Beyond the Logo & Towards Regenerative Visual Design, with Ania Rzymyszkiewicz
mardi 3 février 2026 • Durée 37:03
In this episode, we hear from Ania Rzymyskiewicz, a visual communication designer, facilitator and creative strategist, who helps us imagine what a more planetary future could really look like, and what matters when we think about this. Ania’s work aims to help organizations turn ideas into purpose-driven, clarity-led action. Her work blends process facilitation with regenerative design principles to foster more meaningful, resilient, and future-ready ways of working. Ania holds a Master’s in Graphics, with a focus on graphic design and printmaking. With over a decade in the creative industry, she has increasingly aligned her practice with planetary thriving and social equity. She is a graduate of the Transformational Leadership for Sustainability program and an alumna of the Regenerative Leadership. Currently, she works as an active member of Grafill, Creatives for Climate, and the Bergen Facilitation Collective. In her spare time, she runs Bici Kunst – a small art gallery and event space nestled inside Bici Bergen, a local bike workshop.
She reminds us that design is everywhere around us, and can have a huge impact on how both humans and more-than-humans end up being able to live. In the conversation, Ania shares her regenerative vision for her own business as a designer, and how sustainability can be included in all sorts of small and big ways in visioning and enacting work and space. She mentions some ways that she has taken small actions to make her own business as regenerative and low-impact as possible, which you can also find out more about here. She also shares her initiative called “Creatives in the Wild”, for which she drew inspiration from the Planetary Planning Episode with Emīlija Vaselova, and where a group of creatives went up a mountain Bergen, Norway, and explored how more-than-humans could re-shape their work. You can see some images and details on this Instagram post as well.
Take-aways for planners, by Ania Rzymyszkiewicz
* Reflect on what surroundings you want to live in, and what future makes you feel joyful. And then as, what does this look like?
* Understand “joy” for yourself / your group, but also for the other beings in a given space you use, and seek ways of allowing all beings to thrive and experience joy.
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Exploring "Living Imaginaries", with Claudia Fernandez de Cordoba Farini
lundi 5 janvier 2026 • Durée 52:08
In this episode, Claudia Fernandez de Cordoba Farini joins us for an in-depth conversation about “Living Imaginaries”, how we can access alternative imaginaries that include more-than-humans, and several very concrete examples to ground this. Claudia is founder of “Living Imaginaries”, a social enterprise that combines bold imagination with grounded pathways for structural change. The enterprise works across climate, biodiversity, food, health, and justice as interconnected expressions of deeper political and economic systems. Its work spans research, policy, future-thinking, co-design, and strategy to advance governance rooted in care, equity, and more-than-human interdependence. She is also a PhD candidate at University College London and has an incredible series of relevant actions you can find out more about on her Linkedin profile!
In this Planetary Planning episode, Claudia shares some of what it can look like to challenge dominant imaginaries and envision alternatives, through examples from a project on re-imagining governance with the North Sea, the RIPPLE methodology, Claudia’s contribution to the Planetary Compendium, the Zoöp form of cross-species cooperation, and much more. Along this conversation we clarify how the term governance can be understood in this context, how more-than-humans can come into this, and even touch on relationships all this has with colonialism. We discuss methodologies in both our work experiences, and speak of the meaning of maintaining link to roots, even as we try to allow new imaginaries to emerge. Finally, we even briefly discuss the definitions of Planning as a field, and how closely this is related to Claudia’s work.
Take-aways for planners, by Claudia Fernandez de Cordoba Farini:
* Ask: How do we design cities that are for both humans and more-than-humans, where that design is thought beyond more construction, working with what is already there
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Sustainability, Inclusion, and Arts for Fostering Local Connection, with Rui Monteiro
lundi 1 décembre 2025 • Durée 41:47
In this episode, we hear from Rui Monteiro, and especially his experience working with the RioNeiva Environmental NGO. He tells us about this NGO, its origins in society and the local context of the northern coast of Portugal, and how the association evolved over time in its continued quest to ensure the environmental and social sustainability in the area, handling various emerging challenges and opportunities. He shares about some of the pillars that make this a very successful NGO, both in reaching its environmental objectives, engaging a broad and multi-level, multi-generational, and multi-disciplinary audience, and in bridging this even to the international level through extremely inspiring projects funded by the New European Bauhaus (European Commission), and other funders, including at the Portuguese national level.
