- New alliances
Future placemaking, and future everything, needs a radical shift for more liveable futures.
We propose a series of walks that practice a different kind of togetherness: one that creates situations of attunement to multispecies placemaking and worldmaking practices. If we are to respond to the overlapping crises care-fully, human-centered notion of ‘best practice’ has to make a way for multispecies-centered one.
The sensory aspect of the walks brings in ways of understanding places, rooted in embodied engagement. We will walk and pay attention, through the senses, to practice a wholesome way of noticing the interconnected nature of our places.
This is about staying with the heterogeneity of world-making practices - by Japanese knotweed, seagulls, people of colour, weather and more. ‘It matters what worlds make worlds’ and through sensory walks, we want not only to recognize these practices but celebrate them, nurture them and build new collaborative multispecies alliances.
The sensory aspect of the walks seeks to bring in diverse ways of understanding places, rooted in embodied engagement. We will walk and pay attention, through all the senses, to practice a more wholesome way of noticing the interconnected nature of our places.
Through this, we will walk alongside those, whose ways of knowing and being in the world have not made it into the ways in which places are made.
This is one outcome of such multispecies mapping practice, where children mapped their locality, to re-imagine the area from the perspective of plants. On this imaginative mural, human and non-human forms come together as a hybrid species – half plant and half-human.
We envision creating a framework for multispecies placemaking as an outcome of the conducted walks and workshops.
