About the Writer:
Nathalie Blanc

Nathalie Blanc works as a Research Director at the French National Center for Scientific Research. She is a pioneer of ecocriticism in France. Her recent book is Form, Art, and Environment: engaging in sustainability, by Routledge in 2016.

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Nathalie Blanc

I defend the idea that art and cultural practices can constitute a means of profoundly transforming the cultures of nature, to the extent of a thorough understanding of these practices, and not by considering them as tools of scientific or political communication. In fact, artistic practices can be based on poetry capable of re-enchanting the world, i.e., a mode of evocation that reopens relationships with the environment in a sensitive, indeterminate mode. The aim is to escape the ruts of daily life and routine and imagine links and trajectories with local communities that can transform local ways of living and acting. Creation can thus be an opportunity to create a new context for action that also constitutes a kind of institutional breathing space. In this case, artistic practice no longer aims to produce content, but contexts. Of course, this mode of transformation is above all interstitial, like micro-utopias or concrete utopias conceived as experiments. This modus operandi allows the use of concrete activities while addressing more general questions related to the subject of social needs.

In this way, research-creation not only transforms scientific methodologies but also provides new perspectives on how our world works, thanks to the sideways step. The interest in playing with academic language with poetic freedom also provides a critical perspective on scientific goals and standards. Put more poetically, research-creation aims at a dreamy digestion of the world around us and what constitutes its norms, highlighting some of its potentially transformative properties. In a more structured way, such an approach requires a long-term project, with committed players who recognize and support local socio-ecological mobilizations. Today, however, research-creation projects are very often short-lived, poorly and inadequately funded, and lack a real place of their own.

About the Writer:
Carmen Bouyer

Carmen Bouyer is a French environmental artist and designer based in Paris.

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Carmen Bouyer and Pascal Moret

What can we learn from other species’ collaborations to better inhabit an environment collectively?

In this space where we are discussing the importance of co-creating our cities through dialogue between diverse disciplines and cultures, what if we broadened our spectrum to include non-human living things in our conversation?

When we talk of transdisciplinarity, of openness to other ways of seeing and knowing than our own, when we talk of mutual care, what can we learn from our animal and plant cousins? Let’s open up our perspectives. How do animals and plants communicate with other species and with each other? Do they interact to improve their habitats together? How do they do this? What forms of cooperation in a given environment can inspire us as humans?

This is the case of “mutualism“, where specific inter- and intra-specific relationships between several species enable all parties to benefit. This is the well-known case of the flower and the pollinator. This is a relationship in which each organism benefits from the activity of the other. This mutualism becomes “symbiosis” when two species develop so closely together that their survival depends on each other, like trees and mycorrhizae. These microscopic fungi link the tree’s roots to those of other trees, mapping relationships in the forest while allowing the tree to capture water and minerals from the soil, in the meantime the mycorrhizae extract the glucose that sustains them from the tree’s root system. We can also think of the lichen, an alliance between a fungus and an alga, where the relationship is so intimate that each species has chosen to lose its identity for the benefit of the other, given the benefits they have enjoyed over time. There are also beautiful forms of “altruism”, and the examples are many. There are cases of inter- or intraspecific breastfeeding or support of offspring, where a female mammal of one species nurses or takes care of the young of another. In groups of impalas for example, some females who have not given birth during the year will look after and feed the newborns so that the mother can rest.

Mutualism can also be distinguished from “commensalism“, where inter-specific biological interaction produces neutral benefits for one of the two parties, or from “parasitism“, where one of the protagonists takes advantage of another organism producing harmful effects. This is the case of the protozoa in our stomachs, which are commensals and sometimes parasites.

Let’s work towards a better understanding of interspecific communication, embracing its complexity, its nuances, the interweaving of sometimes contradictory ways of relating to otherness. The aim here is not to idealise non-human ways of living but to develop our knowledge of the many ways in which species relate to each other in order to discern what might broaden our imaginations and our practices of living together. We are invited to refine our awareness of the sensitivities of non-human living beings and of ourselves. With curiosity and respect, perhaps we can draw inspiration from the mutualistic, symbiotic, altruistic, and commensal modes developed by other forms of life.

While we are interested here in how to combine various ways of being and seeing the world to better inhabit places, let’s take the example of the bird called Sociable Weaver. A small species of passerine birds endemic to the arid zones of southern Africa (particularly the Kalahari) that builds collective nests in order to share energy (keep warmth or cold) and protect and assure the longevity of their habitat over several generations. These nests are also inhabited by other species of commensal birds that roost in them, such as the Pygmy falcon, or nest in them, such as the Rosy-faced lovebird or the Red-headed finch. Larger birds, such as the Verreaux’s eagle owl, use it as a platform to build their own nests. These species live together in a sustainable cohabitation.

“The problem of our systemic ecological crisis, if it is to be understood in its most structural dimension, is a problem of habitat. It is our way of living that is in crisis. And in particular because of our fundamental blindness to the fact that to live is always to live together, among other forms of life, because the habitat of a living being is nothing more than the weaving of other living beings”.

“Accepting our identity as living beings, reconnecting with our animality seen neither as a primality to be overcome, nor as a purer savagery, but as a rich heritage to be welcomed and modulated, means accepting our common destiny with the rest of the living world. Accepting that the human being does not find its vector in the spiritual domination of its animality, but in the good intelligence to be sought with the forces of the living within us, means changing the fundamental relationship with the forces of the living outside us and thus regaining confidence in the dynamics of the living”.

As food for thought, we’d like to share a few references from French thinkers and ecologists who invite us to reweave our links with other species. Here are two extracts from “Manière d’être vivant” by Baptiste Morizot (Actes Sud). We also suggest “Apprendre à voir. Le point de vue du vivant” by Estelle Zhong Mengual (Actes Sud); “La solidarité chez les plantes, les animaux, les humains” and “Le langage secret de la nature” by Jean-Marie Pelt (Le Livre de Poche) and “Que diraient les animaux, si … on leur posait les bonnes questions?” by Vinciane Despret (La Découverte).

About the Writer:
Pascal Moret

Pascal Moret is a film-maker, photographer and teacher at ENSCI-Les Ateliers in Paris. His approach reconciles the need to popularise science and the arts through images with the need to highlight tomorrow's challenges in scientific disciplines.

