"To reopen the future of our planet to all who inhabit it, we will have to learn how to share it again among humans, but also between humans and nonhumans, between the multiple species that populate our planet."

we will have to learn how to share it again among humans, but also between humans and nonhumans, between the multiple species that populate our planet. It is only under these conditions that, becoming aware of our precariousness as a species in the face of ecological threats, we will be able to overcome the possibility of outright human extinction opened up by this new epoch, the epoch of the Anthropocene."

Mbembe, Achille.
Out of the dark night:
Essays on decolonization.
Columbia University Press, 2019.

To take Mbembe’s provocation seriously means designing new tactics for cohabiting our planet between humans and nonhumans alike.

In our view, this requires building better relations while healing damaged ones across the planet. As the environmental crises reveals, building better socio-ecological relations can not be restricted by Modernity’s binary logic of local-global.

Splitting the world into these realms has ignored the intricate ways in which the planetary is imbricated in situated sites, and how struggles must be interconnected to meet the demands of the multiple intersecting crisis life on earth faces as we enter a new planetary age.

The Lab, Planetary Tactics for Cohabitation,

aims to consider the everyday creative practices of resistance and reconnection to heal relations across race, class, gender, species, discipline, and other material-discursive boundaries that have been historical constructed.

For us, this means engaging careful criticality with a motivation to affect change. Our starting point is to engage the transformative and experimental potential of design with ways of knowing found in critical research. This hybrid mode is not restricted to science or professional practice, rather it establishes novel connections between sciences (natural and social) and forms of practice and activisms inside and outside the academy.

While tactics refers to strategies and actions but also to spatial arrangements and orders, the planetary offers clues to the spatial and temporal scales beyond the human through which we must consider alternative actions and arrangements toward more equitable forms of cohabitation.

Interventions

Planetary Tactics supports academic and non-academic partners in sites across the planet through a series of interventions which support creative exploration and experimentation in the themes of planetary health, healing and urbanism, current interventions include:

  • Connecting Riparian Struggles in Jakarta, São Paulo, Berlin.
    Funded by the Swiss National Funds, project: “South Designs” in association with the University of Basel.

  • Funded by DAAD with partners in São Paulo and Rio Grande do Sol.

  • Interdisciplinary teaching MA Architecture urban design

  • Special Issue Architecture and Culture Journal

  • A one-day international and interdisciplinary symposium exploring the impacts of multispecies health and planetary thinking on spatial research, urban and design processes organised by the “Planetability” Working Group (DAAD 2023-2024) in association with the BUA project “Multispecies Health”, the Chair of Urban Design and Urbanisation, and the Chair of Transitioning Urban Ecosystems, Institute for Architecture.  

    _______________

    While cities have long been cohabited by a multiplicity of species, the dominance of human exceptionalism has rendered invisible the myriad lives that historically and socially cohabit and produce urban space. Design, planning and urban governance have arguably contributed to this situation making cities increasingly inhospitable environments for more-than-human life. Socio-environmental research shows this strong separation between humans and nonhumans has health effects through increased exposure to pollution, epidemic outbreaks and zoonotic spillover. At the same time, chains of capital have introduced “exotic” pathogens and species into unprepared ecosystems affecting the health of bio- and ecospheres. It becomes increasingly clear, not least through the interlinked climate and biodiversity crisis, that human health is interdependent on the health of other species. We might understand these fragile more-than-human relations as ecologies of planetary health, where what is at stake is how we live and die together, on and with the planet.

    Planetary thinking in health examines the relationships between environmental, human, and more-than-human health within a critical framework. From the microscopic to the planetary, from concentrated to extensive spatial conditions, it urges us to move beyond binary frameworks in shaping urban futures with a focus on the intricate ecologies of multispecies health constituting space across urban and rural boundaries. By recognising human and non-human life as part of the planetary system upon which survival depends, it becomes urgent to reimagine and redesign alternative futures of cohabiting our planet – what we might call designing for “planetability”.

    Against this background, the symposium asks: What does it mean to position health as a framework for reimagining urban spaces as just multispecies environments? How might centring ecologies of health better equip us to address the intertwined challenges of climate change, environmental injustices, biodiversity loss, and social inequality in design and planning processes in the planetary? 

    Information

    Keynote: Sandra Jasper

    Special guest: Matthew Gandy

    Date: Friday 31st of January, 2025

    Location: Forum, Institute of Architecture. Straße des 17. Juni 152, 10623 Berlin

    Time: 9:30 – 18:30

    Hosted by: the “Planetability” Working Group (Technische Universität Berlin, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and Universidade de São Paulo). In collaboration with the Chair of Urban Design and Urbanisation (CUD) and the Chair of Transitioning Urban Ecosystems (CUE) at the Institute of Architecture, Technische Universität Berlin and in association with the Berlin University Alliance project “Multispecies Health” and the urban lab “Planetary Tactics for Cohabitation”.

