Designing with Non-Humans: Alternative Urban Models for Ecological Regeneration.
The project challenges traditional, anthropocentric urban models and proposes a paradigm shift in city planning towards regenerative, interspecies cities. The goal is to transform cities into living, symbiotic ecosystems where all beings, both humans and non-humans, have their place and voice. Interspecies collaboration is becoming not just an act of responsibility and care, but a necessity to ensure survival in the face of climate crisis and advanced environmental degradation. We no longer ask why to collaborate with non-humans, but how. How do we relearn to listen, understand, and co-create? How do we restore our capacity for coexistence? It’s time to move beyond old dualisms, reconnect natureculture, and abandon the human role as destroyer or savior. We are part of a planetary web of life: entangled, co-existing, co-shaping, co-surviving. Everything is relational, fluid, and shared.
Rather than offering a distant utopia, poly:eutopia emerges as a living, situated design practice—empathetic, interdependent, and symbiotic. It is grounded in the belief that design needs to move beyond human understanding, embracing ecological complexity. At its core, “poly” refers to multiplicity: of species, layers, relationships, and narratives. “Eutopia,” from the Greek, means “a good place” – real, achievable, and already emerging. This approach takes shape through the experimental case study that explores two interconnected layers: speculative frameworks for ecological corridors co-designed with slime mold, and relational mapping as a collective act of imagination – a way to rethink the city from a non-human perspective.
The project begins by investigating the potential of collaboration with Physarum polycephalum (a slime mold known for building efficient, adaptive networks) as a co-designer of ecological corridors. Instead of using this organism as a tool to optimize systems for human benefit, such as the wave of research modeling transportation and mobility networks, I ask: What if this collaboration with slime mold could benefit all living beings, not just us? Through experimental prototyping, lab-based observation, and simple simulations based on Physarum’s behavior, I explored speculative frameworks for ecological corridors. These networks go beyond just green layer or canopy-level, integrating hidden and overlooked flows of life. Slime mold’s decentralized, non-hierarchical behavior becomes a reference point for a new kind of infrastructure: one that can be relational, adaptive, and regenerative.
The second layer explores alternative cartographies, non-anthropocentric ways of mapping urban space. Here, relational mapping becomes a collective act of reimagining the city through non-human perspectives. It serves as a zoomed-in approach to the speculative framework co-created with slime mold, adding a soft, experiential layer to the ecological corridor networks. This participatory method invites us to ask: What flows of life and interspecies interactions might exist within these frameworks, across different scales, spheres, dimensions, and temporalities?
Imagine a future beyond the Anthropocene… an interspecies cities, where nature is no longer tool, but a main actor in city planning. Where habitats are no longer isolated, but interconnected living territories. We move past old dualisms, embracing shared belonging and responsibility. Collaboration with slime mold inspired new urban models: adaptive, decentralized, and non-hierarchical. Urban infrastructure is no longer seen only as technical networks, but includes flows of life and interspecies relationships. Ecological corridors become key city infrastructure, supporting multi-layered habitats. What began as an experiment is now core urban policy: and cities regenerate more than they consume.
This imagined future(s) are not as distant as it seems. Poly:eutopia is already unfolding, embodied a shift in design thinking from extraction to regeneration, from control to collaboration. By engaging with non-human agencies and embracing relational, multi-layered narratives, the project proposes new urban models rooted in interdependence and ecosystemic care. This is not a fixed solution, but a living, evolving practice—an invitation to reimagine cities as shared, symbiotic ecosystems.
The future of cities will not be green. It will be interspecies.
And it begins with poly:
