Europan Notebooks #1

By Dimitri Szuter, PhD in architecture, teacher, founder of P.E.R.F.O.R.M.,
Paris (FR)

E17 Runner-up project in Helsinki (FI), HAVEN – for humans & non- humans alike

How to give a voice to the more-than-human species? This is the question that Studio Kantele, the runner up team in Helsinki (Europan 17) is raising as a “living city” answer to the archipelago site. Beyond design, Saara Kantele and Paul Bot are designing political tools to establish an “equality act” that could lead to the preservation and enhancement of the archipelago milieu for all the living entities.
Saara is an architect and designer, Paul is an artist with a background in ecology. They are from Finland and they care about the vulnerable archipelago. That personal attachment drove them to answer to the competition. Their goal: nurturing the nature of the islands and preserving it from intensive human activity. To do so, they are focusing on replacing humans where they belong : as one living entity among a big spectrum of species! They even go further in the reflection: they are considering “non-human” species, in four different categories, as biotopes of marine life, the archipelago fauna & flora, and the cultural species that humans have brought to the islands as equal “clients” as humans.

In doing so, they are performing Bruno Latour's post-human configuration of agency, and raises questions regarding a post-anthropocene ambition : how to give room and voice to the more-than-human species in the discourse and processes on designing the living environments?
For them, it is beyond design! It’s an important paradigm shift that has to be embodied in many ways. The first act is political: they are reusing the modernist “zoning” tool to preserve certain areas off the kick of human intrusions. It’s radical and it’s conceptually reversing the modernist attitude - by reusing the terms but shifting the philosophy of it.
To mitigate this disused way of fragmenting land, they are designing different “gradiants” of superposition in between those zones, that explore how and what to share with other species. This ecotonal way of designing the thickness of “frontiers” allows them to imagine shared devices that give shape to better interactions between living entities.
This political act is therefore translated into a design attitude: build less, regenerate more! The (parts of) islands that are turned forbidden for humans are let to rewilding while the new installations are thought as slight devices that are fully reversible. This sanctuarization of nature is coupled with an attitude of withdrawal to resist our impetuous habit of transforming the world - as if it belonged to us. In order to implement this idea, Studio Kantele imagined an “equality act” that supports the proposition, as an expanded way of thinking processes of designing living environments.

This philosophical, ecological and political act that the team invision serves in the project as a relational device to put all the actors - including the representors of non-human species - at the decision table. In the vein of the Whanganui River in New Zealand, which has created - through humans - its own legal personality, or the experiments around the Loire Parliament in France, this “equality act” is conceived as a driver force to implement actions towards the objectives of preservation and enhancement of the archipelago milieu, that could become, beyond the diversity of species that inhabit it, a legal entity in itself. In fact, the team embodied with their proposition the need to take all perspectives into account - while remaining humans -, in order to expand rights to more species. They are developing new political tools to give voices to silent actors, to change our priorities, to awaken a change of gaze towards a better cohabitation of the earth. They perceive this Europan project as a pilot project, as an experimentation that could give the chance to other vulnerable milieus to get heard and cared for.
Their strategy towards the implementation of this political idea is to generate collectives that could engage short and long term actions that would give life and body to the idea.
By doing so, the theory could get strengthened through concrete actions. It could even become independent from political instances, as an eco-social impulsion that could give birth to a diversity of strategies and active networks. As designers, they aspire to launch a movement that could become bigger and bigger, embodying guides for the establishment of guidelines, for the in-depth of ecological and project studies, for the improvement of the design of reversible installations, to empower multifaceted actors that could collectively hold and carry this meaningful agenda.

That project is valuable in all that sense because it is shifting the roles of designers - from demiurge actors to stage directors that impulse and not impose; because it is reducing the impact of our human establishment and generating a better balance between the species that inhabit the earth. These respectful and less-consuming ethics are steppingstones for the living city, to embody new paradigm shifts into our daily routines, to give hope for a desirable world.