Content uploaded by Kit Kat Braybrooke
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Kit Kat Braybrooke on Mar 14, 2023
Content may be subject to copyright.
1
Note: This is the authors’ version of an article accepted for publication in the journal CITY. Changes
resulting from the publishing process such as copy-editing, typesetting, and other quality control
mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. This author pre-print manuscript version is available
for personal, non-commercial and non-derivative uses only. Citation: Hee-jeong Choi, Jaz, Kit
Braybrooke and Laura Forlano. 2023. “Care-full co-curation: critical urban placemaking for more-than-
human futures”. CITY: n.p. doi:10.1080/13604813.2022.2149945
Care-full co-curation: critical
urban placemaking for
more-than-human futures
Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Kit Braybrooke and Laura Forlano
Can participatory engagements in the form of more-than-human
co-creation be a generative form of socially and ecologically-just urban
placemaking? In recent years, there has been growing interest across
sectors in bringing together diverse needs, desires, and experiences through
co-creative processes that foster transformative futures, which involve
caring with, and for, specific stakeholders. However, institutionalised and
increasingly formulaic approaches to care and participation raise
questions of who exactly is being included and excluded, how co-creation
is carried out, and to what ends. This article explores three interrelated
examples of critical urban placemaking in the arts, interrogating how we
might design for liveable urban futures as matters of care. We propose
that this is achievable through the critical conceptual lens of ‘care-full co-
curation’, which prioritises the vital co-existence of all beings, and designs
with (and alongside) the needs and lived experiences of human and other-
than human actors and agencies alike.
2
Introduction
This article has evolved alongside the Covid-19 pandemic. Since December 2019, the
ways that the ‘throwntogetherness’ (Massey 2005) of urban spaces is perceived and
experienced has fundamentally been transformed across the world. Publicness has
increasingly become a distant abstraction for many who remain immunocompromised and/or in
precarious circumstances, leaving the risks of its perilous physical dimensions for the already
marginalised to take care of in ongoing fights for equality and justice worldwide, as seen in
#BLM, #AgainstAsianHate, and #MahsaAmini protests. The control of personal mobilities
through the introduction of public health and safety measures — some aiming to foster
collective care, others desiring to conveniently control the masses — has had a profound
impact on those whose livelihoods depend on informal street-level economies, public
spaces and collective political action and resistance, as seen in the case of Hong Kong
protests (Chan, Harris, and Choi 2022), closures of social infrastructure (Braybrooke,
Janes, and Sato 2021), and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (Quinn V et al. 2022). The covid-19
pandemic reminds us of a timeless adage that those who carry the least responsibility for the
world’s injustices often end up suffering the most in times where war, conflict, and climate
emergency reign. With these intersecting forces in mind, we present this paper from a space of
cautious hope, based on a belief that change is the only constant, and that transformation
lies around every turn — in a quiet acknowledgement of the lives, homes, hopes, and
publics that have been lost and remain threatened — and the many dreams yet to come true.
Across design fields globally
1
, there has been growing cross-sectoral interest during and beyond
the covid-19 pandemic in fostering ‘diversity, inclusion and belonging’ (Warner, Kurtiş, and Adya
2020; Grzanka 2020; Rankin and Thomas 2019) by moving from consultative to co-creative
models of engagement in designing a wide range of outputs for social change, from
reimagined health care systems and social services to digital technologies and city
spaces. These developments are driven by the democratic potential of co-creation as a
method, concept, and policy-making tool for including diverse (but mostly human) ‘publics’
and their lived experiences in the development process, especially those who are
1
Defined expansively as urban planning, architecture, systems design, strategic design, graphic design, product and
industrial design, interaction design, experience design, service design, biodesign, game design, civic design, and fashion design as
well as many other fields and disciplines.
3
considered marginalised (Björgvinsson, Ehn, and Hillgren 2012; Huybrechts, Dreessen, and
Hagenaars 2018).
Terms like ‘co-design’ and ‘co-creation’ are often confused, however, and are increasingly used
interchangeably (Sanders and Stappers 2008) to refer to a wide array of different kinds of
participatory activities, from civic hackathons and design sprints to corporate crowdsourcing
campaigns, and from new modes of governance such as participatory budgeting to community
consultations in the redesign of services. This diffusion of co-creation into institutional territories,
and the looseness of its meanings, serves to both enhance and delegitimise its utility as a
mechanism for inciting change through equitable, socially just and sustainable urban
development. Critics have cited examples of where terms typically associated with
intersectional approaches like ‘co-creation’, ‘justice’ and ‘equity’ are used merely
gesticulatorily, and co-opted by dominant groups in society (from state to corporate actors)
who seem to be more interested in reinforcing the monocultural design of products and
services than in inviting participants into a truly transformative co-development process
(Warner, Kurtiş, and Adya 2020). In this paper, we argue that it is essential to expand notions of
co-creation to ‘more-than-human’ actors such as microbes, plants, and animals, as well as the
computational systems that make up urban places. In addition, we argue that it is
simultaneously necessary to rethink our approaches to urban placemaking, drawing on a
range of examples from scholarship, art, design, and engineering. In particular, we draw on
projects from the digital humanities and public art as well as critical design and engineering
(Sayers 2018).
The term ‘placemaking’ is one of many illustrations of these linguistic gymnastics in
practice. Placemaking is a community-building tradition long deployed through urban
design practices in the United States and elsewhere, since the 1960s assertions of Jane
Jacobs and the Project for Public Spaces that cities should respond to the needs of everyday
people, through interdisciplinary approaches that shape public spaces collaboratively
(Jacobs 1969; Project for Public Spaces n.d.). The scale and nature of placemaking projects
vary according to community and collaborator needs, for example from direct political action as
seen in Figure 1, depicting the Hong Kong Lennon Wall ‘the most long-lasting, large-scale
participatory project in the 2019–2020 Hong Kong anti-extradition movement’ (Chan, Harris,
and Choi 2022, 355), to street-level events and celebrations such as community dining with
neighbours. Cara Courage argues that placemaking efforts to engage publics differ from
4
co-options of the term in other venues by means of the flavour of participative
community-building that it fosters (2020, 8). This results in a particular kind of relation, where
‘the community is [deemed] the expert in being the community’ (Courage et al. 2020,
citing artist Jeanne van Heeswijk 2012). Placemaking thus is a form of co-creation, an
attempt to encourage transdisciplinary collaborations between communities, artists, urban
designers, policymakers, and other stakeholders and seekers to work together, in ways that
foster inclusive ways forward and invite diverse social actors to the table. Placemaking should,
at its onset, also reinforce the value of public spaces that are open to everyone, the kind that
‘define a place, and support its ongoing evolution’ (Courage et al. 2020, 8).
Such relations are inevitably imbued with uneven power dynamics. Courage notes
that ‘The very real situation for many at the community end of placemaking—or at
least, what is branded as placemaking—is of wholesale social cleansing, communities
evicted and dispersed by developers, artists brought in to placewash’ (2020, 9). This is
evident in that placemaking in recent years has been more commonly deployed in top-
down policymaking contexts by state, institutional, and corporate actors who wish to display
their approaches as participatory and democratic (Markusen and Gadwa 2010). In their
account of a collaborative housing project called Africatown Activation in Seattle, O’Leary et al.
(2019) found that despite their enactment of co-creation language to position themselves as
culturally sensitive, the plans proposed by developers and architects did not always reflect
the needs of the community, who had to carry the burden of ensuring their voices were
adequately heard in the design process.
This diffusion of co-creation discourse into institutional territories echoes that of other
‘fashionable’ terms commonly associated with co-creation such as inclusion and
transformation. Because such terms are diversely understood and enacted by a plurality of
social actors across multiple contexts, some of their outputs actively dismiss the promotion
of the radical social change that was originally intended, instead reproducing products
and services that operate in defense of the status quo (Feola 2015, 381). As such, it is more
necessary than ever to cultivate a sensitivity to the context and evolution of co-creation
processes, and the multiple layers of situated difference and experience that they may
both amplify and obstruct.
