Designing within dischronotopic land-based ecologies: Drinking camomile in Palestine

In the film Nation Estate (2012), Palestinian born British artist Larissa Sansour conceptualises high-rise contemporary living as an alternative to the occupation in Palestine. Each floor of this Nation Estate is dedicated to an area of the West Bank and Gaza alongside floors for international aid and NGOs. Between the modern surfaces, residents try to nurture the growth of olive trees to retain their connection to the land, although the trees break through and damage the floors. In this Chapter I draw from literary and cinematic fiction to explore how design within dischronotopic land-based ecologies is an alternative way to conceptualise time. In particular I focus on relationships that take place in the context of contested indigenous rights to land in Palestine (Copley, 2019; Moore, 2017). The discussion focusses on a design case study working with community activists in the South Hebron hills of the Palestinian West Bank. The community live adjacent to an illegal Israeli settlement highlighting how different ways of ‘being in and of the land’ and ‘living on the land’ come into tension where multiple ancestral rights are claimed in response to diverse land-based ecologies (Clarke et al., 2022).

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.