Caroline Ward
Supervisor
Abstract
Relational Attunement
Bats and the Politics of Multispecies Cohabitation
Cities are deeply implicated in the contemporary polycrisis through extractive urban paradigms that prioritise human dominance, resource exploitation, and spatial control, often at the expense of nonhuman life and local communities. This research project develops and tests a post-extractivist methodological approach that challenges such paradigms by reorienting urban ethical imagination toward regenerative, reciprocal, and multispecies relationships of care. Through a methodological pilot focused on bats as urban cohabitants, the project explores how relational, multispecies practices of attunement - such as listening, observing, and responding - might support fundamentally different ways of cohabiting cities.
The pilot investigates how urban ethics could be transformed to include nonhuman life as active participants in urban worlds, and what reciprocal relationships with land and life might entail under conditions of ecological breakdown. Rather than treating cities as exclusively human domains, the research approaches urban environments as dynamic, negotiated spaces shaped by multiple species whose interactions generate complex, non-linear ecological effects. By attending closely to bats and their lifeworlds, the project seeks to understand how design, governance, and research practices might work with, rather than against, the Earth’s multiplicity and heterogeneity.
Methodologically, the research combines multispecies ethnography with creative research practices, including filmmaking, sound-based methods, and experimental uses of surveillance technologies. These methods are employed not as tools of extraction or control, but as means of fostering attentiveness, reciprocity, and ethical engagement with more-than-human others. Fieldwork is immersive and reflective, treating the research process itself as an open-ended learning practice in multispecies attunement. Nonhuman beings are approached as agents with whom knowledge is co-produced, rather than as passive objects of study. The project also critically reflects on the researcher’s positionality, foregrounding questions of “for whom and with whom we design.” Drawing on lived experience of disability, the research frames relationality and reciprocity as necessary conditions for both human and multispecies flourishing. This perspective extends care beyond the human to encompass soil, minerals, and other forms of life, situating urban ethics within broader ecological interdependencies. By situating local field encounters within planetary dynamics, the pilot acknowledges the restless, plural, and situated nature of the Earth at a time when transformational change must be grounded in specific local conditions. The research proposes that rethinking urban life through convivial multispecies cohabitation—understood as active, creative interaction across species and spaces—can challenge extractive logics and open possibilities for new forms of community, co-design, and governance. Ultimately, the project asks what research methods might help realise an urban ethics rooted in ecological interdependence and multispecies justice, and how such methods might be adapted to other, less accessible sites in future research.
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Contact
Prof Dr Ines Weizman
Professor of History and Theory of Architecture
Head of PhD Programme
School of Architecture
Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore, London
SW7 2EU
ines.weizman@rca.ac.uk
School of Architecture, Royal College of Art
Postgraduate Research (PGR) Programme