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About the Writer:
Paul Currie

Paul Currie is a Director of the Urban Systems Unit at ICLEI Africa. He is a researcher of African urban resource and service systems, with interest in connecting quantitative analysis with storytelling and visual elicitation.

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Paul Currie

Four principles for meaningful meeting

Through 10 years of working on, in and with African cities, I have found myself arriving, with more and more surety, at the conviction that the only reasonable response to the intractable, multi-layered, complex situations we face in our drive to improve urban sustainability liveability and wellbeing, is to invest in sharing joy, build relationships upon joint values, and embed creativity in our everyday practice.

When dealing with complex systems change and trends which shift exponentially, we face plenty of overwhelm, despair, frustration, or exhaustion, which can undermine a sense of progress. However, one of the arenas in which I have found satisfaction in dispelling these heavy feelings and emotions is through the convening work that I and my team have been doing. Be it through small meetings, medium to large workshops, and our large-scale webinars and RISE Africa Festival, the designing of these programs has an explicit aim to queer or destabilize people’s expectations of what meetings or engagements should be and to create space for unexpected learnings, interactions and new collaborations. This approach to joyful creative engagements that harness the collective rational and emotional intelligence is being taken up more and more by peers and like-minded organizations and I have absolutely been inspired by their efforts, techniques, methods and approaches. The TNOC Summit being one of the prominent ones.

I reflected recently about the predominant focus on process and setting collective values in another articlewhich has reflections about how we organized a meeting of 26 diverse partners and 20 cities to centre relationship building. Not to reiterate that fully here but one line feels very pertinent to the themes of the plaidoyer put together by our colleagues. And that is this reflection:

When we spend time together deepening our understanding of each other, creating shared values, and setting the basis for cooperation, I have noticed that we often feel uncomfortable that we have not been ‘productive.’ Feeling productive in our society currently revolves around the production of things, and needs more focus on the ‘production’ of understanding, relationships or feelings. This necessarily requires real time and direct (non-multitasking) attention. Carving the space and time for us to do this really important. 

So if I were to share, not the techniques, but some of the principles behind what makes our meetings worthwhile to facilitate and to attend,  they might be — inexhaustively — the following four things:

Pluralistic multi-directional Learning: If people are going to invest their time and resources to attend, we need to make sure that the flow of ideas is not unidirectional, but that everyone has the opportunity to share. Related to this is a very strong value statement that we can each learn things from each other –  young and old, scientifically trained or artistically inclined, despite or because of language or geography. I have not yet experienced a situation in which I was unable to learn something from someone who was open minded to sharing or listening. In order to make this possible, as facilitators we have to relinquish the idea that we will be able to document everything – instead we must understand and celebrate that each person will learn things which are their own, and they can take forward in their own ways.

Fun breeds meaning: It is all too simple to expect that when we are discussing important topics, we need to dress in starched suits and closed shoes, to remain upright and composed. Indeed, i hope these signifiers will be overtaken by the individualist cultural expressions. The centering of joy and multiple expressions is vital, particularly to acknowledged that people engage ideas in different ways and therefore need different forms of information, sharing or collaboration. These could range from, yes, a speech, to perhaps a mind map, or perhaps drawing, poetry, music, dance, and even silence. If we relinquish the idea that we need to be always be serious when discussing the important, we can access the energy that we typically reserve for the things that give us joy, and we can apply that excess, and often abundant, energy to making sense of the important.

Diversity is an asset: I still get confused when invited to speak in other people’s events that I form part of a pale male panel… Have we not arrived at the point where diversity is the obvious, and frankly now subconscious, consideration. It seems astounding to me that particularly in the sustainability field, we struggle to fill up panels and events with diverse voices and expressions. Here of course, race, gender and geography are the obvious ones, but a sole focus on ‘expertness’ as more valuable than ‘experience’ may also do us a disservice. Mixed representation and mixed ways of presenting mean that we could normalise a poet crossing words with a scientist, a politician exchanging with a community mobiliser. And yes, this practice has to start in a very purposeful manner, but I know that there is obvious improvement in quality and experience of an event when challenged and warmed by differential perspectives. This is not about representational tokenism, but about truly understanding that lived experience from different contexts and histories is its own form of expertise that adds value to any deliberation.

Surrender the control: Finally, surrendering the rigidity of a program enables true co-productive practice. Taking time at the beginning of meetings (and checking in halfway?) to hear what people’s expectations are allows you to interrogate your assumptions about what people want to learn, or share. It enables a form of flexibility and truly makes the meeting a collective experience. This too requires a form of surrender of control and deep excitement about emergence and possibility.

There are so many tips, tricks, methodologies, approaches style games that can help to realize meaningful, collaborative, participatory and joyful events. But in order for this to land they need to be seated on a legitimate and shared desire to meet or experiment with the principles I’ve suggested above. I’m sure there are many other principles too, but I’ll pause here for now…

About the Writer:
Małgorzata Ćwikła

Małgorzata Ćwikła is an Expert in the Built Environment, Culture and Heritage team at ICLEI Europe. She is mainly involved in initiatives related to the New European Bauhaus, innovative methodologies in creative place making, transdisciplinary research, and sustainability in the field of culture.

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Małgorzata Ćwikła

Return to “lifecentrocene”: Embracing synergies and creative coexistence for liveability

In the face of the challenges posed by the Anthropocene, there is a growing need for a paradigm shift that recognizes the interconnectedness of all living beings and their vital role in maintaining the delicate balance of our natural ecosystems. The concept of the lifecentrocene, fueled by place-based, community-centered greening and transdisciplinary co-production, offers an alternative epoch. It emphasizes the importance of synergies, coexistence, and the profound knowledge we can gain from diverse communities and species.

The lifecentrocene proposes a departure from the dominant anthropocentric mindset that has driven human actions and decisions for centuries, causing the climate emergency faced by life on Earth today. It calls for a fundamental reimagining of the relationship between humans and the natural world, recognizing that nothing is separate from nature, but rather everything is an integral part of it. In this epoch, we, the people, can strive to create harmonious and reciprocal relationships with other species, acknowledging their intrinsic value and the wisdom they hold.

