Beyond solastalgia: indigeneity as an antidote to anthropocentric neologism

This article critiques the conceptual and spatial implications of solastalgia—a term describing distress caused by environmental change—arguing that its etymology and usage reinforce anthropocentric frameworks by omitting explicit ties to land, place, and more-than-human life. This linguistic absence signals a broader epistemological rupture: the persistent separation of human experience from the ecologies we co-inhabit and co-create. Within architectural and spatial discourse, solastalgia risks reducing environmental loss to an individualized affective condition, obscuring the systemic spatial violence of colonization, extraction, genocide, and ecological erasure. Related concepts such as eco-anxiety further medicalize collective environmental grief and render planetary distress as a commodified experience most legible within Global North contexts, thereby masking material inequities and the architectural profession’s complicity in reproducing anthropocentric and colonial values.

In response, the article advances a decolonial critique grounded in Indigenous knowledges alongside queer, white feminist, black feminist, and Afrofuturist theoretical frameworks. Indigenous epistemologies foreground relationality, land stewardship, and the inseparability of human and more-than-human worlds, challenging dominant paradigms in architecture and urbanism. Queer and feminist theories unsettle fixed assumptions about identity, space, and temporality, offering alternative models of ecological interdependence and spatial justice. Afrofuturism, often engaging speculative strategies and interrogating technoculture and posthumanism, imagines futures in which Black subjectivities flourish beyond colonial spatial-temporal constraints. Together, these perspectives provide a foundation for rethinking solastalgia not as an individualized emotional state but as a symptom of entrenched colonial and anthropocentric spatial orders—and for envisioning more just, relational, and pluriversal spatial futures.