Dialogue explores spatial design's role in advancing Rights of Nature initiatives in Europe, suggesting new ways to engage with political and ecological issues.
Based on a cycling fieldwork journey along the Meuse (November 2024), this paper asks why Rights of Nature initiatives in Europe lag despite existing legal vocabularies and tools for river subjecthood. The promise to reconfigure responsibility and long-term stewardship often stalls between recognition and practice. The blockage is not only juridical. It is spatial and political, epistemic and ontological. Spatial design is proposed as a mediating political practice that can stage situated encounters, develop representational formats that sustain plurality in public life, and build interfaces through which claims can land, travel, and persist.
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Schasfoort et al. (2026) studied this question.
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