Speaker
Description
As we globally experience a daily hyper-acceleration of multiple crises and with 2024 being the first recorded year of the Earth's average temperature crossing the 1,5 °C boundary set by the Paris Agreement, the inadequacy of such global strategies has been unequivocally recognized. In the face of this stagnant situation, the change of the capitalist system is increasingly recognized as the condition sine qua non for starting to think seriously about a way out of the socioecological catastrophe, as even an equitable degrowth is incompatible with capitalism (Kohei, 2024). Scholars are foregrounding a variety of alternative paths for a post-capitalistic and post-growth world, supporting a pluriversal range of possibilities rooted in the local cultures and economies, arriving mostly – but not only – from Indigenous or marginal communities of the Global South (Demaria and Kothari, 2017).
In this framework, Multispecies thinking has emerged in the West as a refusal of the Euro-Atlantic thought and an alternative for making worlds and kin in our era (Haraway, 2015). Nurtured by a strong core of critical theory in the environmental humanities, particularly critical eco-feminism, with the guidance of Indigenous philosophies and a decolonial approach, Multispecies is asking us to radically reconsider our relation with other living beings and matters, putting their needs at the front alongside ours. Being substantially different from other ecological discourses and the traditional planning approach that relies on conservation and protection, the focus is not on “leaving alone” the environment and other living beings to be able to thrive, but rather on multispecies entanglements and on learning how to live together (Houston et al., 2018). Moreover, recognizing the interconnectedness between oppressions under the system of the capital, the aim is to look after an idea of justice encompassing diverse human and more-than-human subjectivities (Winter, 2022), able to reunite different struggling in a common fight for emancipation.
My research tries to understand the implications of such an approach in Urbanism. What does it mean to fight for the emancipation of the living in spatial terms? Which are the main spaces of friction in the western city? Which technical practices can we mobilize? What tools do we have to change, and what pre-conception and attitudes of the discipline do we have to abandon? Where are the main obstacles in the European planning system to adopting such an approach?
To start addressing these questions I discuss the case study of the city of Brussels, where a long tradition in urban ecology, re-cycle/up-cycle, and metabolism (Grulois, Tosi and Crosas Armengol, 2018) is today accompanied by a flourishing of tentative multispecies urban practices, that involve active citizens, administrations, university students, researchers, and professional practitioners. Through fieldwork and interviews, I map the emergence of these novel practices as well as their potential and struggles in being realized. I underline the scope, the tools, the objectives, and the imaginaries that drive these projects. Finally, I critically question whether these strategies could imagine and steer a radical change for a post-growth urban era, as the ambition the theory set.
References
Demaria, F. and Kothari, A. (2017) ‘The Post-Development Dictionary agenda: paths to the pluriverse’, Third World Quarterly, 38(12), pp. 2588–2599.
Grulois, G., Tosi, M.C. and Crosas Armengol, C. (eds) (2018) Designing territorial metabolism: Barcelona, Brussels, and Venice. Berlin: Jovis.
Haraway, D. (2015) ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin’, Environmental Humanities, 6(1), pp. 159–165.
Houston, D. et al. (2018) ‘Make kin, not cities! Multispecies entanglements and “becoming-world” in planning theory’, Planning Theory, 17(2), pp. 190–212.
Kohei, S. (2024) Il capitale nell’Antropocene. Torino: Einaudi.
Winter, C.J. (2022) ‘Introduction: What’s the value of multispecies justice?’, Environmental Politics, 31(2), pp. 251–257.
| Keywords | multispecies urbanism, post-capitalist futures, radical imaginaries |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
