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The event “Ecologies in Motion: Nature, Movement and the More-Than-Human City ” explores how we can activate, care for, and thrive alongside living urban landscapes.
RULA faculty Anette Freytag presents her work with AIR Collaborative and her perspective on plants in the city amongst Detroit community leaders, artists, and urban designers
Program
- 4:30pm – Performance
- 5:15pm – Public conversation
- 6:30pm – Networking
- 7:30pm – End
Ecologies in Motion: Nature, Movement and the More-Than-Human City
Urban nature is often treated as somewhere else: a park, forest, or preserve that people must leave their neighborhoods to reach. Even when cities add green space, the emphasis is often on what the landscape looks like rather than the relationships, experiences, and forms of life it makes possible. What changes when forests, meadows, native plants, and habitat are woven into everyday urban life? Once these living environments exist, how do we move with them, learn from them, renew within them, create inside them, care for them, and allow other forms of life to flourish?
Ecologies in Motion brings together artists, foresters, designers, and community members to rethink urban nature, and ask how cities can be designed for a more-than-human community of people, pollinators, birds, plants, soil, and more.
The program begins with a site-responsive dance performance by Wayne State University students directed by Biba Bell, with live music by Matthew Daher, within the pocket forest and living landscape of Kintsugi Village. Following the performance, five speakers will explore the relationship between the design of living environments and the ways we experience them. Together, they will explore what becomes possible when nature is woven into everyday city life — when people are invited not simply to observe green spaces, but to move through them, interact with them, and help care for them. Attendees will leave with a new understanding of their surroundings and how they can participate in shaping them.
Ecologies in Motion is part of Living Loop, a Brightside Collective initiative during Detroit Month of Design.
When
Monday, September 14, 2026
4:30 PM – 7:30 PM
Where
Kintsugi Village Detroit, USA
2020 14th St
Detroit, MI 48216