Practitioners of transpecies design aim to consider the needs of all species — not just humans — in the built environment. Their buildings often include habitats for plants, animals and even microorganisms, with the goal of reducing biodiversity decline and lessening the impacts of climate change. The University of Oregon is a hub for the movement, and students and faculty recently showcased it with an exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Architecture.
Adrian Parr is the dean of UO’s College of Design. She joins to tell us more about the transpecies design movement.
Note: This transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Happy Friday. We start today with transpecies design. That’s the newish name for a design philosophy that aims to consider the needs of all species – not just humans – in the built environment. That could mean buildings that include habitat for plants, animals and even microorganisms, with the goal of maintaining biodiversity and lessening the impacts of climate change. The University of Oregon is a hub for this movement. More than half a dozen students and faculty recently put on an exhibition at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Adrian Parr is the dean of the University’s College of Design. She coined the term transpecies design, and she joins us now to talk about it. Welcome to the show.
Adrian Parr: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Thanks for joining us. Before we dig into the kind of design that you’re calling for, I thought we could start with the status quo in terms of our relationship to other species because I have a feeling we are so enmeshed in it, so literally surrounded by it, that it’s hard for us to truly see what it means in terms of our relationships to nonhumans. So where are we now?
Parr: Well, in terms of the species extinction rate, for example, that’s occurring at 1,000 to 10,000 times the natural baseline rate. If we were to look at that in terms of different numbers, that’s about 200 to 2,000 species a year, if we look at the low estimate of species that is used globally. So if, for example, our baseline number of species is 2 million different species, that would mean approximately 200 to 2,000 species are going extinct every year. Why that matters is it’s also an indicator of a loss of biodiversity, which is the number of species – animals and plants combined – that inhabit a given area. We are encountering biodiversity loss at an alarming rate, and that’s directly connected to the species extinction rate.
Miller: And that is obviously tied to many things humans are doing including deforestation, the use of all kinds of chemicals, climate change writ large in so many different ways. What’s the connection between design and architecture and everything you’ve just been talking about?
Parr: Oh, that’s a terrific question. If we think about the world’s urban population, for example, the majority of the world at the moment now is living in urban areas. And that’s said to increase. It’s going to hit approximately 70 percent of the global population will be an urban population by 2050. So that’s an increase of about, I don’t know, 2.5 billion people, over the next 30 years or so.
I think if we take that into consideration and that, as our urban environments continue to grow, there’s also what accompanies that is habitat loss. Cities continue to grow. Suburban areas continue to grow. We’re having a demise of all these sorts of habitats that our wildlife depends upon for its flourishing. I mention that because the design and development of human settlements is directly connected to this problem surrounding biodiversity loss and species extinction. If we take that into account, we can do something about this. It means we have to sort of rethink the ways in which we design and develop our built environments.
Miller: What are the hallmarks of transpecies design as you see them?
Parr: The idea for transpecies design… I might back up just briefly to sort of speak to you about how it came about and how I thought of it. That might be helpful for the listener. I wrote a book – about a year ago it was published – called ‘Earthlings.’ In that I put forward this idea of transenvironmentalism. It was structured by three theoretical pillars: One of them was transgenerational thinking and practices; one was transnational thinking and practices; and the third pillar was what I call transpeciesist thinking and practices. These three trans practices and thinking were the fundamental ingredients to what I’m calling transenvironmentalism.
I thought when I arrived as a dean at the University of Oregon, where there’s this incredibly rich legacy of work around environmental justice and climate change and issues to do with ecological vitality and so on and so forth… In particular, the College of Design has been doing work in this area for decades, since really the 60s, and has been a leader in that space. I thought it would be really wonderful to test one arm of that theory in collaboration with faculty and students. So I extracted the transpeciesist arm, so to speak, and threw it out to the college community as a new dean. I’d already been invited, in my capacity as the UNESCO Chair of Water and Human Settlements, to curate a small exhibit as part of the Venice Architecture Biennale. So I needed a kind of curatorial concept, and I wanted to do something that could be both real and also hypothetical – experimental so to speak.
So the idea was thrust out into the College of Design community. To my delight, there were a whole variety of collaborations across the college that emerged as a result of this call. There were collaborations across different disciplines. There were faculty that had studios with students doing visionary work in this space. Everybody sort of testing these ideas, trying to figure out how might that work in concrete terms. Then from there I selected a group of projects to go on to be exhibited at the Biennale.
Miller: Can you describe some of the projects that, as you say, how they would work in concrete terms? What are some examples of what this can or could look like?
Parr: The idea of a transpecies design practice, I think, is very much indebted to some of the work that’s already taken place around the building of, say, wildlife overpasses. A really good example would be the one in Banff in Canada. Those wildlife corridors are a direct response to habitat fragmentation because of human activities and the constructions of roads and highways, right? What happens if we take that idea of a transpeciesist infrastructure and start to think of the urban environment as a whole, as having the potential to function like an infrastructure for biodiversity.
Other examples might be the High Line in New York, for example, which attracts all kinds of pollinators and migratory birds now…
Miller: That’s a former elevated train platform that’s on the west side of the city that, over the last decade plus, was turned into a kind of meandering park – for humans but also has a lot of plantings.
