Urban interventions are often associated with a strong notion of human agency: architects, designers, and artists acting as political subjects to contest existing power structures. But what if we take non-human and more-than-human actors found in the city into account? How can these actors be brought into collaborative acts of designing and what new conditions occur for material participation and citizenship?

In the recently published article Scaling Experiments in Urban Space, we build up a new framework to help curators, designers, and researchers to better understand how site-specific interventions may reconfigure the relationship between non-human and human actors in urban space.

The article is co-authored by Kathrina Dankl from Design School Kolding and Eva Knutz from the Social Design Unit and is based on their curatorial work in setting up the exhibition Agency in the City of Kolding. The exhibition was part of the Nordes 2021 Conference and videos of eight urban interventions may be found here.

If you are interested in reading the article you may find it published in the Conference Proceedings.