5
While research and practice concerning the possibilities and limits of co-creation
can increasingly be found in disciplines like design, urban studies and the social
sciences, the literature remains limited with regards to a specific focus on whether, and
how, the co-creation of cities can bring about more than tokenistic actions, and ensure socially
and ecologically just futures. Previous issues of City, for example, have discussed various
manifestations and outcomes of participatory engagements, most of which have focused on
spatial design through social(ised/ising) design (such as the special issue edited by Göbel,
Grubbauer and Richter 2017) and participatory governance and planning (Chatterton 2010;
Figure 1: Hong Kong Lennon Wall as a site of urban participatory political action. This image by Pasu Au Yeung is
licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.
6
Davidson 2018; Lipietz, Lee, and Hayward 2014), as well as more recent studies on eco-social
conflicts emanating from complex, unjust power relations involving humans and sand (Cipriani
2022). There has also been a series of provocative papers that reframe traditional ethics and
logics of ‘care’ from feminist multispecies perspectives —for example, Merrifield (2015), Low
and Iveson (2016), and with a specific focus on urbanism, Fitz, Krasny, and Architekturzentrum
Wien’s Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (2019).
This paper extends these conversations about urban placemaking as care, drawing on Puig de
la Bellacasa's definition in particular. She writes:
Care is a human trouble, but this does not make of care a human-only matter.
Affirming the absurdity of disentangling human and nonhuman relations of care
and the ethicalities involved requires decentering human agencies, as well as
remaining close to the predicaments and inheritances of situated human doings
(Puig de la Bellacasa 2017, 62).
Specifically, Puig de la Bellacasa (2017) outlines three aspects of care as practice and praxis:
labor/work, affect/affections, and ethics/politics. We maintain that these three dimensions are
essential for thinking through the ways in which co-creation shapes more-than-human urban
placemaking. Observing how co-creation concepts are perceived and articulated also reinforces
the need for closer attention to be paid to decolonising the underlying asymmetries of power,
agency and access which structure, reinforce, and limit such relations (Braybrooke 2019;
Braybrooke and Jordan 2017; Warner, Kurtiş, and Adya 2020).
With these insights in mind, this paper asks who is included and excluded in seemingly
emancipatory co-creation processes – with attention to both human and other-than-human
modes of participation (entanglements which we refer to in this paper as ‘more-than-human’ to
recognise the many species, agencies, and processes which humans dwell in close relation
with, in line with the work of posthumanist scholars such as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa). We
interrogate what the politics of these inclusions and exclusions look like, how co-creation can be
carried out in more pluralistic cultural and social contexts, and to what ends. We frame how
working with concepts of the more-than-human can enable scholars and practitioners to move
beyond antiquated concepts of ethnocentrism, and place a crucial emphasis on the mutual
7
becoming of humans and the many others whom our species lives alongside and depends on to
build multiple, and inherently related, worlds (Choi, Forlano, and Kera 2020; Choi, Galloway,
and Jungnickel 2018; Forlano 2017, 2016; Bastian et al. 2016). Here, more-than-human signals
both algorithmic others as well as microbe, vegetal, animal, and other kinds of earthly creatures.
In the following sections, we explore these themes through a critical inquiry that examines
dynamics of representation as well as justice, care, and pluralism. Rather than aiming to answer
and/or define the problems of existing approaches and discourses, we conclude by proposing
the concept of ‘care-full co-curation’ as a lens that can be applied to, and enhance, co-creation
practices in critical urban placemaking processes by listening to, and designing with/alongside,
the needs and lived experiences of human and other-than-human agencies. In doing so, our
aim is to provoke future examinations of how co-creation practices can enable not only public
participation in an instrumental sense, but also facilitate the construction of just and equitable
urban futures which have been collaboratively designed with, and for, the diverse “ecolog[ies] of
selves” who co-constitute urban environments (Kohn 2007, 5).
Whose voice/s?
Cities rely on dense ecologies of diversity and pluralism. This is perhaps one of the very few
definitive statements that can be made about them. As Jane Jacobs explained, “varied
components [of cities] are interdependent in complex ways. The more niches for diversity of life
and livelihood in either [nature- or human-created] kind of ecosystems, the greater its capacity
for life” (Jacobs 1993, xvi). In this vein, urban environments are more than the infrastructures of
brick and mortar. They are also spaces, which are continually constructed, reconstructed and
co-constructed from the social relations of the human and more-than-human worlds who
constitute them, built upon a “pincushion of a million stories” (Massey 2013) and their histories
(see Figure 2). As such, a city is also a space of design, a living co-creation produced by those
who claim it. In the words of Arturo Escobar (2018, 5), “every community practices the design of
itself”.
8
Figure 2: More-than-human placemaking at the community garden of Templehofer Feld in Berlin, on repurposed land
formerly reserved for German military practice and Templehofer Airport, 2019. This image by Wikimedia Commons
contributor ’dronepicr’ is licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY 2.0 license:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.e4
These kinds of co-creative practices thus require defining, collating, applying, and casting back
to diverse, and often adversarial, ‘voices.’ Such engagements are difficult to do well, as
demonstrated in various fields, including design (e.g. Parra-Agudelo, Choi, and Foth 2017;
Robertson and Simonsen 2012; Birkbak, Petersen, and Jørgensen 2018), cultural studies (e.g.
Braybrooke 2018), health (e.g. Brown and Choi 2017), computer science (Sloane, Moss,
Awomolo and Forlano 2020), business and economics (e.g. Cooke and Kothari 2001), and
science and engineering (e.g. Galloway 2018). Yet, as we face a multitude of political,
technoscientific and ecological disruptions resulting from the covid-19 pandemic which
challenge the “myth” of human exceptionalism (Choi, Galloway, and Jungnickel 2018) by asking
‘who’ should be deemed a subject, thinking through transformational paths towards more
sustainable futures together remains a critical challenge for all involved.
9
Because co-creative approaches are considered to be resolutely aligned with transformative
practices, particularly those focused on social innovation (Freire, Borba, and Diebold 2011),
they often involve an explicit inclusion of marginalised or less-heard voices including those
marginalised by gender, race, ethnicity, age, economic status, disability, sexual orientation
and/or immigration status (as well as intersections of these categories) in the design process.
Yet, without careful balancing of the creative and the critical, simply focusing on improving “the
participative nature of design practices” can lead to anti-social, anti-political, and anti-inventive
results (von Busch and Palmås 2016, 282), narrowing the possible space for contestation by
counteracting original intentions to promote inclusivity and equity. Such detrimental effects can
be described as tyrannical, as participation can "mask the delegation of power and continued
centralization—all in the name of ‘democracy’ and decentralization” (von Busch and Palmås
2016, 282). Here, the obsession for participative solidarity with so-called marginalised groups
has been referred to as “the new contemporary narcotic” (Miessen 2016, 78).
Increasing mediation and algorithmic curation of experiences in everyday urban lives, for
example, through automated recommendation and/for decision making, further complicates the
meaning of ‘voice’ and ‘agency’ in such contexts. These dynamics can work in extremely
perilous ways for some, as seen in intensified forms of control and surveillance as part of
domestic violence, enabled by smart devices and sensors (Bowels 2018). This provides some
explanation for the growing interest in problematising how more traditional modes of listening—
e.g. active-passive and serious-social (Barker 1971)—have been normalised in organisational
and public communication (Macnamara 2016). These changing communication environments
highlight the need to ensure that participatory engagements in design research and beyond not
only entail listening—however actively—to those who are already included in the conversation
whose presence is legitimised, but also to seek out the perspectives of unfamiliar, neglected,
and/or omitted voices and agencies. As Sloane et al. argue with respect to machine learning,
“participation is not a design fix” and this applies to cities and placemaking as well (2020).
An important point to note is that listening is not just about hearing what is being said, but also
noticing what is not being expressed vocally or otherwise through careful attuning. Another
central concern here is the issue of who is deemed legitimate (and less than or illegitimate) to
give voice, where such groups and individuals happen to be placed, and who else they happen
to be speaking for. A crucial aspect of the alternative implied by these reconceptualisations is
that design work becomes located, by replacing “ways of being nowhere while claiming to see
10
comprehensively,” with “views from somewhere” in defiance of universalism and disembodiment
(Haraway 1988, 584). However, many co-creative endeavours tend to reproduce dialogues with
already identified and involved participant groups (who are typically human), unaware of the
inability of such relations to ensure that social, gender, ethnic diversity and other intersectional
issues of power and agency are actively addressed.
