Amphibious Living

Throughout the 20th century, cities have been designed as spectacles of solid matter. Worldwide, megatons of concrete, steel and glass have been used to coat, cover and encase formidable volumes of urban space. Stable and steadfast, these solid materials have provided the basis for modern city life to unfold.

In contrast, many urban areas are rooted deeply in a watery past. Cities such as Berlin, New Orleans, Mumbai, Zurich, or Mexico City were built on wetlands, marshes and floodplains. Living amphibiously, with dynamic wet-and-dry relationships, was the rule, not the exception, for humans and more-than-humans alike. In these muddy habitats, the occurrence of manifold amphibious creatures signified not only flourishing landscapes but also the existence of those vital, watery conditions, which all life depends on.

The strategic elimination of open urban water bodies, the extensive sealing of urban soil and greenspace, as well as the radical reductionist rainwater management of the past decades influence the life of all city creatures in existential ways. Concrete surfaces can’t absorb water, turning heavy rainfalls into raging urban floods, hot summer days into deadly urban heat islands and previously flourishing volumes of vegetation into completely dry, artificial spaces. As a result, the quality of city life decreases, serious health issues emerge, amphibians go extinct, and finally, critical tipping points and collapsing ecosystems become tangible realities.

To avoid such urban doomsday scenarios, it is time to learn and think about future urban worlds from the wet, fluid and muddy again. New ways of designing urban porosity and permeability are urgently needed. The first issue of Shared Habitats reimagines the city as a place of amphibious living. It seeks to understand the needs and living conditions of various forms of life such as frogs, toads and salamanders, at the margins of the wet and dry. And it explores urgent questions such as: How can we think, plan, and design urban spaces that allow the seemingly antagonistic elements of water and land to coexist, intermingle and provide the very basic living conditions, both for our amphibious neighbors and in the long-run, for all urbanites? How could we transmogrify the solid into the soft and spongy? How can we reactivate the roots of the urban, demystify those muddy grounds and generate new fluid thoughts? How can we create and inhabit new pluriversal urban spaces that allow life to unfold amphibiously?