Becoming with the Meuse
A Dialogue on Political Legibility, Multiplicity, and Spatial Design
Abstract
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.
Submitted: March 6, 2026 | Accepted: May 27, 2026 | Published Aug. 6, 2026 | Language: en
Keywords Altered nature • Meuse • River personhood • Environmental humanities • Rights of Nature • Spatial design • Political legibility
Copyright © 2026 Julia Schasfoort, Luisa Maria Calabrese. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.