Actor-Network Theory (ANT)

Actor-Network Theory (ANT), developed by Bruno Latour, Michel Callon, and John Law in the 1980s, is a methodological and theoretical approach within science and technology studies (STS). It challenges distinctions between humans, technologies, and natural entities by treating all as “actants” in networks of association. ANT proposes that agency is not an exclusive property of human subjects but emerges from heterogeneous assemblages of people, objects, infrastructures, and institutions. Knowledge, power, and social order are thus seen as effects of these dynamic networks rather than as top-down structures. In architecture, urbanism, and landscape discourse, ANT has been influential in framing design as the organization of distributed agencies across scales and materials. Its non-hierarchical view of actors resonates with posthumanist theories and supports design practices attentive to entanglement and interdependency.

Animal

The animal names the fracture in thought where life is both kin and abyss. Giorgio Agamben, in The Open: Man and Animal, argues that the animal marks the limit of the human, the “caesura” by which man defines himself through exclusion, producing a threshold that is neither wholly natural nor wholly cultural. For Heidegger, the animal is “poor in world,” a being entrapped in captivation, its openness sealed in a mode of concealment. Derrida unsettles this boundary in The Animal That Therefore I Am, exposing the violence in the very gesture of calling “the animal” a singular category that erases the infinite plurality of living beings. To speak of the animal is thus to stand before the wound of metaphysics, where recognition oscillates between estrangement and intimacy, between the inhuman excess that unsettles the human and the kinship that renders this excess unbearable.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence enters the scene as both tool and presence—something we command, yet something that quietly grows beyond our grasp. Its influence on the design process remains uncertain: will it accelerate creativity, or dilute it into repetition, convenience, and even more sameness? As a design tool, AI already generates images, narratives, and models, but these emerge from a logic alien to human imagination, forcing designers to confront an unfamiliar partner in creation. Perhaps it is less a species than a new actor, one that learns, reshapes, and unsettles the boundaries between intention and accident. In everyday life as much as in design, AI is no longer simply a machine but a presence that compels us to rethink what authorship, agency, and collaboration might mean. (this text was proof-read and fine-tuned using AI)

Biodiversity

Biodiversity refers to the variety of life on Earth, encompassing the diversity of species, genetic variation, and ecosystems. It is widely recognized as a key measure of ecological health and resilience. Framed as an objective—to conserve, enhance, or restore—biodiversity is often reduced to metrics, targets, and indices. This quantification risks hollowing out its meaning, staging biodiversity as an image or checklist rather than a living, unstable reality. In practice, landscape architecture frequently slides toward ornamental ecologies, where biodiversity is performed as spectacle more than sustained as process.

Body

The body is the first architecture, the singular presence through which scale is felt and measured, the site where space confirms or denies belonging. Merleau-Ponty spoke of the lived body as a hinge of perception, yet this hinge also twists, dislocates, and estranges—making one at home or foreign in the very same terrain. Foucault showed how the body is a political topography, inscribed by forces of discipline, surveillance, and control, while Butler revealed it as performative, sustained through repeated gestures that both stabilize and destabilize identity. To inhabit space is never neutral: the body confronts, resists, identifies, or withdraws, carrying alienation as much as intimacy.

In choreography the body becomes explicit, its gestures staging the negotiations of power, desire, and rhythm that underlie even the choreography of daily life. Architecture and landscape are never still backdrops to this, but rather partners and adversaries in the unfolding of movement. To design with the body in mind is to acknowledge it as a sensorial device, a distributor of the sensible, the medium through which perception and meaning pass.

Children

Design for children refers to the intentional shaping of environments to support children’s presence, safety, development, and agency. It extends beyond playgrounds to encompass public spaces, landscapes, and urban fabric that acknowledge children as users and participants. Too often, children are reduced to a demographic to be managed, with spaces designed as closed zones of entertainment or control. This risks turning childhood into a spectacle for adults, bound to a fenced terrain, rather than a topography for an unfolding subjectivity. When excluded from broader public space, children are denied their role as full citizens, reinforcing hierarchies of who public space is “for.” In landscape architecture, design for children can be understood as creating platforms that stimulate imagination, facilitate emancipation and learning through encounter.

Co-habitation

Co-habitation refers to the shared occupation of space by multiple species, actors, or communities, foregrounding entanglement rather than separation. It resists the human-centered notion of habitat, instead emphasizing interdependence and negotiated survival. In urban and landscape theory, co-habitation marks a shift from ownership of territory to relational dwelling. It suggests that architecture and landscape must accommodate more-than-human agencies. The term is both ecological and political, exposing tensions in how living together is sustained.

Collective Agency / Self-Organization

Collective agency is when groups—people, animals, plants, systems—act together and shape outcomes that no single actor could make alone. Self-organization is how patterns or orders come out of such interactions without a central plan telling them what to do. In design talk these ideas are often celebrated, almost romantic, as if collective means harmony. But it is not always so. Self-organization can just as well bring conflict, inequality, or exclusion, not only cooperation. And when we say “bottom-up,” we should also ask who really gets the chance to self-organize, and who is left out. For landscape architecture it means working with processes that are not fully under control—participation, growth, change, many actors moving at once. The role of design is then less to fix form than to hold open a framework where things and people can adapt and invent.

