More-than-human urban futures: speculative participatory design to avoid ecocidal smart cities
Abstract
We propose a collective participatory speculative urban walk exploring "more-than-human" perspectives for smart cities. The walk will be a curated selection of outcomes from a PDC workshop interrogating how "more-than-human" approaches and their resultant ethical, legal, and methodological concerns can shape participatory design practices toward cohabitation. Our aim with the Situated Action is to use the walk as an embodied approach to push forward a cultural change in the agenda of sustainable smart cities, urban informatics and IoT. The walk will draw from the specificity of urban infrastructures in Hasselt associated with "more-than-human" approaches and include a selection of provisional artefacts in the form of low-fi prototypes, manifestos or future scenarios from the workshop to scaffold participation within the urban environment for conference delegates and citizens.
