Green Participation: Intersectional Ecological Urbanism at the Posthuman Convergence in the Low Countries (1960-3000)

Green Participation reinterprets projects from the archives of the Dutch ‘ecotect’ Louis Le Roy in conversation with those of the Bijlmermeer in relation to their contemporaries elsewhere that shaped the development of green infrastructure in the Low Countries through coalitions and frictions between human and nonhuman participants from the 1960s onwards. It revisits the sociopolitics of inclusive ecological landscape design through an intersectional environmentalist lens to give insight to the struggle against monotonous and monofunctional green spaces produced by postwar technocratic modes of planning, as a critique to capitalist modes of spatial production. It additionally critiques the predominantly white lens of the environmentalism movement of the 1960s and 1970s, by connecting disparate projects that have actively engaged with an inclusive approach to ecological landscape design. Contextualized by the possibilities and challenges of participation and collaboration in green design from both a historical, theoretical and design perspective (e.g. engaging with posthumanism and environmental humanities, political ecology and science and technology studies), the research is situated within a critical post humanist discourse to recover counter historical positions of ecological urbanism intersectionally. Posthumanism enables a critical engagement with the participatory approaches that were employed in ecological landscape design by redressing questions of different categories of the human and species hierarchy to situate alternative ecological design paradigms and practices responsive to the local context that advances the ‘ ‘natureculture’ continuum to enable a better understanding of the mutual interdependence of human and non-human others’ as a challenge to the nature and culture opposition proposed by Posthuman Feminism in relation to Le Roy’s propositions of Nature Culture Fusion. Le Roy developed numerous participatory and biodiverse green spaces since the 1960s that remain sites of both social and ecological experiment in which his theories and practices further continued long-term participatory approach amongst humans, plants and animals. In distinction the Bijlmermeer developed as a result of postwar housing projects of the 1960s with ample green space of inhumane scale, that housed significant immigrant communities from former Dutch colonies which local inhabitants shaped in the context of being neglected. Despite this, a significant archive exists on the development of green spaces of the Bijlmer in which participation was central and ongoing. The project unpacks the parallel histories of these two projects, as an initial stage of the research process, through a time-based approach. This is to understand the design process for multispecies cohabitation in a changing climate beyond anthropocentric conceptions of citizen participation; by situating the temporal and spatial (dis)assemblages in the case studies within an intertemporal framework to recognize that their development already exists as a material of futurist projection at odds or in collaboration with dominant spatial frameworks and processes that continue to shape the development of green infrastructure at the nexus of ecology, design, climate and politics.