You can find several of the projects the RioNeiva NGO has worked on in the References below, several of which are mentioned in the episode. I also include some more academic publications which have also resulted from these projects, and heartily invite you to watch the documentaries associated to most of the projects linked, which have been created by Ana Clara Roberti. Some of the documentaries have English subtitles.
Take-away for planners:
- Incorporate green and blue spaces whenever possible
- Even if it takes time, incorporate new insights as soon as possible into planning processes
- Projects such as the ones exemplified by the RioNeiva NGO can provide much inspiration!
References:
RioNeiva projects (see the exhibition photos and reports from each project on the respective websites as well):
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Thinking Otherwise through "Third Cultures"
lundi 3 novembre 2025 • Durée 18:54
This is a different episode from the usual ones. Here I’m the one sharing some insights and ideas from my own research project, the EU-MSCA-funded MobileWorlds Research Project, based at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences and mentored by Prof. Wendy Tan. Most importantly, I share here some of the core ideas that intersect between the Planetary Planning Podcast and the MobileWorlds project, and share an exercise with you, which might help you, dear listener, identify, break, and re-imagine the boxes you and other put you in…
So have a listen, get ready to participate with some pen and paper (see a relevant link below), check out the additional references below, and hopefully be inspired for your own research, practice, and or daily life. Feel free to share comments in case you tried out the exercise, and do let me know if there’s a specific guest you’d like me to interview next!
Link to build your own box:
References:
On third cultures:
Haste, H. (2016). Pluralism, Perspective, Order and Organization: The Fault-Lines of 21st Century ‘Cultures’ and Epistemologies. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 41(2–3), 167–187.
Ortolano, G. (2016). Breaking Ranks: C. P. Snow and the Crisis of Mid-Century Liberalism, 1930–1980. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 41(2–3), 118–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/03080188.2016.1223577
Pollock, D. C., Van Reken, R. E., & Pollock, M. V. (2017). Third culture kids: Growing up among worlds (Third edition). Nicholas Brealey Publishing.
Snow, C. P. (1990). The Two Cultures. Leonardo, 23(2/3), 169–173.
Useem, J., Useem, R., & Donoghue, J. (1963). Men in the Middle of the Third Culture: The Roles of American and Non-Western People in Cross-Cultural Administration. , (3), 169–179.
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Reconnecting to Nature-scapes and Water-scapes, with Sharon Sand
lundi 6 octobre 2025 • Durée 32:18
In this episode, we hear from Sharon Sand. Sharon is an Urban Planner focused on climate change adaptation, protecting biodiversity, and providing equitable access to nature, parks and green schoolyards. She is on the Government Affairs team as Public Grants Program Senior Manager for Trust for Public Land in California (USA) to obtain public funding for land conservation and urban park projects in neighborhoods that need it most. In this role she also contributes to state and regional policy and strategy related to funding land preservation, access to green space, and climate change adaptation. Sharon is based in LA and has been part of the Stockton team since 2021. Before this work, Sharon worked in cancer genetics research and education including administering international consortia. She is author and co-author of numerous publications resulting from this work. Sharon earned a bachelor’s in Psychology from CSULA and a master’s from UCLA in Urban and Regional Planning with a certificate in Design and Development and another as a Leader in Sustainability through the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability.
In the episode, Sharon is incredibly generous in sharing examples from her work as grant advisor and planner for the access to nature in the U.S.A., and especially in California. She shares insights from as wide ranging examples as access to riversides, to the greening of schoolyards, and shows the crucial emphasis on community-led, bottom-up work. We also reflect a little on how the crucial role of mobility and spaces for mobility in this context.
Sharon also shares a little about the challenges that work in this field is encountering especially now, with a politically less advantageous arena, and how this is requiring pivoting to find funding for such important initiatives for ensuring access to and contact with natural environments for people from all economic situations and diverse abilities.