In practical terms, at the core of the lifecentrocene is the belief that the built environment, as a human-created living habitat, has the potential to be a catalyst for positive change. As we design and shape our cities and communities, we must embrace the values of sustainability, inclusivity, and beauty. We need to ensure that rural and urban built environments foster a sense of belonging by recognizing the interconnectedness of all living beings. This requires a transfer towards regenerative design practices that go beyond growth and actively contribute to the restoration and enhancement of ecosystems. We need creativity for care.

In the lifecentrocene, innovative and transdisciplinary approaches are essential. We must harness the power of collaboration, bringing together scientists, artists, designers, and communities to co-create inclusive and beautiful futures. By embracing diversity and different ways of knowing, we can tap into a wealth of knowledge that exists within indigenous cultures, local communities, and non-human species. Their wisdom, accumulated over generations, can guide us towards more affirmative practices.

The lifecentrocene challenges us to rethink traditional notions of progress and development. Instead of viewing nature as a mere resource to be exploited, we recognize it as a teacher and partner. We seek inspiration from natural systems and processes, understanding that they hold the key to resilience, adaptability, and mitigation. By integrating these principles into the goals of the emerging Mission on New European Bauhaus in a novel way, together with various visionary individuals of all ages, community leaders, global decision-makers, artists, and those who witness daily the impacts of “global boiling”, we can create spaces, neighborhoods, and structures that not only meet our needs but also contribute to the well-being of all living beings.

To embrace the lifecentrocene, we need a fundamental shift in mindset. It requires new tools and methods to deepen the sense of empathy and reverence for the web of life that sustains us all. By nurturing this interconnectedness, finding new artful means of dialogue and learning, we can create circumstances where all beings thrive in harmony. Harmony, the concept of unanimity from philosophy to the arts, promotes liveability without battles for balance, development, and growth.

In fact, we don’t even need to invent the lifecentrocene, we can simply return to it. Officially, there is no Anthropocene at all. Perhaps we can skip the discussion on names, forget the neologismcene as Mentz called it, and just prioritize life at the center, working towards a liveable world for all.

Mentz, S. (2019). Break Up the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press. https://doi.org/10.5749/j.ctvhhhg4h

About the Writer:
Marta Delas

Marta Delas is a Spanish architect, illustrator, and videomaker. Concerned about urban planning and identity, her artwork engages with local projects and initiatives, giving support to neighbourhood networks. She has been involved in many community building art projects in Madrid, Vienna, Sao Paulo and now Barcelona. Her flashy coloured and fluid shaped language harbours a vindictive spirit, dressed with her experimental rallying cries whenever there is a chance. Together with comics and animations she is now building her own musical universe.

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Marta Delas

In addition to the vital importance of a transdisciplinarity approach to solve the problems we face in our societies nowadays, it is crucial to keep in mind that we need to work with an intergenerational mind. We, therefore, must guarantee that every age group is, not only considered but addressed and included as active actors in co-creation processes. To acknowledge all of our life spans as beings is key to our success in creating better cities for us and other species too.

One of our biggest challenges nowadays is to learn how to slow down. Many of our current problems as a society are a result of the continuous need to rush and speed up processes and responses. But this haste can result in excluding policies and decisions that work often against our own well-being, being based exclusively on efficiency and productivity mechanisms. In order to prevent this from happening, it is essential that we give voice to our “non-productive” selves. We must remember to plan for our entire life cycle without neglecting those moments when we are not considered to be the “labour force”, when our pace does not fit into an economic system focused on immediacy and disposability.

When we retire, what is our role in society? For our economy, we do somehow become disposable, although we are still, of course, consumers. But we should be considered more than that; we have gathered knowledge and experience throughout our lives and can become important actors in decision-making processes. It is important for the elderly to have a voice and be able to share what they know with others; otherwise, we are wasting a lot of expertise, skills, and awareness.

The same should happen with youth. If we pretend to change the way we tackle our problems and approach planning, we have to involve the youth and generate a new culture with them. To empower and educate them in co-creation and participation is a way to help them become stewards of their surroundings. We must also acknowledge that their point of view is essential to create new solutions. It is imperative that we recognise the significance of their experience as children and young people, who are part of a community, in order to build better solutions to the problems that concern us all.

We need to plan for the future and learn from the past, we need to think of ourselves and our environment in our changing nature and understand the different pace of every being. Decelerating to the pace of our most vulnerable selves and broadening our focus is a way to guarantee the well-being of our societies.

About the Writer:
Marthe Derkzen

Dr. Marthe Derkzen is a researcher and lecturer with the Health and Society chair group. She studies urban nature from a social justice perspective with an interest in climate adaptation, local food, healthy neighborhoods and stewardship of the commons.

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Marthe Derkzen

The plaidoyer states that place attachment and social cohesion must be actively nurtured. A recommendation under part 3 about “care” is: Nurture continued engagement and place connections after projects are implemented. Whereas professionals typically see the delivered project as the end, residents do not, and indeed cannot.

We experienced this while working with residents and the local government on participatory park design in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Evaluating the participation process, we discovered several findings that plea for the above statement and recommendation. I will highlight three. First of all, when residents participate in park design, they are satisfied with the implemented park and tend to make more use of it. Especially the inclusion of desired park elements; think of a natural play element or a table tennis table, helps nurture place connection. One precondition is that the participation process should be transparent and really include a say for residents. So not: you can choose for design A, B, or C, thank you for participating! But: serious engagement throughout the entire design process: sitting at the table with city planners and project leaders with clear expectations about what is and what is not up for discussion.

Second, the act of getting a group of residents together to think about park design in itself can lead to place attachment and social cohesion. Residents meet each other regularly, exchange ideas, hopes, and worries, and know where to find each other. This builds reciprocal care. By caring in one way, you care in many ways. Caring for a green space in your neighborhood automatically leads to caring for yourself (e.g., taking time to sit down and think about what is important to you) and for those around you (e.g., considering who your neighbors are and what they need). But caring in this way is much easier if it is actively nurtured. For instance, by a clear question or assignment from the planning department, combined with an expectation to come up with an output. This can be an inventory of residents’ wishes for the new park, a community meeting, or even a proposed design. A feeling of need and agency leads to acts of stewardship.

