COSMOPOLITICAL DRAWING. Practices for agency redistribution in urban and territorial co-design.

Territory is constructed through representational frameworks that select which relationships, agents and dynamics are considered relevant, often excluding the relational and more-than-human agencies that constitute the environments they transform. This exclusion is structurally reproduced through the representational tools by which the territory is made legible and reinforced by models of governance that neutralise conflict without negotiating the actual terms of territorial production. What remains outside these frameworks are precisely the qualitative dimensions, such as affective memory, material traces left by the agencies that inhabit it, the slow accumulation of practices and attachments through which communities and non-human entities co-produce a place over time, that are key to create a ‘sense of place’ and form the basis for a high-quality habitat.

This research proposes cosmopolitical drawing as an operational practice capable of making visible what has been excluded, redistributing agency within territorial co-design practices. Rooted in Isabelle Stengers’ notion of cosmopolitics, it is a drawing practice that attends to the material traces left by relations between human and more-than-human entities in the territory. Thereby, it makes their agencies visible and operative within co-design processes and redistributes agency beyond exclusively human stakeholders, whilst maintaining conflict as a productive rather than a resolvable condition. Developed within the NRP81 project Infrastructural Baukultur, which works with Swiss cantonal road corridors as sites where relational, interdisciplinary and socio-ecological approaches to co-design can be developed and tested, this research focuses on West Lausanne and Geneva as primary cases, and on Elche (Spain) as a transferability test developed without the pre-existing co-design context of the project.

The practice, constructed as a design research method, unfolds across three stages. The first reconstructs the territory through forensic ecological methods, recovering latent histories, material traces and more-than-human agencies, to build a situated understanding of how each territory has been transformed over time. The second develops cosmopolitical drawings through contributive workshops in the framework of the Baukultur project, in which the relational worlds —Umwelt— of selected non-human entities are drawn and introduced as active interlocutors, making their agencies operative within the co-design process. The third focuses on the translation of these relational outcomes into situated spatial propositions, identifying strategic locations where minimal interventions might operate as stepping stones within a broader green infrastructure, generating ecological continuity across fragmented territories and contributing to the Passage-Paysage framework of the project.

The research offers a replicable framework of drawing practices that shifts territorial design away from logics of control towards situated negotiation between species, enabling more-than-human entities to participate as active agents in processes of territorial transformation, thus offering a concrete operative practice for more democratic co-design processes capable of leveraging conflict as the necessary condition through which heterogeneous agencies can genuinely enter into an active dialogue.

This text is Natalia Gómez Mateu’s PhD abstract.

KEY WORDS:

cosmopolitical drawing territorial representation
ecological relations more-than-human entities
agency co-design processes