Sharon ends on recommendations focused on this connection to nature and we end up hypothesising that perhaps it is both the communities planners work with, and planners themselves, who may need to re-connect with their natural environments more.
the EPA Community Change Grants were for $20 million max not $50 million.
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Plant Communication, with Mariko O. Thomas and Melissa M. Parks
lundi 1 septembre 2025 • Durée 40:33
In this episode, Mariko O. Thomas and Melissa M. Parks join us to share some of their insights on plant communication, and from and process of writing the book “Storying Plant Communication. More-than-Human Relationships in New Mexico”, available for pre-order now, and to be published in October. As the book description explains, the book “explores the narrative accounts of southwestern herbalists, healers, teachers, farmers, and other plant enthusiasts who maintain deep and reciprocal relationships with the local flora.”
Mariko Oyama Thomas is Teaching Faculty at Skagit Valley College, USA. She holds a PhD in Environmental Communication from the University of New Mexico and is Co-Founder of the arts and ecology collaborative Submergence Collective.
Melissa M. Parks is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication and the Environmental Humanities Program at the University of Utah. She is also the Associate Director of the Taft-Nicholson Center for Environmental Humanities Education in Centennial Valley, Montana, USA.
For the podcast, Mariko and Melissa build on the fact that it seems much easier to imagine more-than-humans as animals than as plants, and how then, in the field of communications, they sought for a way to include plant communication in the picture and in their teaching as well. They describe of how they found storytelling as the best method to study plant communication from a social science perspective (a method we’ve come across a few more times in Planetary Planning, with previous guests such as Jamie Wang, Isabelle Doucet, and Phoebe Wagner, among others). They share several practical examples of how anyone - including planners! - can engage in plant communication, and plant awareness wherever they are.
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Sound and Noise in a Planetary Future, with Edda Bild
lundi 7 juillet 2025 • Durée 50:35
In this episode, Edda Bild shares insights on human and more-than-human sounds, and which of these are considered more positively, versus which tend to be considered “noise”. Edda currently works as post-doctoral research associate at the Institute for Work and Health in Toronto, Canada, where she focuses on topics around occupational health and safety, like the newcomer experience in the workplace, small businesses and psychological health and safety. She also continues her work as a post-doctoral soundscape researcher and an ambassador of the Sounds in the City team at McGill University. She works on the hearing modality, the broader urban sensory experience, and its implications for urban practice, and has now shifted focus to encouraging sound awareness and education. She is passionate about knowledge transfer and turning research into meaningful interventions and practices.
In the episode, we discuss the difference between noise and sound, and which human and more-than-human sounds are more or less considered as noisy. Humans seem to tend to like hearing the sounds of other humans (though not all of their sounds), of birds chirping, and of various “urban waters”, while machines such as cars or construction are often considered only as noise (negative). However, as we discuss towards the end, there are also political policy decisions regarding for example which noises should be tolerated for public purposes even when they are not considered pleasant (e.g. public transportation versus private cars). Edda shares several examples of how sound matters in public spaces (including inside buildings and transportation), and how it is most commonly approached in planning: as noise, that is, as primarily problem. She shows how this makes sense, but that sound is also more complex than staying below 80 decibels to avoid noise, and that sound co-habitation must take many perspectives into account. She also shares some insights on the ways human sound has affected more-than-humans both in (urban) public spaces and under water (referring e.g. to the field of Bioacoustics, see reference below). We end on her take-aways for planners (see below) and on how the theme of sound, like most themes planners work with, have important - e.g. in defining where which sounds are to be permitted, which beings protected from which noises, and so forth. Sound is political.
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Logistics in a Planetary Context, with Subina Shrestha
lundi 2 juin 2025 • Durée 29:25
In this episode, Subina Shrestha, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Network for Equity in Sustainable Transition (CERC NEST) at the University of Toronto Scarborough in Canada, shares her insights about how the field of logistics is changing spaces, human relations, and more - and especially through the increasing dominance of more-than-human, or perhaps rather: less-than-human, digital technologies.
