A theoretical orientation that decenters the human as the sole agent, subject, or measure of the world. It acknowledges the entanglement of human life with non-human beings, forces, and materialities, from microbes and animals to rivers, infrastructures, and atmospheres. The term signals both critique and extension: a critique of anthropocentrism that reduces environments to human use, and an extension of agency, ethics, and imagination to include multispecies and material actors.
In landscape and architectural theory, the more-than-human reframes design as a negotiation within ecological assemblages rather than a projection of human will. It draws from posthumanism, new materialism, and multispecies ethnography, often stressing vulnerability, co-dependency, and the instability of boundaries between human and nonhuman.
Key thinkers: Donna Haraway (companion species, Chthulucene), Bruno Latour (actor-network theory), Anna Tsing (mushroom at the end of the world), Jane Bennett (vital materialism).
The concept complicates design by asking: how can landscapes be conceived not only for humans but also with other beings and agencies?
Landscape architecture should engage intensively with conviviality—it has the capacity to unify many issues in current theoretical debates and connect the discipline to the global network of the conviviality movement.
Multispecies Urbanism (MU) concept proposes that cities be designed and governed for the multispecies whole. In her manifesto, artist, infrastructure activist, and researcher Debra Solomon argues that healthy urban environments for humans are inseparable from the flourishing of other species and their microbial consortia. MU treats ecological labour—cooling, water buffering, pollination, soil formation—as infrastructural work […]
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