Architecture, Building and Planning - Research Publications

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Author: Roudavski, Stanislav × Author: Parker, Daniel × Type: Moving Image ×

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    What Is It Like to Be an Owl … in a Human World? Mutual Support, Conflict, and Design Imagination in Interspecies Communities
    Parker, D ; Soanes, K ; Roudavski, S ( 2023)
    This project challenges Thomas Nagel’s scepticism about the possibility of understanding the lives of nonhuman animals and explores cultural relationships between humans and powerful owls (Ninox strenua) in southeastern Australia. We argue that a better understanding of stakeholder interactions in interspecies communities is not only necessary but readily attainable and can reverse many designed or unintentional harms to support mutually beneficial cohabitation. To investigate this proposition, we conduct immersive ethnographic interviews with humans who have committed numerous years to living with owls and apply their learning to map existing and potential contributions of nonhuman stakeholders in the design of urban places. In the process, we document previously unpublished observations of owl cultures, including mourning, farming, teaching, personal expression, place use, and decision-making. Our approach contrasts these behaviours of owls with aspects of human cultures that cause disturbance, intrusion, and misunderstanding. In response, we describe observed motivations for sustained cultural interactions across species, highlighting the need for a fundamental reframing of power relationships in interspecies communities. Our presentation contributes to the theme of Animal Cultures by demonstrating encouraging existing practices and practical steps that can lead to substantial improvements in parallel with the visionary possibilities of politically inclusive interspecies communities.
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    Multispecies Cultures and Design for Powerful Owls
    Parker, D ; Roudavski, S (Flourishing of the Non-Human in Cities, a session at The Nature of Cities Festival and Speaking About the Humans. Animal Perspectives on the Multispecies World, 2022)
    We argue that nonhuman individuals are experts in their lives and can offer valuable contributions to the design of future environments. Without innovative modifications of prevalent human practices, the unfolding environmental crisis is likely to grow catastrophically. A typical example of the ongoing degradation is the accelerating extinction of nonhuman lifestyles. Humans dominate the replacement cultures, and this anthropocentrism causes widespread harm. Our project seeks to tackle this problem. The study of human cultures already draws a lot of attention. Research on nonhuman cultures is also growing. However, cultures that involve human and nonhuman agents remain understudied. Integration of nonhuman cultural knowledge into future-oriented design is even more rare. Addressing this gap in knowledge, we aim to show that nonhuman expertise can inform designing for and with all life in the age of human domination. To explore this hypothesis, we discuss an ongoing research project that aims to help large owls thrive in dense cities. The article provides a mapping of interspecies cultures in this case and tests this mapping by considering alternative design scenarios. We begin by outlining characteristic individuals that can lead worse or better lives: organisms, species, families, communities, and ecosystems. The next step establishes dimensions of value according to these individuals using the capabilities approach. We use examples of long-term co-living ranging from interspecies friendship to interspecies violence to illustrate the argument. Owls live better if they are healthy, can procreate, socialise, and make their own decisions. The deployment of multiple timescales, from evolutionary to cultural and organismic, helps to capture the full range of possible cultures including the owls’ attitudes towards various humans. Our analysis demonstrates plasticities and fragilities of nonhuman as well as more-than-human communities. This work contributes to scholarship by reconsidering conservation in response to nonhuman knowledge and testing ideas of ecological justice in application to design.