatic futures?
Multispecies thinking urges us to care for the well-being and the agency of more-than-human species. Currently, I’m researching how to translate this thinking into design experiences. For example, in urban design, we completely disregard how other species experience urban light, so a key challenge is to understand more-than-human sensorial worlds of light-darkness and to do this in embodied ways.
Similarly, the production of light and light infrastructure is a pollutant and distant from the everyday life of citizens, making it easy to not care where light comes from. And even in the search for renewable sources of light, collaboration with bioluminescent bacteria, algae and fungi in bio-design are still tinted with utilitarianism of their metabolic characteristics and an imposition of the designer’s intentions over the agency of the organisms. So I took on the challenge to rethink how to care for the agency and wellbeing of bioluminescent fungi in the process of co-production of light, and even more, how to design for cohabitation with bioluminescent fungi.
This research on its own is interesting for the design field, but I do it to be able to articulate it to methods of experiential foresight, which let’s face it, still have a long way to go to be less anthropocentric as well. So my research will allow me to create sensorial-material entanglements with more-than-human species as part of an experiential scenario workshop that I’m preparing in Berlin.
Imagining radical futures of urban light
The scenario workshop will take place at the Floating University in Berlin in early September and will engage participants in nocturnal activities to re-imagine the future of urban light-darkness systems for more-than-human well-being in Berlin. For example, through a sensory walk to perceive more-than-human sensorial worlds of moths, birds and bats, across different streets of Berlin, participants will rethink what is light pollution or light comfort for other species.
Moreover, the Floating University will be set in a darker/low-light atmosphere (lit by lanterns of bioluminescent fungi) testing participants’ ability to re-tune their senses to darkness and cohabit with more-than-human sensorial niches of light. Similarly, in a hands-on activity, participants will create DIY lanterns collaborating with bioluminescent fungi. This will allow participants to experience, and discuss what a caring collaboration with fungi feels like.
Based on these embodiments of multispecies thinking, participants will push their imagination beyond what’s possible today in terms of current design and technology, to co-create radical future scenarios. It will involve exploring questions such as: What happens when we overcome our addiction to artificial light at night when we embrace the full cycle of light-darkness? What happens when we expand the design stakeholders to other species, considering them as users and as co-producers of light? How can multispecies thinking drive sensorial and material revolutions in the design of urban light in Berlin? What kind of city is created by these revolutions? What do the nocturnal economies, transportation, architecture, and entertainment in Berlin look like? And finally, participants will bring those futures into tangible speculative objects, performances, or other forms of artwork to engage in a deeper embodiment and reflection of their designed futures.
Tales of Light Futures
I’ve already been testing some components of this methodology with colleagues from the thematic working group on “worldviews and nature-based solutions” of NATURA (a global network of urban nature-based solutions). We ran a scenario workshop where we had different dualistic hierarchical and relational worldviews as drivers of change.
In my group, we needed to imagine the future of urban light in New York by 2050 driven by multispecies thinking and regenerative economies. This triggered the question of how did worldviews shift in this city? We ended up creating a scenario of New York City where large parts of the city had been completely lost to continuous flooding, as the rest of the world was also losing cities to sea level rise due to climate change. In this world, the collective trauma after such events led to a deeper change in values in the city. The shift to multispecies thinking was a way to deal with loss, but also to find healing.
The scenario called the “Cosmo-bacteria city” imagined that the areas of the city in ruins were slowly recolonized by bioluminescent species, from fungi to algae, and there was no attempt to re-conquer them for humans only. They stayed as they were, shaped by the metabolic processes of bioluminescent beings. These places were lit only by cosmic light (from the sky that was now visible) and bioluminescent light and humans that would visit them had to learn to re-tune their senses to more darkness. I guess in a way that made us think about how to “stay with trouble” as Donna Haraway would put it. Instead of turning the lights back on, citizens of this futuristic New York stayed with the ruins and embraced more darkness at night.
However, these places became symbols of healing, where a wave of regenerative economies started. People created regenerative bio-light farms in these now vacant lots, and soil and water were being regenerated to start a new cycle of urbanism. And later, to perform this scenario we play a situation where tourists would visit the Cosmo Bacteria City and of course, some of them coming from light-polluted cities would have a hard time seeing things.
In another opportunity, we organised a workshop in Berlin with colleagues from the research Cluster “Matters of Activity ‘’ and the collective MycoHackers that I’m a member of. During the workshop participants imagined a more playful scenario where parks in Berlin were only lit with bioluminescent fungi in an attempt to be more friendly with biodiversity. This led us to think about how to feed those fungi. We know of practices of bio-design where it is possible to train mushrooms to decompose specific kinds of waste. So participants imagined that after raves in parks — which are common in Berlin — people would have enough trash to feed the bioluminescent fungi. So party and circularity came together here!
My reflections
I would say that in today’s world, we need to foster critical, nonlinear imagination and experiential imagination everywhere we can. I have found a sweet spot for my work. I believe that there is a special magic that occurs at the intersection of multispecies and relational thinking, experiential future methods, and grassroots BioLabs and FabLabs movements which are all about democratising design and technologies. For me, the challenge is not only about creating radical multispecies futures, but also about giving people access to tools and technology to do rapid prototyping of those futures, not just to deepen the engagement with the scenarios, but also because ultimately people should be empowered to create those futures. In a nutshell, the future of the futures field is one where we push the boundaries of our worldviews, of embodiment and democratisation of methods, tools, and technologies.
