Part 7 of the Near Dwellers series Near Dwellers as Indwellers At Bothkinds Project Space Vancouver, British Columbia October 1 - December 31, 2025 Please email us with your entries and questions at [email protected]. |
The urban environment is widely conceived and designed to meet the needs and desires of human beings. However, towns, suburbs, and cities are also elaborate habitats for not only human animals and their domesticated pets but also for some wild animals that have eked out an existence while having had their homes encroached upon by development or who have migrated to specific city spaces.
How are we to understand the urban confluence of multispecies presence and place? Are there perhaps other ways to know and indeed, embody urban spaces offered by animals? And if so, what are the “possibilities for a more equitable multispecies city, a task that is particularly important for those species that are in some way tied or drawn to specific city places, and perhaps especially, in these perilous times, for those whose future is endangered”?[1] Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose provide us with some tools with which to engage with these problematics. They suggest that places are meaningful to and are “storied” by other-than-human beings, pointing out that “a living being is emplaced through its body: that places are formed between bodies and the terrains they inhabit. Within this nexus of body and terrain, specific places become sites of meaning.” More specifically, “stories emerge from and impact the way in which places come to be—the material and discursive are all mixed up in the making of places, as with worlds more generally.”[2] In collaboration with Bothkinds Project Space in Vancouver, the University of British Columbia and Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Near Dwellers as Indwellers follows up on these observations to explore questions such as: what would it take to recognise multispecies achievements of “storying” place? What are the ways in which the built environment could be (re)designed to guide the human user to be more conscientious of and caring toward their fellow animal residents so as to “draw us into deeper and more demanding accountabilities of nonhuman others”? Indeed, how can such an approach alter the conditions for living with wild animals as full members of a community? — [1] Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose (2012) ‘Storied Places in a Multispecies World’, in Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies, vol. 3, no. 2, Spring, pp. 1-27. Also see ‘Lively Ethography: Storying Animist Worlds’, in Environmental Humanities (2016) 8 (1): 77–94. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3527731. See also ‘Encountering a more-than-human world: ethos and the arts of witness’ in Routledge Companion to Environmental Humanities (2017), edited by Ursula Heise, Jon Christensen and Michelle Niemann. [2] Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose (2012) ‘Storied Places in a Multispecies World’, in Humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies, vol. 3, no. 2, Spring, pp. 1-27. The Near Dwellers project, to date:
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