Transitional Territories Lecture Series | Alter-urbanizations | Michiel Dehaene & Debra Solomon

Event description

The Transitional Territories lecture series explores the agency of design as a mode of investigation and reflexive transformation of the ever-changing interrelations between natural processes, societal practices, and (geo)political frameworks. For 2025, the series is framed under the theme of Alter-Urbanizations: explorealternative modes of human and more-than human coexistence, enabling the realization of potentials for inclusive development, political emancipation, ecological justice, and plurality across scales. The second event in the series invites Michiel Dehaene and Debra Solomon in a conversation on the prospects of incorporating agroecological and more-than human perspectives in alternative forms of urbanization.

Michiel Dehaene: 

Agroecological Urbanism and the Politics of Articulation

Michiel Dehaene  is Professor of Urbanism at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University, where he teaches urban analysis and urban design. His work focuses on the epistemology of urbanism and the relationship between urbanism, ecology and urbanization. His research addresses questions of urban renewal, the legacy of suburban and dispersed development, and the relationship between urbanization and the food question. In his research, he combines exploratory research by design and planning-historical research. With Chiara Tornaghi, he led an international consortium on the development of an agroecological urbanism (agroecologicalurbanism.org).

Debra Solomon:

Multispecies Urbanism: Planning Otherwise for Ecological Justice

Debra Solomon is an artist, infrastructure activist, and PhD candidate in Urban Planning at the University of Amsterdam. She is founder of Urbaniahoeve, a critical spatial practice focused on inter-relations with a multispecies whole, addressing urban biodiversity, climate crisis mitigation, and the more-than-human right to the city and the urban metabolism. Solomon coined the term “multispecies urbanism” and co-initiated the 56-hectare Amsterdam Zuidoost food forest (VBAZO) in 2018. Since 2022, she has collaborated with Ljubljana’s Krater Collective as mentor in the Feral Palace project and artist-in-residence in Crafting Biodiversity (2024–2025), part of the EU co-funded Made-In initiative.

This event is organized by Critical Environments, a platform that fosters intellectual exchange, collaborative knowledge production, and resource commoning. Hosted in the Section of Urban Design, Urbanism Department, the group brings design into dialogue with interdisciplinary perspectives from urban and landscape theory, critical media, and environmental studies.