This episode sheds important light on digital more-than-human dynamics that a Planetary Future must take into account. In many societies, especially among the financially wealthiest countries around the world, it has become taken for granted that any object should be available to us within days or even hours, even when it is not something that is normally available in our immediate surroundings. At the same time, many other places, the people in those places, are working hard for an economy that is nowhere near them and that they see little to no benefit from. And then there are the people working in transporting those objects, be it over long distances or for the least mile.
As Subina shares with us, much of these logistics are dominated by a corporate objective of speed, efficiency and productivity. She argues that planning can and must play an important role in challenging those objectives in favour of more wellbeing-oriented values. This means that seeking a more-than-humanness in terms of technology and automation, as major corporations tend to do, should not be allowed to be achieved when these go to the detriment of human wellbeing - and perhaps also other more-than-human wellbeing, though we explore this less in this episode. Subina does also see the digital more-than-human world to offer many positive contributions, if one is careful to use them to that end, such as by enabling “platform cooperativism”.
In this episode we touch on “cyborg jobs”, workers’ rights and solidarity networks, agency of consumers and local municipalities, the dominance of large corporations in the current planning and execution of logistics, the increasing dominance of less-than-human digital technologies in this, and .
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Finding Our Multiple Identities, and Our Agency, with Liz Challinor
lundi 5 mai 2025 • Durée 34:08
In this episode, we speak with Liz Challinor, researcher in anthropology at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA) of the New University of Lisbon, as well as fiction and poetry writer. She shares her reflections on categories along which we see others - and ourselves - and how it is often forgotten that we have multiple identities, when in fact this is crucial. In fact, creating connections between those multiple identities might be key. Although the more-than-human lens is not Liz’s field, it becomes clear that at least some of what she has studied among humans is likely to also count between humans and more-than-humans (in themselves categories that may better be transcended, perhaps).
Liz highlights the a-historical and a-political approaches that have become more dominant in regards to people crossing borders, essentializing the question of identities and cultures of people often to harmful extents. She also points to how calling out a “crisis” (be it a refugee (or refuge?) crisis, a housing crisis, or a “polycrisis”) can make one feel without agency, hopeless, when in fact we humans have a lot of agency - as well as responsibility for the consequences we now witness.
Perhaps as a way to connect our multiple identities with our agency, we go on to speak on the important role that various arts forms, and especially fiction and poetry, can have for bringing back some of the emotion and intuition - and some careful playfulness, too - that is involved in human relations, but that more academic or “scientific” or “rigour-based” approaches tend to reject. Perhaps there is a place for all these approaches, but writing is certainly a legitimate and perhaps even crucial one to maintain as part of our inquiries.
Take-aways for planners, by Liz Challinor:
* Recognize Planning as presence
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Cyborgs, humans, and more-than-humans, with António Ferreira
lundi 7 avril 2025 • Durée 36:36
This episode is a conversation with António Ferreira, multidisciplinary researcher and writer on themes as varied and interconnected as degrowth/post-growth, urban and regional planning, mobilities and transport, critical innovation and digitalisation studies, and more. António works as principal researcher at CITTA, Centre for Territory, Transports and Environment, at the University of Porto.
In this episode, we focus on cyborgs, a topic António dives into in depth in one of the chapters of his recent book, Mobilities in a Turbulent Era. We discuss what cyborgs are, the extent to which they are more-than-human, less-than-human, or perhaps something else entirely. António gives us many examples of the cyborgs already within and among us, as well as the possibilities that could emerge in relation to cyborgs in future. We discuss kaleidoskopic ways of looking at the world (and problems within in) - as an alternative to feeling stuck in dilemma’s or always applying the same go-to “solution”. António applies some of this thinking when we discuss digitalisation more broadly, and how seeking digital solutions to any problem has become the go-to option that - by losing critical reflection about the why and how underlying it - has many hidden downsides. Of course, we also touch on the materiality of the cyborg and the digital, that brings another dimension to the critique of the human-nature binary that has been previously discussed in this podcast. Finally, António shares his take-aways from all this for Planetary Futures and Planetary Planning based on this conversation:
Take-aways for planners (and others), by António Ferreira:
* Humans in general and Planners in particular should seek more maturity in their decision structures and actions.
