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