This section brings together a selection of projects that understand architecture, landscape, and the city as situated, relational, and political practices. Rather than focusing primarily on the finished object, these projects foreground the processes, actors, temporalities, and multispecies relationships that sustain urban life. The projects presented here engage directly with the conceptual framework of the Decentered City: Multispecies Design by questioning the anthropocentric paradigms that have historically shaped the production of space while also exploring alternative forms of cohabitation among humans, other species, and natural systems.
This article proposes decentered, multispecies urban design as an ethical, project-based response to the ecological crisis. It argues that urban disciplines must redistribute agency and question human centrality, understanding the city as a rhizomatic system: open, non-hierarchical, and interdependent, shaped by relations between humans and non-humans. The multispecies approach introduces a political and material dimension that recognizes non-humans and infrastructures as agents, while incorporating uncertainty as a structural condition of design. Based on a curated atlas of more than one hundred interventions across the Global South—primarily in Bogotá and Mexico City—the analysis reveals a field in transition, marked by advances in social and multidisciplinary integration, but also by limitations in infrastructural coordination and a regulatory framework that remains insufficient.
This paper examines the role of Cenostigma pluviosum (locally known in Medellín as acacia amarilla, or yellow acacia) as a non-human agent in the production of urban space in the Provenza neighborhood of Medellín. Drawing on an analysis of its establishment, the article explores how this species participates in an assemblage that brings together ecological, affective, normative, and technological processes. It concludes that, although the yellow acacia has fostered urban regimes of interspecies cohabitation, the tourism-driven commercial model promoted by the District threatens its persistence, thereby revealing tensions between plant agency, habitat conservation, and extractive economies in urban Global South contexts.
This article examines the Indigenous Nasa-Páez tull in Toribío, Cauca, as a model of multispecies and decolonial architectural design. Drawing on situated ethnographic methodologies, including interviews with community leaders and educators and participant observation, it studies the communal tull as an agricultural, architectural, symbolic, and ontological space that articulates memory, spirituality, and ecosystem benefits. The findings show that the tull integrates practices of care and ecological justice and offers a replicable model for regenerative design in the Global South. The article concludes that the tull can guide multispecies architectures by placing reciprocity and territorial pedagogy at the center.
Spaces designed for a single individual have historically embodied introspection, privacy, and inner dialogue. This article examines how such spaces have gradually lost relevance within contemporary architecture, even as they have been the subject of deeper inquiry in the field of art. The abrupt disappearance of telephone booths, for example, cannot be explained solely by the rise of mobile telephony; with their decline, a genealogy of spaces etymologically linked to the notion of the booth as an individual refuge also fades. The analysis presented in this article considers how the configuration of such proximate environments continues to shape the individual's sensory experience and thus retains significance today, positioning proxemics as one of the most productive and meaningful areas for contemporary architectural development.
