We would like to invite you to this semester's first Teatime Talk as part of the series "Planetability" book presentation on Wednesday, April 22nd 2026 at 5:15 pm at the CityScience Lab Elbakarden (Hongkongstraße 8, 20457 Hamburg).

The talk will be followed by an UD Discussion moderated by our students together with the UD teaching staff exploring the topic of "Futures of UD - Future methods and positioning“.

Spacetimes Matter: Mapping the Planetary

Séverine Marguin (TU Berlin and HCU Hamburg) & Jamie-Scott Baxter (HCU Hamburg)

How can mapping capture the dynamic material entanglements of space and time in the planetary? Spacetimes Matter is an invitation to rethink mapping as a critical tool for understanding multiple spacetimes―and how they come to matter. Séverine Marguin and Jamie-Scott Baxter will discuss a selection of interpretative, qualitative, and reflexive approaches to decoding urban processes, as well as socio-spatial and ecological dynamics from their new book (co-edited with Anna Juliane Heinrich and Vivien Sommer). The work discussed ranges from artistic and performative mappings and game development to complex, multimodal diagrams, and immersive virtual environments. Spacetimes Matter enables new perspectives for scholars and design practitioners seeking insights into the shifting politics, processes, and imaginaries that make up contemporary more-than-human societies. 

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.