Botanical city. Fostering plant awareness in urban public space through design for place-based botanical learning.

Plants are fundamental to all life on Earth, yet their presence often goes unnoticed—particularly in urban environments shaped by anthropocentric design and management. The cultural and cognitive tendency to overlook vegetal life, first described as Plant Blindness and later reframed as Plant Awareness Disparity, reveals how deeply this neglect is embedded in contemporary ways of seeing and inhabiting the world. This PhD research investigates how design can foster plant awareness through participatory and place-based approaches in public urban spaces. Grounded in Participatory Design, Critical Plant Studies, and Environmental Education, it explores design as a mediating and pedagogical practice that cultivates ecological literacy and multispecies coexistence. The study adopts a multi-method strategy combining literature reviews, multispecies ethnography, participatory observation, and Critical Participatory Action Research. Empirical work includes plant observation and drawing exercises with both adults and university students across urban and mountainous contexts. These experiments examine drawing as an investigative and reflective tool able to make plant life perceptible and discussable. The research is currently moving toward the development of a Botanical Co-Design Toolkit—a set of participatory methods intended to nurture attention and care for plants through creative and collective engagement. Aligned with the PDC 2026 theme Peace, Dialogue, Coexistence, the project positions design as ecological diplomacy: a creative practice for cultivating care, empathy, and shared responsibility across species.