Interspecies Cities Workshop.
Barcelona 2025
The Interspecies Cities Workshop translates the speculative framework of Poly:Eutopia into an embodied, collective experience. Conceived as a guided urban walk combined with relational mapping, the workshop invites participants to step outside human-centered perception and explore the city through non-human perspectives.
At the heart of the workshop lies a living artifact: Physarum polycephalum, growing on a 3D-printed model of Barcelona. Participants move through the urban landscape following the growth patterns of slime mold, acting as non-human detectives and tuning into subtle signals of presence, interaction, and coexistence. They explore the city through four sensing spheres (aquasphere, aerosphere, biosphere, and geosphere) revealing hidden flows of life that usually remain unnoticed or unacknowledged in conventional urban narratives.
Relational mapping emerges here not just as documentation, but as a collective act of imagination. Observations gathered during the walk are layered onto the living model, weaving together personal perception, ecological awareness, and speculative thinking. The city becomes a shared field of relations - fluid, entangled, and multi-scalar, rather than a fixed, human-dominated space.
The workshop concludes with a collective reflection, where connections between spheres are explored and interdependencies articulated. These conversations open space for new questions: How do different forms of life shape each other? What kinds of infrastructures support coexistence rather than extraction? What might urban responsibility look like when extended beyond the human?
Master in Design
for Emergent Futures