At other times, it is less about being unaware, and more about rationalising decisions already
preconceived. Evidence can be seen even among counter-movements with well-intended
ambitions to challenge the technocentric visions of control and efficiency embodied in ‘smart
city’ discourse (Greenfield 2017), as they often idealise, and place an over-emphasis on, the
participation of ‘smart citizens’ (Rose 2020; Christensen, Horn, and Johnson 2008). Examples
include the compassionate city, which places a primary focus on addressing issues surrounding
archetypal marginalised populations at the expense of identifying or addressing neglected and
unheard others, and the playable city, which commonly involves interventions exclusive to able-
bodied and connected individuals, disenfranchising disabled and other socio-spatially
marginalised groups from important urban issues of control and access rather than
empowering them (O’Sullivan 2016).
Simply defining the unheard/s from the start may be a tempting solution to the above mentioned
problems. However, this does not resolve issues of agency and access, and can even be
counterproductive; in Jacobs’ (1969, 121) words, “…to seek ‘causes’ of poverty in this way is to
enter an intellectual dead end, because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.” In
some cases, this may also lead to the unnecessary, and even markedly mis-informative,
‘othering’ of particular groups, and make less visible their diverse needs and desires. Another
core concern here is the additional burden placed on those at the margins - for example, BIPOC
(Black, Indigenous and People of Colour), gender-diverse people, and disabled people - who
must engage in invisible and often unpaid labour in co-creation and consultation contexts in
order to ensure their voices are heard, as has long been observed in their advocacy for
representation and inclusion in envisaging and enabling structural change. To avoid replicating
the “false sense of all-knowingness” (Haraway 1988, 582) that has all too often emerged from
the kinds of public consultations typically seen in urban development, therefore, an equitable
and socially just more-than-human co-creation process can benefit from starting with the
following question as proposed by Abram (2011, 175): how might we go beyond speaking
“about … [and] only behind their backs” and instead both actively call out and listen to them?
11
Proposing a mode of critical urban placemaking
as a matter of ‘care-full co-curation’
Actively calling out (or calling in) and listening can be particularly challenging, however, when
those involved in co-creation processes are hesitant to participate for reasons related to self-
preservation (Clark 2008), are experiencing participation fatigue (Cornwall 2008), or have had
experiences that lead them to mistrust institutional practices (Agudelo et al. 2018). These
relations may be further complicated by misuses of language, for example describing
participants as ‘vulnerable’ in situations where the term connotes inherent weakness or
victimisation (Gilson 2016), and mishearing or misunderstanding what participants are saying
(and not saying). In her participatory work with indigenous groups, for example, Eve Tuck
(2009) has called for a revisioning of research frameworks which emphasise oppression in ways
that depict disenfranchised communities as inherently broken, deprived, and wounded. Instead,
she calls for research partnerships which avoid the reproduction of negative discourses around
“damage” by focusing instead on participants’ desires, hopes, and capacities for “complexity,
contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives” (Tuck 2009, 416). This points to the need
to ‘call out’ together, in ways that consider a wide range of epistemological and methodological
concerns beyond mere representation of diversity and inclusion, and move beyond languages of
marginalisation and vulnerability to foster genuine engagement with the complexity of lived
experience amongst those perceived to be marginalised. These concerns of active listening
remain critical yet underexplored in theories and practices of placemaking as co-creation.
How might we listen, then, in ways that transcend binary oppositions of reproduction or
resistance, and instead make clear where we may have misheard, where internalized
(mis)understandings have shaped our beliefs, and where and why our empathic attempts have
failed? Central to addressing this question is an engagement of the researcher (and/or)
practitioner and other participants in a dialogic process centered on mutual care and well-being.
This process invites participatory practitioners to step up as “custodians of care” (Light and
Akama 2014, 160) who actively address questions such as: “how can we acknowledge the care
received from the co-creation participants?” (beyond financial incentives, for instance) and “how
might reciprocal caring influence the participatory process and its outcomes?”
12
These questions demand that we move beyond empathic design — e.g, the process of
designing technologies, services, and spaces ‘for’ those who are most impacted — and towards
care-based design (Avram et al. 2019; Braybrooke et al 2021; Brown and Choi 2017) in direct
collaboration with and alongside, which is only made possible by mindful “tinkering” (Mol,
Moser, and Pols 2010), We can do this, we argue, by shaping every element of the co-creation
process (including participation itself) as a matter of concern - or something that is “inherently
unsettled”, the configurations, ontologies and assumptions of which must be continually, and
collaboratively, addressed (Andersen et al. 2015, 250; Latour 2004; Latour 2005).
Proceeding with co-creation in this way situates care as a central requirement of sustainable
urban development, and requires rigorously dialogic, critical, and iterative engagements which
facilitate sense-making that is thoughtfully attuned to the multiple experiences and interests of
both human and other-than-human participants and those of whom such collaborations will
influence, while accepting the inherent uncertainties and difficulties of such encounters with
humility. This means allowing for contingency in the co-creation process, enabling it to move
beyond, or outside of, our own research and design agendas and expectations, and generating
attuned responses which directly relate to the needs and lived experiences of the participants,
co-creators and companions we work alongside.
In this sense, we believe care-full co-curation is an appropriate term for endeavours that apply a
critical conceptual lens to more-than-human co-creation practices. This term foremostly de-
centers the human and accepts pluralism, as has been long acknowledged and practiced in
many Indigenous and non-Anglo-European cultures (Page and Memmot 2021; Kimmerer 2013;
Abram 2107). It also prioritises a specific flavour of critical urban placemaking, which is informed
by justice and care work, as advocated by Jacobs, Puig de la Bellacasa, Scott and others
(Jacobs 1993; Puig de la Bellacasa 2017; Hobart and Kneese 2020; Scott 1998), which fosters
radical, contingent and collective flourishing among all actors involved in the process of co-
construction – human and other-than-human alike. Curation, in this context, can be perceived of
not only as the process of drawing together objects, actors and possibilities, but also as the
pursuit of experimenting with those relational potentials, by actively and deliberately inviting
human and other-than-human agencies to explore many possible futures together through
participatory encounters and discourses, “such that an alternative course, a different explication,
might become available” (Wilkie, Savransky, and Rosengarten 2017, 184). We also draw
13
together the combined etymologies of the terms accurate, curate, and curiosity here - the term
‘curate’, for example, originated in Middle English from cura, which in Latin means “care.”
Here, co-curation as a care-full (full of care, rather than insinuating caution as in careful)
practice creates a dynamic space for “agonistic pluralism” (Mouffe 1999) to emerge through the
messy and contingent relations of “curating content” and “staging conflict” (Miessen 2016, 51)
for critical-creative reframings of the worlds in which many different agencies operate and
transform. Thus, care, like co-creation, can be understood not just as an emotional or intuitive
task that is an essential part of critical urban placemaking, but also a practice — which requires
active consideration, thoughtfulness, and the ability to make judgements about the appropriate
actions to take in constantly shifting contexts. As we have discussed previously in this paper, it
is also important to recall that care can also become harmful when performed unnecessarily,
paternalistically or in an untimely manner (Pols 2012; Tuck 2009). One example would be to
assume that because a particular participatory action occurs in a public space, its process and
outcomes are necessarily open and inclusive. While this is a popular means of engagement for
many urban design interventions, it ignores the different levels of sociocultural (and sometimes
physical) accessibility that structure and limit such relations; it can also reduce the comfort and
safety perceived and experienced by heterogeneous groups of humans and other-than-humans
who may otherwise use and occupy the site and its surroundings for a wide range of purposes,
inadvertently and potentially violently creating “exclusionary” (Carmona 2010) spaces in the
process.
Another example involves the facilitation of participatory activities and environments that may
not be suitable for some participants, such as physical interactions, and/or choosing exposed or
open spaces. People who have had traumatic experiences — a majority in many parts of the
world (Kessler et al. 2017) — may find considerable discomfort in certain kinds of co-creative
situations owing to experiences of hypervigilance, which can result in difficulty feeling embodied
or safe in unfamiliar spaces (van der Kolk, 2014). Simply informing participants that they can
“opt out” of activities or offering a space to remove and calm themselves when engaging with
the activities has become triggering or stressful, can be uncaring and potentially harmful.
