Arturo Escobar, “Habitability and Design: Radical Interdependence and the Remaking of Cities.” Geoforum, no. 101 (2019): 132-140, 2019, p. 132.
Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Seeing Like a City (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019), 31. Some of the main works associated with this turn include AbdouMaliq Simone and Edgar Pieterse, New Urban Worlds. Inhabiting Dissonant Times (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017); AbdouMaliq Simone, Improvised Lives. Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2019).
Mariana Valverde, “Seeing like a city: the dialectic of modern and premodern ways of seeing in urban governance,” Law and Society Review 45, no. 2 (2011).
Laura Forlano, “Decentering the Human in the Design of Collaborative Cities,” Design Issues 32, no. 3 (2016): 165. See also Laura Forlano, “Posthumanism and Design,” She-ji. Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 3, no. 1 (2017): 16–29.
Tony Fry, City Futures in the Age of a Changing Climate (London: Routledge, 2017); Saskia Sassen, Expulsions. Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1985), xi.
Anne-Marie Willis, “Ontological Designing: Laying the Ground,” Design Philosophy Papers 13, no. 1 (2006): 80.
Richard Sennett and Joan Clos, “A Conversation.” In UN Habitat and Richard Sennett eds., The Quito Papers and the New Urban Agenda (New York: Routledge, 2018), 167.
Alfredo Gutiérrez Borrero, “When Design Goes South: From Decoloniality, through Declassification, to Dessobons.” In Tony Fry and Adam Nocek eds., Design in Crisis. New Worlds, Philosophies and Practices (London: Routledge, 2021), 56–74.
Fry, City Futures, 16.
Ibid., 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: Ian Douglas et al. eds., 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.
Sylvia Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?” In Katherine McKittrick ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 9–89. For a discussion of Wynter’s concept, see Arturo Escobar, “Reframing Civilization(s): From Critique to Transitions,” Globalizations (November 30, 2021), ➝.
Afaina de Jong, “The Multiplicity of Others,” Who is We? (2021), ➝.
Debra Solomon, “A Multispecies Urbanism Manifesto,” Who is We? (2021), ➝.
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 in the 1970s.
Harold Martínez Espinal, Habitabilidad terrestre y diseño (Cali: Universidad del Valle, 2013), 156.
Espinal, Del hábito, 21.
This is a very short rendition of a much longer argument. For a complete set of references, see Arturo Escobar, “El pensamiento en tiempos de pos/pandemia.” In Olver Quijano, ed., Pandemia al Sur (Buenos Aires: Prometeo Libros, 2020), 31–54; Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018); Arturo Escobar, 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, MA: MIT Press, 2015) and Politics of the Everyday (London: Bloomsbury, 2019). The term “design coalitions” is also Manzini’s.
Randolph Hester, “Reattach! Practicing Endemic Design.” In Lynn Manzo and Patrick Devine-Wright eds., Place Attachment (London: Routledge, 2021), 208.
I have developed this set of propositions with Marisol de la Cadena. See Marisol de la Cadena 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 (2021). See also Escobar, Osterweil, and Sharma, Designing Relationally.
Tony Fry, Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).
Bayo Akomolafe, “What Climate Collapse Asks of Us,” 2020, ➝.
This formulation guides the current work of a small group that includes Fernando Flores, Terry Winograd, Don Norman. B. Scot Rouse, and Arturo Escobar, gathered around the formative insights of computer network technologies and design originally formulated in the book by Winograd and Flores, Understanding Computers and Cognition (1985).