A School for the Urban Pluriverse: Learning to Inquire on the Many Ways of Inhabiting

The peculiar Euro-American way of living has come to be premised on highly infrastructured urban landscapes, of variegated kinds. Once considered the pinnacle of modernity, these settlements have had an unmitigated role in unfolding human-centric modes of inhabiting, with disastrous planetary effects: the anthropogenic environmental devastation some call the “urban Anthropocene”. In this disorienting moment, which calls into question how the Moderns have inhabited planet Earth and what they took for granted, might require urban experts and regular urbanites to re-learn what urban habitation might mean from many other urban actors. The current predicaments suggest the need for new learning spaces: not secluded institutions where to be instructed in what must be known; rather, porous sites devoted to making the plural conditions of urban habitability thinkable and liveable as a problem not yet fully known, that is, as a ‘pluriverse’. This notion, cultivated by pragmatist thinkers, has been reinvigorated by a decolonial urban agenda suggesting there are many different and uncommon ways of living beyond the modern ‘one-world world’ worth exploring. Following these lines of insight, this text is a manifesto for A School for the Urban Pluriverse: a space where different urbanites, including urban experts with their technical knowledges, might get acquainted or ‘sensitise’ themselves to the needs of these times of change. Such an experimental pedagogical impulse would demand searching for inspiration in those forms of living — human or other than human — crushed by modern ways of infrastructural inhabitation. Perhaps there are no better guides, no better ways to proceed than to inquire into what it might mean to inhabit together with the many others left behind by the modern urban project. Put otherwise,working with manifold urban actors and thinking collectively about what to do with existing modern infrastructure might invite us to imagine a school where to re-learn what urban inhabiting might mean today.