Coordinator

  • Director: Planetary Tactics for Cohabitation (Lab)
    Postdoc Researcher: The Health Effects of Biophilic Urbanisms

    Technical University Berlin, Architecture-Planning

    Postdoc engaging critical creative methods to research on, for and with spatial design and planning in planetary times. Current interests include (amongst others) unearthing the subterranean, especially Phytophthora and its (troubling) effects on urban processes, politics, multispecies health and categories up above. I work with critical theories of space.

    e-mail website

Collaborators

  • Martius Chair Germany-Brazil for Humanities and Sustainability (USP-DAAD).
    Project associate: Urban Pollution and Multispecies Health & Urban Lab

    University São Paulo, Faculty for Social Sciences and Humanities

    Researches urban evidentiary ecologies, riparian critical zones, and practices of planetary healing and repair in central São Paulo. Works at the intersection of urban anthropology and geography, with interests in feminist STS, theory from the South and the environmental humanities.

    e-mail
  • TDR Partner, Berlin
    Floating University

    Floating e.V. Berlin is a self organized space and group, where practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds meet to collaborate, co-create and imaginatively work towards possible futures. Floating’s rainwater retention basin is home to a diverse range of animals, plants and algae who have taken root and given birth to a unique landscape: a human-made environment reclaimed by nature where polluted water coexists with the relatively new presence of Floating University, forming a *natureculture* (Haraway) or a *third landscape* (Clément).

    website
  • TDR Partner
    São Paulo

    Salve Saracura is a collective of activists and artists who work with marginalized riparian communities and organized environmental and housing movements in the center of São Paulo to uncover the city’s hidden rivers, the histories of violent urbanisation and environmental disaster they carry – including the covering-over of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian memories – also connecting these histories to recent events of eviction and displacement, urban floodings and other examples of socio-environmental struggle.

    Instagram
  • TDR Partner
    Indonesia

    Labtek Apung is a floating tech-lab that was born at the riverbank of Ciliwung river, Jakarta, in 2017. The non-neutral intervention emerged from an experiment, the reinterpretation of a raft into a floating tech-lab at Ciliwung river, involving children, adults, and other concerned citizens, creating a device open to reinvention. These are all done not only to voice the extremely poor river quality but also to make the river speak of its concerns in its own language. The laboratory is a place for demonstrating research-action & citizen-science. The co-researchers of Labtek Apung are: Novita Anggraini (chemist), Gusmiati (environmental engineer), Indrawan Prabaharyaka (anthropologist), Kamil Muhammad (architect), and Endira Juliand (visual artist).

    website
  • TDR Partner
    São Paulo

    Ground Atlas Brazil is an academic-artistic counter cartography project organized by architects and urbanists Ana Luiza Nobre and David Sperling. The Ground Atlas combines a collection of maps and constellations of audiovisual material that allow for mapping the grounds of our worlds, in their multiple dimensions and meanings. The goal of the Atlas’ constellations is to link isolated points, generating rhizomatic structures that bring about new meanings, weaving together and articulating matters that are geographically and culturally distant by creating affinity relationships. By mapping, that is, by collecting and visualizing these histories, the Atlas strengthens the political claims for reparation by marginalized populations in contemporary urban Brazil and other cities of the Global South.

    website
  • Associate professor / visiting researcher
    Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Biology
  • Full Professor, Universidade de São Paulo (USP), Escola Politécnica (EP)
    Head - Planetary Health Brazil, Institute of Advanced Studies, IEA-USP
    Center for Artificial Intelligence, C4AI-AgriBio, USP/IBM/FAPESP
    NIST Fight to Hunger (INCT - Combate à Fome)

    University São Paulo
  • Professor, University of São Paulo (USP), Institute for Architecture and Urbanism (IAU) and Institute of Advanced Studies (IEA)
    Project associate: Urban Pollution and Multispecies Health & Urban Lab
    Co-coordinator Ground Atlas Brazil (groundatlas.org)

    University of São Paulo

    Coordinator of the Center for Studies on Contemporary Spatialities (NEC-IAU-USP) and of the Group Art Science Technology (ACT>IEA-USP). Fellow of the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), developing the project “Cartographies: technopolitics and geopoetics”. Works with mappings and cartographies in the intersection of architectural studies, arts, geography and philosophy.

  • Professor, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Department of Architecture and Urbanism
    Co-coordinator Ground Atlas Brazil (groundatlas.org)
    Project associate: Urban Pollution and Multispecies Health & Urban Lab

    Catholic University Rio de Janeiro

    Researcher CNPq/ Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development. Research Professor at the Center for Studies on Contemporary Spatialities, Institute of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo/IAU-USP. Cofounder of the Ground Atlas project (groundatlas.org). Works at the intersection between architecture, urban studies, history, arts and cartography, within a decolonial, eco-political poetical perspective.

    e-mail