Third, and in line with the above recommendation, is the importance to let residents participate after a project has been implemented. Where professionals see the delivered park as the end of the project, residents do not. They have formed connections to people and place (building a sense of place, of which place attachment is one dimension) and those connections do not end when a green space planning project ends. Sustaining these connections is crucial but, again, does not happen by itself. Also here, it helps to actively nurture continued engagement between people and place. I wish to call upon local governments to include “aftercare” in their participatory planning processes. Once a space is being used, experienced, and lived, unexpected and sometimes also unwanted modes of its use come up.

For our case in Nijmegen, we organized a community gathering in the park one year after its realization to collect residents’ experiences. Several ideas for improvement came up, such as “we need another big tree for shade” and “we notice that this seating area is not in the right spot for optimal use by our elderly neighbors”. Collecting these experiences was easy, but connecting these to action by the city planners was everything but. It is a shame if local stewardship is first nurtured, leading to a successful outcome, and then neglected, leading to a possibly underused park and frustration with residents. That is why I would like to plea for the inclusion of “aftercare” in co-creation processes.

About the Writer:
Tom Grey

Tom holds a degree in architecture from Technological University Dublin and a Masters in architecture (Sustainability of the Built Environment) from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Since joining TrinityHaus Research Centre in Trinity College Dublin in 2009, he has undertaken a variety of urbanism and architectural research projects across key spatial scales examining how people-centred design can support inclusion, health, wellbeing and social participation throughout the lifecourse.

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Tom Grey

Exploring the human, spatial, ecological, and temporal scale of neighbourhoods

The plaidoyer sets out a valuable framework to explore the relationship between the NEB and Nature-based Solutions in the context of achieving sustainable, liveable, healthy, and inclusive neighbourhoods. The value of a framework like this is that it provides an overall conceptual structure in which deeper interrogation can take place in relation to local, place-based, or context-specific issues. Reading these “calls to action” and associated recommendations prompted me to think about a few lines of enquiry that might help us delve deeper, and to address some of the wicked problems and complexities outlined in this document. These lines of enquiry largely focus on the nexus of the human scale, the ecological scale, the spatial scale, and the temporal scale.

How are neighbourhoods explored and defined at the local and human-scale? Neighbourhoods have been identified as a critical aspect of urban sustainability, yet they are deeply complex and often loosely defined and poorly understood entities. How can communities co-produce knowledge about their neighbourhood in terms of boundaries, history, identity, and the hard and soft infrastructures of place?

How do we explore the human scale through the lived-and-embodied experience of place by a wide diversity of people? Our experience of place is shaped by our physical, sensory, cognitive, and neurodiversity characteristics, along with age, gender, culture, and other factors. How do we make sure that this diversity of people is involved in the co-production and co-creation process?

Our lived-and-embodied experience also plays a role in how we perceive and interact with our environment. What is the relationship between a human-scale approach and everyday beauty, aesthetics, and the quality of experience?

What is the role and influence of the built environment at key spatial scales? In the context of the neighbourhood, how does the built environment across key spatial scales (e.g., from housing to community facilities, up to the public realm, and overall urban structure) impact on liveability, health, inclusion, and sustainability?

How do we consider the ecological scale within neighbourhoods and the relationship between nature, people, and the built environment? This document calls for holistic and integrated communities that go beyond dichotomies of culture/nature. How do we explore the relationship between people, the built environment, and ecosystems at various scales within and beyond the neighbourhood in order to grow more harmonious and synergistic relationships?

How do time and temporal scales affect the human/ecological/built-environment relationship in neighbourhoods? Growing relationships between people, the built environment, and ecosystems are mentioned above. This can only happen over time, and through time all things either grow, change, or evolve, nothing stays the same. As part of a human-spatial-ecological scale approach, how do we consider the temporal scale and the relationships, synergies, and challenges that might emerge over time within neighbourhoods? In line with the call to nurture transdisciplinarity and Traditional Environmental Knowledge as set out in this plaidoyer, a temporal approach should draw on the lived-experience and wisdom of people across the generations and lifecourse as part of a local, traditional, and ecological approach to the co-production of knowledge [1].

Of course, the idea of an integrated human, spatial, ecological, and temporal scale approach to neighbourhoods is already embedded in this plaidoyer. However, the above lines of enquiry may provide an additional set of lenses to consider the role of ‘scale’ in the development and evolution of liveable, inclusive, healthy, and ecological communities; from the intimate lived-human experience of place to the coexistence with and nurturing of living systems, across space and time, within and beyond the neighbourhood.

References

Grey, T., et al., Growing Older Urbanism: exploring the nexus between ageing, the built environment, and urban ecosystems. Urban Transformations, 2023. 5(1): p. 8.

About the Writer:
Gitty Korsuize

Gitty Korsuize works as a urban ecologist at the city of Utrecht. Gitty connects people with nature, nature with people and people with an interest in nature with each other.

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Gitty Korsuize

As a practitioner, I see a need to divert from our traditional ways if we want to achieve a substantial greener city. With our traditional greening projects, we reach the people who already have an intrinsic need to green and beautify their surroundings. To green the bigger part of our cities we need more people on board to achieve this mission. This we will only achieve by inventing new ways to relate to people. Some people are best approached by “content”: bring them into contact with other fields of expertise to see how both our missions can align.

Some people we need to reach on a more emotional level: this is where the arts play a vital role. Other people want to take care of their living environment (both social as well as their physical surroundings), and those will be the stewards of the green city when motivated and supported properly. Building new networks is the foundation underlying all the above. We need to get outside (our comfort zone) and start building those new networks!

About the Writer:
Peter Morgan-Wells

With backgrounds in arts, anthropology, and permaculture design, Peter specialises in creating public food forests and applying art as a fulcrum in landscape-scale regeneration projects. Currently based in Devon, UK he has previously led post-quake regeneration projects in Christchurch, NZ, as well as roles in marine research, organics governance, and arts funding.

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Peter Morgan-Wells

To realise the full potential of artistic and creative interventions towards achieving the goals of the New European Bauhaus, there is a fundamental need to take the long view to artist funding & support.