Conviviality

Conviviality refers to the art of living together, emphasizing interdependence between humans, non-humans, and their environments. Originally introduced by Ivan Illich in the 1970s to describe “autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and between persons and their environment,” the concept has since expanded beyond human-centered ethics. Contemporary debates, such as those articulated in the Second Convivialist Manifesto (2020), frame conviviality as a post-neoliberal principle for politics, economics, and ecology. Its five guiding principles—common humanity, common sociality, legitimate individuation, creative opposition, and common naturality—are subordinated to the imperative of hubris control. Within landscape architecture, conviviality offers a framework for designing spaces that foster multispecies cohabitation and entangled lifeworlds. It shifts focus away from human exceptionalism toward relational, process-oriented practices that acknowledge living systems as co-constitutive.

Ethnobotany / Plant Knowledge

Ethnobotany examines the relations between people and plants, tracing how societies classify, use, and ritualize vegetal life. Emerging from anthropology and botany, it situates plants within cultural, medicinal, and symbolic systems. The field destabilizes the idea of plants as passive background matter, instead revealing them as actors within economies, cosmologies, and everyday practices. Ethnobotany is both empirical and interpretive, combining taxonomy with lived knowledge. It illuminates how vegetal worlds shape and are shaped by human existence.

Fauna

Fauna designates the assemblage of animal species within a specific region or temporal frame. Unlike the singular “animal,” it refers to a multiplicity structured by ecology, taxonomy, and history. The term implies both scientific cataloguing and cultural projection, as “fauna” is always narrated from a particular vantage point. In landscape and urban studies, it indexes the presence of non-human life within human-dominated terrains.

Indigenous Communities

Indigenous communities are collectivities with long-standing ties to specific territories, often predating and resisting colonial structures. The term signals both historical continuity and ongoing struggle for sovereignty, cultural survival, and epistemic recognition. Within landscape and architectural discourse, it emphasizes alternative ways of knowing and practicing territory. Indigenous communities challenge extractive models of land use by foregrounding relational, spiritual, and custodial dimensions of place.

Migrating Species

Migrating species embody movement as ecological necessity, crossing borders indifferent to human sovereignty. For design and theory, migrating species unsettle fixed spatial imaginaries, demanding temporal and geographic fluidity. They mark life as always in flux, never fully contained.

More-than-human

A theoretical orientation that decenters the human as the sole agent, subject, or measure of the world. It acknowledges the entanglement of human life with non-human beings, forces, and materialities, from microbes and animals to rivers, infrastructures, and atmospheres. The term signals both critique and extension: a critique of anthropocentrism that reduces environments to human use, and an extension of agency, ethics, and imagination to include multispecies and material actors.

In landscape and architectural theory, the more-than-human reframes design as a negotiation within ecological assemblages rather than a projection of human will. It draws from posthumanism, new materialism, and multispecies ethnography, often stressing vulnerability, co-dependency, and the instability of boundaries between human and nonhuman.

Key thinkers: Donna Haraway (companion species, Chthulucene), Bruno Latour (actor-network theory), Anna Tsing (mushroom at the end of the world), Jane Bennett (vital materialism).

The concept complicates design by asking: how can landscapes be conceived not only for humans but also with other beings and agencies?

Participatory Processes

Participatory processes describe modes of design and governance that incorporate multiple voices, particularly those of users, residents, or marginalized groups. et participation often operates within asymmetrical power structures, where inclusion may mask pre-scripted outcomes. In landscape and architecture, such processes can generate collective ownership, but also risk becoming tokenistic rituals of consultation. Their value lies in exposing the politics of who is allowed to shape space.

Performative Planting Design

Performative planting design approaches vegetation not as ornament but as active infrastructure. Plants are configured to regulate microclimates, filter pollutants, stabilize soils, or produce habitat—functions exceeding aesthetic display.

Plant Agency

Plant agency denotes the recognition of plants as actors capable of influencing environments, practices, and human lives. Agency here is not anthropomorphic will but the capacity to affect and be affected within networks of relation. From invasive spread to medicinal potency, plants enact forces that exceed human control or design.

Social Practices

Social practices refer to routinized forms of doing, shaped by cultural norms, material arrangements, and collective habits. They constitute the everyday production of space—through walking, gathering, cultivating, or protesting. In urban and landscape studies, social practices highlight how environments are activated by repetition and performance rather than static form.

Strange Strangers (Morton)

Timothy Morton’s notion of “strange strangers” names beings that are irreducibly other yet never fully external. Every entity we encounter withdraws into its own unfathomable existence, appearing familiar while remaining opaque. The strange stranger disrupts comfort with neat ontological boundaries, insisting on relationality without assimilation. In ecological thought, it reframes coexistence as intimacy with radical alterity. To live among strange strangers is to dwell in a world thick with uncanniness.

Synurbic Species

Synurbic species are animals or plants that adapt to and thrive in urban environments, adjusting behavior, feeding, or reproduction to city life. The word comes from “syn-” (together) and “urban,” pointing to the new ecologies formed where humans and nonhumans share dense built habitats. Often they are seen as nuisances—rats, pigeons, weeds—yet they are also proof of resilience and adaptation. They show how cities are not only human inventions but living systems where nonhumans reorganize survival. Their presence unsettles the idea of the city as only ours, forcing us to face the messy and sometimes unwanted alliances of cohabitation. For landscape architects, synurbic species are both challenge and chance: to work with the ecologies that already claim the city, not only the ones we plant or plan. They make visible the porousness of urban space, and remind us that design is always entangled with other agencies

Umwelt