CO-HABITAT was an Innoviris-supported research-by-design project conducted between 2021 and 2024 to explore how urban planning and architecture might account for animal life as an active component of the Brussels-Capital Region. It moves beyond the idea of biodiversity as a static inventory and instead examines movement, habitat, conflict, care and cohabitation from an explicitly other-than-human perspective.

The project combines regional cartography, crowdsourced species observations, field investigations and design experimentation. Its atlas maps the movement and presence of selected urban animals across Brussels, while the Marais Wiels case study tests how mapping and design can disclose spatial relationships that conventional human-centred planning overlooks. The work is complemented by theoretical contributions on non-human agency, multispecies cohabitation and the politics of animal-inclusive design.

CO-HABITAT is a key bridge between the Lab’s research on agency, green infrastructure and post-growth urbanism. It demonstrates how cartography can function not only as representation but also as a design and political instrument, opening planning processes to the needs and capacities of other species while questioning who is entitled to shape metropolitan nature.