As this Plaidoyer identifies, lasting transformations that vitalize landscapes and communities require time, trust, and patience to understand the innate character of a place and respond to its needs & potential. However, finding the capacity to build this foundation of observation and relationship is a perennial challenge for many practitioners. Short-term funding is a chronic issue, as traditional grants fund on 1-3 year horizons, too short to empower artists to deliver lasting impacts and too narrow in scope to support complex (and sometimes invisible), transdisciplinary work.

Indeed, historical focus on funding things (public art pieces, performances, gallery exhibitions) can be easily articulated on a balance sheet, yet often misses the underlying value of artists and creatives to build on these catalysts over time. Longer-term support enables practitioners to cultivate a fabric of relationships that generate what artist Brian Eno terms a scenius, or collective genius, which can spark place-sourced transformations and help guide them over the 10, 20, 50+ year horizons necessary to ferment lasting ecological and cultural health.

By taking a different tact of supporting longer-term (5-10 years), operational funding that equips practitioners with livable income and operational funding, creative interventions may generate far greater impact toward NEB and EU Green Deal targets. Some of the benefits of supporting artists & creatives with this depth include:

• greater adaptability of artists to support emerging local needs
• capacity to cultivate long-term visions and intergenerational stewardship
• social infrastructures to complement and regenerate physical ones
• creation of safe (but not too safe) containers for regional innovation
• resilience to political transitions which can derail long-term regeneration of place

In many respects, this Plaidoyer does its part to reflect generations of insight into the power of arts to bring out the best in places. Far from an itemised toolkit, it is the character of arts-based engagement which makes it impactful; generating ecological, economic, social, and cultural co-benefits across a mosaic of unique localities. Providing intentional support for long-term creative engagement in places through the New European Bauhaus and Horizon programmes will be foundational to the success of the NEB mission, in this critical chapter and its resonance through the decades ahead.

About the Writer:
Steward Pickett

Steward Pickett is a Distinguished Senior Scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York. His research focuses on the ecological structure of urban areas and the temporal dynamics of vegetation.

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Steward Pickett

What Does Science Get from Nature-Based Solutions?

It is clear that the idea of nature-based solutions has an important role to play in promoting the inclusion of ecological knowledge and appreciation of natural places and processes in planning and managing the urban realm. In several ways, NBS is an improvement over the term “ecosystem services” as a bridge to public engagement and action, because “nature” is likely a more welcoming term than “ecosystem,” which sounds technocratic to some people. I recall a report from a consortium of conservation organizations many years ago that recommended using “land,” for example, as a friendlier alternative to an ecosystem in public discourse.

As for the other noun in the NBS couple, anybody with eyes even partly open (dare I say “woke”?) these days recognizes the need for solutions in the face of overlapping urban and climate-driven crises. So, nature-based solutions as a term seems well suited to communicating and building a constituency for such policies and practices as ecological design, climate mitigation, and revitalization in settled places, ranging from cities to the wildland-urban interface.

So, what more could one want?

I wonder what benefits flow TO science itself from the idea of NBS. Of course, if the concept of nature-based solutions helps promote the goals noted in the plaidoyer, researchers, scientists, and educators will benefit from healthier, more sustainable environments just like (hopefully) everybody else. But I am wondering about identifying and encouraging explicit benefits to science as a process of knowing and a body of knowledge.

I am sharing these questions without answers. Although I have been musing on them in the background, I haven’t formulated answers myself. The first two are about content, and the last two are about process:

1. Are there ecological theories or concepts that NBS can help develop or clarify?
2. What empirical scientific research does NBS suggest?
3. How does NBS effectively promote interdisciplinary research more broadly?
4. In what ways does the co-production of knowledge motivated by NBS improve urban science in general?

I recognize that the ongoing efforts to promote, justify, and facilitate NBS are big and worthy jobs in and of themselves, but perhaps some focused reflection on “the other direction” might be useful as well.

About the Writer:
Daniela Rizzi

Architect/urban planner (Faculty of Architecture & Urbanism of the University of Sao Paulo). Holds a doctoral degree in landscape architecture and planning (Technical University of Munich). Senior expert on Nature-based Solutions and Biodiversity at ICLEI Europe (ICLEI Europe).

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Daniela Rizzi

I see transdisciplinarity as a powerful and dynamic concept that has the potential to redefine how we approach complex challenges in our world today. It challenges the traditional boundaries of knowledge, inviting diverse disciplines to come together in a way that transcends mere collaboration. It weaves a tapestry of ideas and perspectives, creating a rich landscape of possibilities that would be otherwise unattainable in isolation. In an era marked by increasing complexity and the urgent need to address intricate problems, transdisciplinary collaboration offers a fresh perspective. It goes beyond the confines of a single discipline and embraces the existence of alternative realities. Realities that are multifaceted, encompassing both the spiritual and the quantitative, the emotional and the rational, acknowledging the intricate interplay between our subjective, emotional responses and the objective, quantifiable data, creating a holistic perspective that takes into account the full range of human existence. By involving a wide array of stakeholders, including the wider public, transdisciplinarity becomes a powerful tool for co-producing knowledge that reflects a multitude of perspectives.

One of the most exciting aspects of transdisciplinarity is its embrace of the arts and humanities. It values diversity, equity, inclusion, imagination, and accessibility. It recognises that traditional scientific methods, while invaluable, should not be the sole route to comprehending and resolving complex issues. This inclusive approach allows for the integration of artistic and creative processes into problem-solving. Artists, creatives, and educators can step in to play a pivotal role in bridging the gap between the scientific community and the public. By embracing art and creative processes as fundamental ways of creating knowledge, transdisciplinary teams are enriched, and innovation may flourish.

Inclusivity should extend to educational approaches and initiatives. It’s vital to meet people from diverse backgrounds and identities where they are. In doing so, we ensure that everyone has the opportunity to participate and contribute to transdisciplinary efforts. It is important to include the documentation of stories from all stakeholders. Storytelling is not just about sharing experiences; it is a powerful tool for building trust and creating a common language that is indispensable for the realisation of sustainable and just communities.

