Solidarity is the Tenderness of the Species – Cohabitation its Lived Exploration

The universal human body as a model is more uncertain than ever before. On the shores of the future, architects stand amidst a proliferating crowd of cyborg bodies, prosthetic bodies, animal bodies, pornographic, mutated and tortuous bodies, disabled, migrated and colonized bodies, flying, scurrying, and crawling bodies. Instead of referring back to the questionable idyll of an imagined pre-modernity, cohabitation stands for the lived exploration of solidarity as the tenderness of the species.

The more we focus the optical apparatus of cognition on the political, the more blurred all other distinctions of modernity become. A cartoon illustration in a book by the scholar Donna Haraway depicts a shaggy dog in the place of Leonardo Da Vinci’s ideally proportioned Vitruvian Man as the measure of all things.11.Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2008, p. 8. Couldn’t a stray dog or cat be the measure, if not of all things, then at least of some? After all, no one is connected to everyone, but everyone is connected to someone.22.A street dog is not the same everywhere. See Krithika Srinivasan, ‘The Biopolitics of Animal Being and Welfare: Dog Control and Care in the UK and India’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 38, no.1, 2013, pp. 106–119. Elsewhere, Haraway shows us a cartoon depicting an ancient orchid species whose blossoms were formed in a way to attract a particular kind of bee.33.Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 70. The bee species it mimics, however, has long been extinct, which is why the orchid has been self-pollinating ever since. It lives on as a kind of botanical negative of the vanished bee body. Perhaps humanism, which declared ‘man’ to be the measure of the world, resembles the orchid, embodying the image of a world that no longer exists.44.See Christopher Hight, Architectural Principles in the Age of Cybernetics, New York: Routledge, 2008; Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design, Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2016; Fahim Amir, ‘Heirs of Vitruvius: Lichens, Lapdogs & Cyborg Cows’, in INTRA! INTRA! Towards an INTRA SPACE, Christina Jauernik and Wolfgang Tschapeller (eds.), Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2021, pp. 270–275.

By spatially separating the production and consumption of animals, capitalist modernity created carceral architectures of industrial misery in masses.55.Karen Morin, Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals, Abingdon: Routledge, 2018. But urbanization also alienated part of the population from archaic interspecies violence. Such non-innocent and unfinished processes, resulting from the rapid urbanization of animals and humans, resound in contemporary debates. Yet we profoundly lack the concepts to be able to grasp and articulate the extent and nature of the presence of animals in the world. We need to find more imaginative languages, more apt images, and more inspiring models that help us to better perceive and understand this new world in which we have long been living. Artistic documentary strategies and exploratory design tactics have already begun working on this task.

To include the claims of others as part of the equation is to relativize our sovereignty. Participation also means sharing, and so we will have to give up something. For instance, the idea of a completely controllable and 'manageable' environment. All life forms inhabiting the planet influence each other in complex ways that are neither fully understood nor controllable. This also means welcoming 'unintended landscapes' as encounters with nature, landscapes that have not been created or designed with a purpose.66.Matthew Gandy, ‘Unintentional landscapes’, Landscape Research, 41, 2016, pp. 1–8. Such enclaves of disorder are habitats for unexpected forms of sociality. The 'wild commons' of urban nature are, in a sense, 'the spatial equivalent of free time: a sphere of existence' that has not yet been leveled by the bulldozer of profit maximization and swallowed by extended reproduction.77.Andreas Malm, ‘In Wildness is the Liberation of the World: On Maroon Ecology and Partisan Nature’, Historical Materialism, 26, no. 3, 2019, p. 27. Cohabitation does not prove that another world is possible, but that a thousand other worlds exist.

Today, borders are again being fortified to keep people out around the world. But regulatory policies never have an effect on one species alone.88.Guy Scotton, ‘Taming Technologies: Crowd Control, Animal Control and the Interspecies Politics of Mobility’, Parallax 25, no. 4, 2019, pp. 358–378. The barbed wire also blocks the path of many animals who once were able to move freely.99.Reviel Netz, Barbed Wire: An Ecology of Modernity, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Perhaps this is calculated: with global warming, migration to the cooler north will be the only chance of survival for many animals of the Global South.

Cohabitation, on the other hand, means ‘living with’ – something that is not always pleasant, innocent, beautiful, or free of danger. ‘Living with’ fosters the development of neighborhoods, which are the opposite of gated communities, because neighbors are beings whose presence we did not choose. It includes complicity with plants, even those considered weeds, which grow on the side of the road and elsewhere. Plants are the pillars of the world; with their bodies and metabolism they hold the earth down and the sky up.1010.Natasha Myers, ‘How to Grow Livable Worlds: Ten Not-So-Easy Steps’, in Kerry Oliver Smith (ed.), The World to Come: Art in the Age of the Anthropocene, , Gainsville, FL: Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, 2018, pp. 53–63. Without them there would be no cities, no people or animals.

Cohabitation requires rethinking the political.1111.Fahim Amir, Being and Swine: The End of Nature (As We Knew It), Toronto: Between the Lines Books, 2020. The term polis originally referred to two things: the religious and administrative center of the ancient city-state, and the collective citizenry that gathered there. For as long as the term has existed, the political has been defined in Western thought traditions as a place to which neither plants, animals, slaves, nor women have access, ‘but in which only free anthropodes may hang around, in that know-it-all style of theirs, while the others toil away at the margins, or are eaten wholesale.’1212.Marion von Osten, ‘Pigeon Towers and Donkey Paths’, www.kw-berlin The promise of cohabitation is: The walls of the polis have fallen. Let us begin to build with its ruins a new city for all.1313.This text was originally published on ARCH+ as part of the exhibition ‘Cohabitation: A Manifesto for the Solidarity of Non-Humans and Humans in Urban Space’, 2021.