On the Ontological Metrofitting of Cities

Arturo Escobar, Contributors, Densities, Energy and sustainability, Essay, Formats, Middle Density, Topics, Urban Paradigms.

Biodiversity, Cities, Construction, Earth, Ecology, Essay, Geography, Housing, Soil, Urban Agriculture, Urban organization.

Arturo Escobar, “Habitability and Design: Radical Interdependence and the Remaking of Cities.” Geoforum, no. 101 (2019): 132-140, 2019, p. 132.

Amin, Ash, and Nigel Thrift, Seeing Like a City. Polity Press, Cambridge, UK, 2019, p. 31; Some of the main works associated with this turn include Simone, AbdouMaliq, and Edgar Pieterse. New Urban Worlds. Inhabiting Dissonant Times. Cambridge, U.K: Polity Press, 2017; Simone, AbdouMaliq. Improvised Lives. Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South. Cambridge: Polity, 2019.

Mariana Valverde, “Seeing like a city: the dialectic of modern and premodern ways of seeing in urban governance,” Law and Society Review 45(2), 2011.

Forlano, Laura, “Decentering the Human in the Design of Collaborative Cities,” Design Issues 32(3), 2016,p 165. See also Forlano, Laura,. “Posthumanism and Design.” She-ji. Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 3(1): 16-29, 2017.

Tony Fry, City Futures in the Age of a Changing Climate, London: Routledge, 2017; Saskia Sassen, Expulsions. Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2014.

Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1986), p. xi.

Anne-Marie Willis, “Ontological Designing: Laying the Ground,” Design Philosophy Papers 13, no. 1 (2006), p. 80.

In Sennett, Richard, and Joan Clos, “A Conversation,” in UN Habitat and Richard Sennett (eds.), The Quito Papers and the New Urban Agenda. New York: Routledge, 2018, p. 167.

Gutiérrez Borrero, Alfredo. “When Design Goes South: From Decoloniality, through Declassification, to Dessobons. In T. Fry and A. Nocek, eds. Design in Crisis. New Worlds, Philosophies and Practices. London: Routledge, 2021, p. 56-74, p. 57.

Tony Fry, City Futures in the Age of a Changing Climate (2017), 16.

Tony Fry, City Futures in the Age of a Changing Climate (2017), 123.

I adopt the term “re-earthing” from Timothy Beatley, Biophilic Cities. Integrating Nature into Urban Design and Planning Washington, DC: Island Press, 2011, and Handbook of Biophilic City Planning and Design, Washington, DC: Island Press, 2016, although I take it in an explicit ontological way. Beatley retains a certain naturalized notion of nature as separate from humans, and in this way his proposal goes halfway towards re-earthing visions based on radical interdependence. The same can be said for the large handbook of urban ecology, taken as a whole, edited by Ian Douglas et al., The Routledge Handbook of Urban Ecology (London: Routledge, 2021). There is a need for urban studies to broach in earnest the question of the nonhuman specific to the cities, reimagining cities as living entities through ontological metroffiting.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?” In pp. K. McKittrick, ed. Sylvia Wynter. On Being Human as Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015, pp. 9-89; for a discussion of Wynter’s concept, see Arturo Escobar, “Reframing Civilization(s): From Critique to Transitions.” Globalizations, in press.

de Jong, Afaina. The Multiplicity of Others. Part of Who is We? The Dutch Pavilion for the 17th International Architecture Exhibition. La Biennale di Venezia (2021). https://whoiswe.nl/works#de-jong-multiplicity-of-other Who is We? The Dutch Pavilion for the 17th International Architecture Exhibition. La Biennale di Venezia (2021). https://whoiswe.nl/works#de-jong-multiplicity-of-other

Debra Solomon, A Multispecies Urbanism Manifesto, p. 4 (2021). Part of Who is We? The Dutch Pavilion for the 17th International Architecture Exhibition. La Biennale di Venezia (2021). https://whoiswe.nl/works#solomon-multispecies-urbanism

Harold Martínez Espinal, Del hábito, al hábitat y al habitar (Cali: Editorial Universidad del Valle, 2016), 22. The full architectural and design proposal can be found in Grupo CU:NA, La fusión campo-ciudad desde un nuevo concepto de vivienda (Cali: Editorial Universidad del Valle, 2021), coordinated by Harold Martínez and the architect Verónica Iglesias García. See Escobar, “Habitability and Design” (2019) for a fuller discussion. Martínez Espinal did a graduate program at the Bouwcentrum Rotterdam.

Harold Martínez Espinal, Habitabilidad terrestre y diseño. Universidad del Valle, Cali, 2013, p. 156.

Harold Martínez Espinal, Del hábito, al hábitat y al habitar, 21.

This is a very short rendition of a much longer argument. For a complete set of references, see Escobar, Arturo. “El pensamiento en tiempos de pos/pandemia”. In Olver Quijano, ed., Pandemia al Sur. Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2020, pp. 31-54; Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds. Durham: Duke University Press; Escobar, Arturo, Michal Osterweil, and Kriti Sharma, Designing Relationally: Making and Restor(y)ing Life, London: Bloomsbudy (forthcoming).

The notions of life projects and communities of place are found in Latin American activist literature, as well as in Ezio Manzini, Design when Everybody Designs (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015) and Politics of the Everyday (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). The term “design coalitions” is also Manzini’s.

Hester, Randolph. “Reattach! Practicing Endemic Design,” in Lynn Manzo Patrick Devine-Wright (eds). Place Attachment. London: Routledge, 2021, p. 208.

I have developed this set of propositions with Marisol de la Cadena. See de la Cadena, Marisol, and Arturo Escobar. “Notes on Ontological Excess: Towards Pluriversal Designing.” In Martín Tironi, ed. Resonancias tectónicas desde el Sur: Del diseño centrado en el usuario al diseño centrado en el planeta”, In press. See also Escobar, Osterweil and Sharma, Designing Relationally.

Fry, Tony. Defuturing. A New Design Philosophy. London: Bloomsbury, 2021.

Akomolafe, Bayo. “What Climate Collapse Asks of Us” 2020. https://bayoakomolafe.net/project/what-climate-collapse-asks-of-us/

This formulation guides the current work of a small group that includes Fernando Flores, Terry Winograd, Don Normal. B. Scot Rouse, and Arturo Escobar, gathered around the formative insights of computer network technologies and design originally formulated in the 1986 book by Winograd and Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition. A New Foundation for Design.

About three years ago, I started a presentation at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers by making a case for “re-earthing” cities:

Earth has been banished from the city. By “Earth” I mean—based on indigenous cosmovisions as much as on insights from contemporary biological and social theory—the radical interdependence of everything that exists, the indubitable fact that everything exists because everything else does, that nothing preexists the relations that constitute it. Earth signals the capacity of life for self-organization, life’s ceaselessly unfolding flux of changing forms, forces, behaviors, and relations, and the fact that entities, processes, and forms are always in the process of dependent co-arising. I take this notion of Earth as the horizon for a renewed living praxis, and as the basis for the essential act of human dwelling.