Short Abstract:

Cities serve as core sites of STS research but have always been marred by inequality. This roundtable invites critical reflection on urban living and justice and seeks to interrogate tensions arising between valuing human and more-than-human diversity.

Long Abstract:

Cities are not only core sites of STS research on technical systems, technopolitics, infrastructure and more recently “smartness” but have long, if not always, been highly unequal spaces of co-existence. Racialised inequalities, unhealthy exposures, rent spikes, failing public services, dense habitats, inner-city heat islands, growing precarity and many more challenges imperil equal urban living. Increasingly, however, cities are framed as spaces for hope, creating shelter and providing vital infrastructures for various more-than-human others, such as native plants, wild animals, and other endangered species. Most notably, urban planning initiatives work with imaginations of cities as engineered green spaces of climate resilience, fostering so-called blue and green infrastructure for sustainability. There is a tension though: While more-than-human diversity is appreciated by both science and policy as beneficial to sustainable cities and worthy of protection, human diversity appears ever more a liability. This roundtable invites a critical and convivial reflection on bios, diversities, or perhaps better biodivercities, to move beyond the seemingly unproblematic one-world frame of conservation science and urban planning. We raise the question what constitutes ‘living well’ in urban settings? And for whom? We draw attention to regimes of valuing that are being negotiated in urban settings deeply shaped by migration and postcolonialism, economic inequality, and, more recently, neoliberal projects of green re-growth. We are interested in bringing STS scholarship on biodiversity, multispecies relations, and urban ecologies together to think through the patchy, uneven fabrics of urban biodiversities. Our aim is to provoke conversations about the multitude of diversities that shape urban conviviality, and the entrenched dichotomies and hierarchies that mediate, hamper, or enable multispecies and/or other forms of justice. Panellists are Uli Beisel, Shivant Jhagroe, Samwel Ntapanta, Bettina Stoetzer and Esther Turnhout.