Urban design is shifting away from a human-exclusive worldview. Climate instability, biodiversity collapse, and the spread of networked sensors are exposing the limits of cities built solely for human optimization. A new model is emerging—one where organisms, machine systems, and environmental processes become co-authors of urban space. This is not an aesthetic turn toward biomorphism; it is a strategic realignment of how infrastructure works, how it is maintained, and who it serves.
Across landscape architecture, urban technology, civic art, and architectural research, a set of practitioners is building systems that treat oysters, air particulates, seeds, sensors, and autonomous digital agents as operational components of the city. Their work signals a future in which urban resilience depends on symbiosis, feedback, and distributed intelligence rather than control and centralization.
Ecological and Atmospheric Systems as Infrastructure
Landscape architect Kate Orff and her studio SCAPE exemplify how ecological processes can function as core infrastructure. Projects like Living Breakwaters demonstrate how engineered structures can be designed for biological colonization, allowing oysters to mitigate wave energy, strengthen shorelines, and improve water quality. This model challenges the convention of static hard infrastructure by substituting it with evolving ecological systems that require long-term stewardship rather than one-time construction.
On a parallel track, Studio Roosegaarde explores how atmospheric sensing can become a public interface. The Smog Free Tower, for example, uses ionization to remove particulate matter while transforming air-quality metrics into a visible, spatial experience. Here, environmental data is not a background diagnostic but an active element that shapes public awareness and behavior. Together, these approaches illustrate how biological and technological systems can operate as co-infrastructures—each responding to conditions humans alone cannot manage.
Multispecies Participation and Networked Governance
The more-than-human city is not solely a technological or ecological construct; it is also a civic one. The collective Futurefarmers builds participatory frameworks that link everyday urban life to ecological and agricultural systems. Seed libraries, mobile research units, and collaborative workshops demonstrate how public engagement becomes a critical layer of urban metabolism. Their work shows that multispecies urbanism depends not just on environmental engineering but on shared governance, ecological literacy, and cultural practices capable of sustaining long-term ecological care.
Meanwhile, architectural research studio Space Caviar addresses the other major non-human actor embedded in cities: digital infrastructure. Their investigations into sensor networks, supply-chain logistics, algorithmic governance, and platform-based housing reveal how non-human digital systems influence spatial access and resource distribution. These systems operate alongside biological actors—shaping flows, mediating decisions, and generating new forms of urban governance.
Toward Symbiotic Urbanism
What emerges from these practices is not a single vision but a shared operational shift. Cities are becoming ecological-technological hybrids where oysters, particulate sensors, microbial systems, autonomous agents, and human communities co-produce resilience. Designing for this reality requires architects, technologists, and planners to orchestrate relationships rather than impose fixed solutions. It also demands regulatory frameworks capable of supporting living, adapting, and sensing infrastructures that exceed traditional engineering categories.
The more-than-human city takes shape through these experiments: ecological infrastructures that grow stronger through biological activity, public spaces that react to atmospheric signals, civic practices that cultivate multispecies responsibility, and architectural research that makes algorithmic systems visible. As these models scale, the city becomes not a human-only environment but a shared platform for biological, technological, and cultural interaction—one that is better equipped for the uncertainties ahead.