While emphasising the importance of making neighborhoods more sustainable and livable, it is equally critical to ensure that planning and implementation processes are inclusive and equitable. Inclusivity should also consider the distribution of benefits, supporting local Indigenous communities, immigrant populations, traditional environmental knowledge keepers, and individuals from diverse backgrounds. Moreover, understanding how migrants and immigrants bring their unique visions of nature with them can be a powerful tool in engaging them as stewards of the environment. In this sense, “care” is a key concept. In the context of place-based, neighborhood-centered, and co-productive approaches, care lies at the heart of building livable and sustainable communities. It involves extending the feminist ethics of caretaking to include non-human nature, which aligns with Indigenous’ valuable lessons in sustainability and longevity. It’s equally vital to support local and citizen-driven stewardship, exploring the networks of stewardship and care that often involve small civil society organisations, citizen groups, and small enterprises.

Transdisciplinarity is for me not just a concept. It represents a bridge to a future where diverse voices and ways of knowing are celebrated. It is a pathway to innovative solutions for the plural challenges that define the modern world. By embracing transdisciplinarity, we have the opportunity to weave together art, science, public perspectives, resources, and land management, empowering diverse voices to address the complex issues of our time.

About the Writer:
Mary Rowe

Mary W. Rowe is an urbanist and civic entrepreneur. She currently lives in Toronto, Canada, the traditional territories of the Anishinabewaki, Huron-Wendat and Haudenosauneega Confederacy, and works with government, business and civil society organizations to strengthen the economic, social, cultural and environmental resilience of the city and its neighborhoods.

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Mary Rowe

What we learn from place

One of the most perverse legacies of industrialization has been the structural reinforcement of specialization: the demand for increased production driving a greater and greater narrowing of tasks, initially performed by individuals until automated. AI is continuing this trajectory, celebrated as it releases humanity from tedious repetition. But, alas, decades of material success wrought through task-narrowing has taught the world many of the wrong things. Anyone arguing against the industrial process and ‘scaling’ is labeled a sentimentalist and a luddite. But does an efficient ‘end’ justify a minimized means? Life ― and living ― is not an ‘end’ ― it’s a process, rarely linear, more often crooked, long-winding, frequent dead-ends, requiring repeated course corrections. Life mimics nature, science examines nature, art reflects nature, science ― and life. Art, nature, and science are domains of the whole: none of them tolerate specialization. They are portals to seeing the whole.

A globalized world of free-flowing forms of capital ― of money, people, ideas ― makes seeing the whole nearly impossible. The only antidote to the bombardment of global inputs is re-grounding our focus on specific places. Places embody values, honed by history, and enable people to form attachments, to the natural and built environment of their place, and to each other. Places, by definition, are bounded, by geography, and topography, they produce regional economic and cultural benefits and ecological services. Attachments to places have the potential to neutralize differences of class, ethnicity, race, and social status: we can share our appreciation of, our love, and our mutual dependence on a place. But only if it’s wholly and equally accessible. The industrialized path of economic development served by specialization carved up places too, with property definitions and zoning regimes, and land tenure favouring private ownership taking us far away from a sense of our shared place. But even with those forces constraining our collective impulse, communities have continued to ‘occupy’ places as mutually important. Main Streets continue to incubate local commercial exchange at the same time as housing encampments emerge as an alternate form of shelter, and rural farmer’s markets bring produce to urban dwellers.

Beyond their extrinsic importance in providing shelter, sustenance, and exchange, the tangibility of places provides intrinsic benefits, because the process of creating and sustaining a place requires the engagement of the whole ― one perspective or angle isn’t enough. It takes all hands to nurture a place to be a place, through which we navigate and negotiate a shared future. It’s the result of neither art nor science, not linear or causal, or the result of any one specialization, but an amalgam of innumerable factors, and, interestingly, remarkably resilient. Places teach us to see life as a whole.

About the Writer:
Sean Southey

Sean is now in his second term as Chair of the IUCN CEC and is also President of Zamia Media. He is deeply committed to community empowerment and using creative media to facilitate powerful social change. Sean is a dual Canadian and South African citizen and has lived, worked and travelled in over 100 countries. He holds a MSC from the London School of Economics and a BA in Economics from University of British Columbia, and has a wonderful daughter, Safia.

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Sean Southey

As Chair of IUCN’s Commission on Education and Communication (IUCN CEC), I find the Plaidoyer for Transdisciplinary, Local Agency, and Creative Co-Creation an exciting call to action. We live in an age when our challenges are both unprecedented and complex. We are aiming to work through parallel climate and biodiversity crises while continuing to overcome social justice challenges, all within a complex and polarizing political context where conflicts continue and proliferate.

The Plaidoyer offers an innovative tool and approach ― transdisciplinary action at scale ― that works to touch the hearts of large numbers of people while building upon and respecting, local culture, community, art, and artists. At the IUCN CEC, we have recognized for some time that love and connection to nature is one of the most profound ways to impact long-term behaviours in favor of lifestyles that are good for the planet and people. When the heart is touched evidence shows that this impacts the way we educate ourselves, the jobs we take, the way we vote, shop, and the way we raise our children. Our research, which can be found at www.natureforall.global clearly demonstrates these linkages. Further, the literature also shows that “place” is a particularly important dimension of the bonds we create and feel for nature. Powerful experiences in natural landscapes generate an appreciation for that landscape which not only manifests in the location of origin, but in other similar landscapes. Simply, when we fall in love with nature in a particular mountain locale, we are more likely to love all mountain environments. This is also true for cities! It is true for those who are city-based but travel, often short distances, to experience “nature”. It is true for those who visit a community garden, a natural museum, a botanical garden, a green schoolyard, or a nature-based artist adventure.

What #NatureForAll shows us is that profound experiences in nature are important. When that experience is generated through a transdisciplinary lens; when it provokes responses from the head, the heart, and our hands, it’s even more likely to ignite the complex emotions that bond us to nature and shift our values. These are emotional responses ― we are talking about the way we feel, the values we have, what we appreciate. All these directly influence the way we live.

I deeply appreciate the Plaidoyer’s call for local and community action. Local action is powerful as it more easily allows for an alignment between values and action. It tends to bring the sensitivity to context that creates more impactful experiences. The call for local co-creation, convening of communities at all levels, cascading disciplines, local art, festivals, and community efficacy is exciting and, I feel, critical for a meaningful change in our cultural relationship with nature.