* Let’s not “throw computers at the problem” assuming that “something should come out of it, right?” - think a bit further and more critically (and creatively?) about this
* , before they are capable of making their own choices in this matter
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* Re-imagine biodiversity governance through a more-than-human lens: how can you take the more-than-human approach in how you act in your own work?
Resources:
Many links are provided throughout the text above, but for ease of access and as an overview, I provide them here again:
Fernandez de Cordoba Farini, C., Branca, F., Yoon, J.-H., Fan, S., Fanzo, J., Mercado, S. P., & Demaio, S. (2025). A centre of gravity: Asia–Pacific leadership in global food systems transformation. The Lancet Planetary Health, 9(10). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lanplh.2025.101338
van Doorninck, W., Hermans, T., Molina, P. B., Minderhoud, K., Farini, C. F. D. C., Remans, R., & Karssenberg, M. (2025). Narrative analysis of biodiversity in food system transformation literature. https://edepot.wur.nl/700705
And for those interested in some of my own work that was mentioned in the episode a little too, here are some relevant links:
The MobileWorlds project - including toolkits of various applied methodologies, a library, and more
A critical commentary on (social) innovation: von Schönfeld, K. C., & Ferreira, A. (2021). Urban Planning and European Innovation Policy: Achieving Sustainability, Social Inclusion, and Economic Growth? Sustainability, 13(3), 1137. https://doi.org/10.3390/su13031137
Roberti, A. C., von Schönfeld, K. C., & Monteiro, R. (2025). From Riverbank to Ocean: Involving Young Generations With Their Territory Through Artistic Practices. Ocean & Society, 2. https://doi.org/10.17645/oas.9634
von Schönfeld, K. C., Monteiro, R., Roberti, A. C., & Conceição, G. C. (2025). Exploring the Potentials of Rural Tactical Action for Co-Creating Heritage: The Case of the “Minante” Project. Heritage & Society, 1–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/2159032X.2025.2555019
von Schönfeld, K. C., Roberti, A. C. N., Lopes, B., & Conceição, G. (2023). (Re-)valuing and co-creating cultures of water: A transdisciplinary methodology for weaving a live tapestry of Blue Heritage. International Journal of Heritage Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2023.2234349
Some of my own work in relation to cultures of mobilities:
Cadima, C., Von Schönfeld, K., & Ferreira, A. (2024). Beyond Car-Centred Adultism? Exploring Parental Influences on Children’s Mobility. Urban Planning, 9, 8643. https://doi.org/10.17645/up.8643
von Schönfeld, K. C., & Ferreira, A. (2022). Mobility values in a finite world: Pathways beyond austerianism? Applied Mobilities, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/23800127.2022.2087135
Von Schönfeld, K. C. (2024). On the ‘impertinence of impermanence’ and three other critiques: Reflections on the relationship between experimentation and lasting – or significant? – change. Journal of Urban Mobility, 5, 100070. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.urbmob.2023.100070
Von Schönfeld, K. C. (2025). Questioning streets. On plural origins, plural uses, and plural futures. Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, 31. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trip.2025.101403
For those who prefer to read more than to listen, and since the transcript doesn’t seem to be working for this episode, I share a rough transcript of the episode below:
“Hello everyone, thank you for listening.