Parr: Yes. What I love about that example is that that one’s really a system premised upon mutual flourishing of both humans and other than human species. This is what transpecies design is also trying to highlight – that it’s not just about providing a little plot of land here and there that we hope that other than human species visit and might use, but that actually we can create environments of mutual flourishing for both humans and other than humans alike. The High Line in New York I think functions beautifully in that regard. I mean, it’s a 3.5 acre stretch of land that’s built biological biodiversity back into New York City with 200 species of perennials or something was one of the statistics that I read. It’s one that people frequent and use both for enjoyment but also to walk to work each day. And it’s a place where all kinds of species come together in a system of mutual flourishing.
Miller: That’s an outdoor example as is the wildlife corridor in Banff. I’m curious about… We’re talking via Zoom right now. We can’t see each other. I don’t know where you are, but I imagine you’re inside. I don’t hear any outdoor sounds. What about the room you’re in right now? I mean, how do you envision indoor spaces could change if we’re talking about a profoundly different approach to sharing space?
Parr: Oh, I love that question. I’m actually right now at Overlook in Pennsylvania with the Fuller family, who so generously supported the college in this venture to bring the work of transpecies design to the Biennale. I’m at their home in the middle of an incredible forest in the heart of Pennsylvania. So I’m surrounded at the moment with pollinators, left, right and center.
But when it comes to building structures – and I think that’s really the heart of your question – how might, for example, the facade of a building function as an other than human species habitat, or even more than that, as a habitat for both humans and other than humans alike? I think a terrific example of that would be Stefano Boeri’s Vertical Forest in Milan. That’s two really large residential towers. And really Stefano Boeri, when he conceived of the creation of those two towers, he was trying to come up with a prototype building as a biodiversity infrastructure. One that was premised upon having a positive relationship… that facilitated the creation of a positive relationship between humans and other than human species. It houses 21,000 trees, shrubs and perennials and 300 non-plant residents, as I’d like to say. So, in that example I think, that’s built; it’s functioning really well. It filters waste water for the plants that are all around the building. It also uses renewable energy, with solar panels and so on and so forth. It’s a building that’s conceived of as a process of biodiversity. What I mean by that is that the structure itself is managed both naturally and human managed.
This is the kind of thing that I’m intrigued by. How might we create more structures like that – that fill our built environments with all kinds of plant species and also actors, both attractors for humans and for pollinators, birds and other kinds of wildlife.
Miller: How do you think about transpecies design when it comes to species that could make us sick or even kill us? I’m thinking about black mold or certain bacteria or novel coronaviruses.
Parr: Ah. We had a project included in the exhibit which was a project coming out of the Biology and the Built Environment [Center] with Mark Fretz. That research institute is housed within the college. I don’t know if you ever had the opportunity to interview Mark and the former director, Kevin Van Den Wymelenberg, during COVID, but they were doing a lot of really important work and were consulting during COVID around the spread of viruses indoors and what kinds of materials facilitate and/or inhibit the spread of the virus. In that instance, a lot of their scientific work showed that natural ventilation, daylighting, for example, really, really helps curb the spread of those viruses.
So I think there’s certainly a lot of incredible work that can be done at a multiplicity of scales whether we’re talking at the microbial scale or if we’re moving up into much larger habitat scales, looking at a variety of plantings of native species and so on and so forth. I think the same principle can apply. I think if we start with the premise of mutual flourishing, that helps us be able to talk about black mold. That’s not gonna be something that facilitates mutual flourishing for humans as well, for example. I would imagine for many other animals, it wouldn’t exactly be a friendly entity for them either. But I do think the issue here is how do we think about this in a multi-scalar way.
Miller: We only have a few minutes left. But, if on some level we’re talking about getting better at sharing spaces, it’s at least as much a question of psychology or sociology – about human minds and emotions – as it is about engineering. How do we become less entitled as a species?
Parr: Well, that is the million dollar question. I do think we could certainly look to examples that are working. I will go back to, say, the High Line in New York City, for example, there and the urban reforestation project with the vertical forest in Milan. Those examples show that this can be both a positive aesthetic and culturally enriching experience. The more positive experiences we have in these systems of mutual enrichment, I think the more willing we are both as a society and politically – because I think policy has to be also driving this as well, not just the design community and the science community. If we look at it in that way, I think this is an area that is ripe for further study and further advancement because I think that people can begin to recognize that it’s a pleasurable space to also be inhabiting.
Miller: In the minute we have left, talking about pleasure and you also have talked about joy, I think. What’s the joy here? What are the emotional benefits for humans?
Parr: Ah, so I’ll give you one example…In the slums of Nairobi, I did a lot of research there, and I went into an urban farm in the heart of Nairobi. It was filled with kale plants and tomatoes and small shrubs, and what changed was: the air quality changed, the light conditions changed, the sounds changed because birds were in the area and in most parts of the slums, they don’t exist. So it was a multisensory, multidimensional experience that engaged a variety of our senses. That sort of positive, affective space is one that I think that is at the core of mutual flourishing.
Miller: Adrian Parr, thanks very much for joining us.
Parr: Thank you so much for having me.
Miller: Adrian Parr is the dean of the University of Oregon’s College of Design and coined the term transpecies design, meaning designing spaces with nonhumans in mind as well.
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