Urban Seeding as Multispecies Politics: Louis Le Roy’s Ecocathedral

This chapter revisits the work of Louis Le Roy (1924–2012), a seminal figure in the 1960s and 1970s counterculture in urbanism and landscape design in the Netherlands. Le Roy questioned the validity of a technocratic top-down planning apparatus aimed at the development of large-scale mass housing schemes that all too often resulted in monotonous public spaces, hostile to its inhabitants (both human and other-than-human). As an alternative, Le Roy promoted user participation, ecological variation, and incremental growth. We believe that today’s conceptualisations of ‘seeding’ approaches as a way for urban interventions to address environmental crises—through slow growth, biodiversity, and incremental change—can benefit from studying the achievements and pitfalls of historical precedents, and vice versa. In this chapter we will thus focus on the projects and discourses of Le Roy and place these in a broader dialogue with the field of the environmental humanities, where questions of natural and built environments and of nature and culture are being discussed as relational rather than as separate realms.