Today’s episode will be a little different from the usual - you’ll be hearing just from me, mostly about ways to “think otherwise” or “think outside the box” - something that guides me in my work more generally, but especially in the work I do for the research project MobileWorlds, which I’ve been doing now since 2023. It is an individual post-doctoral research project, funded by the European Union as part of the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions, about rethinking daily mobilities through what we call “third cultures”. I’ll get back to this in a moment. But why is this relevant to speak about here, though, you might wonder. Besides the quite close temporal coincidence of the start of the project and the start of this Podcast, they are also intimately connected in many other ways:
First, they are both about thinking otherwise, as I was anticipating at the start. For Planetary Planning, we’ve been trying to think about how the Planning discipline could be more deeply and explicitly concerned with human-to-human as well as human-to-more-than-human relationships. This often requires thinking a bit out-of-the-box of what has more traditionally been the way of thinking about planning, as a frequently very technocratic discipline, frequently focused on maximising economic gain – or growth – based on the ways in which a given area – urban or rural – has been organized and distributed spatially and in terms of social relations and connectivity. I’m generalising there, I am aware, and there is much more to the planning discipline. Importantly, there is a by now quite large strand of thinking in planning – both research and practice – which includes what is called “participatory planning”, that is, reflections and implementations on how to include diverse voices in the decision-making about what should be prioritised and done in urban and regional planning – often this is about human residents in a given area, for example, sharing their lived expertise on what that area needs and wants to be a better space for them to live their lives in – also in other-than-economic terms, and certainly beyond what necessarily economic growth might be able to deliver. This doesn’t yet tend to include more-than-humans, but does frequently attempt to make important steps towards including diverse groups of people and their often diverging interests. We’ve spoken a little about these processes in the earlier episodes of this podcast, for instance with Jonathan Metzger. All this does often require planners (and researchers of planning) to step outside their usual thinking and acting, to question their assumptions and so on.
Now, in the MobileWorlds project, we’ve been focusing on how to “think otherwise” especially regarding mobility and transport – how we get around, as an activity that is key for all other activities that we humans and most more-than-humans may want and need to engage in throughout our lives. And are sometimes forced to – it wasn’t so much the topic of the episode with António Ferriera a while back, but I recommend to check out his work for more on that. MobileWorlds emerged from the connection of three frustrations, one could say:
1. With the continued car-centric and efficiency-centric planning around the world, in cities and regions, and the frequent “excuse” of “culture” to do so,
2. With the dismissal of what are considered “non-scientific” approaches, such as anecdotal experiences and arts-based understanding, in both research and practice in planning – when a complimentary joining of these ways of thinking has always seemed an obvious necessity to me, and
3. With the strangely exclusive way that “third cultures” were being discussed in much academic work on the subject. Let me briefly explain what third cultures are then. There have been many definitions, but I’ll briefly touch on two.
One is that based on a supposed divide between the two cultures of the sciences and the humanities, identified as such by on J.P. Snow in the 1960s and 1970s, which could perhaps be transcended through a third culture, which would emphasise something like what we would now call more accessible science communication – again, simplifying his idea quite strongly, but I’m providing some relevant references for those curious in the episode notes. In any case culture here was clearly referring to specific norms, values, and ways-of-doing and understanding the world that were different between “sciences” and “humanities”.
A second definition of third cultures emerged around the same time of Snow’s – interestingly – but in a rather different field and context. Ruth Useem and her husband coined the term third cultures, or more precisely “third culture kids” in the 1970s to refer to children who grew up in countries other than their parents’ passport countries, due to temporary work of the parents in those countries. That is, for instance, children of missionary-workers, international-development workers, military, and other such work. The stays abroad for these children (and parents) would always be perceived as temporary, rather than what was often the case for migrants who might aim to stay in a new country permanently – and there was usually a perception of privilege, and perhaps even superiority, associated with the culture of the children moving to another country, as compared to the country they had moved to. In the Useems’ case, they studied children of missionaries from the USA who moved to India temporarily. The Useems argued that these children developed a third culture that was neither really a USA-culture, nor really an Indian-culture, but maintained parts of both, plus something quite other. Much literature on such “third culture kids” has since focused on the psychological and skill-based benefits and drawbacks of growing up in this way. There is much merit to this work, and much nuance about various aspects too, however, there was something I was triggered to think about in view of both my own background as a third culture kid, and in view of my wish to unbind some of the cultural justifications I kept hearing about not changing. Just to give you an example, I would hear people say they cycle because they are Dutch or were in the Netherlands, or people saying they drive because they’re from the USA, or people saying they parked a certain way because they were from Portugal, etc. There’s likely an important grain of truth in that, but at the same time I felt there could be an important value in exploring ways out of this kind of justification, because it might open us up to thinking more creatively about alternatives. And I saw third cultures as an opportunity to think that through – if we could acknowledge the extent to which many people nowadays come into formative contact with two or more cultures, either by moving between contexts themselves: country-to-country or from north-to-south or rural-to-urban within the same country or region; or by coming into contact with different cultures around them in the same place, for instance through work-colleagues, best friends at school, or even the local shops, restaurants and supermarket foods. And if we could think of third cultures in this way, could we then break out of our stagnant ways of thinking of our mobility cultures?
