Paper short abstract:

Viewing urban environments as multispecies places is crucial for inclusive planetary justice in the Anthropocene. This paper attempts to address the issue of multispecies recognition in cities by exploring the kin-making relationships in community biodiversity projects.

Paper long abstract:

The inclusion of more-than-human others in urban planning has been discussed widely by scholars who recognise that urban planning and development has historically viewed cities as separate from nature (Houston et al., 2018), even though cities have been created by the ‘raw’ materials of the more-than-human world (Wolch, 2002).

However, these dualistic boundaries between the urban and ‘nature’ are socially and culturally constructed and are reproduced through “colonial ways of knowing and being by enacting universalizing claims and, consequently, further subordinating other ontologies” (Sundburg 2013, p. 33). As we move towards the next geological epoch of the Anthropocene, with all its unknown climatic futures, cities need to be reimagined as multispecies places.

My paper attempts to address the issue of multispecies recognition in cities by exploring community biodiversity projects in Melbourne, Australia. Building upon Houston et al. call to “Make Kin, Not Cities!” (2018), I will be drawing from participant observation and interviews, exploring how the multispecies kin-making relationships that emerge in urban environments are both resisted and encouraged through uneven power dynamics between people, plants, and non-human animals.

I argue that by engaging more with the lifeworlds of more-than-human others, often through the ties and entanglements of those human communities most intimately connected to them, more inclusive forms of planetary justice come into view.