The Plaidoyer provokes us to act on these insights. Bringing together art, local community, multiple disciples, and nature itself can help shift the way we interact with each other, and our planet ― moving us towards a culture of conservation and care.

About the Writer:
Chantal van Ham

Chantal van Ham is a senior expert on biodiversity and nature-based solutions and provides advice on the development of nature positive strategies, investment and partnerships for action to make nature part of corporate and public decision making processes. She enjoys communicating the value of nature in her professional and personal life, and is inspired by cooperation with people from different professional and cultural backgrounds, which she considers an excellent starting point for sustainable change.

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Chantal van Ham

In a time of growing inequality, humanitarian emergencies, environmental degradation, climate change-related challenges, and artificial intelligence, access to knowledge and information that is scientifically credible and based on truth, and connecting with like-minded spirits, is more important than ever. However, it has never before been so challenging to find such information and reach others who want to cooperate and share their ideas and experiences for our common mission.

This mission is to co-create community-centered, creative, and transdisciplinary actions to take care of our local environments through the deployment of Nature-based Solutions, to achieve the beautiful, sustainable, livable, healthy, and inclusive neighbourhoods called for in the New European Bauhaus.

In my view, going back in time to learn from the generations before us can be very valuable, to finding pathways towards the future. We often seem to forget how cooperative and co-creative our ancestors were and how strong their understanding of the foundations of the sustainable society that we are striving for today.

This starts by restoring the understanding of the natural world and its wonder, beauty, and all that it gives us every day. It means learning about the connections between all of the living world and our lives and economy and creating space and momentum for turning good ideas into reality through community spirit and stewardship.

I have always found the Transition Town movement one of the best in creating such opportunities. In Liège, Belgium, the movement invited local civil society to a meeting where they were asked the question to imagine: ‘What if, within one generation, the majority of the food grown in this city were to come from the land immediately surrounding it?’ 4 years later, the local movement had raised €5 million of local investment, had set up 14 cooperatives, including a seed-saving co-op, a co-op growing mushrooms on coffee waste, a vineyard and a fairtrade milk project. The initial question was taken up by the Municipality which has made all the land it owns around the city available for people to grow food in, and is involving schools, universities, and hospitals involved and change food procurement.

Another beautiful example of citizen action is from Kibera, Kenya. In 2006, the nonprofit Kounkuey Design Initiative launched an approach to improving drainage and sanitation that relies on participatory, step-by-step upgrades of existing infrastructure. Working with community-based organizations, the initiative created a network of public spaces where both built and natural infrastructure, including areas of restored riverbank, help protect the community from floods and reduce pollution across Nairobi’s watershed.

Co-created and managed by local residents, Kounkuey Design Initiative’s 11 public spaces provide the community with more than just flood controls. They are also places to play, learn, and earn a living. The projects build a sense of ownership and pride within the community ― and they work, showing it’s possible to give all city residents safe, accessible, and climate-resilient public spaces.

These examples show the strength of communities, and their creativity and cooperation can drive the change in developing ideas for inclusive action that can make neighbourhoods more resilient and livable.

About the Writer:
Tom Wild

Tom Wild is based in the Department of Landscape Architecture at University of Sheffield where he is the Principal Investigator for the Horizon 2020 project Conexus. Tom is an ecologist, specialising in aquatic and riparian ecosystems, and catchment management practices.

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Tom Wild, Mariana Dias Baptista, and Geovana Mercado

How can we evaluate the impact of transdisciplinarity, local agency, and co-creation in urban nature-based solutions?

The call for co-creation and cross-sectoral action on ecosystem restoration is welcomed and well-needed after decades of top-down environmental policies and planning frameworks in many countries and cities. However, it still remains unclear what will be the measurability and impact of these approaches to developing Nature-based Solutions. Also, the imperative for transdisciplinarity reflects familiar gaps between conceptually driven calls for holistic assessment of urban nature restoration programs versus many city stakeholders’ everyday realities of data paucity, incommensurability, and complexity.

New governance indicators and assessment approaches (e.g., van der Jagt et al., 2022) go some way in filling these gaps and particularly providing a foil against the dominance of physical and environmental outcomes in assessment frameworks. Even in academic literature, the majority of Nature-based Solutions impact assessments tend to address relatively few indicators and just a handful of impacts. This presents real challenges as regards knowledge exchange and co-creation in developing and evaluating city plans and other strategies. New paradigms such as nature-based thinking (Randrup et al., 2020; Mercado et al., 2023), place more emphasis on the transformation of human-nature relations, through developing a new mindset that recognises the intrinsic values of nature, and more closely following relationships between community, governance, and nature’s ecological qualities and cycles.

Nature-futures and other ambitious horizon-scanning approaches represent another interesting reaction to solutionism. The exercise of imagining a desired future for nature in our cities has the potential to help fill gaps in promoting positive visions for urban futures and shift the way we think about human-nature relationships. Moving away from anthropocentric ideas about the future by inviting a more-than-human thinking helps to creatively consider the needs of nature, broadening our views, and responding to the emerging calls to reassess human-nature relationships. Moreover, engaging with artists, creatives, and educators in this exercise will help trigger creativity and imagination to create the transformative pathways we need to integrate richer forms of knowledge and experiences.

These concepts show real promise but also raise many questions. Further research and innovation are required to ascertain the different organisational and socio-economic changes needed to support such relations, as well as the monitoring and evaluation processes that can properly address local conditions and account for specific local evidence needs.

References:

van der Jagt et al. (2022). An action framework for the participatory assessment of nature-based solutions in cities.

Randrup et al. (2020). Moving beyond the nature-based solutions discourse: introducing nature-based thinking.

Mercado et al. (2023). Supporting nature-based solutions via nature-based thinking across European and Latin American cities.

About the Writer:
Mariana Dias Baptista

Mariana Dias Baptista is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Sheffield working on the future and values of nature-based solutions in Latin America and Europe and particularly interested in the socio-environmental benefits of nature in cities and their significance for planning and management.