So these three joint frustrations – about mobilities planning, about valuing arts-based understanding, and about third cultures – led me to propose a project that would help rethink mobilities by exploring third cultures of mobilities through arts- and experience-based activities – such as arts-based participatory workshops, mobile interviews, and a festival combining planning, arts, unboxing, and zines. We’ve done this in Porto, Portugal, Bergen, Norway, and online – with Porto and Bergen as Northern and Southern European second-cities in their respective countries, both with ports and thus with important mobility and cultural diversity related histories…
The methods of working with arts – albeit mostly in amateur ways – in this revealed an important step in reconnecting different modes of understanding and allowing them both their moment to shine and to inspire: more technocratic and solution-oriented ones of more classic planning, and more arts-based creative and imaginary ones. The MobileWorlds project is now working on a Toolkit that will share several insights on how that has worked, how it might be applied in different contexts, and so on.
You can find out a lot more by visiting the project website, mobileworlds.online, also linked in the notes of course, where I’ll also be posting a whole lot more in the coming months regarding other outputs and insights.
But now, to come back to more-than-humans and planning, I want to suggest that much of what was done there in terms of mobilities, could also be interesting to do in terms of the topic of planetary planning. What could be a third culture of planetarity?
I invite you to think on this perhaps with the following exercise, adapted from a workshop done during the MobileWorlds Festival:
You’ll need pen and paper, or ideally pens of several colours, and a soft paper box. I’ll share a link in the notes to a suggestion of how you could build yourself one. It’s not meant to be perfect, especially since - spoiler alert – you’ll be destroying it quite soon after building it.
So, first, I invite you to take a moment to think about the following: what kinds of labels have been put on you, or have you put on yourself, that you are not quite content with. They don’t have to be negative per se, but something that feels like when someone – including yourself perhaps – says this about you, it doesn’t quite seem to do you justice: it might be a country they associate you with, or a specific activity. Human, perhaps. Planner, or academic; mother, or father; woman, or man; athletic, lazy, car driver, cyclist, plant-lover, useful, useless, foreign, minority, leftist, conservative… whatever it is. It should be something that might have some truth to it, but that when it is said about you, or when you say it about yourself, it doesn’t quite seem to fit, it makes you feel there should be more depth, more qualification to it. Because in the end, I think we all have several of those.
Then, use the most regular pen colour you have with you to write these labels on the various sides of the outside of the box.
And then, once you feel that box has on the outside all the labels you felt were important to include: take a deep breath, and smash it. Break it. Rip it. Destroy it.
Now, that was you breaking all those boxes you’ve been put in. Now, carefully open up the box, what is left of it, and find the inside of it. It’s fine if it’s several pieces, or crumpled, don’t worry. But now, use what is there, on what used to be the inside of the box and is now opened up, and write or draw with colourful pens what you wish you found there. What is that depth and qualification that you want to show, that you wish you could be or that you wish others could or would see. It can include labels, words, but it doesn’t have to, it can also be just colour, drawings, anything that makes you feel good and full.
And after having done that, I invite you to pick some of what you found inside your box, and to explore it in some small action near you. Yours might look very different from mine, but I realised in one of the times I did this exercise that I really wanted this to include a deeper, more genuine connection to the places where I live and work. So one thing I did was to go out one night and look for a tree near me, and try to find out as much as possible about it: what kind of tree it is, but also what it needs, how it lives, and how it might have gotten there, to that street, what its immediate surrounding was about, who was this that the tree’s street was named after? And so on. And just this small exercise created a cascade of new questions to explore about the place where I live and the beings I share this space with. Again, you might choose an entirely different exercise, but I can recommend this one, if you’re out of ideas for now!