Although creating care-less – perceived comparatively to care-full rather than the opposite –
conditions has significant potential implications, the complexity and high level of skill required in
both formal and informal care practices continues to be undervalued (Holmes 2015). As well as
14
the obvious need to recognise the value of care-full knowledge and practice, how might we
cultivate and strengthen these skills in participatory urban spaces so that co-creation is
understood and practiced as care-full co-curation? We believe that the following examples from
socially-engaged art, design and engineering will be useful in illustrating the kinds of critical
approaches to placemaking that are in line with our vision.
Calling in, and listening to: three examples of
care-full co-curation in practice
In this section, we will describe how the more-than-human orientation of care-full co-curation
can contribute to critical urban placemaking through three examples of how its ontological
positionings can work in practice. Currently, there are many active projects that engage in care-
full co-curation with respect to more-than-human placemaking. For example, in recent years,
artists, scholars, designers and engineers have experimented with robots and drones (DiSalvo
and Lukens 2011), sheep (Galloway and Caudwell 2018), orangutans (Tironi and Hermansen
2018), plastiglomerates (Lindström and Ståhl 2017; Lindström and Ståhl 2014;), plants (Keune
2021) and birds (Jönsson and Lenskjold 2014) to name just a few. Here, in order to illustrate the
ways in which it is possible to develop an approach to the care-full co-curation of more-than-
human placemaking, we will discuss the following projects in more detail: 1) Feral Atlas, a
curatorial project by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou; 2)
Ghost Forest, a large installation work by Maya Lin, and; 3) a range of examples related to
citizenship, difference and placemaking with urban technologies.
A feral atlas
The Feral Atlas, available on the web as an interactive resource (see Figure 3), offers an early
look at how multispecies and networked worlds can convene in curatorial spaces of
experimentation in ways that weave hybrid topologies together across virtual and physical
terrains, and foster mutual acknowledgement and reflection (Tsing et al. 2021). This project is a
free-to-use web platform compiled by over one hundred researchers and practitioners across
the digital humanities and social sciences to explore "feral" ecologies, or the wild spaces and
encounters which have become defined by, and intertwined with, human-built infrastructures. It
15
offers a diverse compendium of field reports, glossary terms, and a ‘reading room’ of articles
which explore these dynamics, with topics ranging from plant diseases emerging from the
introduction of non-native species and other creatures of conquest to failed efforts to ‘tame’ so-
called savage landscapes into submission. It invites users to self-curate its collections according
to their own personal tastes and whims, in ways that carve out a multiplicity of routes through
“the land-, sea-, and airscapes of the Anthropocene” (Feral Atlas 2021).
Figure 3: Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene. This image is licensed under the Creative Commons
License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode
These feral ecologies are environments marked by danger, difference, displacement and flux,
as well as collaboration and co-evolution - qualities particular to the progression of common life
in the Anthropocene era that the Feral Atlas explores in all their complexity. As the
anthropologist Katy Overstreet writes in a chapter on the impacts of cat colonies on local
wildlife, "How do we learn to see the absences and hear the silences in landscapes?"
(Overstreet 2021). As such, the Feral Atlas is also an experiment in how hybrid virtual and
physical, and local and transnational, engagements can foster new means of sense-making, or
the process by which people give meaning to their own experiences through collective
encounters. By representing a place-based understanding of the impacts of ecological
destruction and adaptation which attempts to be simultaneously localised and transnational in
form, the Atlas argues that the feral entanglements of human and non-human actors are formed
16
through relations within and amongst industrial, imperial, post-colonial and hegemonic
infrastructures - which are always in the process of evolving.
The Feral Atlas illustrates how care-full co-creation can invite transdisciplinary collaboration,
field site observation, and networked culture-building. Its explorations bring to light the kind of
muddy, often unpredicted interspecies relationalities that mark existence in the Anthropocene -
the “long-distance transfers, both intentional and unintentional, [that] introduce new living and
nonliving things into local ecologies” (Feral Atlas, 2021). As a free and open digital resource
which can be navigated in a number of ways, the Atlas invites users to interpret its contents
intuitively, while also offering an analytic understanding of the wide-reaching ecological impacts
of the built environment as befits the particular insights and aims of its co-authors. The acts of
inclusion and exclusion which define the contents of the Feral Atlas thus serve to both reinforce,
and at the same time challenge, the asymmetric power relations of the social actors who wield
them. This makes the Atlas a political force in its own right, warranting further examination of
how its semiotic relations are negotiated and disseminated across multiple platforms.
Ghost forest
Ghost forests are appearing across the world. Rising sea levels, drought, fire, storms, insect
infestations, and more, as a direct result of climate change (Ury et al. 2021; Kirwan & Gedan
2019) are killing trees in coastal and estuarine landscapes, leaving behind the wooden shells
that were once lively creatures. Maya Lin’s ‘Ghost Forest’
2
is a six-month installation which
temporarily places 49 dying Atlantic white cedar trees in Madison Square Park in New York City
in 2021 (see Figure 4). The trees were sourced from New Jersey Pine Barrens, where more and
more ghost forests have been appearing caused by saltwater infiltration from rising sea levels.
Public parks are contested spaces, being artificial spatial inventions built on colonial, capitalist,
and industrial agendas, but at the same, also sites of particular civic and political engagement
(Anguelovski et al. 2018; Gabriel 2013; Gandy 2002). As such, that these trees are physically
situated in one of the most iconic public parks in one of the most powerful global cities (Sassen
1991) is paradoxical. We note the history of Madison Square Park itself, shaped by colonialist,
2
See https://www.pacegallery.com/journal/maya-lin-create-new-installation-madison-square-park/. Accessed on June 16,
2022.
17
capitalist, and industrialist dynamics
3
, which are also found at the root of climate change: they
are what turned the trees into ghosts. Visitors may reflect on some of these aspects as they
move around the eerie ghost forest incongruous to its familiar surroundings. They can also
listen to audio recordings of species that once moved around the same space, but have since
disappeared in the process of urbanisation; they can do so by using QR codes, a quotidian
feature of human urban life since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, which forcefully
paused human movements in urban areas. Lin’s Ghost Forest fuses memories of different
times, spaces, and other-than-humans.
Figure 4: Ghost Forest by Maya Lin in the Madison Square Park, New York City. This image by Wikimedia Commons
contributor ‘oinonio’ is licensed under the Creative Commons License CC BY-SA
2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/
3
https://madisonsquarepark.org/park/about-the-park/
18
‘Ghost Forest’ also brings into the mix memories of different people by integrating diverse
participatory and engagement activities. A series of on and off-line events were planned and
took place over its six-month life in the park, including lectures, performances, exhibitions,
hands-on workshops, and a symposium inviting people with varied interests, ideas, and
experiences, such as members of public, researchers, educators, artists, non-profit
organisations, and policy makers. It included planting of 1000 plants in public parks across New
York City’s five boroughs, for which people could volunteer; this aimed at off-setting the carbon
footprint generated by the artwork with a view to sustain a long-term positive socio-ecological
impact. Even further, the piece was accompanied by a newly launched website called What Is
Missing?
4
an online archive where people around the world can share memories of “something
that you, or your parents or grandparents, have personally witnessed diminish or disappear from
the natural world. Or … a story of recovery, about ecological conservation or restoration”. Ghost
Forest care-fully co-curates multiple ways of relating for and with multiple people (and other-
than-humans), thereby becoming a relational space with and through which we can question,
imagine, and act together towards more-than-human futures in which different ontologies,
epistemologies, and relating for and with care can take place. This so-called site-specific art
does not hurriedly define the site but rather opens and encompasses it for as long as possible.
The identity of the art work is thus not singular but plural; its existence can only be sustained
through care-full curating.
Critical urban placemaking with
computational systems
While the dominant paradigm within computing has been to render the world -- bodies, homes,
workplaces and cities -- computable by amassing large data sets about people and things (Finn
2017), there are a number of projects that seek to interrupt these techno-determinist narratives
that equate technology with progress and, instead, work towards more situated, contextual,
embedded and relational ways of engaging and living with computation. Here, concepts such as
data feminism (D’Ignazio and Klein 2020), design justice (Costanza-Chock 2020), and
pluriversal design (Escobar 2018) are relevant in terms of theorising ways of designing urban
4
https://www.whatismissing.org/about
19
technologies that address questions around gender, race, class, and ability and, more
specifically, that aim to create anti-sexist, anti-racist and anti-ableist urban technologies. The
more-than-human as it applies to computational things has been theorised as a mode in which
humans and machines are co-performers (Giaccardi and Rëdstrom 2020) that design with
(Wakkary 2021) technologies; they are understood as intimate infrastructures (Forlano 2017)
that are deeply entangled with everyday life whether in and/or on our bodies as well as across
domestic and workplaces and urban contexts.
