4 Sep - 1 Okt 2025

Seela Pentikäinen ( Finland )

River assemblies – Learning from the actors and materialities that together cohabit and create a location, a river, or other urban area. How to better connect with those actors to take them in account in urban design? How to identify, map and represent the more-than-human stakeholders that inhabit urban areas? During the residency at ZK/U, Seela is working to develop the project beyond rivers and to implement it as a tool to be used in architecture education, as part of alternative urban planning processes and architecture activism.

In the Entangled city project, Seela continues to expand on the ideas of inclusive and ecologically sensitive urban planning by designing alternative zoning plans that protect urban forests from development. These plans are created through participatory methods that integrate site-specific knowledge with current ecological research, aiming to bring scientific understanding of the environmental crisis into practical planning processes. The work acknowledges the often-overlooked ecological value of urban forests, many of which are among the last remaining natural woodlands in Finland. By offering well-crafted alternatives to official city plans, the project seeks to strengthen residents' agency in planning decisions and to challenge the dominance of resource-intensive, top-down processes. 

Seela plans to flaneur around and draw inspiration from Berlin’s many urban spaces that nurture multispecies life and stem from local communities' creativity — such as the Floating University and Tempelhof Field — and to integrate these influences into her practice.