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- Convenors:
-
Andrea Nóblega-Carriquiry
(Universitat Oberta de Catalunya)
Maria Manso (Maria Manso)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores how Ecocentric perspectives reshape Nature-Based Solutions in urban resilience interventions, questioning anthropocentric assumptions, technical, transformative and governance knowledges, and the politics of re-greening within future urban transformations.
Description
As Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) gain prominence in global agendas for climate adaptation, biodiversity restoration, and urban resilience, their underlying assumptions and implications deserve critical scrutiny. Too often, NbS are framed through technocratic or anthropocentric logics that value nature for its service to humans, thus reproducing utilitarian and extractivist paradigms. Shifting the focus from “what we know” to “how we know” in fostering urban resilience, we ask how cities can give back to nature through more-than-human forms of care and reciprocity.
We seek to explore how different knowledges (technical, transformative, governance) challenge dominant narratives of control, optimization, and “green growth”, and instead cultivate more reciprocal, care-based, just, and multi-species forms of coexistence. This panel aims to advance theoretical and empirical debates on the re-imagination of NbS through Ecocentric and relational paradigms and move beyond instrumentalist framings toward a more reflexive understanding of urban socio-ecological transformations. Empirical and theoretical contributions may address, for instance (but not limited to), the trade-offs and conflicts involved in re-greening processes; the cultural, political, and ethical dimensions of human–nature relations; or the ways applied NbS projects reconfigure urban metabolisms and socio-ecological assemblages. This panel invites contributions that foreground Ecocentric perspectives in the design, governance, and evaluation of NbS in cities, through grassroots ecological restoration and indigenous-led practices to municipal green infrastructure experiments through a “more than human lens”.
This discussion contributes to Science and Technology Studies by examining how different knowledges mediate the boundary between human and nonhuman actors in sustainability transitions. It also addresses the EASST 2026 streams “Transitions”, “Next Natures” and “Resilience”, by questioning how value, agency, and care of nature are defined, negotiated, and transformed in the pursuit of future resilient cities. In conclusion, this panel contributes to broader discussions on how Ecocentric perspectives can transform NbS in an era of accelerating environmental change.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
“Shallow” Nature-Based Solutions (NbS) undermine urban resiliency and frame nature as something to be engineered for humans. Drawing on Deep Ecology, this paper reimagines an ecocentric, “deep” NbS to challenge and transform both NbS and Deep Ecology, suggesting new pathways for urban resilience.
Paper long abstract
That Nature-based Solutions (NbS) have gained prominence in urban resilience and climate adaptation agendas is not surprising given their utility in mitigating floods, reducing heat stress, and enhancing wellbeing. Although NbS may provide local relief to climate change symptoms, this paper argues that “shallow” forms of NbS undermine durable resiliency and sustainability through perpetuating the instrumental, technologizing paradigms responsible for the very symptoms they aim to relieve.
Drawing on Deep Ecology, the paper explores what it would mean to reimagine NbS through an ecocentric ethic grounded in a fundamental reorientation of our relationship to the more-than-human world, technology, and urban life. Deep Ecology argues for an expanded conception of selfhood that includes ecosystems and, ultimately, all life. From this perspective, “Deep NbS” would not merely deliver ecosystem services but cultivate ecological self-realization and strengthen affective connections between urban residents and the more-than-human world. Additionally, Deep Ecology’s emphasis on decentralization and living close to nature challenges dominant assumptions about the sustainability of urbanity.
The goal of “Deep NbS”, however is not to argue for a return to idealized “pre-modern” societies, but a reimagining of urban resilience beyond service provision or adaptive capacity for human populations alone. This reimagining of NbS may also foster an understanding of our cities as living systems warranting ethical consideration. At the same time, engagement with urban spaces and modern technology challenges Deep Ecology, requiring transformation if it should have a role to play in creating more sustainable futures for humans and nonhumans alike.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyzes the Billion Oyster Project, a nonprofit restoring oyster reefs in the New York Harbor for climate risk mitigation, as a technopolitical regime which mobilizes oysters’ cultural associations and materiality to inscribe “nature” in urban spaces as infrastructure.
