We would like to invite you to the next Teatime Talk as part of the series "Planetability" on Wednesday, July 1st 2026 at 5:15 pm at the Auditorium of HafenCity University.

Planetability – Relations of Health & Habitability

Laura Kemmer (USP), Jamie-Scott Baxter (HCU) & Frank Müller (FU Berlin)

About the Lecture:
This lecture introduces planetability as a conceptual lens for examining questions of planetary un/inhabitability through the interrelated dimensions of planetary: health, thinking, and change. Rather than treating these as separate domains, the talk explores how they are co-constituted in practice. This relation is, for instance, articulated in the work of Martinican researcher Malcom Ferdinand, who points to the French term penser, which evokes both thinking and tending to or “dressing” wounds, foregrounding the intimate connection between reflection and repair; health and transformation.

The lecture develops this conceptual framing through three empirical chapters from a forthcoming edited volume (Berlin Universities Publishing / Institute of Advanced Studies, University of São Paulo). The first, co-authored by Laura Kemmer with Rosseline Tavares and Michel Françoso, examines urban wetlands in central São Paulo as sites where practices of healing and habitability emerge in tension with colonial logics of hygienization. It argues that the wetland preserves a set of knowledges and relations that challenge forced divisions between health systems and the so-called “natural” elements – in Ailton Krenak’s words: “Earth/earth is health”.

The second contribution, by Jamie Baxter, traces the spread of the plant pathogen phytophthora ramorum across “green infrastructures” in the United Kingdom. Focusing on forest dieback in Scotland, the chapter explores how processes of ecological destruction can give rise to new spatial figurations and health relations, including the growth of rare fern species signifying the emergence of temperate rainforests.

The third contribution, by Frank Müller, examines how artisanal fishers and coastal communities in Brazil’s mangrove estuaries make environmental change perceptible through everyday engagements with mud, crabs, and polluted waters. Focusing on habitability as a question of sustaining life in toxic environments, arguing that these practices generate situated forms of environmental knowledge that challenge dominant ecosystem-service framings of mangroves. Rather than merely providing benefits to humans, mangroves emerge as contested multispecies habitats where struggles over pollution, conservation, and future ways of living unfold.

Bringing these cases into dialogue, the lecture reflects on how planetability foregrounds environmental breakdown, fragmentation, and toxicity as constitutive conditions of the present. Rather than seeking to restore coherence, it attends to practices that work within and through these fractures, composing new relations of health and habitability.

Planetability: Co-habitation in the Planetary

Planetability brings together German and Brazilian researchers across Urban Design, Engineering, Architecture, Urban Geography, Anthropology, Cultural Studies and Biology to advance a critical interdisciplinary understanding of Planetary Health. The project integrates recent debates on “multispecies urbanism” and the future design of healthy and equitable cities. It is funded by  DAAD-CAPES PROBRAL and co-led by Jamie-Scott Baxter (HCU), Laura Kemmer (USP), David Sperling (USP) and Tatiana Souza de Camargo (UFRGS).

Planetability combines three interlinked dimensions: planetary health, planetary thinking, and planetary transformation. Each dimension addresses a gap and enriches existing scholarship in the others. The field of planetary health, particularly prominent in Brazilian debates, emphasises the interconnection between human and environmental health under climate change. Whereas multispecies urbanism applies critical social theory under the umbrella of planetary thinking to urban contexts. For example, where traditional global health research has been criticised for reducing the environment to a determinant of human health, planetability opens the category of the environment to the multiple forms of life, elements and abiotic forces that constitute it. By drawing on critical feminist theory, this approach is attentive to the ways agency and, in turn, health are distributed the performed in human-nonhuman constellations. Together, these first two dimensions provide the grounding for the third: to examine planetary transformations through the lens of human and nonhuman health relations and the possibility of just and ethical forms of urban cohabitation.