Who is We?Who is We?

Due to the ecological destruction of the countryside, the biodiversity in cities is now often much greater than in rural environments. As evolutionary 'hotspots', urban environments mean that species have to adapt rapidly to new conditions. Moreover, encounters among ever-new species lead to changing food webs. This diversity is not reflected in current design practice; so far, cities have been developed almost exclusively as human habitats.

The 'Multispecies Urbanism' learning trail in Het Nieuwe Instituut's _Neuhaus_ project concentrated on inclusive forms of urban development which take the needs of all the species that inhabit a city into consideration. Artist Debra Solomon first coined the term 'multispecies urbanism' to indicate her artistic, as well as research, practice of soil building and urban regenerative ecology.

The term multispecies urbanism (MU) denotes forms of urban development that prioritise care for the urban natural world. The concept was first formulated in Soil in the City: The Socio-Environmental Substrate (Solomon and Nevejan, 2019)1 which suggests a new paradigm with urban natures as stakeholders in their own right - engaging with civil society reciprocally. MU endeavours to create an urban development that facilitates and nurtures urban ecosystem functions, and considers humans as, per definition, multispecies. MU posits that urban environmental (food and climate) justice can be achieved through ecologically driven policies and practices, recognising humans as part of the natural world, and their health and well-being as being dependent upon the natural world's resilience. MU reprioritises use-value in the spatial and social production of cities, addressing the fact that the global effects of capitalist urbanisation affect urban inhabitants unequally. MU's strategies surpass 'nature-inclusive' policies' business-as-usual approach, which it sees as perpetuating non-democratic development.

MU is an evolving framework for governance driven by natural world priorities in order to do two things. Firstly, the governance framework prioritises radically mitigating the effects of the climate crisis and its ill-effects on human / more-than-human well-being through the immediate decrease of urban heat islands (UHI), the reversal of biodiversity loss and greenhouse gas production, through the production and stewardship of high-value urban natures. These urban natures sequester carbon and rainwater, increase biodiversity by providing habitats and food for key species, including humans. Secondly, MU's aim is to produce and facilitate environmentally just and democratic urban environments for all inhabitants through policies combined with praxis, promoting beneficial ecosystem expression serving all urban inhabitants.

MU's urgency lies in our current climate crisis, caused by capitalist urbanisation and the forms of consumption and spatial production that this engenders. As the effects of global urbanisation are recognised as unevenly affecting inhabitants, these cause crises of democracy in which our publicly supported institutions and political figures are ill-positioned to support civic structures and their development. As climate chaos and plummeting biodiversity further pressure cities and urban natures to perform enhanced social and ecological functions, my research and praxis towards a multispecies urbanism addresses how rethinking the roles and rights of the urban more-than-human might produce better performing urban natures and cities. How might groups from civil society be involved, in conjunction with nature itself? How can they engage in the production of a democratically landscaped public space? How can they inform and be informed by the ecosystems, woodlands, soil organism, and requisite plant, animal and microbial communities? The proposal of MU investigates citizen-expert collaboration as more-than-humans in the design, implementation and maintenance of public space urban greens.

Debra Solomon is founder of Urbaniahoeve, an art and research collective that, since 2010, has collaborated with locals to develop communities of praxis whose expertise maintains public-space food forests. Aside from re-appropriating public space, these high-value natures are documented to support extraordinary levels of biodiversity and sequester water and carbon in the soil organism.