More-than-human biographies: Designing for their endings

In this chapter, I aim to glimpse the future of cities by focusing on the endings of designed things that make up our cities and the multispecies gatherings around things. I rely on the more-than-human concept of biography from the design theory of designing-with. The concept refers to the combined agentic forces of designer and thing, what they inscribe into the world, and what they leave behind. I discuss the biographies of a water-lily pond and a traffic intersection, and the human and non-human gatherings that participate in their making and unmaking. The chapter extends the idea of biographies to reveal the capacities of non-human agencies and temporalities in designing; the fragility, breakdown, and shifting ontologies of waste that are central to the making and remaking of cities; and the conceptualisation of a city as a braiding together of biographies and multispecies gatherings.