Cities did not come from nowhere like spaceships on an alien planet, but grew historically and relationally. This is often forgotten, precisely because they were often conceived and planned in isolation from the environment – an environment, on which they in fact depend in often exploitative and destructive ways. Not least, the climate crisis reminds us of this interdependence and forces us to ask the question of multispecies environmental justice in urban planning. As Sandra Huning argues in her contribution to the “Kin City” text series, a multiple paradigm shift is needed to address this issue in a meaningful way.
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In a 2015 commentary in the journal Environmental Humanities, science theorist, biologist, and gender scholar Donna Haraway argued for multispecies ecojustice: “All earthlings are kin in the deepest sense, and it is past time to practice better care of kinds-as-assemblages (not species one at a time).” According to Celermajer et al. (2021), multispecies justice can be defined as an attempt to make relationships between humans and other nonhuman beings more just, based on the belief that humans, other living beings, rivers, soils, etc. are interdependent and depend on the viability of ecological systems.
Neither Haraway nor Celermajer speak of urban planning. For several years, however, there have been (mainly academic) debates on urban development policy and planning theory, to which interesting references can be made. In this article, I would like to briefly explore connections to four debates and formulate initial ideas on how urban planning could be further developed in terms of multispecies ecojustice and the kinship of all living beings.
Feminist urban critique and the just city
As early as 2005, urban and planning scholar Susan Fainstein criticized abstract and undifferentiated norms of “fairness, individual rights, and right behavior” in urban planning because they do not take into account the effects of social relations, interpersonal dependencies, and obligations on individual life choices. This continues to affect women in particular, who generally take on such obligations to others, such as children in need of care, voluntarily, but often without realistic alternatives. The planning focus on economic rationalities ignores such social relationships and thus narrows the perspective on socio-spatial problems and their potential solutions (Fainstein 2005).
Fainstein’s answer is the model of the just city (2010). According to this model, three criteria – equity, democracy, and diversity – should guide the creation, implementation, and evaluation of urban plans and programs. In concrete terms, this can mean, for example, reducing housing and mobility costs for low-income earners, creating different public spaces for different social groups, and capturing increases in property and land values resulting from public sector investment.
These criteria are not yet sufficient for multispecies equity. The viability of ecosystems and non-human creatures has been missing from most debates about the just city (Davy 2023). In addition to overcoming the anthropocentric view, this requires a rethinking of the use of land as a resource in urban planning.
Urban planning and private property
The modern understanding of urban planning emerged in the nineteenth century, when social upheaval combined with the emergence of a capitalist industrial society made it necessary and desirable to manage urban development in an orderly fashion. As the architectural theorist and cultural scientist Christa Kamleithner (2020) shows, statistics and cartography played an important role in the transition to visionary urban planning from the 19th to the 20th century.
With the help of statistics and maps, it was possible not only to depict current urban conditions (also in temporal and international comparison), but also to support the emergence of ideal urban models and normative orientations of good urban form and desirable (economic) urban development. A central pillar in the implementation of normative urban models was the conversion of formerly collectively administered areas into private property. In order to unleash the forces of the market, the finite resource of land had to be at someone’s free disposal, or even ‘owned.’
This is probably also related to the fact that discourses on the just city persist in an “anthropocentric attitude” (Davy 2023). Building and land law scholar Benjamin Davy contrasts this attitude with Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, which is based on a land community. Leopold denies people the right to exploit the soil (and other living things) and calls on them to protect the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community: “It is not the individual members of the land community that are important, but the totality of the land community or biotic community.” This leads to demands for subjective rights for nature and animals. The question is what consequences this has for more-than-human urban planning.
More-than-human urban planning
One possible answer to this is provided by planning scholars such as Houston et al. (2018) against the backdrop of global environmental change. They problematize dualisms such as nature/culture, city/countryside, body/mind, man/woman, etc. that structure planning thinking and make it difficult for planners to think about the co-production of the urban by humans, animals, and plants. The authors reject the elevation of humans over other living beings and instead emphasize the multi-species entanglements of humans and other living beings. They argue for a relational understanding of planning that considers humans, plants, soil, microbes, fungi, etc. together and in context in their co-production of urban spaces and interactions. They are concerned with understanding the interconnectedness and interdependence of living beings and ecosystems, and that ‘interventions’ and ‘control’ of one species inevitably have consequences for others. This is true even if they are not physically visible, such as microbes.
This raises (at least) two questions for urban planners: “(1) how multispecies relationships can be ethically and politically considerable in spatial land use planning decisions and (2) how socially and environmentally just planning can meaningfully engage nonhumans in deliberative practice without reducing nonhumans to objects or symbols of urban political struggle.” To achieve this, planners would have to 1) abandon the conviction that political rights apply only to humans, 2) address the problem of how political subjects can be redefined, and 3) extend political argumentation to non-human beings without considering them in isolation. This, in turn, raises new ethical problems that need to be addressed in terms of planning theory. Following Haraway, the authors call on all planners to “make kin, not cities!” The city must be considered in its complex interconnections, not in isolation from nature and the countryside.
Urban planning as care
A final starting point for an understanding of urban planning that is open to thinking about multispecies ecojustice is thinking about planning as care. Since the 1970s, feminists such as the political philosopher Silvia Federici have criticized the stereotypical neglect of care work, which is still largely unpaid and performed by women. Cities such as Barcelona (Spain) and Bogotá (Colombia) have developed projects and policies under the label of caring city in various forms to valorize care work as part of the urban economy. Caregivers – whether paid or unpaid – are to be supported, empowered, and networked. In addition, care work is to be democratized so that those who are cared for, nurtured and supported are granted greater self-determination and the right to shape their own lives.
There are more and more voices in the discourse that see urban planning itself as care, because through the design of urban spaces in general and the provision of urban care infrastructures in particular, urban planning plays a major role in how care work can be carried out. Short distances, social infrastructures, and facilities, and public spaces that can be used safely by different target groups facilitate independent mobility and the compatibility of different spheres of life. However, caring urban planning is by no means the status quo. Rather, it requires a fundamental rethinking that can only be realized to a limited extent under current conditions.
A broadening of the perspective – from caring for people to caring for the earth/nature and non-human beings – is already under discussion. However, this also raises the question of how to overcome the dualism between ‘caring planners’ and ‘passive nature’ and how to conceive of the relationship as reciprocal.
Multiple paradigm shifts
The debates mentioned here show, very briefly and necessarily incompletely, that something has been set in motion in urban planning. However, there are still many challenges. Urban planning is embedded in a potentially hierarchical, growth-oriented, and exploitative system. Its foundations were laid in the 19th century and have been continuously expanded and consolidated ever since. In this respect, Benjamin Davy is certainly not exaggerating when he argues for the topic of land ethics that a shift towards multispecies ecojustice would have similarly dramatic consequences as the abolition of slavery. The same is true for a stronger orientation of urban planners towards the need for care in cities.
It can be assumed that a multiple paradigm shift is inevitable in order to achieve the transformation that now seems so necessary in the face of climate change and environmental degradation. Furthermore, an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary discourse is certainly needed to leave comfort zones and to recognize thought patterns and structures that prevent a rethinking. As shown, the potentials and limitations that a change of perspective can bring to urban planning are already being explored in many places.
Editor’s note: The bibliography of the article is listed here.