As a response to an increasing urgency in redefining what it is to be human on a multi-species planet, the School for Multi-Species Knowledges attempts to create an alternative (un)learning environment for exploring the wide variety of practices and concepts emerging from these posthumanist and post-anthropocentric discourses. This initiative brings together local enthusiasts, caretakers, experts, activists, makers, thinkers, scholars and anyone else who wishes to learn how to live together as earthlings, in order to explore methods of tuning into the multiple scales and imageries of multi-species complexities of urban life. The project aims to problematise binary human-nonhuman and nature-culture relations, and to examine the complexities of relations between agencies in the city when we consider a city with billions of lives instead of only millions of humans.

The School’s March-June 2022 edition is the pilot that will lead to a multi-annual programme allowing us to build further each year upon the developed knowledge, networks and methodologies.

This collaboration between Zone2Source and myself resulted from a shared concern of the need to move beyond incidental workshops or lectures, which merely thematise interdependent relations with other species. We wish to move beyond the theoretical debate and, collaboratively with participants, to propose and test new methodologies and public formats of engagement with the theme. In this way, we aim to explore in practice what all this new ecological thinking is actually producing. This engagement means leaving behind human-centred habits of acting, and instead deepening our sensibilities towards the “other”. What does it mean to acknowledge the multi-species co-inhabitance of the city? How can we practice and create better conditions for multi-species cultures and communities? To which settings, collaborative processes, environments, and methods will these inclusive ecologies lead us? Which tools, vocabularies, and literacies are required to enable “complex” cities?