Beyond the human: multispecies and more-than-human architectures
Lead: Deljana Iossifova and Debapriya Chakrabarti
This thematic collection challenges architecture to confront the exclusions embedded in its human-centred paradigms and to imagine alternative futures grounded in interspecies responsibility, ecological interdependence, and spatial justice. By extending architecture’s methodological and conceptual reach, it contributes to urgent cross-disciplinary efforts to reconfigure life in a more-than-human world.
Architecture has long taken the human subject as its normative centre, designing for human use, comfort, and control over space. Yet, as environmental humanities, multispecies ethnography, and posthumanist theory have made clear, the built environment is always already co-produced with, and inhabited by, nonhuman others: animals, plants, microbes, minerals, atmospheric and hydrological flows. These more-than-human agents are active participants in shaping material conditions, spatial relations, and ecological outcomes.
This thematic call invites scholarship that interrogates architecture’s entanglement with the more-than-human world and challenges its anthropocentric assumptions. What becomes of architectural categories such as ‘site’, ‘inhabitation’, or ‘function’ when the agency of nonhuman beings and systems is taken seriously? How might architectural theory and practice respond to the ethical, spatial, and epistemological demands of designing with and for multiple forms of life?
By foregrounding multispecies entanglements, this collection positions architecture within broader conversations on environmental justice, climate precarity, and planetary co-existence. It also asks what role design might play in either perpetuating or unsettling extractive and exclusionary regimes that frame nonhuman life as expendable.
Call for Papers: We invite contributions that examine the more-than-human dimensions of architecture in conceptual, methodological, and empirical terms. Submissions may explore theoretical approaches, speculative design, historical perspectives, or grounded case studies that reposition architecture as a multispecies practice. Papers might address, but are not limited to:
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The spatial politics of cohabitation between humans and other species: urban biodiversity, shared habitats, ecological corridors, and conflict ecologies.
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Infrastructures as multispecies mediators: water, air, waste, soil, light, and heat as sites of cross-species interaction and regulation.
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The political ecologies of architectural materials, including the extraction, transformation, and use of organic, bioengineered, or so-called ‘living’ materials.
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Architectural responses to environmental instability, extinction, and climate breakdown: designing for ecological resilience, retreat, or repair.
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Indigenous, animist, and decolonial ontologies of space and life: how alternative cosmologies might reframe architectural purpose and responsibility.
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The ethical, aesthetic, and epistemological challenges of designing with more-than-human life: from speculative ecologies to care-based design practices.
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Methodologies for studying more-than-human design: multispecies ethnography, ecological sensing, biomimicry, or interspecies mapping.
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Histories of nonhuman presence in architectural theory and practice: domestication, sanitation, urban pest control, and zoonotic design legacies.