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About the Writer:
Geovana Mercado

Geovana Mercado is a Postdoctoral researcher at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Landscape Governance and Management group. Her main research interests centre in nature and urban nature governance, institutional and organisation theories, Global South perspectives, nature-based solutions and urban living labs.

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About the Writer:
Dimitra Xidous

Dimitra Xidous is a Research Fellow in TrinityHaus, a research centre in Trinity College Dublin’s School of Engineering that focuses on co-creation and the intersection between the built environment, health, wellbeing inclusion, climate action and sustainability. She is an Executive Editor of SPROUT, an eco-urban poetry journal, run in partnership with The Nature of Cities.

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Dimitra Xidous

Embodied Knowing, Co-creation, and Transdisciplinarity: All Wrapped Up in the Fabric of the World

For the past 2 years, I have been struggling to write a particular academic paper. Despite my best efforts, this paper will not flow. It’s a funny thing because, much of what concerns me (for the writing of that paper) is laid out here, in big and small ways, in the Plaidoyer for Transdisciplinarity, Local Agency, and Creative Co-Creation in Horizon Europe and the New European Bauhaus. I feel very inspired by what is laid out here, in this text, as it concerns the nature of transdisciplinarity, the conditions for effective and meaningful co-creation and engagement, and how we approach and practice care and caring ― in and for our neighbourhoods, for the communities and people that give them shape and frame them, and, by extension, the shaping and framing that very obviously and very naturally occurs in and across time, as we gather and apply our individual and collective knowledge, again and again.

When it comes to knowing ― and how we come to know what we know, and how we come to make meaning in and of the world, I (re)turn again (and always) to the body ― the body as a zero point for (and of) experience, knowledge, and expertise (cue Maurice Merleau-Ponty!): “[v]isible and mobile, my body is a thing among things; it is caught in the fabric of the world, and its cohesion is that of a thing. But, because it moves itself and sees, it holds things in a circle around itself”. If I could tweak this, tilt it ever so slightly, I would say, yes, the body holds things. It holds, and it carries, and it remembers (and re-members) all things around itself, but! ― when I think about coming to know, making meaning, and generating knowledge, I imagine this holding and carrying and remembering more like a spiral. I imagine a line ― a line that curves and bends but does not connect back onto itself; instead, it goes round and round the body in a spiral. In so doing, it moves in two directions ― one vertical, the other horizontal, all at the same time. Moving vertically, the spiral (wrapped around a body/the body/my body), drills down into the very essence of knowing (of how we (I) come to know what we (I) know). For me, this vertical movement compels me to consider what I know ― to drill into what the body carries and holds and remembers. In one attempt to write the paper that I have been unable to write, I wrote this line down, from another paper: “memory lives in the body”.  This line sent me spiralling about the ways in which the body re-members ―  and I drilled myself down to this: that when I speak of “muscle memory” (what is remembered in the body), I acknowledge and welcome the weight and power of the lived experience: the everyday-ness of our lives ― the mundane, the joyful, the sad and exquisite that contribute to an embodied way of knowing, seeing and being in the world. I understand the body/my body as holding/carrying/remembering towards an embodied way of knowing ― what is beautiful about this, for me, is that it is not static; this way of knowing lends itself to openness and transformation and change (this feels very natural to me, caught up as I am in the fabric of the world).

If this is true for me ― this embodied sense of knowing and being in the world ― then it is true for others as well. We are all changing and transforming, in our knowing and understanding, all the time. Nothing is static; the vertical drilling down that yields personal and embodied knowledge does not happen in a vacuum. The dynamic nature of meaning-making and knowledge generation yields (offers up) space for connection(s) to be made, for trust to take root, for vulnerability, and (here is one of my most favourite words, and I use it often when it comes to facilitating meaningful co-creation and engagement): intimacy. I don’t know how you can ask anyone to give in (yield) and offer up what they know (which, by extension also means being given (sometimes very) personal insight (no matter how big or small) into how they have come to know what they know) without fostering and building intimacy. We do not talk about intimacy enough and what it means and what it looks like when we engage in place-making; or what role intimacy plays in successful stewardship, in establishing and sustaining intergenerational relationships, and as a significant driver for inclusion, sustainability, and quality of experience. I think we should (language and how we use it matters).  For me, intimacy is essential (in all things, including how we thread the pillars and principles of the New European Bauhaus into the fabric of the world); its role is as significant and equal as that as of love. Spoiler alert: we do not talk about love (enough, if at all, either ― I would invite you to read Audrey Lorde’s magnificent essay ‘The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power ’ as it lays it all out, perfectly; imagine if the New European Bauhaus considered the erotic, as described by Lorde (“[t]he very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects ― born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony”) as a driving principle or pillar!); maybe this is why our problems are so wicked ― there is an absence of intimacy, of love, of the erotic, in our collective thinking ― there is a lack of understanding (I’ve done and continue to do my vertical drilling down on this matter; give me time ― and the ability to write that paper I cannot seem to write!).  But I am getting ahead of myself ― let’s turn back, to that spiral I started with; I want to end, moving in the other direction.

I wrote that for me, the spiral moves in two directions. Having drilled into the vertical, time to get horizontal. In a horizontal direction, the spiral radiates ever outwards, out into the world. I move from an interior verticality towards an exterior that is always expanding, horizontally until it (the radiating spiral)/I brush against these words by sculptor Richard Serra, which express an idea I am also having (and which I hope to one day include in the paper I am struggling to write): “[i]n most of the works that I did before Torques Ellipses, I formed the space with the material that I was using and I focused on the measure and positioning of the work in relation to a given context. In these works, however, I started with the void, that is, I started with space, starting from the inside towards the outside, not from outside towards the inside, to be able to find the skin”. [Aside: I love his mind and would recommend his short but superb little essay on weight.] His desire to ‘find the skin’ feels familiar to me, insofar as I understand and apply it to what it means to be transdisciplinary. To work across disciplines is to let the ‘skin’ of one discipline find another, and another after that; and having found themselves, let’s not be afraid to let them ‘touch’. When (and where) disciplines touch, an opportunity arises to put the vertical drilling down that generates embodied knowing (in ourselves, our communities, our neighbourhoods) to good horizontal use ― and all of it, again and again, all wrapped up in the fabric of the world.