Expanding more-than-human care time: Rivers as teachers and carriers

What would it mean to design outside efficiency-focused, linear, human-centred timescales? How can we design with care for planetary time and the temporal subtleties of other beings? Asking these questions has motivated us, in this chapter, to present a methodological exploration of time to learn how various temporalities meet in any moment. It is informed by an ethics of care (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) that shows how we might pay attention to the often-erased and marginalized processes and timescales of our shared more-than human worlds. We take a ‘flood event’ to focus on a moment when the river becomes unwelcome and life-threatening. Through writing and sharing stories, we trouble the assumptions projected onto a flood with an exploration of temporalities and linked fates.

Bringing together a collection of methodological and practical studies, this volume explores how design could define more equal notions of ecological time. It provides a new framework for environmental design practice that departs from a critique of the separation between human and other-than-human times, moving towards entangled multispecies temporalities.

In Western industrialised societies, the times of humans and of the natural world are often considered as belonging to different realms. While human life is regarded as progressive and accelerated, other species are described as following timescales that are cyclical and slow-changing. Highlighting the problematic nature of this conceptual division, which reinforces the disruptive impact of anthropogenic action, a team of design scholars and practitioners identify new ways of approaching more-than-human times, suggesting more sustainable ways of designing and living in the world. They examine a range of more-than-human relationships, weaving together case studies on gardens, rivers, wetlands, and indigenous and contested lands, which span across different geographical contexts including Scotland, the Netherlands, Finland, Palestine and Brazil.

Through a design-led approach, this volume draws attention to the plurality of times in the world and makes the case for an ethical and political agenda that calls us to challenge temporal power inequalities. It reframes the ways we think about, experience, imagine and interfere in more-than-human times so that design can ultimately be more aligned with planetary processes, co-exist with more diverse ecologies and find its way into more sustainable futures.