Figure 5: Paolo Cirio's Street Ghosts at Ars Electronica Center, by Martin Hieslmair. This image is licensed under the
Creative Commons License CC BY-NC-ND 2.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/
Along these lines, an early precedent for intervening with the politics of technology were the
urban technology and locative media projects of artists including Paolo Cirio (e.g. Street
Ghosts
5
), Julian Oliver (e.g. Border Bumping
6
) and Mark Shepard (e.g. Serendipitor
7
) among
others. In “Street Ghosts”, Cirio posts life-size posters of people whose images were captured in
Google Street View at the urban locations where the pictures were taken (see Figure 5). Cirio
5
See https://paolocirio.net/work/street-ghosts/. Accessed on June 15, 2022.
6
See http://borderbumping.net. Accessed on June 15, 2022.
7
See http://serendipitor.net/site/?page_id=2. Accessed on June 15, 2022.
20
writes that the project “revealed aesthetic, biopolitical, economic, and legal issues concerning
privacy, copyright, and visual perception” and that, in the work “ghostly human bodies appear as
casualties of the info-war in the city, a transitory record of collateral damage from the battle
between corporations, governments, civilians, and algorithms over public and private
information,” a prescient understanding of what is at stake when corporations have control over
vast amounts of urban data. Here, we might argue that the ghosts – whether digital twins or
data doubles – become eerie participants in the social life of the city, warning citizens of the
more-than-human creatures in the midst. In similar ways, Oliver’s project “Border Bumping”
critiques notions of national geographic boundaries with a “dislocative media that situates
cellular telecommunications infrastructure as a disruptive force”, illustrating the ways in which
electromagnetic signals are disobedient in that they leak and blead across national borders.
Through this work, Oliver argues that the dissonances and discrepancies between the location
of our bodies and that of our devices produces a “new and contradictory terrain for action”. It
also raises the question about whose bodies are allowed to flow freely across borders and
whose are required to stay behind, even as their devices are allowed to roam freely. Lastly,
Shepard’s “Serendipitor” questions the efficiency of computational systems such as Google
Maps by introducing alternative routes through the city. All three of these projects are
interventions in and with urban technologies, productively questioning the logics of computation
and urban placemaking to reveal the socio-technical imaginaries and explore their contexts: an
approach that was described as "situated technologies" (Shepard 2011) in the mid-2000s. In
this way, they ask about the role of urban technologies with respect to control, participation, and
citizenship as well as about more-than-human participation in critical urban placemaking itself.
While these kinds of projects continue to be interesting and relevant, as discourses around
artificial intelligence (AI) have grown, artists have begun to engage more deeply with critiques
around the ways in which AI systems embed politics that are sexist, racist, classist, ableist, and
colonialist. As a result, scholars, artists and designers have found new ways to experiment with
technology as well as build alternative narratives about what these technologies might be for --
reimagining the more-than-human world of computational technologies and AI systems
otherwise. For example, a selection of recent projects that engage critically and
generatively with AI include Maya Indira Ganesh's "AI is for Another"
8
, Jason Lewis et al.’s work
8
See https://aisforanother.net. Accessed on June 15, 2022.
21
on indigenous games (2018), Heather Dewey Haborg's Stranger Visions
9
, Stephanie Dinkins
Secret Garden
10
, Nettrice Gaskins "Featured Futurists"
11
, Beth Coleman's “Speculative AI:
Octavia Butler and Other Possible Worlds”, micha cárdenas’ “We Already Know and We Don’t
Yet Know” and Mimi Onuoha and Mother Cyborg’s (Diana Nucera) “A People’s Guide to AI”
workshop”
12
. These projects experiment with algorithms and, even, biotechnology in order to
illustrate the ways in which it is not only our cities that must be designed collectively and care-
fully but also technologies themselves. Engaging with what it means to be human and, more-
than-human, with playful, performative and generative artistic practices is one way of exploring
the politics of these relationships as they intersect with citizenship, difference and placemaking.
For example, Ganesh’s “AI is for Another” asks “what is AI? Or, how do we understand what it
means to be human and non-human through artificial intelligence? This dictionary presents how
intelligence, humans, machines, data and mind exist across a variety of cosmologies, sciences
and art practices as perceptions change over time.” The project aims to “forks and distractions
in how ‘AI’ is being imagined and produced in the world,” (Ganesh et al 2020).
Dewey Haborg’s Stranger Visions engages with her concern about racial profiling, “genetic
determinism” and the “culture of biological surveillance” by extracting DNA from the traces of
everyday life (i.e. hair, gum) in New York – and using genomic research and computational
modeling to create life-size 3D printed models of what the people might look like. Stephanie
Dinkins’ Secret Garden is an online experience and an immersive installation that showcases
“the power and resilience in Black women’s stories,” arguing that “stories are algorithms”.
Approaching these questions from another perspective, Nettrice Gaskins creates algorithmically
generated portraits of well-known Black leaders including artists, musicians, political leaders,
scholars and activists. Her “techno-vernacular” creativity explores the ways in which culture and
making by diverse groups can expand knowledge practices, even in domains such as science,
engineering and math, which are often deemed as objective (Gaskins 2021, pg. 5). Similarly,
the “A People’s Guide to AI” book and related workshop run at the Carnegie Museum of Art in
Pittsburgh, PA by Mimi Onuoha and Mother Cyborg’s (Diana Nucera) uses popular education to
explore questions about AI by “demystifying, situating, and shifting the narrative about what
types of use cases AI can have for everyday people.” In the workshop, groups learn to build an
9
See https://deweyhagborg.com/projects/stranger-visions. Accessed on June 15, 2022.
10
See https://www.stephaniedinkins.com/secretgarden.html. Accessed on June 15, 2022.
11
See https://aib.si.edu/futures_nettricegaskins/. Accessed on June 15, 2022.
12
See https://cmoa.org/event/algorithms-social-spaces/. Accessed on June 15, 2022.
22
algorithm as a set of steps, recipes and processes with an understanding of the way in which
values, ethics and justice are embedded in these technologies through “creative imaginings”
(Onouha and Nucera 2018). And, finally, in her book Poetic Operations, cárdenas describes the
use of public performances that use a series of steps, actions and/or gestures (similar to an
algorithm) in order to engage questions around safety for transgender people of color in cities
(2022). According to cárdenas, “poetics” are about actions, movements, offerings and
“possibilities of life” for trans of color artists that “contribute to a decolonial politics that aims to
end the violence enacted to enforce gender binaries, racial hierarchies, and settler colonial rule.
The algorithm of trans of color poetics can be understood as more of a ritual offering than a
formula that seeks to render a totalizing depiction,” (2022, 28).
These three main clusters of examples described above call in diverse people, species, and
technologies and encourage them to listen to one another. They serve as epistemic things
(Rheinberger 1997), material speculations (Wakkary et al 2015), discursive designs (Tharp and
Tharp 2019) and/or boundary objects (Star & Griesemer 1989), which are artefacts that are
perceived, interacted with, and used differently by social groups in order to communicate
experiences and perspectives in myriad ways according to their contexts. Boundary objects are
considered "plastic" because they "are both adaptable to different viewpoints, and robust
enough to maintain identity across them" (Star & Griesemer, 1989, p.393). As such, boundary
objects facilitate common ground without requiring consensus (Bechky 2003), because they
enable social groups to maintain local understandings while also retaining transnational and
shared reference to the project’s collective and co-curated contexts-in-common.