There’s so much more to share and think jointly about, and perhaps in future we’ll do another episode on the podcast exploring such subjects with guests that might help us unpack more of this. But for now, I think you’ve listened to my soliloquy for long enough.
Thank you again for listening, and see you next month – with a guest again by then!”
We discuss the language we use to speak about plants, the ways we can study plants through the stories told about them, and the potential that signage can have if it would use storytelling to speak of plants. They speak of the rhythms of plant communication and the need to de-centre the ego of academic work to be able to engage with this topic.
Key take-aways for planners:
* Allow ourselves to tell stories, and listen to other stories, to help break out of binaries and embrace a more multi-species and commons approach to the world
* Remember to consider perspectives that can’t verbally tell their stories
* We need all hands on deck and all disciplines on deck
* We need to get comfortable with the lack of egoism that is necessary to work in groups
Robin Wall Kimmerer’s books: https://www.robinwallkimmerer.com/books (mentioned in relation to the grammar used surrounding plants and other more-than-humans)
* Place more emphasis on genuinecommunication: when you talk, make sure the messages are simple and / or straight-forward enough for the various audiences involved
* But do not only talk. Good communication is also about keeping an “open ear”. That is: make sure to listen, be considerate and attempt to understand various perspectives. (For some hints for how to “listen” to more-than-humans, see for instance the episode with Emilija Vaselova or the one with Jonathan Metzger)
* Sound is one more element on the list of many that planners need to look out for, but this is why collaborating cross-disciplinarily is key in planning.
References and resources
Bild, E., Steele, D., & Guastavino, C. (2024). Supporting the Living Laboratory: A Literature Review of Montreal Sound-Related Research. Journal of Planning Literature, 08854122241266816. https://doi.org/10.1177/08854122241266816
Di Croce, N., & Bild, E. (2024). How do urban policies shape atmosphere? A multimethod inquiry of the sonic environment. Urban Research & Practice, 17(3), 416–437. https://doi.org/10.1080/17535069.2023.2232344
Steele, D., Bild, E., & Guastavino, C. (2023). Moving past the sound-noise dichotomy: How professionals of the built environment approach the sonic dimension. Cities, 132, 103974. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2022.103974
Trudeau, C., Steele, D., & Guastavino, C. (2020). A Tale of Three Misters: The Effect of Water Features on Soundscape Assessments in a Montreal Public Space. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 570797. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.570797
Other podcasts discussing Sound (as a key theme or on occasional episodes):
* Think about logistics in terms of human wellbeing perspectives - including consumers as well as workers
* Focus on urban vitalism as the key objective in urban planning, meaning to aim to elevate wellbeing for everyone in the city
* Think well about how digital tools can be used well, and avoid using them to the detriment of the local population. When thinking of people-centered planning, this should also include workers in logistics. And be sure to ask: whose interests are technological innovations serving, in both research and practice?
* Engage with Planning as not only about avoiding disruption, but rather also about being open to disruption, and knowing how to welcome it and realize what it’s bringing
References:
Challinor, E. (2018). "Cross-border citizenship: mothering beyond the boundaries of consanguinity and nationality". Ethnic and Racial Studies 41 1: 114-131. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1293278
Challinor, E. (2019). When does difference matter? Border-generating categories in the lives of foreign nationals in northern Portugal. International Journal of Migration and Border Studies, 5(4), 308. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJMBS.2019.105811
Challinor, E. (2022). Who Marks the Borders of the (Un)Known? Relational Reflexivity in the Production of a Play on Forced Mobility in Northern Portugal. In N. G. Ortega, & A. B. M. García (Eds.), Representing 21ST-Century Migration in Europe: Performing Borders, Identities and Texts (1st ed., pp. 208-223). Berghahn Books. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781800733817-014
Challinor, E. (2024). Navigating through the Cracks of the State System: Shifting Spaces of Hope in the Portuguese Mobility Regime. Anthropological Quarterly 97(1), 95-124. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/anq.2024.a923085
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