Dwelling and Designing in the Post-Ecological Era

This contribution investigates take care from a dual perspective — dwelling and designing — through which the designdiscipline may be rethought in response to the contemporary ecological crisis. Landscape design is still largely driven bytechnical and compensatory approaches that fail to address the contemporary climate crisis. To be effective, it requires arevolution in thought. This reflection begins with an analysis of the dwelling practices of the Runa of the Upper Amazon in Ecuador, as describedby Eduardo Kohn in How Forests Think, and explores how this perspective might help landscape design move beyondtechnocratic responses that are insufficient to address the climate crisis. In Kohn’s perspective, dwelling becomes takecare: a practice grounded in attentive observation of the multiple forms of life inhabiting the forest and in the awarenessthat life, to continue, “requires the interplay of many kinds of beings”. (Tsing, 2015, p. 7). The Amazon rainforest isdescribed by Kohn as a space in which a continuous interpretation of “signs” takes place between human and more-than-human beings, ensuring mutual survival. The Runa relate to the forest as a sensitive and responsive reality: they listen toit, observe it, and interpret its signals to orient their actions. Likewise, animals, plants, waterways, and forest spirits areinterlocutors that actively participate in shaping the conditions of existence of the human community through the reading ofsigns (Kohn, 2013). Kohn does not formulate this stance in ethical or moral terms; rather, his perspective understandshuman survival through the recognition of its belonging to a network of interspecies relations. Take care for the forestmeans allowing it to continue according to its own rhythms; in turn, the forest sustains human dwelling by providing itsmaterial, ecological, and symbolic conditions. Take care thus becomes a form of ecological reciprocity. Kohn’s perspective problematizes the Western construct of Nature. As Morton argues, what we call Nature is theAnthropocene in its least obvious form (Morton, 2016). For Morton, Nature functions as a totalizing concept, reducing themultiplicity of entities to an undifferentiated unity. Conceived as a “container”, Nature has prevented us from thinking theweb of human and more-than-human relations that constitutes ecological complexity, reinforcing an anthropocentricworldview in which humans occupy an exceptional position. This construct fosters separation, confining humans to urbanenvironments while encouraging forms of "sacralization" of the non-urban (Jakob, 2009). The Indigenous perspective dissolves this separation: for the Runa, there is no outside to the forest from which it can bemanaged. Forest and humans continuously co-constitute one another, making any position of exteriorityimpossible. Applying this understanding of dwelling to the disciplinary field of design allows us to consider how designshould not operate “on” Nature as an external entity, but rather “with” Nature understood as a complex field of relations ofwhich it is itself a part. This dimension emerges in the roofscape of the Allianz Arena parking structure (Herzog & de Meuron, 2004) in Munich,designed by Günther Vogt, a paradigmatic case. The project extends the heathland of the Fröttmaninger Heide onto theroof surface. Rather than relying on aesthetic mimicry, it establishes conditions for ecological dynamics to co-design withhumans. Vogt compiled an inventory of local species and sowed them without a predetermined formal logic. Withatmospheric agents, vegetation spread through patterns of aggregation independent of the designer’s intentions, shapedinstead by interactions among soil conditions, plant life, and climate. The project thus relinquishes control and becomes apractice of care: the architect acts as an activator and amplifier of vegetal generativity. He does not abandon design;rather, he fosters more-than-human agency through what might be defined as extended design or co-design (Metta,2022). As in Kohn’s account of dwelling, where the Runa regard the forest as a living subject requiring communication for mutualsurvival, these examples suggest that design does not follow an imposing or prescriptive logic. Instead, it becomescapable of inserting itself into the network of more-than-human world-making (Tsing, 2015). The human is no longerpositioned as dominant over nature but acts as an activator of its dynamism for collaborative survival. As Tsing writes, “In order to survive, we need help, and help is always the service of another, with or without intent” (Tsing,2015, p. 29). This raises a central question: how might we define this help if not as a form of take care? And how candesign be rethought as care without transforming the theoretical frameworks through which ecology understands life? As long as concepts such as “ecosystem” and “species” organize ecological thought around separation and autonomy, weremain blind to the generative power of encounter and to the fact that survival is never an internal property of a speciesbut the outcome of assembling processes (Tsing, 2015), through which different forms of life co-produce the conditions oftheir existence.