The examples open new ways to navigate within and beyond the specific world/s in question by
inviting participants to interpret what they offer intuitively, while also offering an analytic
understanding of the wide-reaching ecosocial impacts of dominant patriarchal, neo-liberal
capitalist paradigms. We note that most of these examples are considered to be authored and
operating within Anglo-centric contexts, and as such, our perspective represents a particular
‘cut’ of ecologies which are situated amongst the particular contexts of the worlds from which
they originated. As boundary objects, however, the acts of inclusion and exclusion engendered
by these works both reinforce, and at the same time challenge, the asymmetric power relations
of the social actors who wield them, warranting further examination of how their semiotic
relations are negotiated. Further, these examples offer a more intimate experience of place as
something that is in flux rather than static - tactile, fragile, contingent. Just as the human and
23
other-than-human mycorrhizal networks explored by Tsing elsewhere (2017) help us imagine
possible more-than-human futures, the kinds of relations represented and embodied in these
works render the value of care-full connections not just as a desirable, but instead as an
essential ingredient for common survival and flourishing in the current era of profound
socioecological change.
Conclusion: Care-full co-curation for pluralistic,
critical and joyful futures
The emergence of co-creative agendas and initiatives is a positive turn in a time of polycrisis -
but also one that warrants critical investigation of the relations of power, agency, and access
which structure these developments. This paper is a modest attempt at articulating some of the
questions which have arisen from our own attempts at facilitating care-full participatory research
and practice alongside communities of many different shapes and sizes. This helps us
affirmatively argue against simplifying and commodifying care by instead “stay[ing] with the
trouble,” as Haraway (2016) invites us to, by becoming with and through our existing (and
potential) relations, as a means of reconfiguring the many worlds within our world towards more
just, equitable, and livable futures. Similarly, Puig de la Bellacasa reminds that her project is not
to police mainstream appropriations of care, but rather to participate in “the ongoing, complex,
and elusive task of reclaiming care not from its impurities, but rather from tendencies to smooth
out its asperities—whether by idealizing or denigrating it,” (Location 222, 2017).
In a similar line of thought, the engagements of care-fully co-creating more-than-human urban
futures cannot be understood in terms of “a factual evaluation or judgement of practice” but
instead as a highly contextual, interstitial “intervention” (Mol 2008, 84; Puig de la Bellacasa
2017, 6), which is predicated on a respect for individuals’ and collectives’ agencies as imagined,
perceived, and experienced by/for themselves. Applying a care-full co-curation lens to the co-
creation process also attempts to dismantle the assumptions that can inevitably accompany
participatory engagements such as critical urban placemaking by insisting on working from, and
with, the diverse needs and desires of all concerned. In doing so, we argue for interventions that
enable, rather than create, experimental and relational possibilities that lead to profound
alterings of urban conditions and build towards a multiplicity of possible livable futures. In
24
claiming to co-create the blended digital and physical systems, services, platforms, spaces and
places that shape the conditions and structures of urban life (and death), we must reflexively
ask ourselves: are we caring to listen, and listening to care enough to question not only what is
here, but also what is not here, and what could be, for whom, how and why (Puig de la
Bellacasa 2017)?
Cities are continually being made and remade (sometimes for the better and sometimes for the
worse, depending on one's positionality) through the relations and experiences of the human
and other-than-human agencies who reside within their bounds. In this paper, we have
introduced a series of concepts that argue for the necessity of applying a critical conceptual lens
to future co-creation work that prioritises concerns of justice, care, and pluralism in and around
these relations, in ways that respect and encourage the vital co-existence of all beings. If taken
up in earnest, we believe this more-than-human approach will make a significant difference to
the practices of co-creation and participation already evident in critical urban placemaking. At
the same time, we have also raised key concerns about the potential co-option of such
approaches by corporations, states and other actors who are eager to appear informed about
the latest discourses, methods and modes of citizen engagement, but less willing to commit to
any actions that might threaten their positionalities.
As such, we also argue for a modality of co-creation that is responsive and dynamic rather than
prescriptive, and rooted in care-full, messy becoming-with and its many contingencies rather
than in ordering, speaking for, or assuming. It is here, we believe, that co-creation as care-full
co-curation can transform the status quo, rather than merely reproduce it.
25
Acknowledgements
Jaz would like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung peoples of the Kulin Nation, where
sovereignty has never been ceded, and where Jaz carried out much of the work presented in this paper as an
uninvited guest. Jaz is deeply grateful for their protecting its ecosystems since time immemorial, and their
generous hospitality.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
References
Abram, David. 2011. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. London: Vintage.
Abram, David. 2017. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. Vintage.
Agudelo, Leonardo Parra, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Marcus Foth, and Carlos Estrada. 2018. "Creativity and
Design to Articulate Difference in the Conflicted City: Collective Intelligence in Bogota's Grassroots
Organisations." AI Soc. 33 (1):147-158. doi: 10.1007/s00146-017-0716-5.
Andersen, Lars Bo, Peter Danholt, Kim Halskov, Nicolai Brodersen Hansen, and Peter Lauritsen. 2015.
"Participation as a matter of concern in participatory design." CoDesign 11 (3-4):250-261. doi:
10.1080/15710882.2015.1081246.
Anguelovski, Isabelle, James Connolly, and Anna Livia Brand. 2018. "From landscapes of utopia to the
margins of the green urban life." City 22 (3): 417-436.
https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2018.1473126.
Avram, Gabriela, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Stefano De Paoli, Ann Light, Peter Lyle, and Maurizio Teli. 2019.
"Repositioning CoDesign in the Age of Platform Capitalism: From Sharing to Caring." CoDesign 15
(3):185-191. doi: 10.1080/15710882.2019.1638063.
Barker, Larry Lee. 1971. Listening behavior. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall.
Bastian, M., O. Jones, N. Moore, and E. Roe. 2016. Participatory Research in More-than-Human Worlds: Taylor
& Francis.
Bechky, Beth A. 2003. “Sharing Meaning Across Occupational Communities: The Transformation of
Understanding on a Production Floor.” Organization Science 14 (3): 312–30.
Birkbak, Andreas, Morten Krogh Petersen, and Tobias Bornakke Jørgensen. 2018. "Designing with Publics
that Are Already Busy: A Case from Denmark." Design Issues 34 (4):8-20. doi:
10.1162/desi_a_00507.
Björgvinsson, Erling, Pelle Ehn, and Per-Anders Hillgren. 2012. "Agonistic participatory design: working
with marginalised social movements." CoDesign 8 (2-3):127-144. doi:
10.1080/15710882.2012.672577.
Bowels, Nellie. 2018. Thermostats, Locks and Lights: Digital Tools of Domestic Abuse. Accessed June 24,
2018.
Braybrooke, Kit, Stephanie Janes, and Chihiro Sato. 2021. “Care-Full Design Sprints, Online? Addressing
Gaps in Cultural Access and Inclusion during Covid-19 with Vulnerable Communities in London
and Tokyo.” In C&T ’21: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Communities & Technologies -
26
Wicked Problems in the Age of Tech, 25–37. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing
Machinery.
Braybrooke, Kat. 2019. "‘Placeless’ Making? Reframing the Power-geometries of Digital Platforms in China
through Tactical Co-creation." In The Critical Makers Reader: (Un)Learning Technology, edited by Loes
Bogers and Letizia Chiappini, 258-269. Amsterdam: Institute of Networked Cultures.
Braybrooke, Kat. 2018. "‘Hacking the Museum? Practices and Power Geometries at Collections
Makerspaces in London." Journal of Peer Production 12:40-59.
Braybrooke, Kat, and Tim Jordan. 2017. "Genealogy, Culture and Technomyth: Decolonizing Western
Information Technologies, from Open Source to the Maker Movement " Digital Culture & Society 3
(1):25-46. doi: DOI 10.14361/dcs-2017-0103.
Brown, Alice V., and Jaz Hee-jeong Choi. 2017. "Towards Care-based Design: Trusted Others in Nurturing
Posttraumatic Growth outside of Therapy." Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on
Communities and Technologies, Troyes, France.
Bruno Latour. 2004. "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern."
Critical Inquiry 30 (2):225-248. doi: 10.1086/421123.
cárdenas, micha. (2022). Poetic Operations: Trans of Color Art in Digital Media. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Carmona, Matthew. 2010. "Contemporary Public Space: Critique and Classification, Part One: Critique."
Journal of Urban Design 15 (1):123-148. doi: 10.1080/13574800903435651.
Chatterton, Paul. 2010. "The urban impossible: A eulogy for the unfinished city." City 14 (3):234-244. doi:
10.1080/13604813.2010.482272.
Chan, Kelly K.L, Dan Harris, and Jaz Hee-jeong Choi. 2022 Rhizomatic Activism: a case study of Lennon
Walls in Hong Kong. In Tilley, Elspeth (Ed.), Creative Activism: Research, Pedagogy and Practice (pp.
335-358). Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Choi, Jaz Hee-jeong, Laura Forlano, and Denisa Kera. 2020. "Situated Automation: Algorithmic Creatures
in Participatory Design." Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020 -
Participation(s) Otherwise - Volume 2, Manizales, Colombia.
Choi, Jaz Hee-jeong, Anne Galloway, and Katrina Jungnickel. 2018. "Messing with Methods in More-than-
Human Worlds." Society for Social Studies of Science Annual Conference (4s): TRANSnational STS,
Aug 29 - Sep 1.
Christensen, Clayton M., Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson. 2008. Disrupting Class: How Disruptive
Innovation will Change the Way the World Learns. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Cipriani, Laura. 2022. “Land of sand: reclaiming the sea, landscapes and lives in Malacca, Malaysia.” City,
1-23. https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2022.2126168
Cooke, Bill, and Uma Kothari. 2001. Participation : the new tyranny? London ; New York: Zed Books.
Courage, Cara, Tom Borrup, Maria Rosario Jackson, Kylie Legge, Anita Mckeown, Louise Platt, and Jason
Schupbach. 2020. The Routledge Handbook of Placemaking. Abingdon: Routledge.
Cornwall, Andrea. 2008. "Unpacking ‘Participation’: models, meanings and practices." Community
Development Journal 43 (3):269-283. doi: 10.1093/cdj/bsn010.
Costanza-Chock, Sasha. (2020). Design Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Davidson, Mark. 2018. "Participatory budgeting, austerity and institutions of democracy." City 22 (4):551-
567. doi: 10.1080/13604813.2018.1507107.
Diagne, Cyril, and Simon Doury. 2017. “Curator Table by Cyril Diagne & Simon Doury - Experiments
with Google.” Experiments with Google. 2017. https://experiments.withgoogle.com/curator-table.
D'Ignazio, Catherine, & Klein, Lauren F. (2020). Data feminism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
DiSalvo, Carl, & Lukens, Jonathan. (2011). Nonathropocentrism and the Nonhuman in Design: Possibilities for
Designing New Forms of Engagement with and through Technology. In M. Foth, L. Forlano, M. Gibbs &
C. Satchell (Eds.), From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous
Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement (pp. 421-435). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
27
Escobar, Arturo. 2018. Designs for the Pluriverse : Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds.
Durham, UNITED STATES: Duke University Press.
Feola, Giuseppe. 2015. "Societal transformation in response to global environmental change: A review of
emerging concepts." Ambio 44 (5):376-390. doi: 10.1007/s13280-014-0582-z.
Feral Atlas. 2021. “TAKE.” Feral Atlas: Tippers: TAKE. Accessed January 22, 2022.
https://feralatlas.supdigital.org/modes/take.
Finn, Ed. (2017). What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Fitz, A., Krasny, E., & Architekturzentrum Wien (Eds). 2019. Critical Care: Architecture and Urbanism for a
Broken Planet. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Forlano, Laura. 2016. "Decentering the Human in the Design of Collaborative Cities." Design Issues 32
(3):42-54. doi: 10.1162/DESI_a_00398.
Forlano, Laura. (2017). Data Rituals in Intimate Infrastructures: Crip Time and the Disabled Cyborg Body
as an Epistemic Site of Feminist Science. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 3(2), 1-28.
Forlano, Laura. 2017. "Posthumanism and Design." She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 3
(1):16-29. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.001.
Freire, Karine, Gustavo Borba, and Luisa Diebold. 2011. "Participatory Design as an Approach to Social
Innovation." Design Philosophy Papers 9 (3):235-250. doi: 10.2752/144871311X13968752924950.
Galloway, Anne. 2018. "Engineering at Home." In The Future Starts Jere, edited by Rory Hyde, Kieran Long
and Mariana Pestana, 22-27. London: VA Publishing.
Galloway, Anne, & Caudwell, Catherine. (2018). Speculative Design as Research Method: From answers to
questions and “staying with the trouble”. In G. Coombs, A. McNamara & G. Sade (Eds.), Undesign:
Critical Practices at the Intersection of Art and Design. London: Routledge.
Ganesh, Maya Indira, Raman, Pratyush, Murray, Padmini Ray and the Design Beku Collective (2020) A is
for Another: A Dictionary of AI. https://aisforanother.net
Gaskins, Nettrice R. (2021). Techno-vernacular creativity and innovation: Culturally relevant making inside and
outside of the classroom. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Giaccardi, Elisa, & Redström, Johan. (2020). Technology and More-Than-Human Design. Design Issues,
36(4), 33-44. doi: 10.1162/desi_a_00612
Gilson, Erinn Cunniff. 2016. "Vulnerability and Victimization: Rethinking Key Concepts in Feminist
Discourses on Sexual Violence." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 42 (1):71-98. doi:
10.1086/686753.
Greenfield, Adam. 2017. Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. London: Verso.
Grzanka, Patrick R. 2020. "From Buzzword to Critical Psychology: An Invitation to Take Intersectionality
Seriously." Women & Therapy 43 (3-4):244-261. doi: 10.1080/02703149.2020.1729473.
Haraway, Donna. 1988. "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of
Partial Perspective." Feminist Studies 14 (3):575-599. doi: 10.2307/3178066.
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. 2016. Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene, Experimental futures:
technological lives, scientific arts, anthropological voices. London: Duke University Press.
Hobart, Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani, & Kneese, Tamara. (2020). Radical Care Survival Strategies
for Uncertain Times. Social Text, 38(1 (142)), 1-16.
Holmes, Jonathon. 2015. "Care workers are woefully undervalued – we deserve respect." July 7.
https://www.theguardian.com/social-care-network/social-life-blog/2015/dec/30/care-workers-are-
woefully-undervalued-we-deserve-respect.
Huybrechts, Liesbeth, Katrien Dreessen, and Ben Hagenaars. 2018. "Building Capabilities Through
Democratic Dialogues." Design Issues 34 (4):80-95. doi: 10.1162/desi_a_00513.
Jacobs, Jane. 1969. The Economy of Cities. New York: Random House.
Jacobs, Jane. 1993. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Modern Library ed. New York: Modern
Library.
28
Jönsson, Li, & Lenskjold, Tau Ulv. (2014). A foray into not-quite companion species: design experiments
with urban animals as significant others. Artifact: Journal of Design Practice, 3(2), 7.1-7.13.
Kessler, Ronald C., Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, Jordi Alonso, Corina Benjet, Evelyn J. Bromet, Graça Cardoso,
Louisa Degenhardt, Giovanni de Girolamo, Rumyana V. Dinolova, Finola Ferry, Silvia Florescu, Oye
Gureje, Josep Maria Haro, Yueqin Huang, Elie G. Karam, Norito Kawakami, Sing Lee, Jean-Pierre
Lepine, Daphna Levinson, Fernando Navarro-Mateu, Beth-Ellen Pennell, Marina Piazza, José Posada-
Villa, Kate M. Scott, Dan J. Stein, Margreet Ten Have, Yolanda Torres, Maria Carmen Viana, Maria
V. Petukhova, Nancy A. Sampson, Alan M. Zaslavsky, and Karestan C. Koenen. 2017. "Trauma and
PTSD in the WHO World Mental Health Surveys." European Journal of Psychotraumatology 8
(sup5):1353383. doi: 10.1080/20008198.2017.1353383.
Keune, Svenja. (2021). Designing and Living with Organisms Weaving Entangled Worlds as Doing
Multispecies Philosophy. Journal of Textile Design Research and Practice, 1-22.
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2013. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of
Plants. Milkweed Editions.
Kirwan, Matthew L., and Keryn B. Gedan. 2019. "Sea-level driven land conversion and the formation of
ghost forests." Nature Climate Change 9 (6): 450-457. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0488-7.
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0488-7.
Kohn, Eduardo. 2007. "How dogs dream: Amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement."
American Ethnologist 34 (1):3-24. doi: 10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.3.