Paper long abstract
In this paper, I describe the Billion Oyster Project (BOP) – a nonprofit organization founded in 2014 coordinating the restoration (administration, fabrication, installation, maintenance, and monitoring) of native Eastern Oyster (Crassostrea Virginica) reefs in the New York Harbor (Billion Oyster Project, 2025) – as an actor-network (Callon, 1986; Latour 2005) that enrolls the Eastern Oyster as urban infrastructure. I articulate this network to stage a critique of the technopolitical regime – tightly integrated institutions, myths, histories and ideologies, and artifacts (Hecht, 2009) – which belies projects inscribing oyster reefs as a form of ‘natural’ infrastructure in several cities in the eastern United States.
Although ‘nature as infrastructure’ has been sharply critiqued as an urban development ethos (Carse, 2014; Gabrys, 2022; Parks, 2020), and separately, much work has applied actor-network theory to bivalve mollusks (Callon, 1986; Gilbert, 2023), until recently there has been little reason to consider oyster reefs a kind of urban infrastructure. Now situated as such (Wakefield, 2020), the Eastern Oyster is being enrolled in technopolitical regimes as urban shoreline infrastructures across the American Northeast. Based on ethnographic observation and institutional, social media, and policy corpora, in this article I articulate one such technopolitical regime and demonstrate how it draws on both the materiality and cultural history of oysters to inscribe them as “natural” infrastructure.
Keywords: actor-network theory, technopolitical regime, Eastern Oyster, Billion Oyster Project, nature as infrastructure
Paper short abstract
Across twelve cities in Europe, Latin America, and the United States, we identify recurring eco-centric urban nature imaginaries in planning and grassroots practices, examining how they become actionable and what political work they perform.
Paper long abstract
A growing body of scholarship calls for moving beyond anthropocentric interpretations of nature-based solutions (NBS) towards more eco-centric understandings of urban nature that foreground the intrinsic and relational values of ecosystems. At the same time, critical research has highlighted the social and political tensions surrounding NBS, including divergent priorities, problem framings, and interpretations of sustainability and justice. Within this broader effort to re-politicize urban nature, this paper examines how eco-centric urban futures are imagined and operationalized across different governance contexts.
While previous research has explored eco-centric imaginaries and nature-positive futures, comparative evidence on how such perspectives are articulated and contested across planning and grassroots practices remains limited. Drawing on planning documents (including master plans, climate plans, and biodiversity strategies) alongside interviews with planners, residents, and NBS practitioners, we analyze urban nature imaginaries across twelve cities in Europe, Latin America, and the United States. We further analyze how these imaginaries become actionable through planning instruments and grassroots experimentation.
We conceptualize urban nature imaginaries as the narratives and discourses through which actors understand, interpret, and emotionally engage with the relationship between cities and nature. The analysis identifies recurring eco-centric imaginaries structured by distinct value orientations and problem framings across regions. We examine the political work these imaginaries perform by tracing how they shape proposed solutions, claims to knowledge and expertise, and competing visions of human and more-than-human justice in urban sustainability transitions.
Paper short abstract
Reflecting on ‘Nature-based solutions’ for flooding in Australia, this paper calls for greater respect of Indigenous Australian and other ontological notions of reciprocity and response-abilities to rivers to unsettle anthropocentric attitudes that risk repurposing nature to solve (some) human needs
Paper long abstract
In settler-colonial societies like Australia, the un/relatedness of nature of has long been a weaponised concept. From the use of the term terra nullius – (‘nobody’s land’ in Latin) as the foundational myth on which the British claimed control of an unceded continent, to more porous but equally problematic attitudes of aqua nullius (Marshall 2017, 2017) in contemporary times, Indigenous peoples’ relations to nature and natural entities have been dismissed, their knowledge decoupled and their Country misconstrued and contorted through legislative, infrastructural, industrial and other lenses. In the context of socionatural disasters, ‘green’ ‘Nature-based solutions’ are being increasing put forward as a method to mitigate extreme events like flooding. As afforestation, wetland restoration and ‘room’ for rivers and are revisited ideas to afford at-risk urban areas a ‘natural’ buffer from the nature’s extremes, we should resolve not to solve historical problems without first unsettling the very idea of nature as conveniently apart, rather than a part, of people. Reflecting on the empirical context of ‘Nature-based solutions’ for flooding in Australia, this paper calls for greater respect and consideration of Indigenous Australian and other ontological notions of reverence, reciprocity and response-abilities to rivers to unsettle anthropocentric attitudes that risk repurposing nature to – once more – serve and solve (some) human needs.