Arturo Escobar’s autonomous design reframes design not as the expert-led production of objects, services or development solutions, but as a political and ontological practice through which communities sustain, repair and reinvent their own worlds. Against the modern assumption that reality is composed of separate individuals, resources and institutions awaiting technical management, Escobar advances a relational understanding of life: beings, territories, practices, memories and non-human forces co-emerge within webs of mutual dependence. Design, therefore, must abandon its complicity with development, extractivism and instrumental rationality, and instead become a situated practice of communal world-making. A decisive case is the struggle of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities in Latin America, where territory is not merely land or property but the living condition of collective existence; defending rivers, forests, mountains or seeds is simultaneously defending ways of knowing, feeling, governing and inhabiting. In this sense, autonomous design does not “design change” from outside, but helps cultivate the conditions through which communities may continue to enact their own futures, according to principles of reciprocity, interdependence and pluriversal coexistence. Escobar’s proposal is thus both pragmatic and utopian: pragmatic because it begins from concrete territorial struggles, and utopian because it refuses the inevitability of capitalist modernity. In conclusion, Autonomía y diseño presents design as a practice of re-existence, oriented towards the pluriverse: a world where many worlds, rather than one universal model of development, can flourish.
URBANISM MEETS ART