Latour, Bruno. 2005. What is the Style of Matters of Concern? Two Lectures in Empirical Philosophy. Amsterdam:
Van Gorcum.
Lewis, Jason Edward, Arista, Noelani, Pechawis, Archer, & Kite, Suzanne. (2018). Making kin with the
machines. Journal of Design and Science.
Light, Ann, and Yoko Akama. 2014. "Structuring future social relations: the politics of care in participatory
practice." Proceedings of the 13th Participatory Design Conference: Research Papers - Volume 1,
Windhoek, Namibia.
Lindström, Kristina, & Ståhl, Åsa. (2014). Patchworking publics-in-the-making: design, media and public
engagement. Malmö, Sweden: Malmö University.
Lindström, K., & Ståhl, Å. (2017). Plastic Imaginaries. Continent(6.1), 62-67.
Lipietz, Barbara, Richard Lee, and Sharon Hayward. 2014. "Just Space: Building a community-based voice
for London planning." City 18 (2):214-225. doi: 10.1080/13604813.2014.896654.
Low, Setha, and Kurt Iveson. 2016. "Propositions for more just urban public spaces." City 20 (1):10-31. doi:
10.1080/13604813.2015.1128679.
Lowenhaupt Tsing, Anna. 2017. The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton: Princeton University
Press.
Macnamara, Jim. 2016. "The Work and ‘Architecture of Listening’: Addressing Gaps in Organization-
Public Communication." International Journal of Strategic Communication 10 (2):133-148. doi:
10.1080/1553118X.2016.1147043.
Massey, Doreen. 2005. For space. London: Sage.
Massey, Doreen. 2013. Doreen Massey on Space. In Social Science Bites.
Markusen, Ann, and Anne Gadwa. 2010. “Creative Placemaking: White Paper for the Mayors’ Institute on
City Design.” Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts.
Merrifield, Andy. 2015. "Amateur urbanism." City 19 (5):753-762. doi: 10.1080/13604813.2015.1071119.
Miessen, Markus. 2016. Crossbenching: Toward Participation as Critical Spatial Practice. Berlin: Sternberg Press.
Mol, Annemarie. 2008. The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. London; New York:
Routledge.
Mol, Annemarie, Ingunn Moser, and J. Pols. 2010. Care in practice: on tinkering in clinics, homes and farms.
Vol. MatleRealities/VerKo!rperungen. Bielefeld: Transcript.
Mouffe, Chantal. 1999. "Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism?" Social Research 66 (3):745-758.
29
Onouha, Mimi, & Nucera, Diana. (2018). A People’s Guide to AI.
O’Leary, Jasper Tran, Sara Zewde, Jennifer Mankoff, and Daniela K. Rosner. 2019. "Who Gets to Future?
Race, Representation, and Design Methods in Africatown." Proceedings of the 2019 CHI
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Glasgow, Scotland UK.
Overstreet, Katy. 2020. “Barn Cat Colonies in America’s Dairyland Empty the Landscape.” Feral Atlas,
2020. https://feralatlas.supdigital.org/poster/barn-cat-colonies-in-americas-dairyland-empty-the-
landscape.
O’Sullivan, Feargus. 2016. The Problem with ‘Playable’ Cities.
Page, Alison and Memmott, Paul. 2021. Design: Building on country. Thames & Hudson.
Parra-Agudelo, Leonardo, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, and Marcus Foth. 2017. "The City as Canvas for Change:
Grassroots Organisations’ Creative Playing with Bogota." In Playable Cities: The City as a Digital
Playground, edited by Anton Nijholt, 189-210. Singapore: Springer.
Pols, Jeannette. 2012. Care at a Distance : On the Closeness of Technology. PB - Amsterdam University Press.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Edited by
Cary Wolfe, Posthumanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Project For Public Spaces. n.d. “Eleven Principles for Creating Great Community Places.” Accessed January
22, 2022. https://www.pps.org/article/11steps.
Quinn, V, J.M. et al. 2022. ‘COVID-19 at War: The Joint Forces Operation in Ukraine’, Disaster Medicine
and Public Health Preparedness 16(5): 1753–1760. doi: 10.1017/dmp.2021.88.
Rankin, Yolanda A., and Jakita O. Thomas. 2019. "Straighten up and fly right: rethinking intersectionality
in HCI research." Interactions 26 (6):64–68. doi: 10.1145/3363033.
Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. (1997). Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Robertson, Toni, and Jesper Simonsen. 2012. "Challenges and Opportunities in Contemporary
Participatory Design." Design Issues 28 (3):3-9. doi: 10.1162/DESI_a_00157.
Rose, Gillian. 2020. "Actually-existing sociality in a smart city." City:1-18. doi:
10.1080/13604813.2020.1781412.
Sanders, Elizabeth B. N., and Pieter Jan Stappers. 2008. "Co-creation and the new landscapes of design."
CoDesign 4 (1):5-18. doi: 10.1080/15710880701875068.
Sassen, Saskia. 1991. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Sayers, Jentery. (2018). Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities.
Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Scott, James C. (2020). Seeing like a state: How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. New
Haven: Yale University Press.
Shepard, Mark (Ed.). (2011). Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Sloane, Mona, Moss, Emanuel, Awomolo, Olaitan, & Forlano, Laura. (2020). Participation is not a design fix for
machine learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.02423.
Star, Susan Leigh, and James R. Griesemer. 2016. “Institutional Ecology, `Translations’ and Boundary
Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907-39.” Social
Studies of Science, June.
Star, Susan Leigh. 2010. “This Is Not a Boundary Object: Reflections on the Origin of a Concept.” Science,
Technology, & Human Values 35 (5): 601–17.
Tironi, Martín, & Hermansen, Pablo. (2018). Cosmopolitical encounters: Prototyping at the National Zoo
in Santiago, Chile. Journal of Cultural Economy, 11(4), 330-347.
Tonkiss, Fran. 2017. "Socialising design? From consumption to production." City 21 (6):872-882. doi:
10.1080/13604813.2017.1412923.
30
Tsing, Anna L., Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, and Feifei Zhou. 2021. Feral Atlas: The More-Than-
Human Anthropocene. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
https://feralatlas.supdigital.org/modes/take.
Tharp, Bruce M, & Tharp, Stephanie M. (2019). Discursive design: Critical, speculative, and alternative things:
MIT Press.
Tuck, Eve. 2009. "Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities." Harvard Educational Review 79 (3):409-
428. doi: 10.17763/haer.79.3.n0016675661t3n15.
Ury, Emily A., Xi Yang, Justin P. Wright, and Emily S. Bernhardt. 2021. "Rapid deforestation of a coastal
landscape driven by sea-level rise and extreme events." Ecological Applications 31 (5): e02339.
https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2339. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2339.
von Busch, Otto, and Karl Palmås. 2016. "Social Means Do Not Justify Corruptible Ends: A Realist
Perspective of Social Innovation and Design." She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation 2
(4):275-287. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.07.002.
Wakkary, Ron. (2021). Things we could design: For more than human-centered worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Wakkary, Ron, Odom, William, Hauser, Sabrina, Hertz, Garnet, & Lin, Henry. (2015). Material speculation:
Actual artifacts for critical inquiry. Paper presented at the Proceedings of The Fifth Decennial Aarhus
Conference on Critical Alternatives.
Warner, Leah, Tuğçe Kurtiş, and Akanksha Adya. 2020. "Navigating Criticisms of Intersectional
Approaches: Reclaiming Intersectionality for Global Social Justice and Well-Being." Women &
Therapy 43 (3-4):262-277. doi: 10.1080/02703149.2020.1729477.
Wilkie, Alex, Martin Savransky, and Marsha Rosengarten. 2017. "Speculative research : the lure of possible
futures." In Culture, economy and the social. Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY: Routledge, an imprint
of the Taylor & Francis Group,. text.
https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/RMIT/detail.action?docID=4809749 Available on ProQuest
Ebook Central.
Authors
Jaz Hee-jeong Choi is the Director of the Care-full Design Lab and Associate Professor in School of Design,
College of Design and Social Context, RMIT. Kit Braybrooke is Senior Researcher at Habitat Unit,
Technische Universität Berlin and Director of Studio We & Us. Laura Forlano is Associate Professor at the
Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology.