This thesis investigates how posthuman and new materialist theories can inform urban design practices that cultivate ongoing care for more-than-human actors, with a particular focus on the Meuse River. Challenging dominant anthropocentric and extractive planning paradigms, the research reimagines the river as an agential being embedded within a web of human and nonhuman relations. Through methods grounded in situated knowledge, critical cartography, and relational thinking, the project explores how designers might listen to, interpret, and translate the language of the river into the urban practice.

The project consists of three interrelated components: (1) an open-source digital Atlas for the Meuse that collects a variety of translations of the river’s agency and entanglements; (2) a physical Cabinet for Counter Narratives, a mobile table for discussion enabling collaborative reinterpretations of the Meuse territory; and (3) a Nomadic School for Designers that hosts site-specific workshops where participants co-create alternative cartographies. The three elements are designed to work together as the Cabinet travels across the river basin to facilitate workshops on-site, producing collaborative Cartographies of Dialogue that are subsequently integrated into the digital Atlas.

Together, these components translate theory into an ongoing practice of engaging-with and caring-for the places one designs with. By encouraging slow, attentive design processes and interdisciplinary inquiry, the project repositions the urban designer from master of space to mediator of complex ecologies. As the atlas expands, it gathers situated evidence that supports recognition of the river’s intrinsic rights and cultivates a sense of guardianship among those living along its basin. In doing so, the project contributes to the Rights of Nature movement from an urban design perspective, amplifying the voice of the river within the discipline and beyond.

Explore the set-up of the Alternative Atlas for the Meuse, an open-source website that is both tool and method for co-designing with the river, http://www.meuse-atlas.nl

The Netherlands has the ambition to transition to a fully circular economy before 2050. Between this future and where we stand now, there is still a large gap. The Netherlands produces 60 million tonnes of waste per year. This fact contains two problems that this project aims to deal with: 1) the heigh of this number in the first place, and 2) that approximately 20% of the waste does not find its way back into the system. In 2020, 7.6 million tonnes of waste was incinerated and 32.7 million tonnes of waste was exported to non-EU countries, where waste often ends up in landfill or is send for incineration with adverse health effects.

This project takes the radical stance to stop incineration and export, which means the Netherlands must take responsibility for the waste it produces. For much of the waste that currently follows one of these trajectories, there are no adequate solutions for reuse or recycling. Hence, we designed a system of waste collection, sorting, and storage where materials can be stored in waste houses until they find their way back into the system (problem 1). The piling up of the waste will create awareness of the consequences of unresponsible consumption, affecting the behaviour of people through confrontation (problem 2).

The system we design aims to create a disruption of the existing linear system at different levels. The large-scale societal perception of production-consumption-waste generation will slowly change, while the waste houses will create a sense of urgency at the small scale. This will stimulate niche innovations to find innovative solutions to deal with waste that is stored. Our project is thus both an instigator of change and part of the change itself in the transition to the circular economy.

If the project is successful, the waste houses will gradually become obsolete as consumption and waste production go down. In the far future, the former waste houses can house different functions, or they can be demolished in a circular way, returning the materials into the resource loop.