More-than-human participation: design for sustainable smart city futures

Out of necessity or choice, people and wildlife are increasingly living side-by-side in urban environments. As more species live together in cities, this presents significant environmental challenges associated with high density living, poor resource management, long supply chains, habitat loss and pollution. These conditions can be toxic for humans and non-humans alike. One response has been to make cities “smart” using networked sensing, cloud and mobile computing, to optimize, control and regulate urban processes. “Smart” initiatives are often presented as a social and environmental good. An accompanying agenda however has been to spur on sales of novel technology, with its attendant benefits for a small number of companies and their employees. In other words, smart cities are often positioned as solving environmental problems through technologically-driven, human-centered, and solution-optimizing approaches that promise great benefit, but include a number of faulty premises. While many governments are developing participatory approaches to sustainability challenges, the focus however, remains largely human-centered. Such approaches are often too simplistic to address the complexities of long-term environmental sustainability. They also fail to acknowledge how human and non-human lives - or the “more-than-human” - are inseparable and interdependent, and how we all participate in urban life [2]. Without care, smart city agendas may exacerbate the very problems they seek to solve. What will it take to create a real shift in mindsets of those responsible for smart city design to take a more-than-human participatory perspective? What can we, as designers and educators, do to respond to the environmental challenges our future cities face? In this article we propose an alternative smart city agenda for the interaction design community in responding to a more-than-human perspective. To help us explore and imagine what this agenda could be like we illustrate our discussion with examples shared as part of an interdisciplinary workshop at the Participatory Design Conference, Hasselt Belgium in 2018 [4].